#131 - Echolocation #4: You Can't Crush the Ethernet, Or Can You?
If "Parentheses" by The Blow offers refuge in the encased space between bodies that have become grammatical marks, then Plastic Operator's "Folder" uses computer desktop metaphors to store secret desires safely away in file directories.
This song could only exist in the age of online dating. The male singer "copy and pastes" a desired lover into a "folder with your name" since "it'd be more than I could take if I told you what I feel."
The song is filled with the age-old erotics of the crush. Twenty years ago (and still today), the singer could have just have easily scribbled his crush's name on the inside of his school binder. But there is something extra sad and tantalizing about the use of the computer.
In a way, the song's computerized world represents the crush more accurately than any material incarnation. It's an invisible message, but you can decode it; it's bits and bytes of desire, digitalized hormones, a tingling click of the mouse, and a vanishing into the ether of the Ethernet.
But, by the end of the song, you start to wonder: is this singer more in love with his clicks and bits and bytes than anything else? Are his desires more for his neatly-labeled and perfectly-filed virtual crush than for the actual person who is the supposed object of his desire?
Click and maybe you'll find out.
10 December 2006