New Game: Become the World's Most Pompous Musicologist

I'm trying but I can't stop laughing.

Glad to bring some joy into your day, Anthony.

Indeed you have. I don't know why but those kind of posts always make me want to play the bongos. In front of the poster.

Incomprehensible and pompous? Can do.....

"Plumbing the furtive bowels of the very zeitgeist of youth culture, the heretofore unsung oeuvre of Good Charlotte belies a veritable meta-appropriation of conflicting schools of thoughtlessness, indirectly fjording new streams of demi-mutation. The ensuing musical gene pool, thus, becomes both predator and prey in an Escher-esque loop of mutually masturbatory yet creatively stagnant stasis."

All you need is a classic "third or fourth year in the program/not yet ready to write my thesis/figure this will get me accepted to some conference somewhere" grad student paper title.

"The Sucks/Rocks Conundrum: Reflections on Beavis and Butthead as Metacritics"

haha! this thread justifies the existence of Lord Custos. grebt!

By Zeus! Alex in New York has got it!
Okay, first one to to Alex in NYC's entry get a big bag of M and M's!

"It's All About the Benjamin: The Frankfurt School and Sean Comb's Culture of Spectacle"

"...and so even the relentless commentary on commodification becomes itself part of the commodity (and in doing so literally 'becomes itself'), a way of drawing attention to the Daddy/Diddy division of the world into producers (Daddy) and consumers (Diddy), and in so explicitly acknowledging the boundary erasing it altogether. The Bad Boys are post-minstrel owners of the means of production, functioning within the sub-urban marketplace as both progenitors and debunkers of their own mythology. The audience is rendered not just passive but actually irrelevant, and finds itself in a post-Lacanian inversion, forever chasing after the thing that is forever chasing after the audience..."

You may refer to my well known "Theory of Calumnetics' for insight if you seek amusement

The sociological aspects of earthbound ennui are plainly exhibited in a myriad of popular artistic outlets: the desire to break the sundry bonds of earth and rise, much like the mighty phoenix, to the stratosphere. Whether testing the bounds of human exploration and science with the sounds of long-lost decades-old radio transmissions millions of miles from Earth or envisioning a galactic utopia the likes of which Carl Sagan would fall into rapture over, the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic"...

Oh god, I can't go on with this.

i wasn't sure about the anti-intellectual bent of the thread, but i really like Jesse's post.

anti-intellectual?
Naw. It mocks pomposity (hence the threads title) and critics who pretend to be intellectual.
Like this guy:

Abstract. C Aguilera's rhythmic algorithm model assuming an infinite transbopulation is useful for a theoretical analysis of the booty shake.
However, it is generally difficult to know transitions between differing latin-tinged pseudo-polyrhymtics doodads. In this paper, we propose a method for modifying rhythmic algorithms by using natural rhythms. We use a a neural network programmed with the entire back catalogs of Tito Puente and George Clinton for estimating deterministic transitions between one booty shake and another. Then the (rumba dance) trained network approximates a mapping (or a vector field) which characterizes the rhythm algorithm. Our method introduces a framework for stripping out the funk so the booty shake can be analyzed without the confusing presence of context. In this paper,we use a mixture-of-experts (mostly balding, white, single accountants) with an architecture for modeling (something kludgy code thrown together by another balding, white single accountant) to show that an optimization problem is present (ie. we can't figure out how to program Dave Matthews to shake his booty like that.)

"Its not often that a group, nay a composite of human forms manifests itself so wagnerian in intensity as to provoke not just a war in the mind but in the very fabric of this musos opinion. I am shaken and stirred with the historical uber-umphness that this Good Charlotte disc possesses. If the equation of rock radio is the pleb multitudes swaying in earnest to pan-vibratory gurgling. Then this is the heavens broadcasting the whispers of the old gods.Hear their words and touch the hem of the Helenic-boogloo skirt"

revive

BURN!

The simultaneity of multiple codes, the variable overlappings between periods, styles and forms [Attali writes], prohibits any attempt at a geneaology of music, a hierarchical archeology, or a precise ideological underpinning of particular musicians. But it is possible to discern who among them are innovators and heralds of worlds in the making [...] Briefly, we will see that it is possible to distinguish on our map three zones, three stages, three strategic usages of music by power. In one of these zones, it seems that music is used and produced in the ritual in an attempt to make people forget the general violence; in another, it is employed to make people believe in the harmony of the world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commercial power; and finally, there is one in which it serves to silence, by mass-producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human voices.