|
pop culture kills This morning at work, I had an odd conversation with a fellow employee that was triggered by said person viewing a music CD that I had brought with me to work. As he was scanning the back of the disc reading the track names, he made the following comment: Employee: I'm surprised that your friend can get away with using the backwards letter N on his album. Isn't that copyrighted by Nine Inch Nails? Me: Sigh. I doubt that the Russians have a copyright on the Cyrillic alphabet. My answer seemed to confuse him more than anything else. For me it was obvious what my friend was doing with the backwards letter N in the song title. The song is called Lunik 2 and appears on an album titled Planet Reverb. Besides those two written clues, there is a photo of an astronaut on the back of the disc providing a background to the track names. The space theme used in these examples was obvious to me, but apparently my associate had never heard of Sputnik so the second reference was lost on him. Nor did he seem to understand that in typography a backwards letter N is often used to indicate a Russian feeling to something be it real or not. I found this lack of knowledge to be sad and indicative of how truncated people's memory can be when it comes to recent history. From my perspective the launching of Sputnik far outweighs the historical significance of Nine Inch Nails, but for the person who made the comment, it was completely lost on him. Historical fact and general knowledge had been overshadowed by pop culture. Plus this person is only seven years younger than myself so age should not really play a factor. If I have knowledge of Sputnik why shouldn't he? |