Webspinna Battle

Webspinna Artist Statement

One of the things that we were striving to show in our Webspinna Battle was the disconnect between the baby-boomer generation, and the millennial generation. We have found that there are many things which these two groups don’t particularly agree upon (such as technology proficiency, embracing new things, etc…), and we chose to emphasize the differences in music during our Webspinna battle. Steven represented the millennial group by listening to 1990s Pop Hits such as Brittany Spears’ Hit me Baby and N’Sync, among others. Parker represented the baby-boomer generation by at first criticizing the millennial music, and then coming back with his own music. This music battle went back and forth until the millennial realized that there indeed was something cool about the older music, at which time he switched over to a 1970s hit song, September, by Earth, Wind and Fire. The baby-boomer then threw the millennial a drink, which they then use to toast, having reconciled their differences, and the battle was over.

This experience is not that far from being true. One day I (Steven) was doing homework in my bedroom, and listening to music, which happened to be Earth, Wind and Fire. My dad walked by and poked his head into the room and asked, “What are you listening to?” I replied, “Earth, Wind and Fire. They’re cool.” My dad, surprised, said, “You do know that this is the music from my generation, right? These guys were popular when I was in high school.” I replied, “Yeah, and I think it’s cool.” My dad just laughed and left the room.

During our Webspinna Battle, we created something that had never been created before. The combination of music and audio that we pulled from the web was used in a specific way that had never been done before. Jonathan Lethem, in his article “The Ecstasy of Influence,” states that, “Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked... Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.” The open-sourced culture that he speaks of is very available with the internet, where anyone can grab anything and create something totally unique. This is constantly happening today, and a good example of this is the website “Everything is a Remix.” This website, curated by Kirby Ferguson, is the host to a web series that explains how everything we view, read, and take in is a remix of something else that has already happened. We reuse the things that we know work, and make them into better things, and into “worse” things.

Group:
Steven Bills Parker Davis

What follows is a list of possible songs I will use for the Webspinna battle.