THE DIGITAL PAST

I enjoyed today’s class of talking about beats and hearing them in different songs, both old and new. The PostmodermJukebox people are also really interesting! It was cool to hear them apply the swing beat into songs we listen to today, and they still sound good! The part I didn’t like was when we played Meghan Trainor (I really hate her). I agree with Professor O’Malley’s point of hearing a different kind of music when the song was played with the swing beat and how it made some of them better, like the Womanizer song. The past is present in many ways in music and it’s cool to hear that.

The Justin Bieber song we heard (Cold Water) and then the Sia song (Cheap Thrills) are some of my favorites and it’s so cool we could apply that havanero beat into it and hear it. It may be a pop song, but it has so many different layers you can peel apart and listen to how it is influenced by different genres.

I was waiting for something that I could sufficiently write about and turns out this really grinds my gears.

So minstrels. Wow. Okay. So basically it is a show with white people pretending to be black people and performing songs and plays. I understand it is a big part of american music but oh my goodness what the **********. It’s crazy to me how popular they were (well not really, but it’s just blowing my mind) and the fact they used black face. I think it’s just ironic that we enslave black people for so long and treat them with such inequality but even BACK THEN popular culture was surrounded with their music, acting, etc. What we talked about in class is that they transgressed cultural boundaries which very slightly makes sense but given the time and places they were performed doesn’t really hit me as acceptable. I was surprised that President Lincoln was a fan of them as well and now I feel duped for liking Abraham Lincoln so much.

Another term we discussed in class was that minstrels were a “carnivalesce space,” meaning that it was a place where ordinary rules were suspended. Men would be women, people would be doing things that “normal” people wouldn’t do, people could act like animals, and just be completely opposite of what they are. Minstrels were supposed to be apart of that tradition, but in a country that struggles to unite 2 races to begin with, I feel it’s just contradictory.

Not a fan. Will now cringe whenever I hear Lincoln’s name/think about Minstrels/think about American history and all our #*&% ups.

Before we really delved into the differences of what idealism and realism were, I was sure I was a realist. My entire life I’ve considered myself a pessimistic realist, and after the class discussion I’m sure that I classify under that. I don’t really know if I believe there is a perfect model of anything in the world but I don’t consider myself extremely unreligious. I affiliate with a religion, and believe it for the most part, but I don’t actively practice it. The part I could agree with in idealism is that we are dim copies of the divine, since I do believe in a divine. But I don’t believe that we need to be strive to become that perfect ideal throughout our lives because that means different things for each person. A persons “perfect,” may be another’s hell. I still get moved by things of beauty, like music (Angel by the Weeknd) or a movie (Harry Potter, any of them), books (Harry Potter, again, any of them), but I wouldn’t consider any of them perfect or near perfect. Perfect is such a stupid term because I don’t think anything encompasses perfect. I believe that our generation and basically the entire world overuses the word perfect. What I do think, is that the world could be a better place, and people could be better versions of themselves. But striving to be perfect is just a waste of time. Whatever you do, just be happy with it. As long as you’re not harming anyone, to each their own.

I feel it ironic as I stop reading to type this blog post over the subject of what I’m talking about. When the author described how he has spoken to people that used to be able to read a book cover to cover, but no longer can, it hit me that I’m the exact same way now. I stopped reading the book because I was unable to concentrate so I decided to write about that. Even though I am only about 40 pages into the book, I’ve already heavily connected to most of what Carr has said about this generation and the internet. I’m excited to continue reading on (let us see how far I can get without my mind getting distracted).

After the first real class of material, I can’t say it wasn’t impactful on the way I listen to music (right, already?!). When Professor O’Malley played the examples of how the loudness of music does not change in modern songs vs older ones, I was shocked. It’s now something that I can never un-hear, and something I’ll probably make a comment about to all my friends (who will eventually tell me to shut up). During class when everyone was making their points on what they thought about it, I came to a conclusion similar to that of my classmates: it was just easier, less work, more concise. When a song is the same loudness, whether the artist is just whispering or wailing, it creates less work for producers as well as listeners. What I wonder is whether it’s something that the actual singers want/ask for in their songs.