Julia Friese explains what really lies behind the term no-effort/full-effort dichotomy.
Three observations:
1. everything will change when we grow up
“For decades, for me, old people were mysterious creatures who must have been born in this corrupted state,” writes the 64-year-old literary critic Iris Radisch in “Die Zeit”. “The stories and images” that “determined their attitude to life for the longest time” were about “young people”. She was missing role models for her old age, she wrote in the last days of last year, while television viewers used thin straws to suck up the last remnants of their nineties ice cream sundae.
“Wetten Dass…?!” with Thomas Gottschalk was shown for the third time and at the same time we came across both the “Echt-” and the “VIVA-Story” in the media libraries. VIVA went on air on December 1st, 1993. “30 years ago? “I’m not that old yet,” says ex-VIVA presenter Aleks Bechtel in the documentary, which shows a television channel that was initiated by white men and illustrated with women and PoCs in order to let these texts speak that the male ones The masterminds found it appropriate. While the money from the record companies was so bubbling that some people went from internship to permanent editorial team in two weeks in order to fly to Bora-Bora for a 2-minute record, which they were then annoyed about.
2. the celebration tour
In the current serial crisis mode, the pop culture of the 1990s, which suppresses politics, is seen as a somewhat putrid but nevertheless more pleasant escape. A frontstage without any backstage awareness. A choreographed coexistence without having to be negotiated beforehand. You just dance. With sufficient goods, no, in abundance for everyone. However, Forever Young is not gender neutral. Men are allowed to age visually and freeze mentally in their time. While for women the opposite applies: visually you have to freeze yourself, but mentally you have to keep up with the times.
This no-effort/full-effort dichotomy is illustrated in the “Wetten Dass…?” scene, in which the ossified Gottschalk welcomes the flexible Cher and tells her that he no longer knows whether he can touch women anymore may. And Cher says: “It depends where.” On YouTube, the young Rosalía and the ageless Björk dare to play a game of “Tekken” in the video for “oral”. A Playstation game from 1995. You fight in a white, empty room that looks like computer-generated rooms imagined in music videos around the year 2000.
3. future nostalgia
In 2024 we know that Chat GPT 4, using its Dall-E image generator, imagines rooms in a completely different way. Interestingly, a pure white area is almost impossible for the artificial neural network to detect. Increase prompts, on the other hand, are a popular meme right now.
Like: “Generate one Series of images of frogs and make them angrier from frame to frame.” Chat GPT 4 first increases the number of angry frogs, then he makes their eyes bigger, more intense in color, then he dissolves the previously concrete background into a metaphorical apocalypse. In the last picture, the frogs also dematerialize, becoming heads that rage out of the universe – a kind of cosmic universe.
“A rage that transcends all logic and reality, in an abstract concept of space and time,” is the subtitle of artificial intelligence. It cannot increase further. Its end is all-encompassing, like the universe, like the Vegas “Sphere.” The concert dome made of 1.2 million light-emitting diodes that surrounds the audience and stage alike. During the day, the simulation globe towers over Las Vegas like a yellow ice ball. He winks. Smiles. Works at all times
This column first appeared in Musikexpress issue 2/2024.