[WikiEN-l] listcruft

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On 7/15/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:41:22 +0300, "Jussi-Ville Heiskanen"
> <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Not so much a case in point, but a touchstone. Do *you* think we are
> >better or worse than Britannica for having "List of songs about
> >masturbation". Stand up and be counted...
>
>
> No, a case in point.  There is no encyclopaedic topic "songs about
> masturbation" because there is nothing about masturbation which has
> any logical connection with songs, and vice-versa (although I
> suppose one could stretch a point and say that, for example, Whitney
> Houston's "I will always love you" gives more pleasure to the
> performer than anybody watching).  The connection is an arbitrary
> one, and pretty much every entry in the list was also unsupported by
> references, because in the end what constitutes being *about*
> something, rather than simply mentioning it in the lyrics somewhere?
> I am all for setting up a sister project, triviapedia or whatever,
> for collecting such examples of word association gone mad, but
> there's no question in my mind that a neutral, verifiable
> encyclopaedia is not the place for them.



Your general  point is better than the example you have chosen to
illustrate it. Perhaps the list form is not the most encyclopaedic
way to approach masturbatory imagery in music lyrics, but the
subject itself is well studied, and inherently encyclopaedic in the
wide (non-Britannica) sense.

Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself" is the subject of not one but quite
a few academic papers, reflecting on it as the iconic watershed
on the evolving attitudes toward sexuality of Pop Music particularly.

It would also be almost as hard to dismiss the masturbation theme
in Blues Music as a whole, as it would be to dismiss the metaphor
of inebriation and wine in Islamic poetry.

--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]