Three pieces of music about COVID-19
May. 19th, 2020 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: what it says on the tin, (mild) death, amnesia]
I am disturbed by how disturbing this *isn't*. I absolutely cannot hear any of the ugliness or emotion or narrative or relatability that Siderea and her commenters are discussing: this just sounds like background noise to me. My capacity to appreciate music is *greater* than for visual art, but apparently not great enough.
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*This*, on the other hand, is within my ability to comprehend.
Within, I stress, *my* ability.
There are a lot fewer young children at work now--even *our* customers make *some* concessions to the plague: these days they usually send one or two people to order for the group--but I do still see them occasionally, and I am usually struck with the painful awareness that *nobody is going to _tell_ them*. I know very little about the 1990's: if you grow up in a situation where literally *everyone* but you knows something firsthand, where nobody else has ever needed to be taught it, you generally don't get taught.
This is *exactly* the kind of song that outlives everyone who knows what it means. And those who do not remember history...
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This post was originally going to be *two* pieces of music about COVID-19, but then Mom was watching Youtube on the living room TV (whose prosthetic brain is old enough that we cannot find any adblockers that support it), and this...thing...comes up before her foraging tutorial:
That's right: a No Frills ad consisting of a two-minute rap about appropriate grocery-shopping etiquette in a time of COVID-19.
My *initial* reaction was to roll my eyes and put my earmuffs on, but upon reflection I think this song is actually very valuable (edit: and I'm pleased to see that the Internet Archive has actually preserved it! not just the metadata like they usually do for Youtube, but the video itself!). It is *intensely* the thing that it is; it encapsulates so much about its circumstances. Movie-makers of the future, *please* use this in your set dressing for your historical movies about the plague of 2020.
I am disturbed by how disturbing this *isn't*. I absolutely cannot hear any of the ugliness or emotion or narrative or relatability that Siderea and her commenters are discussing: this just sounds like background noise to me. My capacity to appreciate music is *greater* than for visual art, but apparently not great enough.
---
*This*, on the other hand, is within my ability to comprehend.
Within, I stress, *my* ability.
There are a lot fewer young children at work now--even *our* customers make *some* concessions to the plague: these days they usually send one or two people to order for the group--but I do still see them occasionally, and I am usually struck with the painful awareness that *nobody is going to _tell_ them*. I know very little about the 1990's: if you grow up in a situation where literally *everyone* but you knows something firsthand, where nobody else has ever needed to be taught it, you generally don't get taught.
This is *exactly* the kind of song that outlives everyone who knows what it means. And those who do not remember history...
---
This post was originally going to be *two* pieces of music about COVID-19, but then Mom was watching Youtube on the living room TV (whose prosthetic brain is old enough that we cannot find any adblockers that support it), and this...thing...comes up before her foraging tutorial:
That's right: a No Frills ad consisting of a two-minute rap about appropriate grocery-shopping etiquette in a time of COVID-19.
My *initial* reaction was to roll my eyes and put my earmuffs on, but upon reflection I think this song is actually very valuable (edit: and I'm pleased to see that the Internet Archive has actually preserved it! not just the metadata like they usually do for Youtube, but the video itself!). It is *intensely* the thing that it is; it encapsulates so much about its circumstances. Movie-makers of the future, *please* use this in your set dressing for your historical movies about the plague of 2020.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-19 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-19 11:43 pm (UTC)Yeah nope I can't see it either. Sometimes I feel like classical music makes as much an art of understanding it as of making it; they have so much opaque-to-me nature.
>This is *exactly* the kind of song that outlives everyone who knows what it means. And those who do not remember history...
That was basically an explicit design goal, right? To write a song for the virus that sounded like those old plague-themed rhymes that everyone remembers as noone remembering the origin of?
> That's right: a No Frills ad consisting of a two-minute rap about appropriate grocery-shopping etiquette in a time of COVID-19.
This song is objectively awful and no level of pro-social content can make me actually like it. I agree it makes a good piece to demonstrate something of the era, but that's nothing like quality.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 12:13 am (UTC)Oh, absolutely. It's valuable *historically*, not aesthetically. (Though Mom thought it was hilarious, so I guess there's that.)
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>>That was basically an explicit design goal, right? To write a song for the virus that sounded like those old plague-themed rhymes that everyone remembers as noone remembering the origin of? <<
After drafting but before posting, I tried clicking the Tumblr link in the video description and found that out.
The song is kind of nice in isolation (so to speak), but I don't think I much approve of its context. Although, it's possible that I'm simply judging it by the wrong standards: the point of comparison my brain jumps to upon hearing the concept "folk song about COVID-19" is one of the outputs from the "how to deal with ultra-long-term nuclear-waste storage" brainstorming (the same kind of brainstorming from which the famed "this place is not a place of honour" line emerged): genetically engineer feral cats to glow in response to heightened background radiation, then craft folk songs about how glowing cats are a sign that you should get the hell out of dodge. Because, they said, folk music has historically been among the more effective ways to transmit information across large temporal distances.
With *that* idea in mind, a folk song that *deliberately obscures* its subject matter with the intent of having future generations *fail* to understand its true meaning seems perverse.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 12:21 am (UTC)That said: I dislike that specific cat project for 1. making the earworm song without making matching cats. 2. including in said song a thing regular-ass cats do all the time (having flashing/glowing in their eyes) as a sign of the radiation. 3. getting stuck in my damn head for like a month.
(Ditto with: apparently our culture loves "this is not a place of honour" and wants to put it everywhere, which I feel like is a failure on *some* level.)
no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 01:47 am (UTC)---
Also come to think of it, the Siderea OP is *itself* in large part about how we don't have enough art impressing upon people how big a deal plagues are, so I suppose that was further encouraging me to look at "Hide Away" from a social-engineering perspective.
(I'm not sure to what extent it's true. I'll buy that there's a lack of discussion of *that particular* plague, but I feel like plagues in general get a fair bit of cultural airtime. That could absolutely just be salience bias on my part, though.
Certainly one way or another there are a great many people who are horrifyingly cavalier about disease (I don't think I'll ever forget the girl who casually mentioned she had a cold *after* I'd been sitting next to her for like an hour), but I don't know if more art would help. I don't understand where the difference lies, why so many people didn't experience the developmental stage I went through around age 10, when I became old enough to remember clearly from one winter to the next how much illness sucked and old enough to really grasp that there were things I could do to prevent it.
(Right now I'm gunning my post-work decon procedures just about as hard as they'll go (at least, given the available equipment), straining fifteen years of practice to their limits, and when I do I'm acutely aware that most people *can't* do this even if they now want to: they're too inexperienced to pull it off.))
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>>(Ditto with: apparently our culture loves "this is not a place of honour" and wants to put it everywhere, which I feel like is a failure on *some* level.)<<
Yeah. OTOH, if it's going to fail you *want* to find out quickly, so it's a good thing we have.
(...at least, it's a good thing *if* the relevant authorities correctly parse this as a failure and don't try to actually use it in a real-world scenario. AFAIK there are currently no serious plans to use it, and I hope there never will be.)
no subject
Date: 2020-05-20 10:53 am (UTC)