The Wily Filipino

No Irony Here.

Back in my grad student days when we used to have house parties at 103 Spring Lane, Madonna was always on the dance mix tapes -- that's right, tapes -- that my housemate Big J would make. (We had generally sedate parties back then; one of the few times the cops came to bust us was when the Comp Lit folks came with their own mix tape -- a party no-no, if you ask me -- and cranked up Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance" really loud.) Madonna remained a party staple even after the house changed from its early halcyon life as a predominantly interdisciplinary Southeast Asianist pad (two historians, an anthropologist (that's me), and the lone Comp Lit person) to a full-blown German Studies house. (At that point I was the only holdout, my German limited to the kind spoken in Jim Abrahams and David Zucker's Top Secret!)

During one of our dance parties, "Into the Groove" came on. People rushed to the floor (mostly the Government people -- they always crashed parties). My German Studies housemate, not necessarily in between vogueing moves, came up to me while we were dancing. "The great thing about Madonna," he confided, "is that you can dance to her with a sense of irony." I laughed, told him that I genuinely enjoyed the song, and repeated it to my anthropologist classmate at my side, who was quite offended at the suggestion. "I love Madonna!" she said.

"Even the Erotica album?" I asked skeptically.

"I love the Erotica album!" she said, in between vogueing moves now that "Vogue" had come on.

Thinking about it now, I'm interpreting my housemate's words about dancing to Madonna with a sense of irony to be a particularly early-'90s statement -- back when Seinfeld and Letterman were at the height of their ironic powers -- about cultural production in the '80s. But back then I crudely concluded that our exchange represented the difference between anthropology and comparative literature: praxis versus theory, gratification versus deferment, a joyful participation in sweaty physicality versus a constipated detachment.

Anyhow, I digress -- all this was merely an unconnected excuse to present the most insane site, clothes and haircuts and production values in varying degrees of quality:
1500 videos from the '80s (looks like they're actually hosted on YouTube), where I threw my productivity down the toilet for an hour and gleefully watched the Eurogliders and Climie Fisher and Fiction Factory and Cyndi Lauper and the vine-swinging in Haircut 100's "Love Plus One" and that fake telephone that John Waite smashes in "Missing You" and the Vegemite sandwich from Men At Work's "Down Under" back to back. And without the slightest smidgen of irony.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 15, 2006 07:51 PM