The reaction to the infamous 'Natalia's Song' controversy shocked me.
It was characterised by a vehement and sometimes violent rejection of
Zomby as a musician and, ironically enough, Zomby as an auteur. Forums
and YouTube (which are, if trivial, probably a fairly accurate representation of popular
opinion at large) were filled with comments such as the simple "Zomby
is a thief" to "You are now allowed to stick your foot in your mouth
and hate this man like everyone should. People should be boycotting
his music/shows, this is unacceptable and disgusting." FACT magazine,
all holiest of holy grails, even posted an article facetiously
entitled 'Did Zomby even write Natalia's Song?' My answer: who cares?
This all came about more than 50 years after Barthes' 'Death of the Author' was widely accepted, institutionalised and since radically built upon and
expanded by other theoriticians. In fact, even Zomby made a name for
himself by keeping anonymous (see what I did there?) Surely fans of
the producer would have noticed this and wondered why. And it's not
even as if being anonymous is a hot new thing like it was back in Richard James' day! What I really wanted to say is: don't let this debacle tamper with your fandom of Zomby's music, the controversy is both irrelevant and counterproductive.
No comments:
Post a Comment