Day 163: A Song Nobody Would Expect You to Love
This is a song that everybody who has a sense for anything would expect me to love and it is a reposting of a blog entry from 2009, before I started the 1000 songs challenge, so for the neurotics:this is off the records...:
Back to PC - Popular Culture - the ones having read the entry on the Zombie movies [on the Culture&Religion Blog] might know about RKO; it is exactly that film producing corporation that is featured in the very hymn on popular culture (= B-Movies): Science Fiction /Double Feature from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here is a fine rendering of it, the typical UTUBE award-winning-work, where some person has taken over the work-load of illustrating accurately all the connotations and even denotations of the lyrics:
This is a song that everybody who has a sense for anything would expect me to love and it is a reposting of a blog entry from 2009, before I started the 1000 songs challenge, so for the neurotics:this is off the records...:
Back to PC - Popular Culture - the ones having read the entry on the Zombie movies [on the Culture&Religion Blog] might know about RKO; it is exactly that film producing corporation that is featured in the very hymn on popular culture (= B-Movies): Science Fiction /Double Feature from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here is a fine rendering of it, the typical UTUBE award-winning-work, where some person has taken over the work-load of illustrating accurately all the connotations and even denotations of the lyrics:
Michael Rennie was ill the day the earth stood still
But he told us where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there in silver underwear
Claude Raines was the invisible man
Then something went wrong for Fay Wray and King Kong
They got caught in a celluloid jam
Then at a deadly pace it came from outer space
And this is how the message ran:
Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Ann Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.
I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel
When Tarantula took to the hills
And I really got hot when I saw Janet Scott
Fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills
Dana Andrews said prunes gave him the runes
And passing them used lots of skills
But when worlds collide, said George Pal to his bride
I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills, like a:
Science Fiction - Double Feature
Dr. X will build a creature
See androids fighting Brad and Janet
Ann Francis stars in Forbidden Planet
Oh-oh at the late night, double feature, picture show.
I wanna go, oh-oh, to the late night double feature picture show.
By RKO, oh-oh, at the late night double feature picture show.
In the back row at the late night double feature picture show.
You might think, this is just for fun; oh no, this is serious theory of culture; it is about visual - and not just visual - culture. Everybody seems to agree on the one fact, that all the scholarship on culture should abandon the elitist - high culture - approach. We do not want to have an expertise in a given culture's experts point of view - we want to know about the power-relationships, the social construction of reality and the like in a given interaction between members of this or that or both or more of the cultures involved. As David Morgan, an art historian with a special interest in religious images has put it:
"Western scholars are sometimes fond of assuming that there is an autonomous aesthetic sensibility in human beings that directs artistic activity. Art, these scholars seem to believe, is a basic human need, an enduring instinct linked to such values as ‘freedom’, ‘expression’ and ‘autonomy’. But this notion of art is rooted in the Renaissance understanding of individualism and is universalised with great presumptuousness. It is important for the analyst to resist adopting criteria from one’s own society. Discussing the history of visual culture, as opposed to that of fine art alone, avoids making such invidious distinctions. Rather than limiting oneself to the interpretation of ‘museum-quality’ fine art as instances of artistic excellence, the student of religious visual culture seeks to discern within the production and reception of a visual artifact the social construction of belief and its role in the maintenance of an outlook.“ (David Morgan, Visual Religion. In: Religion 30 [2000], 41–53, 41f.)
Be that as it may, without further theoretical assumptions. I think that the old man responsible for the song has done a convincing version of it:
"Western scholars are sometimes fond of assuming that there is an autonomous aesthetic sensibility in human beings that directs artistic activity. Art, these scholars seem to believe, is a basic human need, an enduring instinct linked to such values as ‘freedom’, ‘expression’ and ‘autonomy’. But this notion of art is rooted in the Renaissance understanding of individualism and is universalised with great presumptuousness. It is important for the analyst to resist adopting criteria from one’s own society. Discussing the history of visual culture, as opposed to that of fine art alone, avoids making such invidious distinctions. Rather than limiting oneself to the interpretation of ‘museum-quality’ fine art as instances of artistic excellence, the student of religious visual culture seeks to discern within the production and reception of a visual artifact the social construction of belief and its role in the maintenance of an outlook.“ (David Morgan, Visual Religion. In: Religion 30 [2000], 41–53, 41f.)
Be that as it may, without further theoretical assumptions. I think that the old man responsible for the song has done a convincing version of it:
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