Reel Life (Cont.)
Live and Let It Die-Off.
McCartney was considering the mondegreens:
"I don't think about the lyric when I sing it. I think it's 'in which we're living', or it could be 'in which we live in', and that's kind of, sort of, wronger but cuter," before deciding that it was "in which we're living." (The Music of James Bond)
But that was also the early 1970s. Politics were of course toxic at that time with Nixon, but the "ever-changing in which we live in" was just beginning. Artists weren't sitting around wondering what the possible fallout would be in 50 years. But the cognitive dissonance between then and now is stunning.
The song has already been used twice in a creepy juxtaposition with the pandemic. It was used back in May (The Guns 'n' Roses version) when he visited a mask factory. But it's not that surprising that it would be appropriated in this way. Lyrics in a song are usually less important to most listeners. Some people may not even see the connection between the song itself and its original inspiration, a James Bond film. But it seems to be suggesting that (he) is in the James Bond role holding a gun to someone's head, as a form of celluloid heroism.
Progressive Erosion
Ever since Hitchcock, we have become more inured to violence, and certainly at the point Natural Born Killers was released in the early 90s. Millennials that were born then have completely grown up with that vibe, although I grew up in a time Hitchcock films were popular, but the violence became gratuitous to the point of believing it wasn't there.
Film has always been a way of distancing ourselves from real experiences. In the days after 9/11, a common comment was that it was something that we saw in a movie. And this is exactly how it felt on that morning when I walked into the office and people were watching it on the 13-inch TV in the mailroom. In 2001, people were still reading newspapers on the commute. (I distinctly remember that I was reading about Bob Dylan's new release, Love and Theft.) Everybody now knows the feeling of being concussed by what we see on a daily basis. We witness life go by as normal, but then you have to continuously deal with the violence on the screen.
After 9/11 I also had an idea that it would be interesting to make a film or a series of films that were just recreations of Good Morning America shows across two days--which was where most people saw that morning play out. Now it would unravel on social media--which really isn't like a film at all. So I wonder what's going to happen in the future when social media becomes what film was. It will not be something we saw in a movie; it will be something we saw (or thought we saw) on social media. I find myself saying this even now in idle conversation: “I saw something on social media the other day.” And the erosion keeps happening based upon what technologies are in place. But it doesn't matter what's in place, it just keeps falling because the ground under it is just naturally unstable.
In retrospect, it's interesting to revisit how we consumed media. It was still very much a "push" situation in 2001. Established media channels were something you dialed into, and were limited. Radio was still broadcast over the airwaves. There may have been some radio streams (or downloads) on the internet, but most people weren't yet on cable modems, which started to increase rapidly around 1998, and as people started replacing their old (ancient) computers which perhaps didn't even have a modem.
A diary entry when 9/11 was still smoldering. "Context collisions" which never had occurred before started to appear in the collective psyche:
9/16/2001
While listening to music on the radio, you get these very interesting coincidences, or "collisions of context". You'd be listening to a report about an Islamic holy war, change the dial to a rock station and hear Lennon's "Instant Karma", followed by Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down"--I'll stand my ground". (Prediction: song lyrics will become more important. Songwriters will also have to censor their own work.) The bad thing about recorded media is that it prolongs bad memories.
We did in fact begin to censor our work as a form of social commentary. It was no longer just an innocent creative moment for a pop songwriter that never really experienced a "Pearl Harbor" moment. You had to comment on the world; No longer was it sitting at the piano and engaging in wordplay (which I miss, and still do nostalgically).
This image is of The Church of St Mary, built in the 12th century, which glacially eroded up until the late 19th century, reduced to piles of flint by the 1960s, and now is reduced to sand.
Old technologies, or even ways of life, die off but they don’t necessarily get directly replaced. Everything is "heading west" (as is the east coast of the North Sea), leaving nothing of the original substance (essence). This is probably a continuous natural process as is erosion in the natural world--including the erosion of memory. But even then, we have degraded the environment such that erosion happens faster than before. Perhaps we have just given up on replacing what has eroded--or don't have a direct connection with memory to inform the present. We're still heading west in the figurative sense, just falling off a cliff (or letting it fall away) and not making any permanent settlement with some connection with the past.
The melting ice sheets on the poles is an extreme form of erosion. It has a replacement--simply the land itself, and if the ice wasn't there it would be replaced by some other natural elements that emerged. But obviously, we don't leave the natural elements alone; we always interfere. We're always heading west in the utopian sense. There are replacements in most cases but are never better or equal to what was there before in terms of its resilience with the top-level systems. "Disruption" is seen as the essential element of innovation, but not really when you consider all the systems in play.
In music, the top-level systems were the music education programs, the mostly functional music industry, and people generally involved in the art form. People are still doing this but it's on the replaced ground, it is what was left, the flint and the sand of a church and a community, or in the case of the Doggerland, submerged, like the coasts will be in a hundred years.
It is also interesting and ironic how technology itself has become the replacement for consciousness. In many cases there is no distinction between life and reel life, and that's perhaps why we sometimes treat music as a soundtrack for our lives, namely the use of McCartney's music.
The really sad thing is that the song is now dead--or its meaning has been completely eroded and replaced. McCartney probably would not perform this live. The spirit of it has been killed. But it was based on artifice to begin with.
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