{"id":348,"date":"2017-10-19T16:05:50","date_gmt":"2017-10-19T20:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/?p=348"},"modified":"2019-02-11T14:37:29","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T19:37:29","slug":"thematic-thursday-the-social-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/2017\/10\/19\/thematic-thursday-the-social-network\/","title":{"rendered":"Thematic Thursday: The Social Network"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome back to Thematic Thursdays, where I share a good soundtrack for writing and\/or working. Today we have a guest post by Marc Fowler<\/a>, a good friend of mine and a fellow designer in Toronto. When he’s not building responsive web experiences he can be found either making too much guacamole or passing you on the left in the bike lane.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>When Victoria invited me to guest post, I felt spoiled for choice. I listen to a wide variety of music while I\u2019m working, but I always come back to my #1 working soundtrack: The Social Network<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The 2010 film, directed by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, tends to split people. If you like Sorkin\u2019s writing, you might find it a moody exploration of the dirty deeds that people do to claw their way to the top–an interesting juxtaposition of making real life enemies while inviting people to be digital friends. If you\u00a0don\u2019t have a taste for it, it\u2019s two hours of shitty rich dudes being smarmy two-faced assholes to each\u00a0other. Your mileage may vary.<\/p>\n

The music though! While Reznor and Ross have partnered on a number of projects, both soundtrack and\u00a0otherwise, The Social Network<\/em> seems to have a drum beat that many other of these collaborations don\u2019t\u00a0feature as strongly. Reznor and Ross build a forward momentum that drags me through the day with it. It is music that makes Jesse Eisenberg mumbling about Perl scripts and Apache config files seem interesting, so you know this stuff is industrial grade.<\/p>\n

Specifically, I listen to the appropriately titled In Motion so much that Spotify may very well be concerned\u00a0about me. A methodical synthetic drum beats on behind low-fi vaguely video game bleeps. It\u2019s like\u00a0someone whispering \u201cYou\u2019ve leveled up! Excellent combo!\u201d in your ear all day.<\/p>\n

The soundtrack is full of little surprises. Would you expect Reznor to do a damn good digital remix of\u00a0Edvard Grieg\u2019s classical composition and Saturday morning cartoon staple \u201cIn the Hall of the Mountain\u00a0King\u201d? Because it\u2019s track 12. You\u2019ll hear a few familiar tracks from some of Reznor\u2019s previous work,\u00a0Ghosts I-IV. Classical piano scattered among the low-fi digital pings. Moody and foreboding notes that\u00a0stretch into white noise to block out the rest of the office.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re familiar with Reznor\u2019s work from 2005\u2019s With Teeth and onwards, none of this will be much of a\u00a0surprise to you. While it still has the moody sad notes of his earlier stuff, this is leaner, more calculating\u00a0album. It exists to serve in film the same purpose it will serve you in real life: Take boring, methodical\u00a0computer work and put it in sharp, interesting focus. So open up your most mundane of tasks, throw on your largest headphones, crank it up, and put the hammer down: It\u2019s time to get shit done.<\/p>\n

\n

Trent Reznor’s 2010 soundtrack to The Social Network, via\u00a0YouTube<\/a> or\u00a0Spotify<\/a><\/p>\n

A Line Rider video<\/a> set to the classical version of Hall of the Mountain King. It has nothing to do with The Social Network<\/em>, I just think the video is amazing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guest post by Marc Fowler: When Victoria invited me to guest post, I felt spoiled for choice. I listen to a wide variety of music while I\u2019m working, but I always come back to my #1 working soundtrack: The Social Network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6,10],"tags":[27,23,24,15,12,26],"class_list":["post-348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-guests","category-thematic-thursday","tag-bass","tag-complex","tag-electronica","tag-focus","tag-soundtrack","tag-tension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=348"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":878,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348\/revisions\/878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victoriafeistner.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}