Just got a really great message from Sister Linda. Dig it! Theres LOTS of books we should all be reading, and according to this gal, heres one of em! Sounds good to me! From Our Band Could Be Your Life, the Beat Happening chapter: We had this idea that it was actually dangerous not to conform, not to go along with consumer culture, says Jensen, who compiled the collection with Johnson. And using local nonmusicians made another point: It’s not just consumption; it’s [a] process of involvement. We’re not just buying somebody’s ideas, Gary May said in a 1982 Sub Pop interview. We write songs about ourselves, and people who know us have a shot at understanding what we’re talking about. The label later issued a 1985 sequel called Dangerous Business International. If the point of punk was to let it all out and be yourself, as the K bio put it, the logical extension of that was to break it down to the extreme bare essentials, a person and their voice. According to Jensen, issuing cassette compilations of a cappella singing was part of the idea of propagating a resistance to the technically mediated way of consuming your lifetime, from going to school to doing your job and dying, to buying that house to being suburban to studying how appropriately you should play music, how you should entertain yourself and in fact, just leave it to some experts, leave it to some people who have the means to take care of some very expensive equipment who need to know what they’re doing, the idea of instead coming up with a strategy by which you might, through an act of bravery — demonstrable, jaw-dropping, minimalist bravery — provoke people to see that there was a behavioral barrier, not a technical or financial barrier, to being up onstage and making the culture happen right now with you and everybody else in the room.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 19:13:10 +0000
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