“Throughout the course of history, numerous works of art have stood at the forefront of their respective genres. British indie band My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is one such work. Their unique sound on the album defined a sub-genre of indie rock known as shoegaze. This thesis is the first major academic study of My Bloody Valentine and their decisive presentation of shoegazer aesthetics: Loveless…The essential objective of this thesis is to justify My Bloody Valentine as one of the most important bands in music history.”
— A Master’s Thesis on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless
I think this would have been a bit more persuasive: ”Throughout the course of history, numerous records have stood at the forefront of the makeout record genre. British indie band My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is one such work.”
Makeout record genre. Indeed.
I can’t think of any genre-defining, seminal record that would be more unpleasant and boring to study/play for months on end than Loveless. Every second is overrated.
Agreed, but I think the same could be argued for a lot of my favorites.
The bigger point is that this whole thesis kind of makes you think academia is a scam:
From the summer of 2003 until the summer of 2004, I was a member of a rock
band that I considered the culmination of my musical creativity up to that point called
The House Project. It was not a rock band in the MTV or modern radio sense of the
term, rather the experience was more like four disgruntled musicians with bachelors
degrees in music pounding out their frustrations with a corrupt mainstream music
industry on their instruments—an industry that seemed to place more emphasis on image than on artistic creativity and the music itself. Our music was initially simple, yet
became more complex—far beyond our initial concept of the band—as the four of us
struggled with our ideas until we achieved what we believed was musical perfection. We
wanted to create beautiful, slow-moving music that would unexpectedly change
dynamics, from so extremely quiet that the listener had to strain to hear the music, to so recklessly loud that one had to run out of the room. In the process, we wanted to move people to uncontrollable tears while lyrically satirizing the redundant nature of the American-suburban life that we were all victims of in our youth.This is a Master’s Thesis, at a major university.
I’m with Sam on this one - I like Loveless, and even though I don’t worship it nor would I want to spend 3 credits studying it, I kind of hoped this would be deeper. I came across this paper a while ago (where I don’t remember, but I recently found it in a junk downloads folder on my desktop) and instantly remembered my experience. I opened it expecting some kind of meticulous analysis of it and instead found a thoroughly detailed blog post. I don’t think I read more than a page of it.
I wrote an undergraduate thesis on using deconstruction as a way to start reading House of Leaves - and it may be equally as trivial, minute, or inconsequential as this thesis (granted, mine was more of an independent learning exercise rather than a groundbreaking work of criticism), but it doesn’t read like I culled it from Wordpress entries or the early pages of my diary.
Reblogged from Synaptic Burble Baubles & Infinite Ammo.
September 08, 2009, 9:09am
