Last night Caitlin and I were watching American Idol two hour special where the judges (Simon, Ellen, brunet chick, and black dude) narrow the contestants down to 75 people before telling us about the top 24.
After that Caitlin randomly turned the channel over to MTV which was playing Ke$ha’s Tik Tok, prompted a conversation about the identity of youth reverberating styles from past identities. There’s a ton of crap that reminded me of the 80’s in Tik Tok. Tie-die-ish t-shirt with a neck hole that’s large enough to drape a ways down a shoulder, sitting on the ground next to a boom-box busting out her lyrics, while sporting big styled hair. The bling-cycle is pretty 90’s, imo.
We didn’t talk about this, seeing them just brought up an idea to ponder of where are we going next? We were in awe of the what’s already come about in within our available memory. When I was in late elementary school most classes had a Macintosh which rarely got used. I don’t remember there being a computer lab. My middle school was brand new, just made, and it had a small lab of Mac II’s that were on rolling tables! High school I was in a different school district and every teacher had at least one PC with Windows 95/98, there was a tech room, and a couple computer labs with 40+ more PC’s per. Today I have a phone more powerful than those school computers.
Fyi, the subject goes back to music in the paragraph after next.
The world has gotten exponentially smaller since the computer and the internet came around. The Iran elections. The not so closed preceedings of the Prop 8 trial. China’s cyber attack on Google. These are just a few examples of how the internet is changing the world into something more transparent. Every aspect of media is being affected… the business side of it is just insane to think about how fast the ground shifts lately. How many different styles of music have come about in the last century?
When I let my imagination ponder the situation I see a blurred picture. Perhaps its bias, but it seems central to America: piano, guitar, various drums, wind instruments, other strings, bells, banjo. All of these different sounds being brought from their origins to hands who don’t know their ‘proper’ place. They try and figure out what sounds good. I think my brain is breaking trying to think about it all at once. It’s every bit as complicated as trying new foods from the super market and just making something with what you have.
For my generation and a couple that came before it, at least by my interpretation, music and language was a means of expression and setting yourself apart from your parents. Among other things it’s expression toward whoever the authority is and declaring individuality. My generation is already desensitized to the crime and the language. It’s hard to believe that my daughter will find a new shock factor to throw at me. Will my daughter find a new alienation factor in her generation? Maybe she’ll talk as fast as the Ke$ha chick sings, that would be kind of annoying I guess.
Right now I’m thinking that thinks will keep going like a string vibrating where these styles aren’t really anything new, just different arrangements of what we already know. It will be interesting to see how humanity changes over the next hundred years now that all nations and cultures can talk to each other. Computers will obviously get more refined, practical, and hopefully more reliable; but that paradigm is done shifting for the most part. The next big thing that’s going to blow minds is nanotechnology. The possibilities of some new stuff I’ve heard of will change the way we think about matter.
I let myself ponder this on the drive to work this morning and I inevitably came to a point that I got to when talking about behavior vs emotion in animals… I wont go into that though.
On My Mind
Learning: Peaceful Days, I found the guitar tab I wanted, now I just need the fingers to do it in time.
Writing: Getting to working out my expression on the Venus Project and the IshTube group
Active: I want to do 50 jumping jacks and 10 pushups every morning and evening
Stuff I found of interest while online today:
Hilarious: Stache Power
Funny: Training the cat wasn’t working out
Funny: If he hollers let him go
Funny: Calvin & Hobs on religion vs. science
Funny: Ash Wednesday
WTF?: Peeing baby toy
Interesting: NY Times Graph Economy vs Stimulus no idea how true it is.
Interesting: Road to recovery since Bush administration again, no idea of validity.
Interesting: Some Perspective Regarding the Above graphs
Interesting: NY Times: Obama Approved Nuke Power for Georgia
Interesting: Tampa getting religious perspective
Interesting: OKcupid makes a case for dating older women I didn’t read all of it.
Interesting: The next Mars rover?
Interesting: Why Space Exploration? I agree with him
Interesting: Cricket mothers pass information to young
Interesting: Scientology Exploiting Haiti
Interesting: Catholic Church Bails on DC Foster Care… Then Blames Gay Rights. It didn’t matter
Geek of all trades (GOAT) 
