Women will listen to James Taylor singing the phone book
And men will watch anything with the James Bond theme playing, including cartoons. Some audio clues are so engrained into our unconscious that we react as a nation, as a gender or as a generation accordingly.
We're at an interesting plateau in our pop culture, because we come preequipped with a library of audio cues that preceding generations didn't have. We're preloaded like a PC that comes with MS Office instead of Works (does anyone actually use Works?).
Every visual thing becomes so much more powerful when a recognizable music tag is attached to it. Nike used the Beatles Revolution, teen movies today use the music of teens 40 years ago. Think how recognizable the beginning of some songs are like Back in Black by AC/DC, Thriller by Michael Jackson or Hard Day's Night by the Beatles.
Today's pop culture is recycling musical tags to quickly generate emotions and overlay them on top of something graphic.
What will tomorrow's pop culture do? Probably the reverse. They'll take the video images today and use them to garnish future sound.
I imagine we'll see new art forms follow from these entertwined uses of pop culture video and audio. Where's Andy Warhol now that he would really be appreciated?
Posted on November 15, 2005
