Category: other

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Regurgitator’s Pogogo Show – a review

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The Song Formerly Known As was the first song that made me aware and like (love) Regurgitator. That was back in the late 90s. And my opinion of them has not changed since. They are what we like to call “big kids”. And this latest album – Regurgitator’s Pogogo Show (iTunes) is another example of their playfulness.

Regurgitator collaborated Australia’s national television and radio service, Australian Broadcasting Commission, to produce an album for children (perhaps for the first time in their careers) and one that is relatively children-friendly … for their standards. The iTunes blurb points out without exaggeration their style which traverses punk, pop, electro, rock, hip-hop and funk. Regurgitator often, if not always, do this on a single album (and sometimes in a single song) without missing a beat. The blurb continues with where the inspiration came from (a toned-downed kids show they did of their songs in 2013). Their music is regularly a pastiche of music history genres. And on this album they have not deviated from this successful formula.

The album is a 17-track monster, moving along dizzyingly from Zelda-inspired RPG music, to rap, acid jazz, punk, computer-game funk, guitar-driven punk, light Japanese Cornelius-like indies, crazy-Bob country, garageband, old-school gangsta-rap, Ramones-punk, RPG story, Miami Vice intro-ed hip-hop song, a ukulele song, Shonen Knife punk, Cuban rumba, and ending with a clearly Kraftwerk-inspired electronic track.

The Gurg (as they are known to fans) are as cheeky as ever, toying with sounds that only they can. Having not lost any humour with age they have blended various styles effortlessly to create an album not only will kids enjoy (elements of The Wriggles) but also something for the adults who ultimately fork out the money. While the lyrics are written for kids in mind a couple of tracks will draw more than a giggle from adults. Mr Butt and Farting Is a Part of Life placed towards the end of the album will educate children empathy and reality. A well thought-out album collaboration that not only highlights the quality of Australian music (especially music for children), Australian values, but also just how underrated and misunderstood Regurgitator are. And this can be considered their first foray into the mainstream music consciousness.

This is only an album Regurgitator can make. They have not returned to being children because they had never left. While the fortunes have not been with them it is perhaps time to revisit some of their older works. Recommended is Dirty Pop Fantasy (iTunes). Thoroughly postmodern in the positive sense of the word, they have created an album which introduces to the next generation a breadth and variety of music that no other band could pull off, all the while being entertaining.

All tracks, except for the last track (The Robots), are under three-minutes long as appropriate for a children’s album.

Rating: 4.8 out of 5.

Tracks

  1. Fanfare Intro (0:34)
  2. Pogogo Show Theme (2:24)
  3. Favourite Song (2:05)
  4. I Don’t Wanna Dog (2:21)
  5. Games on My Computer (1:46)
  6. Pillow Fight (0:57)
  7. The Morning Theme (1:01)
  8. Pigeon Riding on a Motorcycle (2:34)
  9. Party Party Party! (1:34)
  10. The Box (2:23)
  11. Ghost Cat (1:55)
  12. Pogogo Show Story Time (2:09)
  13. Mr Butt (1:12)
  14. Farting Is a Part of Life (1:38)
  15. Best Friends Forever (2:15)
  16. Curumbo! (1:06)
  17. The Robots (7:05)

Naive or Direct Realism

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Naive realism holds that its philosophy of perception can be summed up in the following way:

  1. There exists a world of material objects.
  2. Statements about these objects can be known to be true through sense-experience.
  3. These objects exist not only when they are being perceived but also when they are not perceived. The objects of perception are largely, we might want to say, perception-independent.
  4. These objects are also able to retain properties of the types we perceive them as having, even when they are not being perceived. Their properties are perception-independent.
  5. By means of our senses, we perceive the world directly, and pretty much as it is. In the main, our claims to have knowledge of it are justified.

I am satisfied with Statements 1 and 2.

But I have trouble with part of Statement 3 – “The objects of perception are largely, we might want to say, perception-independent”. “largely” seems to suggest that there is something that is perception-dependent.

The concept of object-property in Statement 4 is also problematic. Whether an object has properties or not is unknown.

And Statement 5 also suggests that perception is an unproblematic or non-existent medium. Direct perception must mean without needing sense faculties. A damaged eye or clouded view must necessarily suggest that the medium is not perfect and therefore not direct.

Meta-epistemology

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When I first come online as a being (whatever that may be) is that I am confronted by a reality. I sense the reality but I do not know that I am sensing it. I only see “data” coming in. That data is somehow stored and slowly I begin to make sense (note the metaphor) of it. We call this experience and knowledge. As I build up my knowledge of the reality I begin to understand its limitations and possibilities within it. It is only after some time that I can understand what experience is, and what knowledge is, and that it may or may not a thing. Having these experiences I have to make a decision on how to perceive it and deal with it.

External reality and anti-realism

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In anti-realism, the external reality is hypothetical and not assumed. This sounds like a reformulation of the veil-of-appearance argument. Our knowledge of the external world is one mediated by the sense, and never amounts to direct knowledge. The conclusion is that our perception of the world is secondhand information.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the last mind

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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the latin title of Wittgenstein’s first and only work published within his lifetime.  It translates roughly to A Treatise on Logic and Philosophy.

The stance then is that of logic.

I do not agree that logic is the best place to start. Logic, to me, seems to be an activity of the mind. And the mind is physical object take performs such processes. To me, place to start is ontology and then epistemology.

Someone commented in a previous post that it is ironic that one must use logic to even start to ask ontological and epistemological questions. I agree. And that tells us something about the inescapability of the act of thinking in order to get to the understanding. Logic, in other words, is a physical act. Logic cannot occur without the availability of the body or mind. This extends to knowledge (the epistemological act) as well. Logic and knowledge do not exist without a mind perform these acts. When the last mind extinguishes form this world so too does logic and knowledge. What continues to remain is the physical world, the reality. And logic and knowledge will restart when another mind comes into (for lack of a better word) being.

The ontological and epistemological questions

Warren Tang6 Comments

The question of what ontologically exists is of upmost importance and fundamental in answering any question about what is to be epistemological known. The problem is its circularity, that we can only “guess” at what exists from what is known.

The nature of knowledge, then, must tell us something of the nature of what exists, that is, we can never “know” something else directly. If we were to know something else directly then we would be that thing. Then, we would not be something else. Things are necessarily separate and never known directly.

This also tells us about the nature of knowledge – that a medium is always necessary in order to have knowledge of it. This is true of both self-knowledge (or will) and other-knowledge (or representation) where they both are indirect. The internal (self) medium is no different to the external (other) medium. They only differentiations in degrees of knowledge and levels of activity or process.

#ThereIsNothingSpecialAboutThought

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#ThereIsNothingSpecialAboutThought only thought – being the egotistical thing that it is – thinks itself special.

Wittgenstein’s First Proposition

Warren Tang5 Comments

1. The world is all that is the case.

The definition of case used is

a situation that exists, especially as it affects a particular person or group

The definition of situation used is

a combination of all the things that are happening and all the conditions that exist at a particular time in a particular place

There is an assumption of space and time here as a necessary truth, that is, it is propositionally true. Logic assumes reasoning and pure reasoning. I do not believe there is such a thing as pure reasoning. Reasoning must necessarily be impure since it is limited to the time, place, and to the person (a particular point-of-view).

The reality just is, with or without being observed or reasoned. In pure being there is no thing, space, and time in the sense that none of these have sentience of the other in any kind of complete and coherent system.

The world is a place of suspended judgment. It is only the sentient who do not suspend their judgment. That, in some way, is a curse.

Philosophy is not above and beyond analysis and criticism

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I do like postmodernism. It was the staple of late twentieth-century intellectualism and thought. I don’t particularly think it was saying anything new. Others have noticed what postmodernism was saying. But it said it differently, and in a more appealing less confrontational way.

When postmodernism says nothing is truly sacred, it means everything operates from the standpoint of its difference to all other things. Sometimes Man stands in contrast to animal.  Man with a big ‘M’ may even stand uppercase man. And man often stands against woman. But really there is only these series of differences. Nothing has meaning in itself.

Science, religion, and philosophy are ordinary activities, and not beyond analysis. One can think of the idea of paradigm put forward by Thomas S Kuhn as an example of science. Atheism and agnosticism as examples of religious analysis. And Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a meta-philosophical analysis.

For philosophy to be reflexive is important. Any ideas to truth-claims are dangerous and need to be carefully analysed and understood in order not to fall into complacency. One’s own self-righteousness leads to not only metaphorical blindness but generally ends in conflict. The only shared world there is the physical one. Mental ones rely on it, not the other way around.