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what on earth would cause anyone to associate a football halftime show with musicianship?
up to the last couple of posts, i had taken this thread as confirmation of the (accidental) wisdom of not watching most sports on television, and not watching the orange bowl in particular.
but now i no longer understand it.
if you were serious about playing, why would you take a halftime gig?
what would you get for having taken it?
i mean apart from cash, the only reason to be there.
the facetime you might get on tv would be mitigated by shitty sound, crappy conditions, made-for-television timing, drunken nitwits in the crowd in the stadium and at home---at best, you are a wind-up toy trotted out between other elements in the middle of one of the great jokes of american higher education--big time, big money university-level sports (dont get me started....just let this coment lay there). you are filler between commercials, like everything else is. so why not ashlee simpson? it seems all aspects of the "entertainment" deserve each other.
say you were to take the gig and play your heart out--well, if playing your heart out did not amount to stringing together a series of cliches, you wouldnt have the gig in the first place. in which case no-one would care if you did play your heart out. the audience at a football game, if they are listening at all, are listening to and for what they already know.
IT IS A FOOTBALL GAME.
the question of who or what is a "real musician" and who gets to decide that is problematic in many ways---but talking about answers and the problems raised by them would run right off the edge of this thread----which is about the fucking orange bowl halftime show and a performer whose mediocrity is just a little too obvious-----
so i'll defer it. the topic will come back up. with straight players around, it always does.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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