#106 - Shredding the Mystery
The selections for the Da Capo Best of Music Writing 2006 have already been announced, but Culture Rover nominates a late entry: Virginia Heffernan's piece, "Web Guitar Wizard Revealed At Last," which appeared in last week's New York Times Arts and Leisure section.
What made the article so good was that it started out as a conventional mystery story, a whodunit about a youtube.com video of a baseball-cap-masked, slashing Zoro of a guitarist with the moniker funtwo, but as the article proceeded, it started to deepen into a truly weird, bottomless story about the intricacies of online communities, the sensibilities of guitar subcultures, the odd porn-meets-guerrilla-media video aesthetics of youtube, and the complex workings of Asian styles of masculinity. The article was at once about nothing special and everything going on in the world of youth culture today.
So Culture Rover says: Shred it, Virginia Heffernan! You rock!
01 September 2006