So long, good friend

VHS is finally dead.

“The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was “A History of Violence” in 2006. By that point major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves so the valuable real estate could go to the sleeker and smaller DVDs.”

I know, not my usual shocker article, but I’d like to pay homage to the VHS.  After it was made mainstream by porn, VHS has entertained us for something like three decades, really taking off in the 90’s.

So I’d like to write about some memories that I have with VHS. A eulogy, of sorts. Feel free to add your own memories in the comments section.

I remember still being in Russia, so I was under the age of 6, and how I thought my Grandpa was something close to god (secular Soviet home) because he could make TV stop, rewind, and play at will. I watched endless reruns of the same episodes of Gummi Bears (in Russian of course). I thought the TV power solely belonged to my Grandpa. Sure, I didn’t know it was a trusty VHS that held my joy on it, but there it was, a token of  my early childhood.

In case you’re curious as to what Gummi Bears sounds like in Russian..

You can only imagine my sheer happiness when I discovered that this strange new land, America, also had Gummi Bears, albeit in it’s own language. America also had those adorable little cheese wrapped in wax (Babybel), which I first met on the plane coming to the USA, where I promptly ate the cheese, wax and all, until some nice lady took pity on me and explained to me that I can take the wax off.

Oh VHS, I remember the sheer control. I could put it in, record anything I want on TV, play it back, record over it again. I remember recording mistakes. I remember footage being lost. I remember the joy of finding it again, accidentally, that as you’re watching some old cartoon, for nostalgia value as now you’re too told for the cartoon, that you recorded at a very tender age that would get interrupted midway through by the porn that you recorded from the TV at that same tender age.

I remember feeling so powerful. I could capture moments. I could rewind and play at will. I could erase. Maybe this sounds so geeky, but the idea that one could take memories from the TV without permission. We don’t have that anymore. We pay for it. We are also watched. Someone else knows what we record. What we prefer. The privacy is gone. That was really the glory of VHS, video home system, the privacy in your own home. Obviously this was primarily for porn purposes in the beginning, as it’s nicer to watch it at home instead of some peep show theater. With VHS we had our own personal cinema. It was so revolutionary. It was so intimate. I loved hitting pause, and then play and watching everything move very very slowly. I loved the noise of the machine when it would fast forward or rewind. You could feel the little guy working.

I remember the anticipation of tracking. When the tape was too old and it would be fuzzy and not so perfect, and you would hold your breath hoping that tracking would fix it. I remember actually the days before auto-tracking and how that was a bitch and a half to set the levels just right. It was a sense of pride and accomplishment every time I made a video look good.

I loved the working technology as a kid, but I also loved it when my parents gave me the important task of destroying videos as well. I’d pull the black tape out and out and dance with it in the house. Sometimes I would rewind it manually with my fingers. See if I could put it back together. See if I could undo it more. I would braid it into my hair, then take it out because I wasn’t allowed to look like that outside the house. I loved how tangible VHS was.

My college house still has a ton of VHS tapes. Old Disney movies, not digitally remastered, that we gather around and watch. We bask in the feeling of being young again. Of the tape sometimes being soft around the edges. How everything wasn’t so perfect, and that is, and was, part of the appeal. Nothing more exciting than taking that clunky VHS tape and watching the VCR eat it. No menu screen with options. Just ff and then play. No DVD that sits and keeps replaying the menu screen over and over.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the new digital world. Yet sometimes I miss the fuzzy memories of my youth.

So goodbye and so long, VHS. You done good. I know others will make a far more creative and artistic omage to you. You might get some gallery installations. Some modern art pieces. Maybe a movie and documentary. Maybe a porno.

But you will never again teach young immigrant girls how to capture memories on their own. Don’t worry, VHS, your memory is already captured. It keeps playing inside. My generation watches your graceful death. You embody the death of our childhood.

Mashups

A mashup  is a song or composition created from the combination of the music from one song with the a cappella from another…In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mash ups have been described positively as “ultimate post-modern pop song[s]” or “‘culture jamming in its purest form’” and “display an analytical impulse…we actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another…in a way, the music speaks for itself”.

I know Kanye’s “Stronger” became popular. He spliced his song with Daft Punk’s “Technologic”–also an awesome song on it’s own that was used for an Ipod commercial.

Eminem also did a mashup with one of Enya’s songs:

Girl Talk is a great example of mashups. He’s actually really famous. Although he is in a good heap of lawsuits. Listen to the song and let me know how many songs/rifts/etc you can identity.

“Ultimate post-modern pop songs,” was a line from the above paragraph from Wikipedia. I think that is a beautiful description for this. Girl Talk grabs snippets of songs, lyrics, rifts, beats from other songs in order to create a “new” song. Mashups are the music for the tl;dr generation. There is overarching melody or theme. Only punctuated moments of enjoyment. That after we have them, we don’t remember them, because suddenly we blend into another snippet of enjoyment. We don’t seem to savor the enjoyment, but consume it and quickly move onto another one. Well, in a way then, we don’t actually enjoy. We don’t like things that are too long. We like our headlines. We like our quick sentences. We enjoy our information to be fast and concise. We want to consume it quickly and move onto something else. It seems to be the same style with our contemporary music.

You cannot tell when one song blends into the other. The entire album could have been one track. I’m not saying the music or the process of creating it isn’t complex. The way we experience music, at least mashups, has changed. This is nothing like the long, drawn-out (albeit beautiful) Baroque music, where different parts of the piece will refer back to the larger theme..nor anything like the predictable pop songs where we have the chorus 2 or 3 times, a zenith, and then a fade out, where we know the structure and the length of the song, and we come to expect all of these parts to occur. The Girl Talk songs just do. No theme, just snippets. Sweet, enjoyable snippets. In a way, we can hear many, many songs all at once. We do not have to choose which song to listen to first. “Do I want to hear this…or this…how will I ever decide?” No need to! I think this feeds into our society of enjoyment rather well. Our satisfaction is instant, but not permanent. We don’t really enjoy it, because we keep craving.

I believe we get a delight from (not only the snippets) but also the fact that we have the knowledge of all of these various snippets. That we can identity all the songs that are being spliced and used inside this one song. A type of cultural elite, per say. In order to really appreciate the mashup we need to know what the musician is making references to. So we must amass a large body of knowledge, musical and general pop culture. Sucks for those who don’t.