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Old 10-17-2008, 12:15 PM   #20 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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Location: essex ma
ok.

btw there are varying degrees of manufactured. and varying standards of it. back in the day, there were people who didn't like the monkees because they were understood as a fake band, even though they could, in fact, play and did, in fact, write a lot of their own material. mylie seems part of a different kind of machinery--the sort of thing that involves interchangeable producers making interchangeable beats over which interchangeable songs with vacant lyrics using more or less the same phrasing in more or less the same way as any other--the variation being in the hook---and these songs are entirely about the hook, a kind of taylorist bubblegum. it could be anyone. it could be you, mcgeedo, singing these tunes. it hardly matters whether you have any pitch--everything can be shifted and then, like roy orbison, you learn your recordings and perform those.

so what's strange about this machinery is that it presupposes from the outset that you're a copy of yourself, and that you tour as a copy of a copy. mylie takes being a copy of herself particularly far, in that she tours as a fictional character that her fictional character plays in a show. i'd be impressed if i had even the slightest sense that any of it was her idea, or that she even understood it as an idea--being a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy--and had fun with it. but there's no particular irony.

the worst crime in all this is being boring.
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