Critical Karaoke

I recently participated in an event sponsored by my department called Critical Karaoke. The CFP was thus:

Thinking alongside Alexandra Vazquez, this is an invitation to listen in detail—or “listen to it all at once”—in preparation for an experimental Critical Karaoke event hosted by the English department this fall. The event is designed to showcase the different forms that meaningful intellectual work can take and will celebrate the transformative power of performance, improvisation, play, failure, feeling, silence, and sound.

Inspired by interdisciplinary and cross-field conversations about music and Experience Music Project’s annual “Pop Conference,” the organizers of this fall’s Critical Karaoke event—Duncan Faherty (tambourine), Eric Lott (cowbells and backing vocals), and Danica Savonick (lead vocals, lead guitar, drums, bass, and harmonica)—invite brief essays that engage with a particular song. Papers will be read aloud in accompaniment with the song, and should last no longer than its duration (“cut it down to three oh five,” or thereabouts). Beyond this stipulation of brevity, stylistic choices regarding format, volume, dance breaks, and dramatic pauses are up to participants. Performances can move freely among keywords and key changes, the popular and the peripheral, the lizard and the lyric. More promiscuous intellectual affair than long-term commitment, this low-stakes event encourages participants to dabble in a different field, flirt with an old fling, or linger with a guilty pleasure.

What can possibly be said, thought, or felt, in such a short space? How can a song—or a movement from a larger piece—move us beyond inherited major and minor scales of thinking? Honoring Jose Munoz’s queer feeling that “this world is not enough,” how might listening practices help us hold dissonance in harmony?

I chose to riff on an excerpt from Neil Cicierega's Mouth Sounds mixtape, specifically a little section called "D'Oh," which I chose for its brevity and its amusing amalgamation of Homer Simpson, "Ants Marching," Austin Powers, Sir Mix-a-Lot, the Doug theme song, and the Talking Heads:

How will future generations tell the cultural history of BIE, or Before Internet Era? I believe this excerpt from Internet meme-maker Neil Cicierega’s 2014 mashup mixtape “Mouth Sounds” can give us an idea. A fifty-six minute cacophony of earworms, catchphrases, and number one pop hits from the turn of the century, “Mouth Sounds” is a musical version of the Buzzfeed listicle “How to Tell You’re a Nineties Kid.” It’s a chronicle of the cultural knowledge of the last cohort of American children to grow up with a finite number of media sources: Billboard radio, live-action PG-13 comedies, basic cable television. The novelty that Poe described in “The Imp of the Perverse” as “the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories” is simply now called a meme.

How to explain the Talking Heads, though? It was dance music from our liberal arts college youth, as kids clad in thrift store finds who scoffed at the sexual sincerity with which our peers moved to hip-hop. The Talking Heads refracted the Africanist presence in American rock through academic polyrhythms, shepherding irony-laden brains to the dance floor, cajoling us to ask:

How -- did -- I -- get -- here?

The event was a rousing success, with participants musing on everything from Townes Van Zandt to No Doubt to Calexico to the Arcade Fire to classical piano to The Carpenters to Bon Jovi. Each one just kept getting better and better. Really made me proud of the critical intensity/perversity of my fellow GC colleagues. Hope to do it again soon...