I found some interesting links between Carla Pretorius’ Golden Record Curation assignment and my own.
I was surprised and impressed to find Carla’s straight to the point attitude of saying that she didn’t care for the assignment. It’s a little bold and I always find that sort of dissension really impressive.
And I appreciated the way in which she chose to not engage with the assignment in the prescribed way, but rather found her own way to demonstrate her thinking on the topic.
We had a couple of parallels in our thoughts, notably the near omnipotence of JS Bach on the golden record. I found that a little curious also. The math thing is of course mentioned in the podcast, but that’s a lot from one artist all the same. And we both picked a couple of the same songs. Notably the one from India and the Chuck Berry track.
I didn’t feel during the listening that western music was over-represented on the record, but in thinking back after reading Carla’s post, it definitely was at least a little too much.
I found the particular complaints about the languages selected were just piling on, as the exact same Sesotho vs Swahili argument could have been made in reverse with a different rationale. You can’t please all the people all the time.
And the Nazi links to the former director of the UN were I believe unknown at the time. And if they were known, he was still director of the UN – so for better or worse he’s who was chosen to represent us. So for better or worse (certainly worse in the case of Nazi ties), he was our deliberate face at the time.
All in all, as always, very insightful and interesting to hear super different perspectives on the same exact media.