Christopher G. – The Mass Production of Music

This YouTube video pokes fun at the fact that ‘top hits’ in the the music industry sound relatively similar to one another and that they are created off of a basic production scheme. It shows that all songs are made by having the same foundation and just altering a few things to make it come off as different. Many electronic music producers such as, David Guetta, has been targeted for creating songs that sound similar. This idea relates to what Adorno and Horkheimer have to say about the culture industry. They explain how the culture industry aims to create things like art with economic success in mind instead of creativity. If a song that was created became tremendously successful finically, why not produce a similar one and make just as much? This is the reason movies are predictable and why people sometimes confuse songs. By using this video as an example, due to the creation of a culture industry by capitalists, all the top arts (films, music…etc.) are created off of a basic step-by-step format.

Nathan R – Pastiche!

Because there was a question about what pastiche was in class, and I saw this this morning on Facebook, I thought I would share it.

So the definition of pastiche is:

pastiche |paˈstēSH, pä-|

noun an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period: the operetta is a pastiche of 18th century styles | the songs amount to much more than blatant pastiche.• an artistic work consisting of a medley of pieces taken from various sources.

verb [ with obj. ]imitate the style of (an artist or work): Gauguin took himself to a Pacific island and pastiched the primitive art he found there.ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French, from Italian pasticcio, based on late Latin pasta ‘paste.’

So, for example, this would be an example:

(http://lolzbook.com/2013/02/if-mona-lisa-was-alive-today/)

Another example would be using recognizable samples of in rap/hip hop, such as famously Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” using the same base line as Queen’s (far better song) “Under Pressure.”

It literally means to paste something in.