On Mar 18, 10:13am, Britton James wrote:
quoted 10 lines Subject: Re: (idm) Spice Girls> Subject: Re: (idm) Spice Girls
> >
> > what?
> > advertisements SUCK!
> > If the product was *any* good, they wouldn't need
> > an advert to sell it to you in the first place.
>
> I only watch the tv for the ads. I'd rather be sold goods than be sold
> lifestyle and sociological stereotyping via tv shows. At least the ads
> are fairly straight forward in their politics.
You reckon?
Here's a couple of ads doing the rounds in Sydney at the mo' and then
tell me if their politics is straight forward.
AD1 for fizzy soft-drink A, advertising the fact that you get more drink
in a six-pack, or something:
Bottle of drink moving about on a rocky landscape crying out "I'm free!
I'm free! I'm free to do this! I'm free to do that!" etc. Then there is
a voice over describing the offer. After that there is a shot of the
rest of the six-pack and an imperious male voice saying: "Are you quite
finished there? Get back in the pack(!)" and the bottle submissively
does so.
Ok maybe I'm missing the subtle humour or irony, but it does makes me
wonder.
AD2 for fizzy soft-drink B, a popular drink from the US which is only
now beginning to be sold in Australia:
Shot of the Statue of Liberty in New York. The statue tears itself from
its foundations, walks into the water and there is a shot of it swimming
under the water with the torch held in front. Then there is a shot of
two guys fishing at the base of a cliff when with a great splash the
Statue of Liberty rises out of the water. The two guys then take a
refreshing swig of fizzy soft-drink B and the one says to the other:
"American?", the other: "Yeah, I could get used to it". After this cue
the funky music and the statue goes off to park itself in the middle of
Port Jackson next to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House.
What the fuck do you call this!!! Are advertising execs so stupid or is
just this an indication of the depths they can sink in their brand of
intellectual prostitution. The programmes that surround the adverts are
usually no better, being to ads what shit is to flies.
I'm not trying to say stop watching television or buying soft-drink (I
quite like soft-drink B), but that people (advertisers too) should be a
bit more critical. Just because ads are short doesn't mean that they are
meaningless or even harmless.
Someone else on this list said that ads are just entertainment, not
facts. Yes, but they are also _convincing_ among other things. They say
things about the society we live in and the society some people aspire
to or worse want to create. If you approach them actively, you should be
able to tease out all sorts of _facts_, instead of absorbing them
passively and being conned. There is no such thing as an invisible
conspiracy; they just hope you won't notice.
OK, what has this got to do with IDM? A lot in my opinion. When
Intelligent dance music was first hyped in Australia all those moons ago
with those two Warp compilations, Its selling point, which seems to have
been obscured or discarded in the recent American invasion, was that
techno had become a medium of (almost covert) communication of thoughts,
feelings and ideas without words.
Of course one could see how this line would be useful in winning over
people in the alternative-rock scene that only knew/know pop music with
lyrics, and this would no doubt be true, but the fact remains that this
kind of music is very much a means of direct communication from the
artist to the listener by means of abstract symbols and the odd
well-placed sample/word without recourse to obvious lyrics, as well as
being entertaing and sometimes funky (like a lot of ads!).
Autechre: "AntiEP" and Richard H Kirk "Agents with false memories" are
two examles that spring readily to my mind, which require active
participation on the part of the listener to read their message(s) (of
course, they're also very satisfying and a lot of fun).
It was this concept (true or false, promotional or not) that first
fascinated me, and still does, about this kind of music. It opened up in
my naive mind the possibilities of composition. It doesn't have to be
musical - remember: ads follow the same rules - and you definitely don't
have to participate in the received IDM tradition (whatever that really
is) to explore it.
--
Chris Tourgelis