The Unbearable Lightness of the #18A Bus
Thursday, January21st, 2010
A Snippet of (Now) Edited Reality in My Kitchen
Conversation overheard on the #18a bus this morning:
A woman in a puffy trashbag-like Northface winter coat is complaining that every artist (from “That Beyoncé” to the Jacksons) lip-syncs. She looks puzzled as she tries to explain her dislike of the practice of dubbing and lip-syncing live performances to the half-asleep, rapidly drying-out middle-aged woman next to her in a blazer roughly the color of freshly laid dung. A heated debate follows with both reaching the conclusion that all live music since (I’m not kidding) Wayne Newton has been pre-recorded crap.
This is where I finally became thought conscious in my morning haze.
Why do we have such an intense aversion to the knowledge that our favorite pop-culture music icons can’t duplicate their studio performances in front of a live audience? Just when I thought I had shed my thick patina of MFA/grad school mentalities, it dawned on me. Baudrillard was right in saying that the simulation of reality is always more real than reality. In the case of music, we prefer the perfect studio recording (without audience noise, feedback, mistakes, off-key renderings of “Its Not Unusual”) to the real thing. In a world where a highly edited version of New Jersey is popular on television, why shouldn’t all live performances of music be edited to the artist/label’s heart’s content?
I wish we could take this a step further and “undo” Milan Kundera’s paradoxical situation in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. I want to be able to create a perfect, studio-edited version of myself, my life, my actions, my speech, my mind… that I am able to summon up and present to the world as soon as I feel a mistake coming on.
If only.