Oh my God, it's full of stars!

Dave Bowman, the lonely astronaut in “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Stanley Kubrick, after removing last HAL 9000's module, finds a monitor, double clicks the only icon he can see... and enters “Yahoo! Music”... (sic!)

This is how to quickly fuck up a great movie, right at the end. Byebye hallucinations, byebye kaleidoscopic sixties, byebye visionaries excerpts on a remote future and the many questions about its meaning.

After having shut down the paranoic HAL, and while he is trying to cool his anger, Dave comes face to face with the Flash animated Rihanna's icon, that smiling and waddling sings:

“When the sun shines, we’ll shine together
Told you I'll be here forever
Said I'll always be a friend
Took an oath I'ma stick it out till the end”

Dave knits his brows...

“Now that it's raining more than ever
Know that we'll still have each other
You can stand under my umbrella
You can stand under my umbrella”

Dave knits his brows...

”(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh)
Under my umbrella
(Ella ella eh eh eh eh eh eh)”***

Now, after the last “eh eh eh…” sequence - the one that, slowing down, gets the rhythm of the dock workers of my town at the beginning of the night shift, but that corresponds, in the same time, to a beautiful close up, during the videoclip, of our starlet “b-side” -  Dave's conscience is facing a crossroad that leaves no escape. What shall he do?

1) He misunderstands the situation, mixing up Rihanna for a sexy version of the transvestite HAL, then he lifts up the monitor, throws it outside the spaceship, observes HAL turned off and stands still there, astonished, until Stanley Kubrick, Hari Seldon in person and a Obi-Wan Kenobi ante-litteram enters that room and tells him, quietly, that everything is under control and that he has to keep calm.

2) He tells himself that he has already had too many problems during the film, so he gives a chance to his frozen willy. He wants to relax. He watches Rihanna, opens his pants fly and… makes the first handjob of the space history...

After having ruined a masterpiece introducing the option Rihanna (the consequences are inevitable as the avalanches in the mountains), let's leave Dave to his dilemma. The end, at this point, should not interest anyone ...
The sad aspect - origin of my parody - is that the Internet is becoming very close to what, over the years, the cable TV has become. If we choose, instead of Yahoo Music, some other big portal, things do not change very much. If we enter MySpace, looking for new musical talents, we are crowded round by thousands of different "bird calls". Colored and sparkling. Aggressive and unequivocal.
It is really full of "stars", up there, between the constellations of the charts.
The traditional media move to the Internet, creating communities and exploiting them in order to sell their products.
There's nothing wrong with selling something, everyone can sell what he wants. And commerce on the web is essential, as well as advertising.

Evil begins when someone uses people's dreams to sell the opposite of those dreams. The deeply wrong thing is to use the musicians' dreams not to sell their music, but the "plasticized" music of the majors, to mix contents "hand made" by thousands of people and contents designed by marketing offices,  to turn music into minced meat and make a great hamburger where shit is the basic ingredient.

Well... I get often pissed off, so maybe I’d better stop here... Anyway, this question, in my opinion, is a sad affair. Commercial music (we’d better say “too” commercial) removes poetry from music itself, and the big media that publish and sell this music (often they produce it too), well, they spotlight only what they care. The others - new talents and new ideas - are lost in the "anthill community".
So, we are likely to come to "my" Dave’s end... and become part of a stupid parody, that mocks us in the end. We risk losing the way for the beautiful things, the ones which are difficult to achieve and not common, but also demanding and "cool". We risk losing those ideas that make our imagination grow and give us the opportunity to think.
In other words - brutally speaking - we risk losing the "real end" of the story.

I think we really need something different.

Carlo Trevisan

PS. Maximum respect for “Umbrella”, one of the most beautiful commercial songs of this period… Perhaps!
 
 ***  From “Umbrella”, written by The-Dream, performed by Rhianna, published by Defjam.

2001: A Space Odyssey - Official Website