Better Late than Never

So like I said I’ve been deliriously sick for about a week and so it’s been pretty difficult to keep up and not think crazy thoughts—I’ve been watching a lot of television and the new fad in cable news (at least last week) is to really probe and dig deep and make inflammatory, over-simplified statements like “racism is over,” the logic being that if we can elect a half-black man from Kansas and educated at Columbia Law, we’re ready to do anything. Sean Hannity for example believes this but I’m not convinced we agree on what racism means or what being racist is now—I think that he’s right when he says only a small minority of Americans are racist, but I’d argue that what he means is open and unashamed racism—you’re not marrying my daughter I’ve got a shotgun kind of racism. Sure, we’re no longer doing violence against blacks, latinos, or Asians, (for the most part) and we’ve mostly done away with open racial slang (great), but racial preference is rampant; we’re not hiring—black unemployment is double white, blacks make less money etc. So obviously "racism is over" is an absurd statement and deserves about one minute of someone’s time that has any intelligence but it still made me angry and so I wanted to tackle some sort of social/racial issue with my sound project (also I’ve never tried to create a politically/socially driven piece of art so it could be interesting) the theme being “dialogue.” So I sat at the tv with a microphone and recorded people discussing race and racism for a few days mostly on pbs and fox news (mostly because of the discrepancy between intelligence and respect, and just because it would give me a wider range of voices and kinds of voices). Basically what I’ve done is collage, mash, and break up different voices—to make them mostly intelligible, but also allow them to interact, play, contradict, compete. I couldn’t help myself trying to make Sean Hannity sound like a jerk and a moron though—I cut him off and looped moments of stuttering or stumbling over words, but I also feel that the privileged middle aged white man doesn’t need the last word or the loudest voice in this situation. I tried to give a louder voice so to speak to those with the smallest voices—the everyday people protesting the NY post after the chimpanzee cartoon they ran. Here’s the link to the article/video: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/20/hundreds_protest_ny_post_cartoon_seen

(By the way, if anyone wants any of the clips I used they’re all on my flash drive that I’ll have with me in class). I featured the NY post protests because I think that whites still don’t understand the anger and residual anger blacks feel everyday—it makes me think of that song “Cop Killa” by Ice T that was a big deal in the early 90s that politicians condemned and damned so thoroughly. Maybe it went too far but I think it highlighted a racial gap—white people just couldn’t identify with black skepticism and anger toward authority and more specifically, police. I tried to include as many marginalized voices as I could—women, latinos, blacks, etc. What I thought was really interesting was that after I used a clip of Martin Luther King Jr I realized just how marginalized his actual voice has become—it’s been boiled down to the “I have a dream” bytes which are just so different and watered down from the way he actually talked. So my project is not without bias or preference but I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily—maybe it’s too easy to pick on Hannity like I did and it’s more difficult to really make a smart conceptual project. I hope I’ve still done that while also having some fun in the process. The music that I’ve used underneath the vocal clips is Alias’ “Kill My Television” which is how I felt at the time of its selection, but I ultimately used it for its emotional quality, its versatility. It’s quiet and repetitive enough to compliment vocal audio very well, and since it’s mostly empty, it makes for a perfect instrumental accompaniment that really augments the language and vocal intensities of the individual people I feature in the project. At times it also obscures the “dialogue” so to speak (I say “dialogue” because no one’s actually talking to each other—they talk past each other or to no one most of the time) and rises above the language which I also think is interesting and part of the “aliveness” maybe of the sound???


Also, Gabe can vouch for me that I ran into several problems with the files of my project corrupting and so I lost a bit of it and am now working with an older version that I’m going to try to get in shape for the presentation tomorrow. See you then.