Katie Hines asked us a couple weeks ago if she could use one of our songs for a video for her Digital Ethnography course with Dr. Wesch.  If I could take one class from KSU now it would be this course.  Its all about how things like youtube, facebook, and the internet in general are affecting culture and its probably the most interesting anthropology class out there. I’ve seen several different presentations by Dr. Wesch and they’ve always been awesome.  Katie did a great job with it and made me like the song that much more!  Make sure and leave her a comment here or at her youtube page.

EDIT: Katie sent us an e-mail with a little blurb about her inspiration for the song.  Read about it after the break…

Dr. Wesch’s Digital Ethnography class is the kind of thing you can’t get away from. The ideas we threw around in discussing the concept Anonymity this semester seemed to apply to everything: my other classes, my relationships, random car commercials… life had become research. Researching pop culture does well to blur the line between work and play.

In the arena of “play”, Tim and Patrick had been faithfully posting their songs every Monday, and I couldn’t get “In The Way” out of my head. In my part of the project, I kept noticing how much people needed to be known and understood. That seems pretty basic, but it still fascinated me that the knowing and understanding was sought from unknown people. In the song, that last line, “You see me” repeated as it was came to me as a triumphant declaration that being known was possible. I wanted that resolution in my project, and so built my script around the song.

Then we read a speech by David Foster Wallace in my Philosophy class. He says, “My natural default setting is the certainty that situations like [grocery shopping after a long day's work] are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.”

The rest of the song clicked. It is about breaking the myth that we are so disconnected from one another. And I can’t shake the feeling that the way Tim and Patrick’s song fit so perfectly with a semester’s worth of my research is a little bit beyond us.

-Katie

Each song so far has been…  different, which has made this process really fun.  This song is no exception.

A couple weeks ago Tim was working on a different song and recorded all of the random percussion (whisk, wooden spoons, acoustic guitar drum thing) for it.  That song was scratched because it wasn’t taking shape very well, but Patrick had been working on a separate song independently, which happened to have the same tempo as the first.  So we pieced them both together and videoed the process. Enjoy!
-Tim and Patrick

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“In the Way”

lyrics by Patrick Largen

You are in the way, in the way
I don’t want to be a bother
Don’t get bent out of shape

You see me