Comprehension and Analysis

Interesting discussion today (for other purposes than what I usually write about here) about comprehension versus analysis. This applies (as discussed today) mostly to children in various developmental stages -- roughly kindergarten through middle school. But it also applies, I think, to us.

The way it applies, though, is somewhat counter-intuitive. When teaching children, it is usually assumed in most forms of education that analysis follows comprehension. Comprehension can loosely be described as being able to piece together given strands of information into a coherent narrative or larger idea. Analysis is in the disassembling -- re-examining those pieces for context, subtext, non-obvious meaning, etc.

We performed an interesting experiment in a higher-level issue that arises when comprehension is taken for granted, though. We listened to side one of an old children's record telling the origin story of the Lone Ranger (available here at Week 26). Afterwards, we discussed various techniques for analyzing the record, gauging it to be generally familiar (genre, characters, tropes) but unfamiliar in other ways (we weren't used to following a radio play). But something interesting happened. We were all so busy analyzing -- discussing Western expansion and ethnocentrism and stereotyping and historical aesthetic context and genre conventions -- that none of us could recall what had actually happened.

Well, I did, anyway, because I actually thought it was pretty neat, and it reminded me of listening to old radio shows with my dad on tape in the car. So I gave the synopsis -- it's the origin of the Lone Ranger, describing how he was separated from the other Texas Rangers after an ambush from the Cavendish gang -- and we relistened. My colleagues' faces lit up...oh! (During discussion, one person thought that my piecing together of the narrative was from prior knowledge of the Lone Ranger. "But they actually said that!") We had a nice discussion about what you might call inverse media literacy, which is itself a kind of media illiteracy -- privileging analysis to the detriment of comprehending the piece itself.

This pretty well articulated for me something I've been kicking around in my brain for quite a while, something I've wanted to call "second-level media illiteracy." Roughly, media literacy is the ability to ask critical questions of media (not in the sense of "criticize," but in the sense of understanding what the various messages of media are, who made it and why, whom the piece is directed to, etc.). We can assume that anyone with eyes can receive an image, but not anyone with eyes can necessarily understand what is being said in the message or how it's being said (conventions, techniques, etc.). Again, this doesn't necessarily extend just to hot-button academic issues -- ethnocentrism, chauvinism, etc. -- but basic issues that blur the line between comprehension and analysis.

Anyway, in what I've been calling second-level media illiteracy, what happens is that you're so busy reading for subtext that you start to miss the text. This is exactly what happened to us listening to the Lone Ranger -- we were obsessed with validating the system of strangeness or wrongness in which the piece was framed, but we couldn't tell you what happened. Our analysis actually destroyed our ability to comprehend the text at the most basic level. And apparently there is some literature that backs this up -- one danger of heavily analytic critical media literacy is that it actively diminishes other kinds of comprehension skills. Following a plot, understanding which character is which, etc. (Can't and won't point to a specific study for this, since I'm just floating ideas here -- let's just say this is anecdotal and base it on my own experience today.)

In many ways, savvy is the enemy of comprehension. One who understands how to access information can't necessarily handle the information themselves -- the recent gushing over the role of Twitter in the Iranian protests is a good example. I would imagine that most Western onlookers have very poor comprehension of Iranian politics -- who the major players are, why they matter, who the factions are, who Iranians are -- and so giving this person an endless stream of firsthand analysis is in many ways counter-productive. Certainly comprehension and analysis can work hand-in-hand, but I don't think this is what happened with the Iranian conflict; though it would be totally unfair to say that those who followed the insta-analysis of Twitter feeds etc. learned nothing about Iran, it's also likely that these people did not truly invest themselves in the complicated history of Iranian politics, trying to piece together political movements from at least the time of the shah. (My only firsthand experience with this kind of comprehension-building was portraying Iran on a Model UN team -- a good way to learn Iranian history, but I won't pretend it makes me even marginally competent enough to have a strong opinion on what exactly is happening there.)

The internet is full of analysis, and it's full of content, but it's not all that well equipped to provide comprehension tools. These would necessarily be instructive in nature, and are extremely difficult to achieve in isolation. Conversations are a good way to build comprehension (and a lot of my music history, for instance, has been shaped by the conversations I've had online), but often conversations are venues primarily for analysis -- you already need to know the material before you join in.

But when everyone is essentially analyzing, it's entirely possible that they are simultaneously weakening their comprehension skills. And the tenor of many internet debates in which I've been a part resemble something like this -- lots of smart people who for one reason or another refuse to truly try to understand what another person is arguing, sticking to their own primary evidence and merely attacking from different rhetorical stances. Pausing, relistening, and recalibrating an original response is not really in the vocabulary of Accepted Internet Argument Techniques. It's as true for someone dismissing Fleet Foxes for being self-evidently mediocre (and hey, I suspect Fleet Foxes are pretty mediocre, but I don't want to do the necessary comprehension building, i.e. listening to them again, to figure out why, so I should be pretty honest about that and not fling poo) as it is for someone dismissing Ashlee Simpson's "La La" for objectifying women without noticing the actual (specific) narrative that's happening in the song (she clarifies what the song's really about in the bridge -- "I feel safe with you / I can be myself tonight / It's alright with you / 'Cuz you hold my secrets tight").

So I'm beginning to wonder if my Big Concern about internet communication has been backwards the whole time -- here I am thinking that the problem is that we're not getting very good analysis, when in fact it's possibly the sheer volume of analysis that's hampering a more basic form of comprehension, of everything from policy (cf. the absurdly overwrought reaction to a justice department memo on the Defense of Marriage Act that claims "Obama" is "comparing gay marriage to incest") to music criticism*. When you de-privilege basic comprehension in favor of snap analysis, you'll inevitability degrade the analysis itself, just as our Lone Ranger conversation was essentially meaningless if we couldn't accurately recall what we had actually listened to. In effect, we had a very thoughtfully- and passionately-argued conversation about nothing. And this starts to get at my fears about the further dispersion of online chatter -- lots of (occasionally very good) analysis, but fewer centralized places in which someone might actually be challenged to listen more than once to make sure they got it right the first time.



*The Singles Jukebox is in many ways an experiment in how comprehension and analysis can go completely out of whack in a productive way, i.e. when the comment threads find a middle ground by taking in a variety of perspectives, some of which have a better idea of what's "really happening" in a given song. I think a lot of people, myself included, were a bit off on what Regina Spektor was doing in "Laughing With," but the conversation was revelatory. I note that the most recent comment has some eloquent, thoughtful analysis that once again doesn't seem to totally connect back to what the Spektor is literally saying, but there's at the very least a process to negotiate his interpretation within a group understanding of what's going on when content itself is up for debate along with a particular line of analysis.

Me: An Introduction (Noughties Edition)

Wack Narcissus

[EDIT: Quick tech note, I've finally forwarded this blog to the domain name http://www.cureforbedbugs.com -- the blogspot address will still link here, but the direct link is the regular dot-com]

For the next few months, I'm going to be posting intermittent pieces about life in the 00's [how are we pronouncing this? I like "oh's"] and What It All Means, mostly as an excuse to wax nostalgic over the (so far v. exciting) Poptimists 00's Singles Poll. I may post according to heat (er, it's complicated) or just according to year, haven't decided yet. But it's all part of the History of Jop project.

So for those of you who don't know my entire life story, or weren't following along during the History of Jop roughly-sketched autobiographical stuff, my history with rock and pop music as a Thing began in earnest in 2001. I'd followed music on the radio and through a few personal influences, but it was never a major force in my life until I got it into my head that this should be something I Take Seriously. This was pretty much the peak of the Napster era -- I think in 2000-2001 I was using Audiogalaxy a lot, that bright blue beacon of mislabeled promise -- and the musical genealogy that I carved out was almost entirely internet-aided. I spent an inordinate amount of time navigating All Music Guide, obsessively marking down albums that either interested me or seemed important in a giant Word document unassumingly titled "music list," a ten-point font monstrosity that was too large even to print out. I've long since lost that list, and the countless crappy CD-Rs I burned during this period, usually cobbling together albums from track listings song by song, but it ran the gamut of rock and jazz standards.

So what did music history look like when you established it "cold" from piecemeal from internet sources? Well, the question is a touch disingenuous to begin with. No one is "cold" when it comes to pop music -- just look at a dozen or so Napster-aided mix CDs that immediately preceded my "homework period" c. 2000 and plenty of mixtapes of Metallica and Weird Al before that!) and my existing tastes and social circles largely dictated how I searched. But roughly it was, in those early days, a firmly Rolling Stone-sanctioned list -- positions I then held but have since revised: The Beatles Got Better After Rubber Soul; Rap Music Was Better When It Was "Positive"; The Pixies Are the Genesis of Contemporary Rock Music; etc. etc. I still like all of these things -- post-Rubber Soul Beatles, "positive" rap music (which I now feel totally compelled to put in scare quotes for some reason), the Pixies -- but I do like to think I've developed a bit more of a holistic understanding of music history, my own personal tastes (which have changed, though not as much as one might think), and general knowing the ropes of rock crit over the ages.

Anyway, I'll talk about this more in 2001. Just as a table of contents of sorts, here's what to look for:

ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOOL

2000: 10th grade - Pre-obsession, ear to the radio and residual adolescent RAGE!
2001: 11th grade - Obsession, doing yr homework, finding a conversation and lurking in it, constructing a history
2002: 12th grade: Connecting constructed history to contemporary history via current online sources

I LOVE COLLEGE

2003: Freshman - First forays into music criticism/synthesis of "homework"
2004: Sophomore - Early (lucky) breaking point in terms of music crit exposure -- short-lived -- newfound fear of posing, being "caught," etc. (a recurring theme)
2005: Junior - Break from exposure, return to lurk, taste realignment
2006: Senior - Re-entering the conversation (if only I knew then what I knew now)

MY TEMP YEAR

2007: Finding and trusting a voice, feeling comfortable publishing for the first time

I LOVE COLLEGE AGAIN, BUT NOT AS MUCH AS I HATED TEMPING

2008: Grad School 1: A bit of floundering, some cracks in a more assured voice, trying to take in more perspectives, more conversations (e.g. the year I went back to school)
2009: Grad School 2: Er, not sure what the Big Idea here is yet, do I? Probably has something to do with The-Dream.

I'll also be tracking my personal life through the decade. I'll be marrying Emily toward the end of this year, and we've been dating since the very first piece I ever published (on my first blog). She was the one who encouraged me to start writing in the first place.

Teenpop antiquarian enjoys company of Swedes.

An album for Ashley's first nose?

So the thing about this new Ashley Tisdale album, which I've heard piecemeal about 1/2x so far, kind of shooting from the hip here, is that it hearkens back to a time when teenyboppers were secreted away to Sweden to cut a pure-pop sugar staple on the DL, only to take the world by storm and everyone's like...uh, where the hell did this come from? Well, from guys with two S's in their last name -- Persson, Larsson -- and first names with umlauts. [EDIT: I am reliably informed that Persson is in part responsible for many of Ashley's best tracks on her first alb, including "Not Like That," h/t Frank.]

Thing is, we know where Ashley came from, and that era is kind of dead. So here's Ashley Tisdale, that Girl Wot Played the Bitch in HSM, with an album that a second-to-third-tier no-name teenybopper might have cut (and sounded slightly out-of-date) c. 2004-2005, and it's standing alone, the spotlight shining on it in an uncomfortable sorta way. This album was meant to be bundled with "A" albums in shopping mall giveaways or something -- as a purportedly "A" release itself, it flounders a bit.

And yet I'm a sucker for a lot of this cheeze. She does the Kelly C. sellout moves more squeakily than Kelly does ("Erase and Rewind," "Masquerade"), does Vanessa Hudgens style fake-dance in the "Sneakernight" mode ("Crank It Up") like the Kidz Bop version of the Timbaland album. Even the ballads are terrible! Man, nostalgia. Hell, she even slightly taps into my The-Dream luv by providing an answer track of sorts in "Hair" -- "I like what you do to my hair." And this isn't an idle linkage -- Demi Lovato wants to work with The-Dream; Taylor Swift wants to work with T-Pain. The ground is shifting, folks.

Which means that this thing is a veritable relic, of someone in 2005 pretending it was 2001. Perhaps this is the Cheiron flipside to bits of Skye's Matrix album, which included some identically positioned awkward retro pop, in the form of demos that Matrix never got off the ground in 2004 (that, at the time, were trying to sound recent-past retro themselves). So yeah, it's kind of interesting. But is it good? Uh...y'know, about as good as any of those second-to-third tier efforts can be. A roughly 30-60-10 ratio of "good/competent/bad," and so many of these songs run together it's almost useless trying to parse it as anything other than an occasionally enjoyable crystallized sugar blob. (Even the DioGuardi co-penned anthem, "What If," sounds nostalgically generic, though it's still a bit of a highlight.) At the very least I can't wait to buy a one-penny (plus shipping) online copy in three months as the imminent over-pressing of the CD goes "E.T. Atari Game" and starts cluttering up a few used bins.

Countdown to July 21st

h/t JMWCYL

Quick turnover, there, Demi. Advice to all readers: HOP ON THIS BANDWAGON NOW.

Broadway couldn't handle a zoom lens.

Fairly disappointed in the Mamma Mia movie, even given my super-low expectations. A few thoughts on why it failed so miserably:

1. General incompetence: in singing, in choreography (holy shit the choreography -- did the choreographer basically just tell them all to go figure something out in their bedroom and then they'd rehearse it with a chorus line?), in cinematography (y'know what'll make this number pop? SPINNING THE CAMERA!), in editing (which seems to have been randomized a la the last minute of this klassik Youtube mash).

2. General incompetence: in singing. Did I mention the singing? And how bad it was?

3. Anyway. TOO MANY EFFING CLOSE-UPS. The entire film has a weirdly claustrophobic feeling, even for a flick that takes place on a small Greek island. Also, it gives us way too much intimacy with the characters, and has no sense of when to let the film pull back and let in the full (WIDE WIDE WIDE angle) scope of its improbable choruses. See: Pennies from Heaven, The Young Girls of Rochefort, and even that one doesn't quite know what to do with a slightly-too-old Gene Kelly. There's an unflattering telephoto flatness that pervades the whole thing, smooshing everyone together in space instead of giving us a sense of a big stage musical breaking out in the midst of an actually quite sad story.

4. Along those lines, the broad strokes of the story are pretty genius, the pop getting mixed up in the melodrama like the peanut butter chocolate goodness of a classic ABBA tune. But the film (maybe the show) itself doesn't really seem to fully understand how perfect the story is for the music, and falls back way too hard on camp, undercutting much of the music's sadness and occasional black humor. Most egregious example is when they reverse the meaning of "When All Is Said and Done," one of the best songs about D-I-V-O-R-C-E evah, to be a kind of "we're not too old to be together!" thing. NO!!!! It completely destroys the weirdly fragile charm of the song, in which a divorced couple reminisce with bittersweet fondness over the time they've had together, admitting they can still see each other, and other people, but just don't work together any more. So much beauty wasted. Minor offenses: changing the gender of "Does Your Mother Know" takes away much of the uneasy, sorta slimy appeal of that one, and "Lay All Your Love on Me" is demolished in context for some reason. Haven't figured out quite why, but again the gender reversal isn't doing any favors.

5. Movie's having a lot more fun than we are. Most present in the epilogue, in which Meryl Streep and co. finish a refrain of "Mamma Mia" and she kind of exasperatedly shouts out "DO YOU WANT ANOTHER ONE?!" with an odd snarl, leading into "Waterloo." It's like the whole cast is tired, as though this was a real-time documentary and we're on the final number. The whole film has an air of forced smiles to it, everyone realizing in the thick of production that what sounded like fun on paper, and looked like fun on stage, was turning out to be more of a chore as a film.

Seriously, no forgiving what they did to "When All Is Said and Done." The movie is basically to ABBA's music what "Glee" was to "Don't Stop Believin'" -- an oddly formal exercise in frivolity that seems to understand intellectually the appeal of its source without being able to actually convey it. Which, of course, is one reason why ABBA is brilliant.