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More Assignats

“What I sent are a reflection of a continuum of desires I carry around all the time, (as well as mental actions). They might seem primitive:

1. decompressing after a shitty day at work
2. simultaneously shutting out the bad thoughts and letting through the good
3. remembering passing someone hot on the street
4. reading an ekphrastic passage that will be interfaced on your brain for the rest of your life (Proust is hot, too)
5. listening to music that makes you anticipate every next moment even if you know you will simply be sitting on a train for the next ten”
-- M. Dalton

“I used to feel that way for music--like flirting, like eyes across a bar. O, like sex. Now I think they are masks and these ten are fun for me because they are not where I am now (an all-night robot-boy, gloom-goddess, zippety-do-dah type, a suicidal, homicidal, an obsessive, a beggar--a pretty average grouping I’d say for a suburban mother of two/PhD student). --Sort of me in lyrical relief-- you can find me in between these 10 fingers with a knife.”
-- K. Kaschock

“Or all this is to say that I noticed that the key word in three of the nine songs that I‚d snippeted had the word “c’mon” as integral to their affect: the musical shorthand for a becoming-collective.”
-- "gseigwor"

“...a view of the type of confident coolness I've always wanted and have always been SO not.”
-- C. Bull

“There is a good balance of lines I can personally relate to & lines I like for their instruction. There is possibility in most of them, & an eager embrace of the unknown. I find myself less interested in lyrics that retell past events, or a specific course of action. The lines I singled out are more invested in exploring the unknown events of the future. Most of the songs I picked are I-don’t-know-where-I’m-going-but-I’m going songs. This type of song can be found in every form & style of music. And it can take a wide array of stances: defiance, fear, excitement, apprehension, stagnation. Feelings that I have been sitting with for over a decade. These are songs of metamorphosis, certain of only their uncertainty.”
-- C. Meng

“The lyric I identify with least is the most specific: “So we rode to the club, to see if we could get it on, even if we don’t know how we're gonna make it home.” But this precisely describes a situation that many people I have known have been in (none of the other lyrics give themselves a chance to form such a concrete attachment). It’s no coincidence that the rapper here is (or rather, was) the closest to me geographically. The thought comes to mind that it represents a life I decided not to lead: a concrete world I gave up for the abstractions of the academy. “Gave up” possibly overestimates the choice I had in the matter. The point is that this is the sort of life that many kids I went to school with are leading. The full lyrics to this song make the connections of this with race and class and gender clear -- it blasts the “white collar criminals,” with the (female) rapper spitting the word “white.” You could say my championing of this song has something to do with liberal guilt. But nothing in the world makes me so proud to be not white. So let’s call it liberal glee.”
-- B. Luen

“Can’t find any connection to my life without a stretch, but then again, has there to be any just because we chose the songs? Writing down the passages I absentmindedly sing along has actually imbued meaning into them, much to my grief...”
-- M. Roddier

Posted by jane at August 4, 2004 06:31 AM | TrackBack