The ever increasing speed at which our culture devours, devours and then subsequently devours new art is at Randy Johnson with a viral video infection. The new cultural paradigm of blog break/blog backlash (new term flog culture??) has certainly allowed neo-liberal "citizen journalists" an untold power in today's shifting tectonic marketplace. That much of the music brought up, up and about throughout today's blogosphere sounds like Little Red Corvette drifting up from the restaurant below your second story studio apartment seems largely irrelevant. The new old sound is fusion, the guilty pleasure of big rave synths and reedy Steely Dan perfectionism. A piccolo, a snare and a handclap all hitting synchronously on the 7 and 13. Fifty year old mothers make the mashups of their 20-something son's sensitive piano ballads.
The sound is familiar, comforting, but ultimately fleeting. Pop music is no longer sugary sweet, it's the cancerous lump of an aspartame-addled lab rat: pulsing and growing in dark and strange new directions.
The playlist is out of your control. You feel the bass, the L.R.C. now a Caddie with hydraulics crushing the pavement. Every red-blooded, reformed-metrosexual American has headphones on, frantically flipping between each new noise, stopping to chat only while recharging batteries over a straight black cup of coffee from temporarily-back-on-its-feet career criminal Starbucks, payed for with a post-ironically ironic American Flag and Eagle Platinum Capital One card. Why discuss rap music when the hottest MCs are on Craigslist?
Que-que: What's in your wallet?
Answer: Post-grad ennui and an empty stomach.
Mother Mash-Up may have taught us to share and share alike, but our personal playlist has become a safety blanket. Despite large-scale dismissals due to a fifteen year recession and production shift towards South Korea (insert unfortunate typhoon metaphor here), it is dark horse candidate Japan who seems to have won the Cold War (a come-from-behind victory, certainly as no one but Michael Crichton even knew they were in the race.)
Music creation is a Toyota factory, assembled from parts manufactured across the globe in a cheap and timely manner. Dissemination is efficient, a model based largely on tireless workmanship (He with the most updates wins?).
Most significant, the ancient Japanese concept of Ma take on a decidedly modern bent when we consider the Twista-like brevity of both critical length (measured to the letter) and delay (posted in GMT). Rather than focus on the gap and space between two fence posts, blog culture forges an awareness of the gap and space between two flog posts. The silence in-between is the sole respite for information junkies, maintaining sanity only in the precious few seconds it requires to manipulate their on-screen environment or apple key-R idolator.com
Crichton, despite his claims to the contrary, might have to except his own Inconvenient Truth; praise be to Japan. The tidal wave of non-believer blood will wash away the wicked excesses of this world, leaving a new Earth designated solely for the innocent and faithful.