Gunderson's Vocabulary

Secily Thomas
English 102
Billy Middleton
March 1, 2010
I believe Gunderson’s vocabulary was to large to easily read through and comprehend because he was writing the article for a more mature audience. Knowing about Danger Mouse’s Grey Album and “mash-ups”, one would be writing to teenagers. He contradicts that idea by writing the article for such readers as professors or the corporate business world appealing to the older generations. He wrote to this type of audience trying to capture heir attention so they would actually take him serious and read the review of The Grey Album listening to the points he was trying to get across.

During his article he gives several discussions on topics such as mash-ups, file sharing, bedroom producers, and distribution. He used words such as “sacrilegious”, which only means sacred, in a sentence saying “Danger Mouse’s album represents the illegal plundering of some of the most valuable property in the history of pop music, the sacrilegious re-mixing of said recordings with a capella tracks of an African American rapper, and the electronic distribution of the entire album to hundreds of thousands of listeners vexingly oblivious to current copyright law”. Even though he used this grand vocabulary this sentence is only saying the recording industry thinks Danger Mouse is stealing from someone else’s property and he’s distributing this sacred music to thousands of listeners that has no concern with copyright laws. For another example of his confusing vocabulary is “the audio cut-and-paste, pastiche technique of The Grey Album might seem an unlikely candidate for such a modernist notion as “aesthetic autonomy”, but in a culture saturated by sham originality the only viable gesture towards autonomy would have to be the representation of cultural contradiction itself ”. In transition from the other sentence I find this one very confusing and don not understand much that it is trying to say but aesthetic means existing or functioning independently.

Danger Mouse made mash-ups with artists such as Jay-Z and the Beatles or Destiny’s Child and Nirvana and said the sense of humor immanent to a good mash up, meaning operating within, relates with Freud’s theory of humor that relies on sudden lifting of the repression on psychic energy. Gunderson continues to talk about mashing Jay-Z with the Beatles saying he “highlights the fact that African American hip hop is in many ways a direct descendant of early twentieth century African American blues, which in turn owes something to Christian spirituals sung on plantation”. I feel as though he wrote that sentence to explain how music correlates with each other and how they are all related in some way appealing to corporate America’s readers. In this next example he gives his readers both a negative and positive view on mash-ups. “One could look askance at mash-ups, viewing them as puerile, disrespectful mucking about with other people’s property, but one could also celebrate that very puerility insofar as it is anti-oedipal—insofar as it short-circuits the culture industry’s normally enforced boundaries between disparate genres of music.”
Danger Mouse tries to down play his mash-up between Jay-Z and the Beatles just as Duchamp does with the Mona Lisa. He “scandalized bourgeosis fetishists of Renaissance art” by painting a mustache on the face of Mona Lisa and implying that the original model had a “hot ass.” Danger Mouse uses the musical institution that the Beatles have become and changes their sound into a new critical context. They say if art is to change, which both artists seem to be trying to say, “repressive pieties are broken down and humor injected into the mix.”

Gunderson’s review of Danger Mouse, The Grey Album, Bootleg Recording was written to higher educated adults than to his actual listeners. He wrote the article trying to persuade them that file sharing is ok, amongst other ideas, by using this type of vocabulary to appeal to their educational knowledge.