.: March 2018

Mr Smith's Uncool Playlist

I'm Just A Killer For Your Love - Blur

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx4DJRTtcXE

Today's Lesson Creating an 'uncool playlist'

1. Read Brian Eno's article on the death of uncool

2. Using your ipod, spotify, iTunes or other generic music account set your software to shuffle and select the first TWELVE songs, you cannot cheat, you MUST use whatever the software chooses.

3. Post your 'Death Of Uncool' shuffle mix.

4. Add a genre to each song.

5. Write about the postmodern meaning of your shuffle mix, what does it say about your taste in music, are there any songs you were embarrassed to have on your playlist, any songs which are a guilty pleasure?

6. Find the images you want to use for your bricolage CD cover which will accompany your CD mix

7. Write a blurb for a fictional film which this playlist would be the soundtrack to

The Death Of Uncool

Brian Eno — 25th November 2009

It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating. The category I had a hand in starting—ambient music—has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked. A similar bifurcation has been happening in every other living musical genre (except for “classical” which remains, so far, simply “classical”), and it’s going on in painting, sculpture, cinema and dance.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

This article first appeared in the December edition of Prospect magazine

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Ensure all tasks are completed by the end of the lesson.

Order your blog in the following manner:

Note to the moderator
Music Video
Digipaks and magazine adverts
Evaluation questions 1-4 or 4-1
All posts must be labelled - final evaluations must be labelled YOURNAME evaluation e.g.: Alfie evaluation. The same format applies to digipaks and magazine adverts.
Music video analysis must also be labelled in the same way
Please ensure that all links work
All images must be visible
Embed apps were possible (essential for Prezi)
Draft work must be labelled draft

3.22.2018

Mr Smith's Uncool Playlist

Today's Lesson Creating an 'uncool playlist'

The Death Of Uncool

Blog admin

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