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.

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.

On Music

Warren Tang2 Comments

1.
We are surrounded by culture, that is, we are surrounded by people. In various ways we express ourselves, and we recognise these expressions. We express ourselves because we recognise others will recognise our expression. Communication is a vicious or un-vicious circle, depending on who you ask. And music is but one of the many ways of expressing ourselves as human beings.

2.
I wasn’t born in the eighth-century. I wasn’t even born in the 19th century. My time is the late-twentieth-century. I heard disco. I heard new wave. I heard pop. I listened to post-punk. I clubbed. I read Smash Hits and Face. I even read iD and watched a bit of Top of the Pops. I didn’t have complete control of my musical environment. I took in what was there. This was what was there.

Musical “taste” is different for everyone. No two people have the exact same music experience. Like everything else, we must necessarily see things differently. My favourite song can only come from what I have heard. We can try to have as wide a music experience as possible but we can never have the entire music experience. It isn’t even worth trying, unless you do so as a professional. I cannot imagine the knowledge of someone like Ryuichi Sakamoto or Mozart. My knowledge of music is limited to pleasure.

3.
As I said, my Top 10 songs can only come from what I have heard, what I know. And sometimes it is not worth expanding your knowledge.

Think of your musical knowledge as objects filling a room. At some point not much more can fit into it. We loathe to throw these things out. They “do the job”. They bring joy and sometimes sadness. Anger even. They belong to the history of me, the owner of this room.

Sometimes someone asks you to listen to this or that. But I already have the love songs to remind me of long past romances and present loves (plural because love is not for one but many: wife, child, parents). The newly introduced song, without sounding cold, means nothing to me. It reminds me of no one (except for the introducer) and no time except (for the present). But that song must mean everything to that introducer. And that song is all that matters. That is his or her song.

My room is filled. That person’s room may not be. He or she may be only starting to fill theirs. And yet others like you may also have filled rooms like yours. Finding people with similar rooms is a near impossible and almost futile task.

4.
Sometimes I would like to take out a particular song and play it. But why I chose that song to play is never clear. But once it starts it would bring back memories of the past, of people, places, and time. The associations are specific to me. It is immediately clear in the sense that I enjoy those memories, but would require much explanation to all others who do not have privileged access. That is the meaning of being me, and the meaning of others.

5.
Temptation by New Order.

Forty years have passed. But the days I would listen to this song are vivid to me, at least the general atmosphere, light, feelings. Joy. Discovery. Freedom. It is by no means a great song, but it reminds of all those things mentioned and more. It reminds of my friend to whom I had played it and it please me that he liked it too. That feeling is all that matters and mattered. And as I listen to it now as I write this, those same feelings return.

I will stress again this point – it doesn’t matter who has heard or likes the song, only what it means to you. The link to the past is so important that everything else matters not. Perhaps if you take that link away the song will no longer have that power over me.

In some ways it would be a mental assault. Reality would be changed in a way which would hurt greater than perhaps physical pain. This point I cannot confirm but only imagine to be so. Even imagining this now is painful and it has not even happened. Such is the intensity of music, and of experience in general.