I hung out a lot this past weekend more than I usually hang out - which is still not that much or as much as I wanted to - but walking around downtown with friends … it just looks like someplace to be able to afford to hang out. I know I couldn’t afford it. Overbuilt, uninteresting and boring - the people made it fun. Or maybe I’m just an old fart.
At first I was going to title this post “The End of Technology” or “Technology Kills Art” or something equally ominous, but (obviously) decided against it. We’re living during what feels like the end of something, but I can’t quite place my finger on it. So I won’t.
There are many artists from the 80’s due to release albums/CDs/(whatever you call a thematic collection of songs now) this year. I’ll probably post either a series of reviews or a birds-eye view of many of them later this year. I mention the 80’s because that’s the decade when many artists became much more comfortable with using technology to create their art - especially musicians. Just imagine Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” without its famous synth line (discovered by Dave Stewart accidentally playing it backwards) or Prince with a real drummer and without a Linn drum machine. And what would the 80’s be without the advent of the promotional music video? I’ve been watching Grace Jones’ (and Jean-Paul Goude’s) masterpiece video “A One Man Show” on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) for the past week. (Yes, it’s been on my list of Videos That Should Be DVDs along with Prince’s “Sign ‘O’ The Times” for a while now.) You might also want to check out Miriam Kershaw’s article “Postcolonialism and Androgyny: The Performance Art of Grace Jones” for a more scholarly analysis of that period of Grace’s art.
