Pop gets schooled
Four years of my misspent youth were whiled away as an English major at
a piney liberal arts college where, when not playing beer
pong as it’s meant to be played, I was in the library muddling
through abstruse academic texts like Julia
Kristeva’s Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity, Felix Guattari’s Psychoanalysis and Transversality.
It wasn’t always easy going. Trying to decipher word clusters like "the almost astrologically lush
plurality of its overlapping taxonomies of physical zones" or “a narrowly
and severely normative, difference-eradicating ethical programme has
long-sheltered under developmental narratives and a metaphorics of health and
pathology” — those are from Epistemology
of the Closet, by pioneering queer theorist Eve Kosovsky
Sedgwick, who
died earlier this month — can be challenging in the best of times, never
mind when one has indulged in a few
postprandial bong hits.
I don’t smoke pot anymore, and I also try very hard not to read much in
the way of dense intertextual deconstruction. But San Francisco designer Nikolay Saveliev has made me wistful for
those long-ago days.
With help from our neighbors down in Providence at Brown
Student Radio, Saveliev’s Pop Matters project
screen printed 140 vinyl record sleeves, each with a two-sided insert featuring
“faux-academic
material on pop music and the state of the record industry, seeded with
promotional material for indie radio stations.” These were then secreted into
used & new record stores and sneaked onto the shelves.
And so, some unsuspecting platter flipper alighted surprisedly on Kanye West’s new auto-tuned glitch-trip Profit Margins in
Coupling, or Nickelback’s self-recriminatory nu-MOR flagellation Relations:
The Recursiveness of Professional Mediocrity. Or any of these:
Even more so than those spot-on titles, I dig the album art. It
reminds me a lot, of course, of Sonic Youth’s bone-dry SYR series.
Come to think of it, actually, the sleeve art was my favorite thing
about those records too. I’ll confess I never really listened too much to the airy
experimental jams contained within. With apologies to Thurston & Lee, I suppose I just
wasn’t meant for egghead music or fancy book larnin’.
But, hey, If
you’re so inclined, it is true: a little Lil Jon is a fine soundtrack for a
re-reading of Alan Sokal’s
“Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.”
BONUS FUN: Chomskybot!!!