april is the cruelest month
Apr. 7th, 2002 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistpop music has poisoned my brain today.
voltaire said that anything too stupid to be said is sung.
i would say pop music is a powerful meme transmission mechanism...no wonder a song stuck in your head can drive you insane. there is a greats hort story by an underappreciated sci-fi author henry kuttner called "gingerbread" which is a linguistic fable about US state department people using language & psychology to create a random nonsensical sequence of words that would stick in one's head forever. then they broadcast it into nazi germany and it completely demoralizes the troops because they can't concentrate on anything instead being distracted and pondering the nonsensical verse something along the lines "soldier left/ a wife and seventeen children/ left/ nothing but gingerbread left" and at the end when hitler is about to kill himself in a bunker that's the last thing in his head driving him insane...
anyway all this is just because i had the gorillaz "clint eastwood" song stuck in my head all day, which is actually fine because i really like them and the song. and the nazis are on my mind because i have been working on a paper for my culture and media class about a nazi propaganda film called "hitler youth" that was analyzed by gregory bateson for the state department in the 1950s, very typical psychoanalytic approach to propaganda, which creates an opposition between nazis (good/orderly/gloriou/desexualizeds) and communists (disorganized/ sloppy/ undisciplined promiscuous) in Nazi Germany. of course, the interesting thing about the commentary provided by this American anthropologist is that it was done in the 1950s during the height of communist paranoia in the US, and the cateogories he employs in his analysis could be just as easily applied to the patriots/communists bifurcation going on in America. i am trying to use that and connect it with the anti-Arab propaganda in the media at the moment...
and we lost an hour last night. daylight savings. one less hour of sleep, but then again it will stay lighter longer...
voltaire said that anything too stupid to be said is sung.
i would say pop music is a powerful meme transmission mechanism...no wonder a song stuck in your head can drive you insane. there is a greats hort story by an underappreciated sci-fi author henry kuttner called "gingerbread" which is a linguistic fable about US state department people using language & psychology to create a random nonsensical sequence of words that would stick in one's head forever. then they broadcast it into nazi germany and it completely demoralizes the troops because they can't concentrate on anything instead being distracted and pondering the nonsensical verse something along the lines "soldier left/ a wife and seventeen children/ left/ nothing but gingerbread left" and at the end when hitler is about to kill himself in a bunker that's the last thing in his head driving him insane...
anyway all this is just because i had the gorillaz "clint eastwood" song stuck in my head all day, which is actually fine because i really like them and the song. and the nazis are on my mind because i have been working on a paper for my culture and media class about a nazi propaganda film called "hitler youth" that was analyzed by gregory bateson for the state department in the 1950s, very typical psychoanalytic approach to propaganda, which creates an opposition between nazis (good/orderly/gloriou/desexualizeds) and communists (disorganized/ sloppy/ undisciplined promiscuous) in Nazi Germany. of course, the interesting thing about the commentary provided by this American anthropologist is that it was done in the 1950s during the height of communist paranoia in the US, and the cateogories he employs in his analysis could be just as easily applied to the patriots/communists bifurcation going on in America. i am trying to use that and connect it with the anti-Arab propaganda in the media at the moment...
and we lost an hour last night. daylight savings. one less hour of sleep, but then again it will stay lighter longer...
