Schneider TM "Pac-Man/Shopping Cart"

(I'm currently a bit swamped. Here are a couple of oldies, the first not so old.)

"A jaundiced figure floats across the screen. He is constantly searching for things to eat. We are looking at a neo-Marxist parable of late capitalism. He is the pure consumer. With his obsessively gaping maw, he clearly wants only one thing: to feel whole, at peace with himself. He perhaps surmises that if he eats enough--in other words, buys enough industrially-produced goods--he will attain this state of perfect selfhood, perfect roundness. But it can never happen. He is doomed forever to metaphysical emptiness. It is a tragic fable in primary colours."*

In the years immediately following the success of the Atari video game that gives this song its title, much cultural critique, academic and popular, tongue-in-cheek (above) and serious, was devoted to a reading of Pac-Man (and the godlike, omniscient players of same) as the embodiment of American capitalism---the Marxist ideal that mindlessly consumed everything in sight, only to be rewarded for clearing a level with a new, identical one. On "Pac-Man/Shopping Cart" (mp3), Schneider TM mastermind Dirk Dresselhaus has much sympathy for the poor little guy, more than twenty years after he's been long replaced as cultural icon/embodiment of consumerism. Combining the soft thuds of distant, long-forgotten 8-bit worlds with delicately sad strings and plucked acoustic guitar he sings of the former icon, the victim of "too many dimensions, too many to mention" is now relegated to fulfilliing his insatiable desires by putting around Wal-Mart. Dresselhaus sings, "He was real fucked up, but he looked just the same, verging on the insane". It serves as both bizarrely sad lament and awkwardly profound metaphor for the disposability of entertainment.

Schneider TM's first record since 2002, Skolda Mluvit, is out on City Slang.

* From Steven Poole's 2000 book Trigger Happy: The Secret Life of Video Games.