The Dancing Song (song that dances)

I liked the Zarathustra readings more, perhaps, than I would have otherwise were it not for our discussion last week on the possible futility of trying to sciencify music. To whit, one needs must write a close reading of such as poetry. Which, of course, produces it's own automatic disjunction against "serious" scholarly discourse, for which there are norms. Serious, weighty, norms. Nietzsche is not unaware of this, "God's advocate am I before the devil: but the devil is the spirit of gravity." (219)

The sense of play as anodyne to the dragging weight of seriousness, as the way to pierce the veil that such a mindset casts, was hard for me to think of in song. But then I decided just to have fun with it and my mind alighted on Smooth Criminal. Not for any obvious, clearly delineatable reason, but because it seems to me that the video takes delight in ignoring the content of the song it accompanies. Lyrics, setting, action, none agree with one another. Everything is an excuse, or perhaps a reason, to just dance.