two things:

1. that notorious moment when contrived and programmed images became affixed to music radically altered how we all perceive and experience music, hip hop or otherwise. seminal event: in a inversion of the addition of written text (code? coding?) to images – as roland barthes says, “parasitic” – the images this time around acted parasitically as “text” (or code, as in semiotic, social, cultural, political, affective) on the music itself. the images became icons and indexes and even symbols of what the music was purported to represent. very important moment of transfiguration.

the “integrity” of making an image from sound (a time- and duration-relation) inside of our fatty-acid containers now had a model to subscribe to, or rather had a prescriptive map that required consultation before one could be sure of what the mental or physical experiential territory of that compilation of sounds, beats, and breaks in fact was or could possibly become. the video was a governor. if you didn’t hear poor belaboured aerosmith falling behind in “walk this way”, the video certainly confirmed run dmc’s primacy, walls smashing in and all.

not that one had to suffer completely in relation to the machinations of these images: we can shut them off, listen to music without them, maintain a kind of dialogic relation to the sounds themselves. also, picking-up cues publicly in terms of a dance hall or any musical space or venue or show certainly allows this same prescriptive map to emerge: music sucks, but everyone’s rockin’ so it doesn’t matter much if the music sucks because, in communion with this image before me, i also rock and shake until i sweat heavy. more beer and puff reef, please.

aural imagination was invaded and while images didn’t and don’t necessarily take over, their addition certainly erects a referential pole to which we all, in watching and listening, must relate, either in avowal or disavowal or in one of the curious points somewhere in between. call it a new kind of productive force. one need only consider the bling-baroque and musical-influenced (i’m talking rko 1940’s musicals) hip-hop videos currently getting airtime and the incorporated code becomes apparent. think about the tailings that constitute that “indie-rock”/punkish substrate of bands like simple plan and sum 41 and blink 182 and the same thing, with a different genre and form, is also evident.

i wonder if mobilized ipods and other inward-looking mobilized & privatized technologies alter this relation to the image in the sense of rejecting the image (videos) in order to allow a sense of (recuperated) imagination and performance of what that “image” of music may “look like”? is the mp3 player in particular just another layer of mediation that requires engagement in the processes that see us all mediating our own environments?

gilles deleuze and felix guattari said, quite famously, “music is anti-memory.” that doesn’t seem the case in some cases, especially after the mass popular marriage between image and sound (consider cinema’s dilemma in this sense in the late 1920’s…).

2. in line with the open-source theme: the current issue of “the walrus” has compiled a wonderful visually-inflected/ thought-bomb-map genealogy of “open-source”; i was going to scan the article but my soapbox has been giving me some real problems so i figured i’d just drop a reference.

see jerry keehn’s “open source (v. 1.7)”, december 2005/january 2006 issue, 42-43.

n

OpenSource deals more with the models of business / distrobution / development / management / etc… not very much with the actual creation of the media itself. I believe that media is constantly created under “OpenSource” methodology, mainly by the electronica culture. While hip-hop frequently uses remixed media in their work, generally the models that dictate the use of that media fall short of what true OpenSource is all about.

Again, thanks for your thoughts, I’ll be reading this site a lot more often now!

p@
austin, tx