Do you remember where you were on 9/11? How about when Princess Di was killed? When the Berlin wall came down? When Kennedy was shot?
What do all these things have in common? Your memory of them. Or rather, how you remember your experience of events that likely had nothing to do with you.
According to Thomas De Zengotita, author of the book Mediated, there’s been a steadily growing folk genre he calls the “where was I when the Event took place?” story.
As he describes,
“Ask yourself this: did members of the Greatest Generation spend a lot of time talking about where they were and what they did and how they felt when they first heard the news from Pearl Harbour? People certainly remembered the moment, and a few anecdotes got passed around – but did a whole folk genre spontaneously emerge? Did everyone feel compelled to craft a little narrative, starring me, an oft-repeated and inevitably embellished story-for-the-ages reporting on my personal experience of the Event? Or did they just assume that Pearl Harbour and its consequences were what mattered, and talk about that.”
But what the heck does this have to do with the Saturday Night Jukebox?? Give us the damn music already!
Well today’s song is a bit different. I didn’t choose it because it’s a great song, but because it uses a technology that allows the viewer to actually insert him/herself into the music video. Not only is this super cool, it strikes me as another degree of the “little narrative, starring me” folk genre that De Zengotita is talking about.
The video uses your history, your nieghbourhood, and your artistic 
expression. Suddenly the song really is about you. We’ve always listened to particular songs and pined for lost lovers or felt nostalgic for the times when we first heard them. We often imagined that the songs were about us, and expressed perfectly how we felt, or said what we wished we could say. So we’ve always been inserting ourselves into the music, to some degree. But this video takes it a step further.
You have to see it to understand. It’s definitely cutting edge. Not just in terms of technology (because the technology is amazing, a lot will come from this, I’m sure), but in terms of culture. This video has hints of virtual reality making us the protagonists in a world not quite real and not quite unreal. It’s the ultimate mediated experience.
(I definitely suggest downloading Chrome and closing all your other programs, as the site suggests. It sounds like a hassle, I know, but its well worth it for the whole experience and Chrome is very quick to download – about 3 mins from download to installation and start-up.) (oh, and don't close any of the little windows that pop up before the song starts.) Enjoy!
www.thewildernessdowntown.com
