When 85/100 sucks
Dr. X posts this from Sound Chamber #9:
"I enjoyed this encounter with an audiophile from Gizmodo.
"But isn't this just quintessentially American? One pays $350,000 for a stereo, and then listens...to David Bowie? And from the David Bowie oeuvre, one chooses 'Heroes'? (With apologies to the President in Exile.) It just seems to play into the hands of our European critics.
"Bowie's work looms large, by the way, in my upcoming lead article for the Journal of Quantitative Musicology, which empirically derives an efficient frontier of art vs. popular appeal. Optimality is described as maximization of A relative to P, after, of course, deducting a penalty for the risk-free level of artistic achievement. The referees have already been very kind, so I anticipate a warm reception upon publication.
"I would like to post more, but I have purchased a $6,000 food processor and am looking forward to using it to make a cheese sandwich."
posted by The Front at 10:23 PM
6 Comments:
I'm wasting a lot of time here trying to figure out what to be more confused by-- the idea of this absurd sound system, or the idea that my old friend remembers a record I turned him onto when I was 14 years old. (Or is he able to see into my itunes account and see that I actually ordered a track from that album, along with one from Young Americans?) Now I see why these psuedonyms are so important.
Question: why are almost all "audiophiles" men?
Almost forgot to add: maybe he doesn't have any Andre Rieu on vinyl.
I propose that all human progress stop until each us states what song they would choose to listen to on a $350,000 sound system.
I'd plump for this one.
Not the CD version of course, the special vinyl edition, the one engraved with the analog-optimized synthetic diamond needle.
I don't usually score very well when it comes to explaining the differences between men and women. But in the case of 'audiophiles' I would suggest that women are less likely to fall for the argument that 'the medium is the message'. The message is the message.
Also, what's wrong with "Heroes"?
Dr. X posts this from the Virgin Megastore liquidation:
"I have always found 'Heroes' fascinating, and do not dislike it. I have listened to it and tapped my toes. There is nothing obviously wrong with it. But I do not find myself captivated, either.
"So I argue it is a good song, not a great one. And why would you demo a $350,000 stereo with a good song when so many great ones are available?
"Why not 'Gimme Shelter', or 'The Beautiful American', or 'Rockaway Beach', or 'Good Vibrations' or the 5/4 Waltz from Patetičeskaja, or, if one were exceptionally discriminating, 'Teenage Kicks'?
"In my view 'Heroes' is less good than these and many others. Now that you mention it, perhaps if there were something wrong with it I would like it more. Flaws are a sign of risk, a necessary feature of artistic achievement, and art without risk is...complicated (fortunately, my upcoming article clears most of this up).
"But one may take this view even without the aid of quantitative apparatus. It has been claimed that, as mature musicians, the Sex Pistols had to re-learn to play their instruments badly to regain their historic sound for the Filthy Lucre tour. This is a well-established principle in Japanese aesthetics, where flawed perfection may be seen as the artistic achievement of the highest sort (see my monograph on this in the (alas defunct) Harvard Journal of Artistic Merit, "Wabi-Sabi and the Pop Sensibility").
"An interesting version of 'Heroes' is here, in a most unlikely and instructive setting.
"Perhaps it is not the song I am slightly disparaging, but the execution. I find this version more appealing, possibly because of the live venue, perhaps because of the exceptionally skilled accompaniment, but also because Bowie's single-tracked voice is flawed and contains traces of emotion I do not detect in the original.
"I fear I may have drifted slightly from the main topic...I meant to say, it is pretty good, but I don't count it a $350,000 song."
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