Introduction
Danica SavonickThinking alongside Alexandra Vazquez, this is an invitation to listen in detail—or “listen to it all at once”—in preparation for an experimental Critical Karaoke event. The event is designed to showcase the different forms that meaningful intellectual work can take and will celebrate the transformative power of performance, improvisation, play, failure, feeling, silence, and sound.
Inspired by interdisciplinary and cross-field conversations about music and Experience Music Project’s annual “Pop Conference,” we invite brief essays that engage with a particular song. Papers will be read aloud in accompaniment with the song, and should last no longer than its duration. Beyond this stipulation of brevity, stylistic choices regarding format, volume, dance breaks, and dramatic pauses are up to participants. Performances can move freely among keywords and key changes, the popular and the peripheral, the lizard and the lyric. More promiscuous intellectual affair than long-term commitment, this low-stakes event encourages participants to dabble in a different field, flirt with an old fling, or linger with a guilty pleasure.
What can possibly be said, thought, or felt, in such a short space? How can a song—or a movement from a larger piece—move us beyond inherited major and minor scales of thinking? Honoring Jose Munoz’s feeling that “this world is not enough,” how might listening practices help us hold dissonance in harmony?
Alec Magnet
Melissa Phruksachart
Neil Cicierega – “Mouth Sounds”
How will future generations tell the cultural history of BIE, or Before Internet Era? I believe this excerpt from Internet meme-maker Neil Cicierega’s 2014 mashup mixtape “Mouth Sounds” can give us an idea. A fifty-six minute cacophony of earworms, catchphrases, and number one pop hits from the turn of the century, “Mouth Sounds” is a musical version of the Buzzfeed listicle “How to Tell You’re a Nineties Kid.” It’s a chronicle of the cultural knowledge of the last cohort of American children to grow up with a finite number of media sources: Billboard radio, live-action PG-13 comedies, basic cable television. The novelty that Poe described in “The Imp of the Perverse” as “the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories” is simply now called a meme.
How to explain the Talking Heads, though? It was dance music from our liberal arts college youth, as kids clad in thrift store finds who scoffed at the sexual sincerity with which our peers moved to hip-hop. The Talking Heads refracted the Africanist presence in American rock through academic polyrhythms, shepherding irony-laden brains to the dance floor, cajoling us to ask:
How — did — I — get — here?
Danica Savonick
The 88 – “At Least it was Here”
While the bouncy beat of The 88’s “At Least It Was Here” seems fitting for the witty humor of the television show Community, its catchy melody belies uncomfortable feelings of temporal syncopation evident in the lyrics: impatience, frustration, and exhaustion. “Give me some more/Time in a dream/Give me the hope to run out of steam,” the show begins each week, evoking that feeling of not-enough-time that so often characterizes our experiences of educational institutions. Time to degree completion; time to take orals; time to get in, out, and through this place; NO time for jury duty.
[PAUSE] until after “run out of steam” (:39)
What is this dream we’re invited to linger with? The show parodies the happy fantasy of attending one’s dream school, a too-narrow version of the good life which renders Greendale a “loser college…for remedial teens, twenty-something drop-outs, middle-aged divorcees, and old people.” In other words, those hard-working CUNY students, with whom we never have as much time as we know they deserve.
The song’s title evokes the already here-ness of educational institutions: the given, the inherited. At schools like the fictional Greendale, or even CUNY, how might “hope” relate to the attenuating feeling of running out of steam? Under what conditions can running out of steam be understood as desirable?
[PAUSE] “be here to recognize there’s another way” (1:12 – 1:23)
“Watch what you throw away,” the song cautions, echoing the questions asked at the Mississippi Freedom School in the summer of 1964. Not only “What do we not have that we need?” but also “What do we already have that we want to keep?” To move towards the educational good life for which we may not yet have the language, we must “be here to recognize/there’s another way.”
(PAUSE UNTIL LYRICS END – ONE BY ONE THEY ALL JUST FADE BUT I LOVE YOU MORE THAN WORDS CAN SAY 2:21)
As cruelly optimistic academic fantasies “fade away,” certain habits, traditions, and tendencies run out of steam. I borrow from Jose Munoz to understand how the song’s repeated demand to give us time and give us hope “perform(s) an insistence on wanting more in the face of scarcity,” an imperative I witness when an adjunct at Hunter is on the phone with facilities begging for a door to her classroom. The dismantling has already begun. The song, then, can help us understand hope as syncopated, punctuated–because it has not always been this way, it does not always have to be.
