Last week I gave a paper at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle. Wow, it was my 7th presentation at the conference, and each time I inch towards what I am interested in doing and being as a thinker about music. The directions below might be some indication - my paper on laptop use among music writers/scholars involved an interactive laptop performance element, which about 10 people did while I was speaking. With that going, my paper being read, and a number of slides presenting information from a surveymonkey-based online survey I conducted, I was attempting to create some small part of the affective experience of multimedia thinking, while at the same time calling attention to the enfleshed world that was "the wisdom of crowds" in the audience.
EMP PAPER
Hello Thanks for being in my laptop brigade.
There are three things
CUE: what you pay attention for
ACTION: what you do when you are supposed to
STOP ACTION: when to stop
OKAY LETS BEGIN
to merely be there...
Off to merely be there, to completely be there.
(apologies for the lame video, but love the song)
American Boy
Jetset, weekend getaway shopping trip, stop off to play the sold out show – it's a narrative of two fabulous cosmopolitan lives set to electro pop synths on Estelle's "American Boy," which has been floating through my head endlessly in the past few days. Whereas Ladytron or Annie go breathy robo-girl to such pads, Estelle's neo-soul melisma, rasp on more dense syllables, and exploration of a static story through phrasing shows her a nuanced vocal talent that goes beyond the songs Euro-cool. She takes this "American boy" phrase and develops it – unlike Winehouse, whose repetition tends to incorporate the same vocal performance each time. Zzz. That Kanye is maybe said boy is amusing – as if he would be a weekend fling.
