Cartoon Physics/The Revenge of the Tangible

[sadmanbarty]

i remember luke writing on dissensus offhandedly alluding to the dance being called "the robot" and it being futuristic. he wasn't making a point and using it as an example.

it really struck me, i'd never put two and two together; it was such a comedy retro thing by the time i was growing up it'd never even occurred to me that it would have been futuristic at one point.

 

[versh]

'Eskimo' being seventeen years old is insane. It's such a youthful music. It can't be that old.

 

[versh]

i remember luke writing on dissensus offhandedly alluding to the dance being called "the robot" and it being futuristic. he wasn't making a point and using it as an example.

it really struck me, i'd never put two and two together; it was such a comedy retro thing by the time i was growing up it'd never even occurred to me that it would have been futuristic at one point.

Yeah, even the term 'robot' sounds antiquated to me. Something from 1950s comics.

 

[luka]

Dance is interesting as it never really develops or gets more advanced. There's a video on this thread of James Brown doing the robot. it's been around a long time. Dance is dance.

 

[sadmanbarty]

donna summer did it in a performance of i feel love

 

[versh]

Krumping seemed like an advance on popping and locking, the robot, but krumping looks dated now too.

 

[luka]

i suppose luke's old enough to have seen a whole culture be born and die. that must do something to you; to have outlived an era.

being in my 20's, stuff being 10 years ago is always a bit astonishing. i remember seeing youtube videos with "10 years" written by the upload date and being shocked. uk funky and the gully/gaza war being over a decade old were similarly amazing.

We've probably overpriveleged the psychedelic here and as a result forgotten the example of hip-hop which also was a nuclear level event. This cultural explosion which unlike rave, was neither drug fuelled nor utopian but unleashed at least an equal and very possibly a greater level of energy. Rave transformed the country to a far greater extent, but just at the level of energy generated, the will to participate, people inspired, quickened, electrified, hip-hop was enormous.


This is one of the many reasons hardcore/jungle is so fascinating, it's fuses the two. But jungle didn't inspire people to literally dance on the streets or paint the walls of their city. It didn't have nearly the same visibility. The sense of a benevolent virus running merrily amok. Jes Grew.

 

[poetix]

Loony Tunes physics depends on an implicit understanding of real-world physics to generate surprise (initially) and then, even more delightfully, counterfactual continuity: here is a universe with its own distinct rules. It's most pronounced in Road Runner, where the mishaps befalling Wile E. Coyote start to become predictable, and the toon even starts to play with anticipation: you know this is going to go wrong, you know how it's going to go wrong, and then it goes wrong and then some.

There's a distant resonance with Kafka - the universe is against you, is running according to mad rules which seem designed to thwart rational agency - except that it's material rather than social reality that is warped and adversarial: rocks, not bureaucracy. Also, the typical Kafka protagonist is broadly sane, if gradually deranged by circumstances, whereas Wile E. Coyote is himself possessed by a mad, monomaniacal drive. His material environment is placid, stately, monumental, until he introduces disturbance into it in the form of Acme gizmos which purport to grant the bearer superlative mastery. Reality revolts against attempts to bend it to one's will.

 

[firefinga]

Yeah, I get that too. I can't quite get my head round the 90s being almost 30 years ago. I'm so used to the 80s being 20 years ago. Dubstep being like fifteen years ago is a real eyebrow raiser.

Supports my theory the really stagnant decade was the 2010s. I recently re-read (or rather, flicked thru) a few copies of music mags from around 2009/2010 - and things that got lauded there - streaming, social media, smartphones - are still at the center of attention a decade later.

As a proud reactionary I don't see history as a constent stream of change, I rather see sudden bursts of change which then lead into a solified new era. The 1990s and 2000s were the transitional period from analog to fully digital/dematerialisation, the 2010s are the first full digital decade - Especially the second half.

 

[luka]

The 2010s never happened.

 

[luka]

Therefore I'm still 30.

 

[luka]

"In this civilization there were successive epochs of high development- a series of creative periods which produced inestimable treasures not only of a material kind but also in the intellectual region of culture; and there were also periods of temporary stagnation and decline, when the creative powers of this or that part of the ancient world were for the time enfeebled. The zenith of cultural creation was attained by Egypt and Babylonia in the third millenium B.C.; by Egypt again in the second millennium and, at the same time, by Asia Minor and part of Greece; by Assyria, Babylonia and Persia in the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries B.C.; next by Greece in the sixth century B.C. to the second, and by Italy in the first century B.C. and the first century A.D. From the second century A.D. A general stagnation in creative power is observable in the whole of the ancient world; and by the third century an almost complete cessation of this power and a gradual reversion to more and more primitive conditions of life."

 

[versh]

The 2010s never happened.

Alright, Jean.

 

[luka]

 

[mvuent]

classic cartoon punch / slap sound used as a snare starting ~1:10. I tried to do the same a few times before hearing this so I guess it's a common idea.

 

[thirdform]

As a proud reactionary I don't see history as a constent stream of change, I rather see sudden bursts of change which then lead into a solified new era. The 1990s and 2000s were the transitional period from analog to fully digital/dematerialisation, the 2010s are the first full digital decade - Especially the second half.

lol m8 if you were truly a proud reactionary you wouldn't identify yourself as such, as reactionary thought is itself modern. it's like people saying they are proud traditionalists. barmy.

 

[thirdform]

i am god suck my cock i know everything.

 

[thirdform]

good thread this. there's also a kind of overtly implicated cartoon physics in ayler/cecil taylor as well. I think liberatory music has to have that dialectical tension between the cartoon and the serious. you tilt too much in either direction and you go up yer arse.

in lyrics, it would be gangsta humour, bushwick bill and Geto Boys.

 

[versh]

I've always found Mingus' Moanin' quite cartoonish. It's got these big farting notes at the start, like a cartoon character being squished or bonked on the head.

 

[thirdform]

a lot of those 50s-60s bebop to hardbop sessions are interesting in that they alternate between fast uptempo cartoon tracks, like car horns honking, and basically hotel music. Stockhausen remarked something very similar about going to see the Sun ra arkestra. it totally confused him. a compliment for us if there was ever one. Matt of course wrote a lot about this back in the day. you got his big book Version? It's really good.

Metal of course is quite big on the whole goblin voice. but its a cartoon physics i can't necessarily jell with because the best stuff sounds like childhood horror ghosts (fantastic) and then the pantomime goblins come in. once again that ying yang.