I tend to not like the fast pace of Young-Hae Chang’s hypertexts. The constant flashing of words at such rapid speeds and the black and white block lettering leave me feeling as if I am asking for a seisure to be granted to me. I find these hypertexts leaving me feeling stressed and anxious. Although there is slightly more going on than in “Bust down the Doors!” which only adds more strain to my being, I do tend to prefer All Fall Down over “Bust Down the Doors!”. The music gives it a much more cheery feel and instead of being entirely stressed out about the text the music aids in giving the hypertext a more “game-ish” feel. I want to be able to read as much as possible more as a competition for myself than out of music instilled fear which I found as one of my main motives when studying “Bust Down the Doors!”. Flipping the colors of the text and the background also gave the text a more positive feel and helps in understanding what the text is actually saying better. Upon first viewing it in class I was included in the group that had to watch this top part. It felt almost as if the text was lyrics to the music playing. The text moved with the music and it seemed as if it had the same amount of syllables as notes in the music. The structure of the text and the way it flashes, moves, and disappears at such a rapid rate gives off a sense of chaos, the inability to gain control, at the hands of the elements presented to you, and confusion.
Originally, I thought that the text was lyrics to the music I pictured a little banjo band sitting outside a stoop clapping their hands to the music, with the “Ah, Yah, Yup, Right, uh-huh’s” being sung words of agreement to the main lyrics/singer. Then I got the little banjo band image out of my head and I thought that the black background with white text seemed to be a commentary on what the phrase proceeding it in white background and black text was saying. The text starts out playful but as it became a little less light-hearted and instead kind of crazy and weird, the image of a crazy person saying these things popped into my head. The phrases were all so nonsensical yet still correlated in some strange way. You always hear about how crazy people sometimes have extraordinary mental capacities and can process some things in ways that no other human can and that is kind of the feeling I got from what I imagined the speaker of the text to be. I finally came to the conclusion after sifting through all of my initial guesses that it seems as if it is one speaker blaming himself on mistakes he himself has made, and humanity as a whole has made.
Rather quickly though the text begins to take on a different tone. It gets kind of mean and vulgar. It says something positive or cute, reminiscent of playfulness or cute eye catching phrases like “beautiful town”, but then follows it with things such as “too damn late”. The text mentions some girl looking drunk and good in red lipstick, her looking good even as she falls down drunk and how “you” never even spoke to her, “you” fool.
It gets faster and faster to the point where really it becomes nearly impossible for me to read the black background white text, and instead only the white background black text. the text continues with negativity and talks about emails falling down, servers falling down.. everything that could possibly fall down is mentioned to do so. Basically, the demise of everything humanity puts its trust in is just falling down. No sunshine, lose your mind, flame out… these are few of the phrases that make me think of nothing but the end of hope and complete loss of faith.
So then I went back and read the bottom part of the page as it scrolled at a soft and steady pace across the bottom of the scene. The text is much more poetic and thoughtful and you can see the speaker is distraught and deeply emotional over the loss or being unable to obtain this women. He writes about her thoughtfully and carefully about the way he longs for her and the things he notices about her. But he also writes about himself as well, “have you ever felt if you be youself just like they tell you and it isn’t good enough”. This section seems to be the logical stable side of the speaker that gives some explanation to what it was that ticked him and sent him in the crazy uncencored downward spiral we see in the text above.