Re: (TV) "Musicians"

[Maurice Rickard <maurice@mac.com>]

At 9:44 PM -0700 5/27/04, grntg wrote:
> what profession, that pays decently, is
> considered to have "soul"?

The problem here is the "pays decently" condition.  The class of 
one-upping hipsters who determine where "soul" resides are all 
ironically underemployed, and frown upon anyone in any better-paying 
profession.  (Back in the 80s, photocopy shop work was *it*, 
apparently; that's what Thurston Moore and Peter Prescott, among 
others, did for dough.)  I think in the early 90s, slinging coffee 
was the way to go for "soul," and there *might* have been a brief 
golden period in the late 90s when web work was both well-paying and 
featured access to a certain cachet, if not "soul," but once we 
reached the point where one couldn't fling a dead cat without hitting 
a dot-com IPO, there was no chance of "soul" happening there.

So, given the people doing the deciding, I guess the answer is rock 
critics, which is what the "soul"-defining hipster class amounts to. 
And it's only the well-paid ones who consider themselves to have 
"soul," as  a) the not-well-paid rock critics think the well-paid 
ones are sellouts, and b) every rock critic thinks other rock critics 
are soulless dupes, bandwagon-jumpers, or con artists.

(Side note: fans of the Homestar Runner animation site should note 
that at the very end of Strong Bad Email #53 
<http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail53.html>, there's a devastating 
parody of a hipper-than-thou conversation at the local independent 
record store over the looped intro of "Teenage Riot."  "I just 
couldn't get into it.  You know, the whole thing's in 4/4..."  "I saw 
'em like twice last night, actually."  "Yeah, I saw them earlier this 
morning like four times."  "I've been a bigger fan than you for a 
while..." If you don't want to sit through the "Teen Girl Squad" 
comic, you can read an inaccurate transcript with some corrections at 
<http://www.hrwiki.org/index.php?page=StrongBadEmail%2Fcomic%2FEasterEggs>)

So there you have it.  I think Joe may be right about Unix/Linux 
system administrators, though, at least the lucky ones who haven't 
had the souls burnt out of them by PHBs and countless instances of 
User Failure.
--
Maurice Rickard
http://mauricerickard.com/   |   http://onezeromusic.com/
--------------
To post: Mail tv@obbard.com
To unsubscribe: Mail majordomo@obbard.com with message "unsubscribe tv"