Tequilla's Music Video of the Week

Tequilla

This is actually a pretty good 80s song but the video has to rank right up there for one of the funniest (as in turrible) videos of that era:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LatorN4P9aA

AZDuck

http://youtu.be/NWg2yaePvVw

I delivered a talk on the topic of “criticism as evaluation” four or five times from 1994 to 1996, but never committed it to print, because the best parts of the talk (I thought) were the film clips—the last (and best) of which involved Beavis and Butthead making fun of the German metal band Accept. And it’s a good thing I didn’t commit this stuff to print back then, either, because the general point at issue is made much more clearly and compellingly by Simon Frith in Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music and (more recently) the series of essays by David Shumway, David Sanjek, and Barry Faulk in The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Anyway, here’s the relevant bit of the talk; it starts by taking issue with Andrew Ross’s remark, at the end of No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, that studying popular culture involves a “necessary engagement with aggressively indifferent attitudes toward the life of the mind and the protocols of knowledge,” since what Andrew pretty clearly meant was something more like ”academic or formal protocols of knowledge.”

I wish I could include the clip, though. It’s the best part. You’ll just have to imagine it, and sing along on your own.

Beavis and Butthead not only have well-developed protocols of knowledge; they have a somewhat ironic—or critical—relation to the language of reviewers as well. Take for example their wonderful review of a less than wonderful video from fake-metal band Accept. As Accept runs through the repertoire of choreographed metal swagger, the video shows wrecking balls crashing through brick buildings and a line of t-shirted young men banging their heads against a wall. B & B’s commentary runs as follows:


Butthead: Well, he is saying “balls,” and normally that would be pretty cool.
Beavis: Yeh. But under these circumstances, it sucks.
Butthead: Yeah. Usually demolition and destruction is pretty cool too, but I dunno, it’s like, here it’s just like, it falls flat.
Beavis: Yeh. Yeh. I think even if they had some fire in this video, it would still suck.

Viewers unfamiliar with Beavis and Butthead might expect them to have an uncritical relation to metal bands, and give them all As and thumbs up unreflectively. But such viewers should realize how accurate B & B’s judgment is here—the video really does suck, and, as any movie critic might say, even the scenes of destruction somehow “fall flat.” Equally important is a later scene from the video, which depicts a number of zombie-like creatures advancing toward the camera—presumably toward the building in which Accept is playing “Balls to the Wall.”


Butthead: Check it out. It’s Krokus coming to kick their ass.
Beavis: Yeh. Heh-heh.
Butthead: It’s the night of the living bands that suck.

Now, Bourdieu would be entirely right to note (if he cared to do so) that our boys are, after all, evaluating music videos rather than sonatas, so it’s not as if they’re throwing around their excess cultural capital with abandon. But even though there is a distinction here between what Bourdieu calls the “aesthetic” disposition and “ordinary” dispositions, it does not follow that “ordinary dispositions” cannot also be variously critical dispositions. In fact, I could go further and say that Beavis and Butthead are engaging in what one traditionalist critic calls “one of criticism’s foremost responsibilities: the making and revising of critical discriminations.” For in order to understand who’s the butt of Butthead’s bon mots here, you not only have to catch the brief visual reference to Night of the Living Dead; you also have to know your metal bands pretty well—well enough, at least, to realize how devastating an insult it is to suggest that any metal band could have its collective ass kicked by—of all people—Krokus.

All the same, evaluative systems work—in part—by being exclusive; as Bourdieu insists, they would not be readable as systems otherwise, and all evaluative systems—if they work as evaluative systems—must be somewhat reliable in their evaluations and somewhat opaque in their exclusivity. For example, it’s crucial that after about a minute of viewing the video for Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law,” Butthead decides that “I still like Judas Priest and all, but, uh, this video sucks.” It’s a cheesy early-’80s video, poorly produced, badly acted, and sloppily lip-synched—and for that reason, it’s important to our sense of B & B as evaluators that they can admit the video is poor even as they thrash around on the couch and scream, “breaking the law, breaking the law” on the choruses. Likewise, Beavis and Butthead must be somewhat reliable if their enthusiastic support of a video from White Zombie is really going to put White Zombie on the map (as, in fact, it did). But at the same time, no evaluative system can work unless it maintains some degree of opacity to those not in the know. If you got to ask, as Louis Armstrong once put it. . . .

Or, to put Satchmo’s point in slightly different terms, all systems of evaluation must be at once exclusive yet translatable, opaque and yet transparent. The more opaque and exclusive the appeal, the more “cult” the following; conversely, the more persuasive the criteria, the more potentially influential the critic. An evaluative system that is infinitely translatable is, at least in principle, infinitely influential; but a system that is perfectly internally coherent but unreadable to anyone save its creator is as problematic to cultural critics as the idea of a “private language” was to Wittgenstein. Just as Jan Mukarovsky, in Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, notes that every aesthetic norm strives for a universal validity it cannot possibly achieve (since if it achieved complete universality it would not be perceived as a “rule” at all), so too should we note that every evaluative system, like every language, must be distinct yet translatable. The difference between my position and Mukarovsky’s, however, is that mine insists that not every aesthetic norm “strives” for universality; on the contrary, there are innumerable aesthetic norms whose value lies precisely in their unintelligibility. Why do you listen to that awful noise? If you gotta ask. . . .

Fire_Marshall_Bill

tl, dr

whatshouldicareabout

Tequilla said:

This is actually a pretty good 80s Journey's best song but the video has to rank right up there for is one of the funniest (as in turrible) videos of that era:

FTFY

AZDuck

Fire_Marshall_Bill said:

tl, dr

dnc

Is it Old Man Music Friday already?

RoadDawg55

This week's edition is just a corny 80's video. Last week's pumping iron one was better.

Tequilla

If you think I"m going to be able to produce a weekly video as good as "Pump Iron," you're bound to be disappointed.

That's the best/worst video I've ever seen in my life.

Fire_Marshall_Bill

AZDuck said:

Fire_Marshall_Bill said:

tl, dr

better luck next time

uw2010

There are so many options:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA5GkLM5C7M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp_PIjc2ga4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOVwIBhVaE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJQVlVHsFF8

dnc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo4glASbEh4

hth

unfrozencaveman

dnc said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo4glASbEh4

hth

Ho-lee-fuck, I feel violated, what kind of site is this

PurpleJ

If you weren't such a lifeless cunt with millions of worthless posts I'd take the time to down vote your tripe. You really need to get more than just a match and a lighter and put an end to yourself, seriously.