Manifesto

Years ago I lived alone on a Scottish island. At the time I was obsessed with the song "Lucky Man" written by Jimmy Peterman on the early Steve Miller album Sailor. I didn't have much paper so when I decided to write down everything I could about the song I wrote right up to the margins in tiny full caps handwriting. I filled both sides of a sheet of A4, listing what each instrument did at each moment, laying out structure, dynamics, performance, tone, meaning and context. Then I ritually burnt the paper.

People argue badly. We have trained ourselves to look for the bad guy for the hero to defeat. We try to win instead of reach understanding. You can't win an argument because as soon as any position is stated the emergent synthesis encoded within that position begins to manifest. Everyone is always wrong and everyone is always right. The polarity of a statement is meaningless. Sure, you can harm your opponent if you want to. But in their suffering is also your own. This is an inescapable and objective consequence of theory of mind.

I want to highlight the gulf between the speaker and the listener, the gap between artist and audience, the void that separates a musician's intent from how they are percieved. I'm basically just repeating the thesis of Barthes' post-strucuralist text The Death of the Author. The true locus of writing is reading, and the true locus of music is hearing. To do this I will use the medium of old pop videos to discuss how alternate readings can deepen and humanise both the artist and the audience. Using snapshots of work ordinarily placed in alien contexts by pervasive cultural practice allows easy entry for the crowbar of analysis and the puppy dog of relatability.

Ready? Let's ritually burn canonical cultural instances as a working against the accepted structure of discourse.