Savage MTV Performance (WARNING XXX CONTENTS)

..Let me first apologise for the contents of the blog—Sorry about it. I’d also like to implement hopefully in readers’ mind that what is posted up here is never to promote some kind of opinion of mine but they are to help understand what it is I hope to get across in terms of ideas. The importance of the Savage videos is to hint at an aspect fundamental in and across the ideas developed here—of course the whole notion of ‘assemblage’ and ‘relationships’—but the importance of bringing back the concept of ‘aesthetic’ in analysis of popular culture and especially urban-Polynesian cultures not only here in Aotearoa; but also elsewhere in the world. The inescapable idea that we are living in a consumer-orientated world is important in that it points to us back to the idea of relationship and of course aesthetic.

There is an essential space existing between two primary dimensions important to the understanding of contemporary and economically advanced societies—not to be disrespectful to those who thinks otherwise but I am hoping to sketch a general context that is highly ‘urbanised’ and connected to the overarching notion of ‘world’ or ‘globalisation’ or whatever you’d like to call it through means resistance to traditional notions of boundaries or any sketchy and related idea of it. And it is this ‘space’ existing in-between these dimensions that are of most important value here in my analysis—now; we can substitute these flanking dimensions with various kinds of understanding depending on the context and the things that we are actually discussing but the ‘in-between-space’ I am hoping to roughly sketch here remains almost the same in terms of function but not necessarily in terms of content—which I’d like to further add that whatever these contents may be, they are determined largely by the things constituting the flanking dimensions and its nature. Also, these dimensions don’t necessarily flank in the sense that they are connected to the ‘in-between-space’ that I continually refer to here through various terms such as ‘assemblage’, ‘relationships’—rather, the emergence of this ‘in-between-space’ is the result of these dimensions’ overlapping impacts such as when I mentioned beforehand concerning the nature of the elements at work (whether implicitly or explicitly) giving rise to the manifestation of ‘knowledge’ or ‘re-presentation’.

Put it simply—using Savage and the Music Market; the artist exists as an intersecting point between his music and the Market. No one can ever convince me that there exists a musician who doesn’t anticipate the reception of her/his music otherwise that person is not a musician—as every (or at least most) artist who is or has been successful would say “the fans made me or my music” or at least something along those lines. What I’m trying to put forward here is that the music put out by artists or musicians manifest various things understandable only through a relational sense of understanding or analyses. The artist informs about various things important to him/her and the community in which they are a part of; now the idea of community here can be understood as or comes to us through various forms—hip-hop community, youth-community, Samoan or Tongan community, Urban-community—and these are not necessarily actual and physical understanding as it may be informed by or through a geographical sense. By this goal or impulse to ‘inform’ the artist simultaneously ‘formulate’ certain manifestations which also simultaneously ‘transform’ the ‘space’ or environment or conditions upon which these manifestations exist. By now we can determine that this kind of understanding echoes the ‘Hermeneutic-Circle’ in a general sense.

But by being ‘in-between’ is not as straight-forward as I’d want it to be for the sake of not having to type more and more into the complexities of this understanding. What I can say is that this ‘space’ is not in itself independent to the extent that it can exist on its own in isolation to the flanking-dimensions; rather, this ‘space’ is dependent on whatever may exist around it—so it doesn’t come into being unless regulated or stimulated by a certain event of intersection between two elements or dimensions of life. Yet also, and likewise, these elements are not what they are as we might understand them at a particular point; rather, their understanding at a particular point in time is dependent also on what can be determined between it and other elements in life. Generally, we might all agree that no music exist on its own without a market—what I’m trying to say is that apart from a certain ‘image’, ‘song’ or a certain ‘re-presentation’ having being expressed through an author and that also to an extent we can see the author in that work, it is also an appeal to something beyond the presence of the author and everything that he or she is. That we can see the nature of what it is that such works appeal to intermingled and intertwined within the complex make-up of that certain work—even if not in an explicit sense, we can still find traces of that ‘space’ to which the work ‘appeal’ to in the work.

See you soon…