Never mind the why and wherefore...

Still working on that Evelyn Evelyn article. It's gonna be heavy on the pretentious, a little lighter on the whimsy, but we'll see what goes.

I wanted someone to bounce ideas off of, so I went online looking for some kind of pop culture geek forum where geeks who are into culture studies go to geek out to each other. Alas, no such place seems to exist (an internet full of geeks with varying geeky tendencies, and I can't even find a single haven for my particular geekery of choice? And yet, somehow one can find porn for just about any obscure and stigmatized fetish out there?)

I've mentioned it to a couple of people, and met with little interest. I find that when you start to analyze anything (from pop culture to music to literature) people get very standoffish with you. There's always a sense that if you analyze something, you take away some of its value; a fear that if you break the delicate surface of the illusion, you will look beneath and see that it was smoke and mirrors the whole time.

Which makes me a bit sad, really, because hidden in that assumption is the belief that the inner workings of things are inherently either dull, incomprehensible, corrupt, or all three. It's a view that I see as both naive and cynical at once. Why is it so hard to believe that beneath what is beautiful and fascinating lies an even more beautiful and fascinating clockwork machine to make it go?

When I listen to Evelyn Evelyn, I am unsettled, saddened, fascinated, and entertained all at once. I don't automatically know why, but the answer lies in a complex web of nature and nurture. If I take my thinking a little deeper, I can find all sorts of things; anxieties about the body, about the media, about ideas of normalcy and identity, all kinds of comfort zones regarding what is and what is not, and what labels we assign to both. Understand why a song effects you and you understand more about yourself, and about the people and ideas surrounding you at all times.

I don't listen to the song and go, "Aha! Here's the metaphor! Puzzle solved!". I listen to songs that tinker and play with my own inner clockwork, which makes me want to find out why, and look at the cogs and springs of the song itself. It enriches the song, teases out more questions that will haunt you in different ways, and inspires a kind of awe in just how wild and unfathomable this bizarre little existence really is.

And I promise, no matter how much you find out about things, there will always be more to find out.