State Of The Art

My latest musical obsession is one I appear to share with much of the world: Gotye.
As usual, I'm late to the party: the song Somebody That I Used To Know unaccountably managed to reach #1 in eighteen countries--and stick there for quite a while in many of them--before I'd heard it so much as once.

(Aside: it appears I really should watch Glee if I want to keep ahead of the curve in modern pop. That said, I probably won't. Right now I'm willing to set time aside for one television show a week, and there ain't nothin' gonna touch Game of Thrones.)

I pirated its album, Making Mirrors, listened to about half of it, went to bed, and then started dreaming some of the songs, including that one. I woke up singing it. At that point I erased the pirated copy from my hard drive and went and bought the album in iTunes. The deluxe version, no less, with six videos. I've got the other two albums as well, the first of which iTunes declines to stock: apparently they don't want my money. Since then I've listened to all three albums on shuffle, and will continue to do so for some time yet.

One of the songs off Making Mirrors is called "State Of The Art". It's a campy and deeply creepy love song to the Lowrey Cotillion D575, an actual electronic organ ca. 1981 (retail cost at the time: $15,000).

Dig this:




This is supposed to be a fun video. But watching this animated family fall in thrall to the Cotillion brings up a host of unpleasant associations. Musically, it conjures ELO's "Yours Truly, 2095". Literarily, for some reason the rhythmic dancing organ dredges up IT, the brain that governs Camazotz in Madelaine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time. And personally, I can't help but think of my own personal Cotillion: the Internet.

"Now we don't want to go out/when we could spend the night at home..."

and, most tellingly,

"...but these amazing simulations end up sounding even better than the real thing".

Gotye's referring to synthesized music, but his words certainly apply to the synthesized relationships many of us seem to prefer in this "state of the art" digital age.

We are slaves to our machines. I know people who have named their phones, and we all have seen people reach for them instantly at their every least chirp and buzz, as if delay means physical punishment. I've managed to avoid that snare, but by no means should you think I'm some kind of superior being: the computer in this living room has an unnatural pull, seeming bigger than the rest of the furniture. Quivering. Pulsing. Let me feed you. Let me pour information into you until you DROWN. 

"I'll put the Genie Bass on so my left hand can play the choir/ with 16' Diapason and Lowrey's patented Orchestral Symphonizer..."