#86 - Bang on a (Cheap Plastic) Can
Listening back over their albums, Daft Punk's music takes place in a world of cheap plastic things.
We cast disco lights on the remaindered aisle at Walmart. Stacks of plastic knick-knacks gather dust on their shrink wrap. The seams on the goods show the mass-produced imperfections of over-used molding machines. The objects are heinous colors, sugar pinks and lemonade yellows, nuclear vomit greens. The fluorescent overheads flicker. Your face, distorted, tries to smile in the waxed linoleum.
Bang on a can, a gigantic brown garbage container will do, or a storage box stack. The cheap plastic things of the world have dulled sonic qualities: they thud without breathing, they pound without echoing; they clunk without blood; they whisper without words; they scream from dried-out throats; they whistle the body polymerized. They are vacuous and deadening. Your homework, should you accept: carve life -- and our lives -- out of their stifling membranes and airless resonances.
12 January 06