this song has followed me around my entire life. my first memory of recorded music, outside of children's media, was finding it as the first track on a CD my cousin had, and listening to it over and over, even though i had no idea what it was about. i often revisited it. there's a comic in my first book named after it. it made such an impression on me over time that i made sure my daughter's first experience with recorded music was 'switched on bach' - which is referenced in this song, as a kind of microcosm: a new tech usurping older forms of artistry - the album is just bach played on synthesizers, made back when this was a mind blowing feat. i even played it for her on vinyl to make some meta point about... something, or nothing i guess, to myself. occasionally, you get figures that straddle the edge of two time periods. martin luther is my favorite example, bridging the medieval and modern eras. on the one hand, he's clearly a medieval guy - on the other hand, he isn't really medieval at all, and doesn't fit into that world. in some ways, he's modern - almost the first "modern" person, if you wanted to be a dramatic academic about it, but he would also be totally out of place in modernity. i have a theory that this song (video killed the radio star) itself is one of these straddling entities. it was released in 1979, but its extremely 80s. more than that, its small details prefigure too much for it to be of its own time. the band is called the buggles - a play on the beatles, themselves two fictitious characters who live in a recording studio. they're fake derivative and referential personas, something that would become the hallmark of essentially all music (imo) and media after this. the main musician involved was originally a guy who wrote jingles for commercials. the song itself can be read this way, really an amalgamation of several jingles, fit together as one piece of music. extremely short form content, commercial forms spilling back and becoming a form of art - likewise, this is also all here. if someone asked what vaporwave was about, you could show them vaporwave, i guess, but you'd also have to explain it to them. or, you could just show them this song. this song is a tighter encapsulation of what vaporwave is about than any one piece of vaporwave music: i grew up with this old media, now that it's gone, been replaced, it haunts me like a ghost, and there's no way for me to go back - but it, despite often being commercial detritus, speaks to my soul in a way that nothing else does. sometimes it feels like most internet media became about what this song is about. all the "what happened to XYZ figure" and "12 forgotten internet worlds" youtube videos, "didn't video games used to be better?" conversations, all the retro aesthetics, it's all here in a few minutes. as the acceleration of history has made us all historians, the acceleration of technology coupled with its enmeshment in our own inner lives has made us all our own flavors of hyper nostalgic aesthetic critics and sociologists. today, the best part of this song may be that it was wrong. music videos died off relatively rapidly, compared to radio (i believe the song starts with the singer as a child listening in to some post WW2 broadcast, that would have been over 70 years ago). most adults probably can't remember the last time they watched a music video, or got excited about one. meanwhile we all listen to the radio in our cars, and things like spotify or mixes on youtube ultimately are more like the radio than music videos. maybe the truth of all the media with this message: "time is changing, but i like the older technology and its spiritual implications better" (this being a kind of ur-text for that) is that the change can't really be enforced, and that the truly human media will live on - like a human: scraping by, even if oppressed, surviving however it can, until it can re-emerge and flourish again. maybe the most human aspects of technology will never die: in an appropriate musical metaphor, they just get run through a distorting filter.
https://hell.twtr.plus/media/088e5b7fa166eada0b7070c59dd226fc4b97d742441c896dde930d8221f6c4c5.file