One can reasonably expect to be disenchanted, angry, or callously indifferent when faced with the oeuvre of a prolific artist. There can be no coping with such a legacy. Bob Dylan is lost to me. Even if a life is spent excavating and distilling the essence of one person’s lifetime-output it can be concluded that another individual’s works are at the same time going unnoticed, getting moldy in some basement or else suffering the ignominy of zero-hit & zero-comment in an online archive. It’s a natural and unavoidable assumption that there is just as much manna going to waste when you embark upon specificity, when you write that first outline of your thesis proposal.
The answer then is to do nothing yourself, or at the most, very little.
But of course do it publically and in a grand fashion. This means the collective output of humanity might one day become manageable and graspable to all. True collective wisdom is at stake. We must acknowledge the failures of the past – failures that in no way rely upon the content and ideas raised in various works and discourses, but instead failures that may be adjudged as such by weight of their weight. In short, ideas remain opaque to the majority because of abject authorial prolificity. One must be against this; all must be against this. We need not advocate a burning of books, but instead just a gradual turning of the eyes. Forget the writers who wrote a lot, the musicians who lived a long time, and the artists with ‘phases’. (All unnecessarily long blog-postings should be resolutely ignored too.) When we come to a consensus on this matter it seems inevitable that world peace shall follow, consumerism – the feted cause of a material world war 3 – being nothing but the awkward desire for a more prolific, multi-faceted sense of self. I look forward to the day.
Just as everyone looks forward to the arrival of truly intelligent post-avant hip-hop, or a paradoxical segue that gets warmer the longer you linger over it. The majority of commercialized packages of the hip-hop genre (I speak of it broadly, generally, and without research) maintain the boring status-quo of a long gender imbalance. The vociferous male rapper rages through verse after verse of unintelligent stereotypical drivel, that is nevertheless, fascinatingly wordy, and even rhythmic to the point of being nuanced. Words come at a rate of knots until the sound-bite chorus loop. Typically, here you are given the beautifully wistful female vocal – she won’t ‘say’ much, but she sure is pretty (thereby effective). The male is wordy, aggressive and angst-ridden in his daft language-doubt; the woman is silently beautiful and practical (calm) because she understands the essence of communication, like perfume. Same old same old. Post-avant rappers will recognize this perpetuation of the prolificty myth and rectify it. Perhaps they already have. Bugger epiphany.
Everything will be said in a more concise manner by everyone. And everyone shall be poets, and we shall all be able to share in the theories that matter. Like this one. There will be an upsurge in the popularity of irony and online random-essay-generators. Topics, like search-strings, will abound.
Ha! Beautiful, made me smile all the way through. Where is that post on cool, again?
And ‘daft’ is such a great word. Heh, have I ever I told you about my theory re everything being made out of waves, and hence, the fundamental primacy of rhythm. We must talk about it one day. Have a fantabulous day full of tiny miracles like unexpected flowers blooming, Mr Motion.
I like to think I say rather a lot in my hip-hop poetry. And I am on your doorstep, and not really that pretty. Perhaps, Mr Motion, you might search for the few of us that are out there, rather than lamenting our absence.
http://web.overland.org.au/?p=897
hiya maxine – yes, you’re right, & i kinda knew as i hit ‘publish’ that i would be over-simplifying things.
but in my defense, i was clutching at a specific straw, the mainstream ‘charting’ hip-hop song, the type that will often feature a male rapper, or crew, who will often utilise a female vocal on loop. i know i’m ignoring a huge amount of stuff by doing this, but i just wanted to search out an idea, say something about it…
& i didn’t mean that the female vocalist is pretty, i meant the relative affect of her melody could be analogised as ‘pretty’ when compared to the rapped sections, which focus instead on rhythm, rhyme, alliteration (doing nothing to pretty-up the harshness of language & meaning)… & most of all the amount of words in a song, the resulting density, which i think might be seen as both aggressive &/or intellectual.
it is true that i probably don’t know enough about what i’m talking about to talk. but it just doesn’t seem to stop me.
thanks for the links too – very cool.
(bit unsure about people calling me Mr. Motion though. i really don’t feel that capital. squires started it. i don’t know why.)