The music you listen to says a fair amount about who you are. This is even more true when you're a teenager. When I was in middle school, I remember seeing classmates walking down the halls wearing t-shirts of bands such as Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. I used to think about how weird that was. Aren't those bands from the 60s? It's 2006, why are they wearing those shirts? Ever since then, I've had this latent but continuing fascination with nostalgia and its role in problematizing how we conceive of "newness."
Many years later, this led me to my first official writing credit when I interned with a start-up media outlet and YouTube channel called Wisecrack (I've mentioned them in a previous blog entry). The video was part of our 8-Bit Philosophy series, and it sought to explain the pervasiveness of nostalgia in our culture. I mean, if you really think about it, it's everywhere. Think about how many reboots have populated our movie theaters and TV screens in the last few years. Just in the past few weeks, the popularity of the "Roseanne" sitcom as well as the nostalgia-packed Spielberg spectacle "Ready Player One" have inspired numerous headlines about the state of modern popular culture.
In roughly the same period of time, the Media Center staff started playing music through our workspace with music selected by students during our shift. My pick, due to my current Motown phase, was "It's the Same Old Song" by the Four Tops. I love this song, and I've been listening to it a bunch lately. The instrumental has a whimsical cotton-candy quality and a bouncing beat. When the vocals start, they pierce through this rollicking sound with a forceful ringing clarity that always gets me. It's almost as if the lyrics were delivered from a pulpit. And maybe I'm just over-interpreting, but when you listen to and interpret the lyrics, they seem to sneakily evoke the weight of nostalgia on modern popular culture. "It's the same old song," the group sings, "with a different meaning since you've been gone."
Someone once said that history happens twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. Could it be that the twenty-first century is just the farcical re-enactment of the twentieth, with pieces of influential popular culture turning into tacky remakes featuring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? Maybe the twenty-first century really is the "same old song with a different meaning since 'you' have been gone." But who or what is the 'you?' Is it notions of progress? Visions of the future? I've discovered a number of explanations in my limited and difficult forays into postmodernist theory, but I'll leave that to philosophers. At any rate, when I think about how to bring originality to our nightly Annenberg TV news broadcasts, these dilemmas inevitably crop up in my thinking.
However, I did manage to help bring one new element to our show this week. We were unfortunately tasked with covering yet another gun-related tragedy, this time at YouTube headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area. Working with one of our reporters, we built a segment with a monitor in the background where we could illustrate the geographical path that the shooter took to get to YouTube. While it may not have been a major stylistic innovation of the news broadcast form, it did add something new to our show and it turned out fairly well. One of the key things to remember about any visual medium is that we're attracted to motion. One can speculate that it's an evolutionary holdover from our time as hunter-gatherers looking for moving prey on the African savannah. At any rate, this key insight helped add an interesting and engaging element to the story.
I'm excited to think about and experiment with innovations in my producing work. Outlets like Cheddar and the Young Turks are developing new ways to present TV news, and they definitely inspire me to brainstorm innovative ways to engage audiences. However, I think I still have a long way to go before I'm ready to try out something major. As the saying goes, you need to understand the rules before you can break them.