It's easy to forget this now but people once debated the truthfulness of Laguna Beach. It was a show that was ostensibly real and looked profoundly fake. And this moment of reality (or should that be in quotes?) in 2005 or 2006 was the official tipping point between what was real and what was fake. If characters on a debatably real "reality" show could watch characters on a fictional drama, whose fictional lives were loosely based on the "real" girls on the "reality show," the world might have finally found a way to eat itself. True and false might have finally dressed up as each other for Halloween and it might be October 31st forever. The universe might finally have looked too deeply into its own reflection and found not a mirror but a cliff at the edge of a black hole. We might be done.
Which brings us roughly to today - a day when Peter Gabriel and Hot Chip recorded a cover of Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa." It is a song that name-checks Peter Gabriel in its post-chorus and it is a song that Gabriel is ready to take on. Slightly changing the sound to something ethereal (think almost Toto's "Africa") and changing the lyrics to, "It feels so unnatural. Peter Gabriel too. And it feels so unnatural to say your own name," Gabriel is fearlessly going where no man has gone before. Welcome to the brink of meaning and the brink of post-modernism. Welcome to the end of the fucking world. It feels so unnaturally fine.
Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa - Hot Chip & Peter Gabriel
1 comment:
I believe this is the most relevance MTV has had to music since Beavis and Butthead stopped watching music videos.
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