My favorite part is "hummingbirds."
He said go dry your eyes and live your life like there is no tomorrow, Son, and tell the others to go sing it like a hummingbird the greatest anthem ever heard: We are the heroes of our time but we're dancing with the demons in our mind.
Small point, hummingbirds don't actually sing as songbirds do, they more scream territorially, or demandingly, they have flowers to protect.
Russia won second with Polina Gagarina's A Million Voices. Wrought with Disneyesque or possibly Romani costume of the sort the princess cannot move from her spot. Inclusive, entirely inclusive, nothing whatsoever personal as some other entries, she'd like to buy the world a Coke.
Oh?
Tell me why when I think, I only think of you
Tell me why when I love, I only love you
Tell me why when I live, I live inside you... great love
A few years ago Amanda Yesilbas writing for 109.com drew together a wonderful roundup of then recent Eurovision musical videos concentrating on the wildest most insane. One of her favorites was linked yesterday on a British site and favored so the Ukrainian act had and held their attention for its bizarre recombinations; sequined lamé, dancing Nazis, folk beer hall type song run through electronics. Verka Serdyuchka is the drag character of comedian Andriy Mykhailovych Danylko. It's quite a video and it makes the point I am about to make better than any of them. Ukraine entry for 2007, Dancing Lasha Tumbai sung in four languages. The performance was controversial at the time. Its title is nonsense.
Commenters to Amanda's piece back then linked to Kpop (Korean) videos along a similar vein. And those are interesting indeed. BigBang, Fantastic Baby and Block B, Nillili Mambo for two examples.
Most of the Eurovision videos displayed at 109 and the two Kpop videos are examples of Post Modernism and now that Post Modernism approaches exhaustion it overlaps with an extreme Post Modernism.
But what is all that?
We can spend hours describing and discussing, and the tendencies overlap, they change from one to another because elements are exhausted and people get tired of seeing them. They become unimaginative. Whereas Modernism is clean lines and planes and with science geometry and math duly respected with an eye toward the future and a sense of already living comfortably in it. Post Modernism is tired of that. Post modernism is completely comfortable turning that inside out and recombining it with classical elements. Post Modernism is a comfortability with all of history of all of the arts all at once, so that cakes can be stacked to defy gravity and buildings can twist contrary to their materials, classic art combined comfortably and naturally with cartoons, mixing of ancient and modern.
The best way to get it all at once is Google images. You will see immediately what is meant by the general use of the terms no matter who or what is argued to the point dueling. I read one such discussion on Twitter today. Nothing is more wearisome than university trained art students.
Incidentally, the first time I did these two searches the Geisel Library came up in results for both. Now it comes up only for modernism where it belongs, but it is also an example of Brutalism, not because it's brutal but because it proudly shows its basic concrete structural material (béton brut -- raw concrete) and its sense of being anchor that lands with a solid kabong as center to an entire community. Popular with libraries just as Post Modernism is popular with libraries, schools and museums.
Abiding in a Post Modern and Extreme Post Modern era we see buildings turned inside out like cubist paintings. It is an attitude that accepts that you can look at a thing in profile, or straight on, or at three quarters or from the top and through time all at once.You accept new materials along with ancient coexisting in the same place, a collapsing of time and an inversion of all its elements so that even sexes are deconstructed and recombined. It's why a hero is one who dances with demons in his mind and survives it, and an Italian male lover can be so confused and uncertain and needy, one who needs his lover to tell him why he thinks things, why he loves and why he lives, in a love song that rises to emotional and operatic crescendo while drawing on modern American mythologic imagery, the pottery wheel wet clay pot and spooning embrace in the film Ghost and hang from the ceiling kiss in Spider Man. Shaken but not rattled, boldly confident and strangely uncertain, simultaneously solid and wobbly, matured to point of knowing everything all at once and yet resolutely childishly naïve, Post Modern.
2 comments:
Okay, first off let me admit that I'm not particularly impressed with either song, so that may invalidate my complaint. But here goes: it seems to me that every recent music video I've seen is overproduced. Which leads me to believe that the songsmiths themselves know their product is mediocre and are trying to hide or camouflage the completely forgettable nature of the product with inflated light, choreography, drama.
Agree? Disagree? Don't give a D?
The songs are developed regionally through competitions then brought together by the European network. I think they doll them up best as they can based on what they have to work with. Many involve stunts, Rising from the floor dramatically and such.
There is also the transvestite thing. Crossdressing thing, male soprano thing.
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