I like to imagine that Britney’s new video came about when Britney, in a room high up in Spears Towers, complained to her team: “Christina had an elephant in her video! I want an elephant. No, I want two elephants!” And so, they wheeled out the rather tired celebrity/circus analogy, in an attempt to justify the elephants (which, really, ought to be their own justification). The tired conceptual architecture is an example of the general blahness of the album identified by Steven Shaviro; Read more↴

The steampunk genre is all about historical discontinuity, about universes where some event happened at the wrong time or in the wrong way, the invention of computers in the 19th century, or a post-WWII British space program displacing NASA. Something similar might explain Girls Aloud; they certainly don’t sound like anything from our universe. In our world, no-one would ever make a record like “Revolution in the Head,” with its cod-Jamaican accents, hardcore bassline, dub drums, and, erm, cor anglais Read more↴

It’s a good Fall for music: I like the Sugababes album (though it does seem a little mean of them to have stolen Mutya’s idea of making a northern soul record), and I’m obviously eagerly anticipating the new Britney and Girls Aloud records that are on their way. Meanwhile, the Russian version of the new t.A.T.u. album is out, and I fear I’m a little underwhelmed, although I have enjoyed transliterating the song titles. The previously released tracks, “Белый Плащик” is fairly good and “220″ is extremely good. Other tracks show promise, such as “Снегопады,” which starts fairly well, and has what sounds like a rather good bridge, which unfortunately fails in one crucial aspect, because the song doesn’t have a chorus for it to lead in to. On the whole, though, I don’t find myself being grabbed by the album as much as I would have expected; perhaps it’s just the estrangement effect of it being in Russian. A friend of mine suggested I learn Russian, to test that theory.

There is, though, one significant exception to this indifference: “Fly on the Wall” is absolutely fantastic. All the elements of the song work together perfectly: the tense build-up of the verse spills over into the psycho-sexual bass rumblings of the chorus; better still, the industrial clanking of the drums suggests a social context for the whole thing.

The new Britney song’s not that great, but the video is really quite extraordinary. It appears to be some kind of schizo-masochistic delusion:

I’m impressed that Britney’s recovery from tabloid madness simply involves the universalization of madness to her entire career. I guess it’s not actually surprising, but it’s nice to see it done so well.

A while back, I was re-reading Isaac Asimov’s series of novels about robots. There’s something faintly uneasy about them, which I’d meant to blog about at the time. The underlying theme of the books is the effect of robot labor on society; and the key thing which distinguishes robots from other types mechanization is that they are sentient, which makes the situation uncomfortable like slavery, a similarity which is always present in the books, but is not dealt with explicitly. This does raise a question for cybernetic communism, though: the usual assumption is that mechanization will abolish, or at least minimize, necessary labor, but what if this depends on an unjustified humanism, an assumption that we can simply farm our work off onto dumb machines? But shouldn’t a sufficiently complex assemblage of machines have some kind of say in its own future? Read more↴

One thing I couldn’t mention in my last post, without breaking the meme rules, was that I’d been listening to a certain amount of funky house, too; because, obviously, I can hardly use the word “funky” without registering my disgust. Indeed, I’d previously dismissed the genre entirely just on that basis. But then I read a post on blissblog describing funky house as “like Musical Mobb and Jon E Cash if they’d tried to do broken beat,” which sounds pretty great. I haven’t actually found anything that sounds that good, though this track by DJ NG is pleasingly sinister (and it’s good to see that funky house shares bassline’s predeliction for producer names that sound like serial numbers), and Kyla’s “Do You Mind,” as mentioned on blissblog, is good, though I’m not sure the funky house version is better than the bassline original (the crossover between the two genres seems kind of interesting; a geographical division of labor?). Actually, the funky house version would be better, if it weren’t for the most obviously funky house part, the shitty drums. On which point this guy seems to be doing better.