musicoLOLogy

About a month ago, my brother introduced me to the lolcat phenomenon. People seem to be obsessed with putting captions on pictures of cats and while most of them are throwaway gags, there are a few that resonate. Stephen even got in the game with a brilliant lolcat reconstruction of Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode, inspiring a host of imitators.

As musicology has long been the stepchild left in the garden shed while all the other children are having birthday cake of the academic world, it is fitting that as the fad is beginning to run out of gas musicologists attempt to create musicoLOLogy.

Observe exhibit A, lolcage from Tim Rutherford-Johnson:


Good effort and nice allusion to the opening lines of Cage's famous "Lecture on Nothing," but the blue lettering just doesn't quite work and his Kitty pidgin is a bit off.

Of course, the theorists beat us to the punch with this little lolfege:


It needs larger lettering, but kudos for bringing the 10th century Guidonian hand into the digital lolcat age. Still, all in all, the examples just show that musicology has an uncanny ability to take a new paradigm and poorly imitate it. I mean, will we ever see musicoLOLogy equal this level of sublimity:

Sadly, I think not.