Digital Drugs aka iDosing
This video is amazing in many ways. The extent to which “the internet” doesn’t take it seriously makes me wonder…
Will future presidential candidates defend their i-dosing past by saying, “But I had it on mute”? Are we supposed to declare a war on cyberdrugs or a cyberwar on cyberdrugs? How will police know if a teen is with headphones on is i-dosing or just listening to Justin Bieber? Is the iPod the bong of the future?
- Wired
I just got so wasted on this and then did a whole kilo of pure heroin; stuffed it right into my ears…Look at that, I’m a drug dealer now! Now you’ll all be pounding on my door in the middle of the night looking to score some tunes.
- Kottke
from Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind - A CONVERSATION WITH ANIRUDDH D. PATEL (NYTimes)
Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?
A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!
My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.
Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?
A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.”
This is all to say that there is no shadowy conspiracy at work here. The conspiracy is already fully exposed; it’s all right there, on the surface, and we are all complicit in it. Within Lady Gaga’s simulated reality, there are no shadows; she exists solely in the spotlight of fame, amidst stylized signs evacuated of hidden content.
Lady Gaga’s secret is hidden in plain sight. She reveals that today it is not signs or symbols that rule the world and control our minds. It is style.
- from Jeremy Riles’s “Lady Gaga’s Secret Religion.” (from RD mag, via book4m)
Recent studies by Professor Nina Kraus, a neuroscientists at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have shown that the electrical activity inside the brain while listening to music closely matches the physical properties of sound waves.
Using brain scanning equipment Professor Kraus, who presented her findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego on Saturday, said the brainwaves recorded from volunteers listening to music could be converted back to sound.
In one example where volunteers listened to Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water, when the brainwaves were played back the song was clearly recognisable.
She said: “When we play the brainwaves back as sound, although they don’t sound exactly like the song, it is pretty similar. It shows that the brain matches the physical properties of sound very closely.”
from “Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope” (UKTelegraph)
- from ‘M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop’ (NYTimes)
I kinda like that babies say Gaga’s name, to be honest.
“MMM de Homero”
via WAG
Roger Linn’s “Linnstrument”
Come In Here
Madonna, the Madonna of the conical bras and the dancing myrmidons, had a similar thing going for a while, but tempered always with her rather frigid sense of self-importance. Gaga is post-Madonna and therefore freer: bandaged in yellow police tape or pounding at the piano with one leg up on the keyboard, she fears no trespass on her dignity. There’s nothing in Madonna’s videography comparable to the John Waters–esque sequence at the end ofTelephone, in which a mass poisoning is perpetrated and fried food falls in lumps from people’s mouths. What does it mean, the image of an aproned Gaga turning a diner into a vomitorium? It means gaga, it means gagging, it means nothing. Or rather, right now, somehow, it means Pop. And who will be post-Gaga? Nobody. She’s finishing it off, each of her productions gleefully laying waste to another area of possibility. So let’s just say it: she’s the last Pop star. Après Gaga, the void.
(from “The Last Pop Star” by James Parker, The Atlantic. Image by Sean McCabe)
Andy Loses Touch With New Music
“MAYBE WE SHOULD CALL IT EVEN.”
