NPR had a
nice piece this morning on music and film: Basically saying that the number one movie (Avatar) and the number one song (
"Tik Tok" by Ke$ha) are completely derivative (just recycled old ideas put together; a "montage of tropes" as NPR put it), but very skillfully produced. They seem like they should be great all-around but they are actually unoriginal. They are great productions only.
I thoroughly agree with their analysis (but please note that I like watching and listening to highly produced things - it's
just entertainment though, not art). It got me thinking about the cultural pendulum swings: bell bottoms in, now bell bottoms out only to be back in-style next decade; facial hair in, now facial hair out followed by side burns and goatees; slick productions now soon to be replaced by naturalist Cinéma vérité and back; synthesized voices followed by acoustic guitar back to sampled hits of yesteryear; etc.
Thus is ever was so - history shows us these patterns of taste oscillate back and forth over time. So, at first I was going to blog about how perhaps this NPR piece is an indication of the end of the highly produced derivative era we have been in: We should expect retro-grainy black and white movies with no CGI next year with lots of acapella singing and acoustic guitars.
But then I started thinking - the cycle time for the cultural pendulum swings seem to be getting shorter. We may be the first generation in a position to actually feel the oscillations. At some point, perhaps the oscillations will simply stop and we will enter a new
dialectic. Or perhaps, just as a real pendulum winds down eventually, we may be entering an era of no oscillations - everything will just be mashed together as self forming groups sample their own "montage of tropes" at their own pace.
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