The Hairy Ones

My last post on the subject of music history covered the relatively short timespan between around 1950 and 1965, leaving off at about the time The Beatles began leading the ‘British Invasion’ of American music culture. This invasion was a confluence of a whole host of factors; a fresh generation of youths wishing to identify with something new as ‘theirs’ and different to their parents, a British music scene that had been influenced by the American one without being so ingratiated into it as to snub their ability to innovate and make a good sound, and the fact that said generation of youngsters were the first to grow up around guitar music and thus the first to learn to play them and other genre-defining instruments en masse. Plus, some seriously good musicians in there. However, the British invasion was only the first of a multi-part wave of insane musical experimentation and innovation, flooding the market with new ideas and spawning, in the space of less than a decade, almost every genre to exist today. And for the cause of much of part two, we must backtrack a little to 1955.

Y’see, after the Second World War Japan, the dominant East Asian power, had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies and there was no dominant force in the region. This created something of a power vacuum in the area, with a host of new governments trying to rise from the post-war chaos and establish themselves as such a power. Many of these new nations, including those of China, Cambodia, North Korea and North Vietnam, were Communist states, and therefore were a serious concern to the western world. The US in particular, as a fiercely capitalist power, were deeply worried by the prospect of the whole of South East Asia, according to communist theory, just amalgamating into another great communist superpower and landing them with next to zero chance of triumphing in their ‘battle against communism’ against the already hugely powerful Soviet Union. As such, they were hell-bent on preserving every ounce of capitalist democracy they could in the area, and were prepared to defend such governments with as much force as necessary. In 1950 they had already started a war in Korea to prevent the communist north’s invasion of the democratic south, with the practical upshot (after China joined in) of re establishing the border pretty much exactly where it had been to start with and creating a state of war that, officially, has yet to end. In 1955, a similar situation was developing in Vietnam, and President Dwight D Eisenhower once again sent in the army.

Cut to ten years later, and the war was still going on. Once a crusade against the onward-marching forces of communism, the war had just dragged on and on with its only tangible result being a steady stream of dead and injured servicemen fighting a war many, especially the young who had not grown up with the degree of Commie-hating their parents had, now considered futile and stupid. Also related to ‘the Red Scare’ was the government’s allowing of capitalist corporations to run haywire, vamping up their marketing and the consumer-saturation of America. This might have lead to a 15 year long economic boom, but again many of the younger generation were getting sick of it all. All of this, combined with a natural teenage predisposition to do exactly what their parents don’t want them to, lead to a new, reactionary counter-culture that provided an impetus for a whole wave of musical experimentation; hippies.

The hippie movement (the word is, strangely, derived from ‘hipster’) was centred around pacifism, freedom of love and sex (hence ‘make love not war’), an appreciation of the home made and the natural rather than the plastic and capitalist, and drug use. The movement exists to this day, but it was most prevalent in the late 60s when a craze took the American youth by storm. They protested on a huge variety of issues, ranging from booing returning soldiers and more general anti-war stuff (hippies were also dubbed ‘flower children’ for their practice of giving flowers to police officers at such demonstrations) to demonstrations on the banning of LSD or ‘acid’, one of their more commonly used drugs. This movement of wired, eco-centric vegetarians didn’t connect well with the relatively fresh, clean tones of rock & roll and The Beatles, and inspired new music based around their psychedelic and their ‘appreciation’ of drug use. It was in this vein that The Beatles recorded Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, and why Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rose to fame in a new genre known as ‘acid rock’ (named after the drug from which most of the lyrics were ‘inspired’). Characterised by long, confusing and hideously difficult solos (I’m looking at you Hendrix), this was the prominent genre on show at the infamous Woodstock festival of 1969, featuring Hendrix, Joplin, The Who, The Grateful Dead & Carlos Santana among other things. Woodstock was the high point of the hippie movement, with over half a million fans attending to smoke, listen to the music, skinny dip and make love in and around the lake and generally by as hippie as possible.

Hippie culture went downhill post-Woodstock; public outcry following the Altamont Free Concert close to San Francisco (where Hell’s Angels provided security and shot a concert-goer during The Rolling Stones’ set for brandishing a gun) coincided with ‘the hippie generation’ mostly growing up. The movement still exists today, and it legacy in terms of public attitudes to sexual freedom, pacifism and general tolerance (hippies were big on civil rights and respect for the LGBT community) is certainly considerable. But their contribution to the musical world is almost as massive; acid rock was a key driving force behind the development of the genres of folk rock (think Noah and the Whale) and heavy metal (who borrowed from Hendrix’s style of heavy guitar playing). Most importantly, music being as big a part as it was of hippie culture definitively established that the practice of everyone, even the lowliest, ‘commonest’ people, buying, listening to, sharing and most importantly making music themselves was here to stay.

The story of hippies covers just one of the music families spawned out of the late 60s. The wave of kids growing up with guitars and the idea that they can make their own music, can be the next big thing, with no preconceived ideas, resulted in a myriad of different styles and genres that form the roots of every style of modern rock music. This period was known as ‘the golden age of rock’ for a reason; before pop was big, before hip-hop, before rap, decades before dubstep, before even punk rock (born in the early seventies and disliked by many serious music nerds for being unimaginative and stupid), rock music ruled and rock music blossomed.

You could argue that this, then, marks the story of rock, and that the rest of the tale is just one long spiral downwards- that once the golden age ended, everything is just a nice depressing story. Well, I certainly don’t like to think of that as true (if only because I would rather not have a mindset to make me stop listening to music),  but even if it was, there is a hell of a lot of stuff left in this story. Over? Not for another post or two…

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Bouncing horses

I have , over recent months, built up a rule concerning posts about YouTube videos, partly on the grounds that it’s bloody hard to make a full post out of them but also because there are most certainly a hell of a lot of good ones out there that I haven’t heard of, so any discussion of them is sure to be incomplete and biased, which I try to avoid wherever possible. Normally, this blog also rarely delves into what might be even vaguely dubbed ‘current affairs’, but since it regularly does discuss the weird and wonderful world of the internet and its occasional forays into the real world I thought that I might make an exception; today, I’m going to be talking about Gangnam Style.

Now officially the most liked video in the long and multi-faceted history of YouTube (taking over from the previous record holder and a personal favourite, LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem), this music video by Korean rapper & pop star PSY was released over two and a half months ago, and for the majority of that time it lay in some obscure and foreign corner of the internet. Then, in that strange way that random videos, memes and general random bits and pieces are wont to do online, it suddenly shot to prominence thanks to the web collectively pissing itself over the sight of a chubby Korean bloke in sunglasses doing ‘the horse riding dance’. Quite how this was even discovered by some casual YouTube-surfer is something of a mystery to me given that said dance doesn’t even start for a good minute and a half or so, but the fact remains that it was, and that it is now absolutely bloody everywhere. Only the other day it became the first ever Korean single to reach no.1 in the UK charts, despite not having been translated from its original language, and has even prompted a dance off between rival Thai gangs prior to a gunfight. Seriously.

Not that it has met with universal appeal though. I’m honestly surprised that more critics didn’t get up in their artistic arms at the sheer ridiculousness of it, and the apparent lack of reason for it to enjoy the degree of success that it has (although quite a few probably got that out of their system after Call Me Maybe), but several did nonetheless. Some have called it ‘generic’ in music terms, others have found its general ridiculousness more tiresome and annoying than fun, and one Australian journalist commented that the song “makes you wonder if you have accidentally taken someone else’s medication”. That such criticism has been fairly limited can be partly attributed to the fact that the song itself is actually intended to be a parody anyway. Gangnam is a classy, fashionable district of the South Korean capital Seoul (PSY has likened it to Beverly Hills in California), and gangnam style is a Korean phrase referring to the kind of lavish & upmarket (if slightly pretentious) lifestyle of those who live there; or, more specifically, the kind of posers & hipsters who claim to affect ‘the Gangnam Style’. The song’s self-parody comes from the contrast between PSY’s lyrics, written from the first-person perspective of such a poser, and his deliberately ridiculous dress and dance style.

Such an act of deliberate self-parody has certainly helped to win plaudits from serious music critics, who have found themselves to be surprisingly good-humoured once told that the ridiculousness is deliberate and therefore actually funny- however, it’s almost certainly not the reason for the video’s over 300 million YouTube views, most of which surely go to people who’ve never heard of Gangnam, and certainly have no idea of the people PSY is mocking. In fact, there have been several different theories proposed as to why its popularity has soared quite so violently.

Most point to PSY’s very internet-friendly position on his video’s copyright. The Guardian claim that PSY has in fact waived his copyright to the video, but what is certain is that he has neglected to take any legal action on the dozens of parodies and alternate versions of his video, allowing others to spread the word in their own, unique ways and giving it enormous potential to spread, and spread far. These parodies have been many and varied in content, author and style, ranging from the North Korean government’s version aimed at satirising the South Korean president Park Guen-hye (breaking their own world record for most ridiculous entry into a political pissing contest, especially given that it mocks her supposed devotion to an autocratic system of government, and one moreover that ended over 30 years ago), to the apparently borderline racist “Jewish Style” (neither of which I have watched, so cannot comment on). One parody has even sparked a quite significant legal case, with 14 California lifeguards being fired for filming, dancing in, or even appearing in the background of, their parody video “Lifeguard Style” and investigation has since been launched by the City Council in response to the thousands of complaints and suggestions, one even by PSY himself, that the local government were taking themselves somewhat too seriously.

However, by far the most plausible reason for he mammoth success of the video is also the simplest; that people simply find it funny as hell. Yes, it helps a lot that such a joke was entirely intended (let’s be honest, he probably couldn’t have come up with quite such inspired lunacy by accident), and yes it helps how easily it has been able to spread, but to be honest the internet is almost always able to overcome such petty restrictions when it finds something it likes. Sometimes, giggling ridiculousness is just plain funny, and sometimes I can’t come up with a proper conclusion to these posts.

P.S. I forgot to mention it at the time, but last post was my 100th ever published on this little bloggy corner of the internet. Weird to think it’s been going for over 9 months already. And to anyone who’s ever stumbled across it, thank you; for making me feel a little less alone.

Freedom Bridge

I must begin today with an apology- I’m going to go on about games today SORRY DON’T RUN AWAY IT’S DIFFERENT THIS TIME! Instead of looking into gaming as a whole today I want to focus on just one game.

Before I do, I should probably give you the rundown as to what I am getting at. The majority of the population, including (and quite possibly especially) the gaming population, generally views games as a pastime- a relaxation, a release, a chance to take out some of their surplus aggression and stress on an unassuming NPC. However, some people are willing to go further, and suggesting that games be considered something special on the mass-media scale- not just another tool for making money, but a tool of expression and delivery unmatched by even TV or film. In short, some people believe that games are a unique and special form of art.

This is the subject of quite some argument among both gamers, artists and (of course, since they are never ones to let a good contentious issue go to waste) journalists, but to explain both sides of the argument would be long, tedious and biased of me. So instead I thought I would present to you a case study, an example of just what the Games Are Art crowd are going on about. I give you Freedom Bridge.

Freedom Bridge is a free-to-play online Flash game (I’ll include a link to it at the bottom). It takes all of a minute or two to play (depending on how you play it), and it’s generally about as simple as games come. You play as a single black square on a white background, able to move up, down, left or right using the arrow keys. Your movement is somewhat restricted- you cannot move up or down beyond the dimensions of the playing screen you start with, and cannot move very far to your left either. Your only choice to progress involves moving right, towards a curly line that stretches across the screen in front of you. You cannot move to either side of it- your only choice is to go straight through. As you do so, your movement instantly slows- your block is struggling to move through, and when it finally does, it is leaving a thin, sparse trail of red spots behind it. The spots are blood, and that curly line is barbed wire.

Your direction is still limited to moving right, through a large expanse of white screen broken only by you and your trail. Stopping for a while causes the spots to build up into a bigger red mass- your blood piling up. As you continue to move right, another length of barbed wire appears in front of you, and you once again have no choice but to go through it. Once again, your motion becomes painfully slow, only this time, when you’re on the other side, some of your loss of speed remains, and the trail of blood is thicker and more obvious. You may turn back if you wish, but will not find anything new- your only real choice is to press on right. All the time the sound of rushing water, playing since the start, is getting slowly louder. Another length of barbed wire appears and, beyond it, the source of the sound is revealed- a fast-flowing river, with a bridge crossing it. Once again, your sole choice is to go through the wire, and once again you are slowed still further, and your bloody trail becomes still thicker. Your movement is laboured now- but the bridge awaits. You cannot travel up or down the river, so your only choice is to cross the bridge. As you do so, your movement now slow and bloody, a shot rings out, and you disappear into a splat of blood. That’s it. The game doesn’t even fade out (well, not for a while anyway). There’s just the sight of the blood, and the sound of the flowing water.

At first glance, this barely warrants its description as a game. This is a game that makes platforming look open-world, has no levels or sub-divisions- hell, there aren’t even any characters, or clearly defined plot for that matter. There are no options, no way to win. And that is the secret to its effectiveness.

The game does, in fact, have a plot, but it’s hidden amongst the detail. Think of the title, Freedom Bridge- that bridge is the embodied representative of freedom, of escape, of liberation, whilst the barbed wire and your side of the river in general is symbolic of restraint, or oppression. Think of the wire itself- used to guard borders by oppressive regimes who don’t want their citizens leaving. This bridge could be in Korea (where it is actually based on), cold war-era Germany, Zimbabwe, wherever- it represents them all. The white landscape itself is symbolic of the bleak emptiness of the borderlands, devoid of care and emotion. Think of the way it ends- the sound of the water very gently fades out to nothing, but for a long time the scene doesn’t change (and when it does, it’s onlt for some rather poignant context). Your death doesn’t change things, doesn’t make the world a different place. The world is uncaring, you appear immaterial, and all your sacrifice has done is coloured the earth red. And then, think of the game element itself. If you were to just hold down the right arrow key, you could replicate the experience almost exactly by watching a short video. But the effectiveness of that video? About zero. The important detail is that you have a choice of how to proceed. You can, if you want, go up, or left, or down, you can try to look for the thinnest points in the wire, you can try to see if there’s another way across the river- if you wanted to, you could draw pictures with your own bloodstained trail, or even (if you had rather too much time), turn every spot of white on the map red with it. The point is that you have all this choice, unavailable if this were simply a film, but it doesn’t make a scrap of difference. No matter what you do, the game is still going to end with you as a splat of blood on that bridge. This is a game about inevitability, and whatever you do in it, you are only delaying the inevitable. Death is inevitable. For the poor soul trying to escape their oppressive regime, there is no way out- only the icy grip of death awaits them.

Without the element of choice that the game offers, this message simply cannot be delivered with the same effectiveness. The experience of it cannot be replicated by a film, or even a piece of art- this is a an experience which, when thought about, can be immensely harrowing and poignant, and yet cannot be replicated in the same way by any classical art form- only the interactivity of games allows it to be quite so special. Some people argue that this kind of experience cannot really be called a game. But even so… if the experience that delivers isn’t art, then I don’t know what is.

To play Freedom Bridge, follow this link: http://www.necessarygames.com/my-games/freedom-bridge/flash