Carrie Underwood – Before He Cheats (You Tube)
Posted by Bobby Kuechenmeister on April 15, 2007 
Comments(9)
Comments(9)
[Here is something I notice about this video that really bothers me. According to CMT, this song hit #1 on Billboard’s Country charts and helped Underwood’s album go five times platnium last year, but now this song is shooting up the pop charts as DJs and VJs herald it as a “new” song. Naturally, appearing on Country and Pop charts makes Underwood a successful crossover artist like Shania Twain, but what bothers me is that DJs and VJs are treating her as if she is brand-new whereas before they were aware of a crossover artist’s previous success. BK]
category: Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Poetics, Television
These people make their living on marketing the “newest thing” so anything from last year is automatically labeled old and no good (pretty good setup for a capitalistic society, eh). Check with some of your students in what they think are old movies. I’ll bet it would be anything older then 5 years ago. I don’t consider a movie old unless it was made before I was born generally. Same with music.
Sure, generating new capital from old by recycling is brilliant, but that marketing strategy is dependent upon consumers having disposable memory. Unfortunately, memory is anything but disposable.
Wolfgang Iser says in Act of Reading that when we read something, it becomes stored like short-term memory as a theme. Once we read something else then that theme becomes part of a horizon, or long-term memory, helping us derive new meaning whenever we read something over again. Given our increasingly visual culture and understanding that everything is a text, then Iser’s notions still prove true, so perhaps our culture’s attention span continues waning.