Entrades
As an Art Historian I have to say I'm very lucky to have to deal with some of the best stuff in Western Culture on a daily basis. I read, write and lecture about paiting, sculpture, architecture, etc., also in order to understand or to interpret such things I have to keep myself up to date with Western avant-garde thought, including Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Postfeminism, and so on. High culture and theory is then my daily job. You know, sometimes it's too much. Very often I find a bit tiresome, too heavy and raw, even though I really love what I do. So, in order to relax and rest from it all, I go back to one of the greatest pleasures life can provide: Eurodance (Music) of the 1990's!!!
I find very often that some people are prone to disregard, ignore or dismiss "pop". Sometimes just to try to sound or look cultured or tasteful. Petulance apart, I know a thing or two about taste, beauty and aesthetics, and let me corroborate, most often than not, the much touted "High Culture" is just a tepid piece of pretentious nonsense. After having studied the elite of the elite for so many years now, I can say how much I appreciate the excitement and fun, the freeing and unpretentious experience of a lot of great Eurodance tracks of the 1990's, pure fun, no major pretention, inventive, involving, highly effective and all-around entertaining. No wonder why so many of those tracks have been recycled in the sad hip-hop-saturated world we're living in nowadays. Also, massive dance events were still quite the rarity those days and the atmosphere must have been really of novelty and excitement.
Being the intense theorist I am, I can also remember a thing or two that are not particularly exciting. During the Golden Age of Eurodance, thousands were being abused, hurt or murdered like animals in the former Yugoslavia. Just as I was dancing the night away and enjoying myself greatly, many youngsters like myself were in refugee camps, fighting behind enemy lines or hurt or dead. That thought hunted me pretty much throughout the mid 1990's and at some point still do so today.
But anyways, let us not fall into too much war-talk and let's go back to the original point: awesome dance Euro music of the 1990's. Whenever I'm sad, confused, angry or all three, I know there's a medicine which never fails to brighten up my day. The memories of 1993-99 are quite vivid and happy. I was a teenager discovering the world. Sometimes it was painful, sometimes, for example, at the dance floor, it was pure joy. The joy of knowing I was alive and about to take on the world, so to speak. I must also admit, that between the ages of 16 and 18, I was g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s, aha, so totally. It was a time of so much hope and expectation, I remember fondly and still revisit it when wanting to recapture the positive spirit of those days.
I find very often that some people are prone to disregard, ignore or dismiss "pop". Sometimes just to try to sound or look cultured or tasteful. Petulance apart, I know a thing or two about taste, beauty and aesthetics, and let me corroborate, most often than not, the much touted "High Culture" is just a tepid piece of pretentious nonsense. After having studied the elite of the elite for so many years now, I can say how much I appreciate the excitement and fun, the freeing and unpretentious experience of a lot of great Eurodance tracks of the 1990's, pure fun, no major pretention, inventive, involving, highly effective and all-around entertaining. No wonder why so many of those tracks have been recycled in the sad hip-hop-saturated world we're living in nowadays. Also, massive dance events were still quite the rarity those days and the atmosphere must have been really of novelty and excitement.
Being the intense theorist I am, I can also remember a thing or two that are not particularly exciting. During the Golden Age of Eurodance, thousands were being abused, hurt or murdered like animals in the former Yugoslavia. Just as I was dancing the night away and enjoying myself greatly, many youngsters like myself were in refugee camps, fighting behind enemy lines or hurt or dead. That thought hunted me pretty much throughout the mid 1990's and at some point still do so today.
But anyways, let us not fall into too much war-talk and let's go back to the original point: awesome dance Euro music of the 1990's. Whenever I'm sad, confused, angry or all three, I know there's a medicine which never fails to brighten up my day. The memories of 1993-99 are quite vivid and happy. I was a teenager discovering the world. Sometimes it was painful, sometimes, for example, at the dance floor, it was pure joy. The joy of knowing I was alive and about to take on the world, so to speak. I must also admit, that between the ages of 16 and 18, I was g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s, aha, so totally. It was a time of so much hope and expectation, I remember fondly and still revisit it when wanting to recapture the positive spirit of those days.
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Culture Beat -Mr. Vain- I know what I want, and I want it now... I can only think of corpses as the only objects on Earth who wouldn't just get up and dance to this absolute masterpiece of Eurodance. Too bad the producer died so soon, he sure could have come up with other great ideas.
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Sash! -Encore une fois- Clubby, clubby, clubby. I remember people going nuts with this one. Had more hits than Culture Beat, although none perhaps as important as Mr. Vain. Very good memories, though, from Encore une fois.
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4 comentaris:
For Aryaprabha: I stumbled across your blog page via a concatenacious route that started with FWBO People, Moksananda's blog who made reference to your ordination. I must say that I like the approach you take to high and low culture. I often find myself in my study group at the Birmingham Buddhist Centre saying that some soaps - or certainly some themes or moments in soaps - deliver dharma or high aesthetic value along the lines of Shakespeare (whom I adore). This is something I studied and lectured on the late 70s and later. I also studied on and around stereotypical imagery of gay men at the time - particular with regard to gay porn and sport (Yes I know, there's a twinning!) I note that you are interested in Foucault. I interviewed him with a colleague Frank Mort (still a scholar on gay issues, consumerism and cultural theory) in 1978 but which was only published with my translation last year. It is in New Formations 55, published by Lawrence & Wishart: the whole issue is on Foucault. Next time we are on retreat together maybe we could pick up on some of these things - best wishes from Roy, your Ordination photographer and fellow retreatant at the time of your Ordination.
Hello Roy, welcome to pretty much my brain! :-) It's really nice of you to post a comment. Well, yes, "High" and "Low" culture as concepts are things I pretty much want to leave behind. In fact, as you surely know, there's now a field of study, Visual Culture Studies, which has almost completely gone forth from the rigid compartmentalizations of culture. I've seen your website also, although I have to admit I haven't studied much, theoretically or formally the practice of photography. I consider Foucault to be pretty much part of my family, in fact, in fact, I think he's got he's own seat in my Refuge Tree, haha. Pretty much sitting next to Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin.
Nice to blog with you! The type of cultural studies I taught and studied (my tutor was Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) did not make such distinctions between high and low culture. It is only since engaging with Bhante and his notions of the aesthetic and in discussing that with other Buddhists that I find I return to that shorthand. And I must say, limited though the idea is in a strictly theoretical sense, in an empirical and cultural sense I have found it quite useful in such debates! One regret I had when I interviewed the Fouque was not to ask him to pose for the camera I had slung round my shoulder at the time. I felt I didn’t have an idea (photographically that is) big enough to put the man in and that I was turning into a tart if I asked him for that in the middle of deep theoretical (and what turned out to be original) ruminations. It was from that disappointment that I began to value the snapshot because right now I would have been happy with just that. Similarly, far from me being a tart, he would have been flattered further I’m sure. For my Refuge tree and in loyalty to my teachers I’d have to get back to you on that one. For the moment, Mahler, Jackson Browne, Brian Wilson, De Saussure, Sartre, Freud, Stuart Hall, Shakespeare, Nelson Mandela and Andrew Marvell would very much make my starting line up with a couple of comics on the subs bench such as Peter Kaye and Stephen Fry. But that line is liable to change before the next match. Thanks for hitting my website.
PS To last posting. I looked up your references and found them fascinating. I have felt that Buddhist notions around sunyata – plus that of no-fixed-self - being neither nihilist nor essentialist (and learning a great deal in this regard from the FWBO scholar, Sagaramati) were essentially congruent with my earlier forays into Foucault and discourse theories. Butler’s site seems very very interesting in this respect. I shall certainly point my daughter who is researching in French cultural studies at Leeds to Griselda Pollock, too, who is there. These names were new but not entirely their pedigree. Also new was Zizek who seems to trace my own route having started out in Cultural Studies from a Marxist perspective Lukacs, etc and then Althusser (from the 1861 Gruendrisse Introduction by Marx) which paved the way for so many of us lefties at the time to go off and, escaping the narrow determinism in cultural theory that followed on from Marx’s German Ideology and the 1844 Manuscripts, spread our wings flying on the thermals of ‘relative autonomy’ from whence semiotics, Lacan and Foucault.
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