To all my niggas{{INTHEWHITEHOUSE!!!}}

My round-up of the Howard Dean Remixes in City Pages, an alternative weekly published in {{MINNESOTA!!!}}. Perhaps a bit late in the game, but hey.

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Just finished reading Levi-Strauss's "Myth and Meaning," which contains some notable observations about music, myth, and language. Using the structure of language as his paradigm -- phonemes, words, and sentences (in its simplest sense) -- he posits that music has an equivalent to the phoneme: the note. But these "sonemes" are organized directly into melody lines (or "sentences,") bypassing the "word" level altogether. Myth, on the other hand, lacks the equivalent of a "phoneme"; the most basic unit of meaning in a myth, according to Levi-Strauss, is something more equivalent to a "word" -- which is then used to form sentence-like narratives. So, he concludes that "...Music on the one hand and mythology on the other both stem from languages but grow apart in different directions..." Music emphasizes the sound aspect of language, while myth emphasizes the sense, or meaning aspect of language. Which seems to fit Saussure's "parole"/"langue" dichotomy pretty well. There's no sound without a meaning, and no meaning without a sound to communicate it. So music and myth are like symbiotic sisters, each forgoing the full communicative flexibility of a true language in favor of a specialized function, although each behaves like a language in and of itself.

Then there's a fantastic structural analysis of Wagner's Ring cycle, in terms of how melody organizes myth-cells ("mythemes") synchronically. My friend's mother, who wrote the introduction to this volume, seemed to like the Wagner analysis, too -- which prompted me to lay an inverse "Dozens" on him when he happened to call while I was reading: "Hey -- your momma's so smart, she writes introductions to books by *French* motherfuckers!"

"Tristes Tropiques" is pretty enthralling as well. There are some obliquely funny riffs on globalization and Latin American petty bureaucracy that remind me of the cranky missives in William Burroughs' "Yage Letters," as well as Tim Cahill's tongue-in-cheek meme theories about culturally-socialized grift as the legacy of the gold trade in "Road Fever."

posted at 8:24 PM