Webspinna Battle

What we found interesting about this week and the webspinna battle, was how open ended it really was. Going into it, we knew we needed to do a battle of sounds with a partner, and create this story, or this theme that we can show to the class. And with that theme or story, we can educate people on how we feel about a certain subject, and how they should possibly feel about it as well. From the start, we wanted to do something that involved music. We were both impressed by the mashup of The Beatles and Jay-Z. We found it interesting how someone took the theme of old meets new, and combined the two together, showing that they could work as one.

So what we wanted to do was take that concept of old meeting new, and applying it to music from this generation and the last. We wanted to combine the classics of yesterday, with the classics of today and see how they compared and contrasted against each other. So with these styles, we thought it would be fun to do a Pitch-Perfect style riff-off battle, where I was representing the New Age, and Taylor would do The Old classics. And we also thought that since lip sync battles are really popular at the moment, that it would be fun to memorize certain lyrics from our songs and lip sync along to them in front of the class. It was a lot of fun to find the songs that we were going to perform. Not only that, but we found that some of the songs applied to our subject matter, such as the lyrics from “Radioactive” where the singer says “Welcome to the New Age”.

Our decision to create a battle between the new age and old age of rock’n’roll gave us the opportunity to find differences as well as similarities between the two genres of music. In Jonathan Lethem’s article “The Ecstasy of Influence” he speaks on the technique of musicians having the opportunity and sources to recreate music from past sources, for example blues and jazz musicians. We live in a day where technology gives ample resources to remix, rewind, and replay so one can create their own version of a song or a piece of that song. For example, the remix artist, Pogo, takes classic Disney songs and literally puts his own spin on them creating a new age of Disney music.

Many things can be learned from this assignment and the approach we decided to take. Similar to what is discussed above, we were able to highlight differences between the two genres, however, what brought them together was their similarities. This can be applied with not only music, but any form of art. We can remix two vastly different mediums or techniques in order to produce a more abstract and meaningful piece. It also poses a challenge that promotes creativity built from limitations.