Near the end of that Ke$ha video from last month , Paul Muldoon and the Princeton Tiger kid say that they haven’t even mentioned the title “TiK ToK” yet, and that it’s deeply poetic and stands for time, ticking away. So, OK, can we actually talk about that tick? For a second? Instead of laughing it up over the idea of talking about it? Because there must be things to say about the moment that just passed, when two of the songs that were everywhere were “TiK ToK” and “Telephone,” a complementary pair of digital odes to, or even eulogies for, analog technology. Jack Halberstam observed that most of the phones in the “Telephone” video were landlines: immobile, outdated, restrictive, even analogous to patriarchy insofar as they were to-be-escaped-from. I might go further, and try to direct the observation differently—do we even talk on “telephones” anymore? Is the distance of tele – (always a phantom distance) even there, in the way it was just a few years ago? And if the song and the video had been called “Cell Phone,” would the play on imprisonment have been too obvious? From one point of view, the key metaphorical idea that allows the feminist/liberationist politics of “Telephone” to function at all is one that’s looking ever more old-fashioned itself. It’s the idea of unreachability, of an imperfect phone which can’t always be accessed or access you—which, even if it’s mobile, might actually get no service in the club, making it that much easier for you to ignore the male voice that’s trying to get to your ear. How much longer will that kind of unreachability last, when, to take one example from Tony Scott, the technocapitalism that holds us hostage can now get wireless access in the bowels of the New York City subway?
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Don’t stop / pop plots
