Introduction

Welcome to the Church of the Sonic Death Monkey! My name is Trevor Byrne-Smith and this is my little Post-Modern Pleasure Palace, so to speak. That is if you believe in the existence of post-modernism and your pleasure is intellectual musings about popular culture.

Perhaps I got us off on the wrong foot. I'm a graduate student at Emerson College working on a degree in Visual and Media Arts. I begin my thesis soon and then hope to go for a PhD in Media Studies when I finish my Masters. In an attempt to warm up my intellectual muscles, if you will, I started this blog to post some of my more academic writings about media studies. Here you'll find me waxing intellectual about television, film, music, new media, and anything else media related that might spring into my head. I don't claim to be a professional or a professor or even necessarily an expert. If you're looking for blogs from actual professionals in the field, there's a good selection of them in my Blog Roll. All I claim to be is a student, a thinker, and a fan.

Much like the characters in the movie that I stole the title of this blog from (High Fidelity), I don't believe that media and popular culture are mere throw away elements of our society. Every dry piece of classic literature your high school english teachers made you read was, at one point in history, written off as a base and vulgar element of modern society. Did you know that the novel, as an art form, was originally criticized for being nothing more than frivolous entertainment? Now we force teenagers to write papers about them because we believe they're culturally relevant. Oh, how times have changed. How much easier it is to see value in the past than in the present.

Popular culture is a part of who we are and how we live our lives, whether we like it or not. Some complain that it poisons or cheapens our society. Even if you're a pessimist, though, you can't pretend that popular culture doesn't affect our daily lives. As new technologies make the world smaller and make media more mobile, none of us can escape the grasp of media, short of becoming hermits living in the woods. Rather than rejecting popular culture altogether, why don't we study it, recognize its successes and failures, and start a dialogue about it? We can't eliminate television, radio, film or the internet from our lives, so why not open up discussions on how we can improve these things?

To quote from my favorite short lived television show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:

"I'm writing about it because what's happened here is important. I think what's happening here is important; I think popular culture in general...[is] important."

So sit back, relax, find a seat on the couch somewhere between Roger Rabbit and Nosferatu, and enjoy The Church of the Sonic Death Monkey.