Guest Post: Uptown Funk, The New Years Song that Sunk Strike at Annabel’s

 

It’s New Year’s Eve and Ink Black Heart readers naturally think of Strike’s meeting Madeline at Annabel’s. The music that was playing as he makes perhaps the biggest mistake of his romantic life? Ronson’s ‘Uptown Funk.’ Chris Calderon shares his thoughts below about the song and why he thinks it is a meaningful choice for this scene.

Happy New Year!

In honor of the turning of the New Year, I thought it a fun idea to share the song that was playing at the club in Ink Black Heart, where Strike was foolish enough to let his guard down around Cupid, the god of eros, and thus fell into one of Charlotte’s snares.  I do it for two reasons.  The first is because the song itself acts as a subtle marker to the online nature of IBH.  Much like the adventures of Hearty and Friends, the song Uptown Funk has gained the same sort of internet notoriety and fame due to the influence of fans exerting their will on the work of another artist, or in this case, a whole slew of past artists.

What’s happened is a mere song has been spliced and edited in such a way that allowed the single to become first an overnight sensation, and then, finally, a meme, which is apparently the current format for immortality in the World Wide Web based 21st century.  It isn’t until you go back and read the book again that you realize it is probably the author sending an early signal to her readers about the nature of the upcoming mystery, concerned as it is with the kind of fame that comes with creating online based creative projects.  It signals that the writer knows of this song, and is also well versed in the type of artistic communities that would create the sort of mashup style of video art.

It further signals that she’s established a grounding in what might be termed a new kind of media literacy for the sake of the sixth Strike book.  Along the way, it has allowed her to gain an awareness of the kind of digital shared text that power the type of fandoms that exist both on and off the pages of IBH.  It’s the kind of move I didn’t expect, yet probably shouldn’t have been too surprised once I stopped and thought it over.