What is good about Pop Music?

blissblogger

Well-known member
pop

henrymiller said:
opting out of consumer culture/opting for more you-friendly consumer choices (ie less market-oriented music) are fairly low-level political choices aren't they? i don't think anyone can exactly take the high ground either way based on their choices of music.

yeah i agree, in some ways it's a battle, or to put it less melodramatically, a disagreement between modes-of-consumption and their attached sensibilities

i suppose what's irritating about pop-ism, which is not so much a straw man as such as an extrapolation of certain traits and tendencies towards their ultimate destination, is that side of it which leans towards the celebration of the fake over the real ( that whole line of argument that "fake grime/dancehall/etc" = superior because more poppy than the genuine article; selling out leads to more enjoyable music etc)


and also celebration of non-quest -- the non-questing consumer, and the non-questing producer

wanting it all on a plate made out as a kind of virtue

and the celebration of instantness as ALWAYS superior to more difficult or slower-yielding pleasures

consumer laziness is fine (there's all kinds of music i have a lazy attitude towards, i'm sure if i ever venture to grapple with Extreme Metal, the Wire's new hot zone of subcultural capitalization -- and hey i've still got my subpop prerelease cassette of Earth's first lp, i thought it was 'ambient grunge' though! -- it'll be in a totally dilettante, indolent manner)

when it's turned into a sort of proudly lazy ethos, a virtue, that's when it becomes more irritating

but as someone said upthread, there's a strong element in which these disputes are totally irrelevant to the vast majority of pop punters

mind you, i think the idea of the maundering-along 2 cds a year doesn't give a fig for genre consumer is also possibly a construct -- really there's a myriad of ways of engaging/semi-engaging/being dis-engaged from pop

when i think of people i know who aren't part of the blogging world and how they relate to pop there's a whole span of types, many so singular you could barely call them 'types' at all

i know someone who barely reads the pop media anymore but who's favorite band is the Libertines even though she's pushing forty but six years ago was a fanatical junglist

i know someone who NEVER reads pop media and is totally outside the blogging universe but who somehow mysteriously keeps up ... not w/ ariel pink and kononon no. 1, say... but, well, a few years ago i rang her up and she said "me and Tabs (her four year old), we're into Fiddy and Sean Paul.." this is someone who's quite posh and a 37 year old single mum but who's somehow kept up with street music . i think because she's into dancing and mixes with people a fair bit younger than herself

"normal", "civilian" types will often have the most peculiar record collections, real haphazard accretions of stuff

and the trajectories they follow often are exceedingly erratic (and interesting therefore) c.f. the more selfconscious and "questing" ones we virtusosos-of-consumption (i hope the irony is audible there) pursue
 

Backjob

Well-known member
Completely agree about 'normal' people's bizarro record collections - there's probably a really strong case to be made that the more into music you get, the more boring and stereotyped your record collection becomes as it either fits into a neat genre specialist slot, or broadens out to cover all bases...

But I was thinking about the whole pop consumer issue last night and another thought occurred to me - there's actually a real freedom from consumer culture in choosing to seek your meaning in pop. So many things in life have been imbued via marketing with a supposed meaning about your identity - we're supposed to express ourselves through our choice of shoes, phones, cars, watches and of course music.

And picking certain types of genre music does make a strong statement about identity. Whereas liking pop makes none at all, because it's the default option. I mean anywhere outside London, saying you're into 'grime' and then having to go into a 5 minute explanation of what that means, signifies "hipster wanker" very strongly; as opposed to saying "well, I really like the new Gwen Stefani album" which is much more likely to be a point of contact with other people.

Having said that, maybe part of the reason there's a popist backlash just now is precisely because saying you are "into pop", on the internet at least, DOES now have strong identity connotations....
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
henrymiller said:
opting out of consumer culture/opting for more you-friendly consumer choices (ie less market-oriented music) are fairly low-level political choices aren't they?

yes -- it's a very low-level political choice

nor is there anything artistic about consuming another person's work (unless you're a dj)

it's more like post-Xian religious devotion

and so here record collecting becomes a "quest" (SR's apt term upthread) to bring the spirits and deities into one's own private shrine, i.e., cabinet full of records

or maybe not

i'm merely trying to make sense of my own position/disposition

Backjob said:
And picking certain types of genre music does make a strong statement about identity.

yes -- this is very true even though it's a low-level political choice and not at all artistic

i'd say that my identity is closely bound up with the books on my shelves and the records in my cabinet, i.e., these are the things that i choose to "collect" around myself, they define my personal space ----- and they are also ways for me to connect with people other than through the medium of money & services

now some people might say that to think of one's identity in these terms is "inauthentic" or sadly consumerist, that identity is determined not by consumerist choices but by one's actions, actions in the sphere of politics, actions in the sphere of the arts, actions in the sphere of love

action = doing something with and alongside others or in front of others, such that your character & identity is made manifest to them -- and it is the others who will write your obituary & have the final say on who you are

and writing books & producing records are modes of action and not merely instances of art, b/c by doing so you put yourself out before others, it's how you reveal yourself to the world ------ whereas there is no such revelation of the self to others in collecting records, this is merely consumerist retreat into the private domestic space

and so the argument runs

and i can come up with no good argument to set against this argument, only an empty shrug and "sorry, but i am the way that i am"

Backjob said:
I mean anywhere outside London, saying you're into 'grime' and then having to go into a 5 minute explanation of what that means, signifies "hipster wanker" very strongly

yes and no -- there is at least that connotation

if you live in america but are not into hip hop or reggaeton, and you then turn around and seek out grime, it's going to be hard to justify

now i'm not into (nyc) hip hop or reggaeton, but i like some crunk and some grime -- so i need to work on a justification!
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
dominic said:
and so here record collecting becomes a "quest" (SR's apt term upthread) to bring the spirits and deities into one's own private shrine, i.e., cabinet full of records

kinda corresponds w/ hegel's notion of the fetishized object as most primitive stage of religion (and so we post-Xians have as a matter of course moved in this direction)

the object has magical properties

in the grooves of the record the spirits move

and in playing the records, we hear and feel the spirits, or we're gripped by voodoo (and if not "spirits" or "voodoo powers," then however you want to refer to it)

and this perhaps also explains our dislike of cds and especially mp3s, b/c they lack the aura of the object

OR perhaps it's more like Hinduism or other religions of India, i.e., the notion of the cabinet of records as shrine for the household god or gods

(I realize that I'm straining for an analogy, a familiar explanation -- so please don't get the idea that I'm the sort of person who keeps his records in pristine condition! or that i'm some kind of boorish vinyl snob -- indeed i have a lot of music on cd! -- again, i'm basically grasping at straws for why this "low-level political choice" is for me so important)
 
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Woebot

Well-known member
henrymiller said:
sympathise with blissblogger's points but at the same time opting out of consumer culture/opting for more you-friendly consumer choices (ie less market-oriented music) are fairly low-level political choices aren't they?

Arguably not when position 1 means never actually buying any music, just downloading it. I presumably ought to get a grander drum to beat, like er, I dunno (empty skull echoes). Better bone up on my data!

henrymiller said:
i don't think anyone can exactly take the high ground either way based on their choices of music.

This must be the default Pop reaction, to retort along the lines of "At the end of the day it doesn't matter" or "You're ruining my fun you prig" I suppose that's a fair enough reaction, "Anti-Pop" does seem an incredibly petty thing for one to take a microposition on, just looking for meaning in my wretched, shallow, music-obsessed existence I guess ;)
 

henrymiller

Well-known member
some people like pop music more than the subcultural stuff it's biting because the very fact that something that a few months ago was a local or underground thing is now on popworld is jarring, exciting, and sometimes produces something startling. i don't know what woebot thinks of schaffel or richard x, but wasn't 'some girls' kind of an event in a way that another kompakt 12" is not? likewise, i'm predicting a new 'grime direction' for blazin squad (which, granted, is much more likely to be shit than 'some girls', which owned the summer), which, even if it *is* shit, will also be a kind of rich and stange thing to live through. like seeing dizzee rascal on TMF (free-to-view crapola digital music channel). it's a kind of dissonance.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
I've actually been thinking about this kind of thing a great deal recently too... prompted by comparing the early with the late Scritti...

I mean, I would say that I am 'aesthetically' but not ideologically a Popist... in that, I like and privilege Pop, by almost any defintion (check my end of the year round-up!). (It's rock and avant-tedium I have aversions to... rock will ALWAYS sound tired and old to me, indie is the worst music ever to exist on the planet, and who needs all that Wire-beloved noodling?)

But it is popists' account and legitimation of their consumption that I reject, not so much what they consume. The depressing notion that 'if someone likes it, it must be good', the idea that there can be no other criteria other than pleasure, and that, fundamentally, Pop is ABOUT pleasure: this is what I find questionable.

Was thinking about this in relation to Cupid and Psyche 85, which must be one of the most accomplished Pop LPs ever - don't try it kids, it's like audio crack. (1985, as I recall, was just prior to the ridiculous NME positing of guitar crap as 'perfect Pop'.) In many ways, C and P 85 was the culmination of New Pop and the legitimation of Popism: the triumphant occupation of the centre ground by the (formerly) marginal.

What's always puzzled me about C and P is, where are the supposed 'deconstructive' elements... Isn't this 'just' pop music? I mean, yeh, as Simon says, it's all about surfaces etc, there is no soul - but (given that the whole soul thing is a superstition) it's not as if there is LESS soul in Aretha Franklin.

Point is, even though few albums can deliver as much pleasure as C and P, I would say that it lacks something that was definitely there in the early stuff... but it's not that the early stuff was straightforwardly avant-garde either: it wasn't just marginal, it delivered enjoyment (jouissance) NOT pleasure....

Pleasure is, literally, the repetition of previous satisfactions. But I think that it is only for Popists that Pop has to be like that.. Pop can still be modernist, challenging, uneasy, why not?
 

Tim F

Well-known member
I started to write a long post tackling some of what i consider to be the more awesomely off-kilter sentiments expressed in this thread, but I'm not really sure where to start. The big stuff first I guess:

"have to fundamentally disagree here. the pop ethos has strangled just about ALL critical writing on music. i'd even argue that The Wire's position (that bastion) has been defined rather timorously by its near total encroachment. "ooh don't mind us, we'll just plough our own little furrow, dig our little tunnel deep under the mountain" rather than flicking two fingers to the by now practically unassailable edifice of smug consensus."

Matt please elaborate because I just don't know what on earth you're talking about (except the bit about The Wire ploughing their furrow). Do you really think that critical writing on music has been "strangled"? I dunno, i can't help but take this argument slightly personally, not because i think at all that it's aimed at me in the slightest but because it indicts me anyway. As a writer, and as a reader. Here I thought I'd read and engaged in an innumerable number of interesting, insightful debates on music in various forms (in magazines, on blogs, on message boards, in pubs and bars) where apparently it was all just smug neanderthal bleating of "this is catchy and in the charts --> IT IS GREAT! That is not --> IT SUCKS!"

Maybe I can't be objective in this discussion because I do think of myself as a popist, but then I've never held the strawman position being attributed to popists, and to my knowledge none of the other self-identifying popists I associate with do either.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"Maybe I can't be objective in this discussion because I do think of myself as a popist, but then I've never held the strawman position being attributed to popists, and to my knowledge none of the other self-identifying popists I associate with do either."

Or have I/we been doing this after all the whole time? If all attempts to think about pop music ultimately boil down to that then please liberate me from my ignorance now...
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Tim, are you really any more of a Popist than me, really?

Does liking and privileging Pop music and being actively hostile to rockism make you a Popist? If so, count me in...

I took it that Matt meant that it killed all critical discourse about pop in mass media*, but surely we must celebrate that. Fanzines and the old music press were massively important, but what is happening now on the web is quite unprecedented: in terms of the interaction between serious intellectual work and popular culture, possibilities of immediate and global circulation and distribution etc etc. Let's stop looking in the rearview mirror.


*There's of course a proliferation of REVIEWING in mass media; you can't pick up a broadsheet without some witless pontificating about pop (or rather rock, most such journos having rockist defaults).

In any case, I would question the idea that we are in a time when Pop values reign... we are in a time of Celebreality.... in other words, of anti-sublimation, a double, contradictory desire to both have your stars as idealized objects AND see them with cold sores on their lips...
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk on his blog said:
The Lad magazine addresses this 'authentic id' with the leering superegoic injunction to enjoy. 'Go on, admit it, you don't want to be bothered to cook, all you want is a fishfinger sandwich... Go on, admit it, you don't want to be bothered to talk to a woman, have a wank instead...' The fact that this reduction is possible means that Lads implicitly accept the Lacanian notion that phallic jouissance involves masturbation with a 'real' partner. It also indicates that Laddishness is more defined by a propensity towards depressive indolence than it is by any lasciviousness. What Laddism attempts is a short-circuiting of desire (yes, I know that the 'inhuman partner' of desire cannot be attained, just give me pictures of girls next door instead).

i have a bad habit of dividing things into arbitrary classes, but let me do so again on the basis of my understanding of k-punk's piece on scritti politti -- and i'll try to keep it brief

(1a) the "mike skinner" lad, i.e., the lad who reads lad magazines and feels no guilt -- his pleasures are cheap

(1b) the lad whose "quest" for records is in many respects (1bi) fantasy/idealization of the past, e.g., the rave phenomenon, or (1bii) fantasy/idealization of that which he cannot join, e.g., the grime massive -- and who suffers guilt symptoms precisely b/c of his questing disposition, i.e., knows that his quest is a complicated distraction, disguised indolence -- and so he has no enjoyment

(2) the adult who is fully accommodated to "reality," has a conventional job, kids, marriage, not much time for what he calls frivolous things

(3) the heroic sublimators, who create new modes of enjoyment -- the artists & musicians doing the actual work, and perhaps certain critics, sympathizers and tastemakers

k-punk said:
Pleasure is, literally, the repetition of previous satisfactions. But I think that it is only for Popists that Pop has to be like that.. Pop can still be modernist, challenging, uneasy, why not?

if the matter is put this way, then the figure (1bi) whose quest is concerned with musics and scenes belonging to the past is more akin to the figure (1a) indolent popist than the figure (ibii) whose quest is oriented more toward the new & innovative & strange & avant ------ w/ the proviso that figure (1bi) shares with the figure (3) sublimating popist an appreciation of periods of peak enjoyment, i.e., he knows that it is the peaks that matter
 
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Tim F

Well-known member
'Tim, are you really any more of a Popist than me, really?

Does liking and privileging Pop music and being actively hostile to rockism make you a Popist? If so, count me in..."

Well, as Simon and Matt seem to be arguing that a return to guarded-rockism is necessary in order to defeat the evils of Popism, I suspect that a combination of liking and writing/thinking about pop music and being anti-rockist makes one pretty popist for the purposes of the debate.

I tend to define popism as privileging the experience of music's <i>effects</i> rather than (as per rockism) the search for correct signification (auteurism, authenticity etc). Simon seems to argue that popists enforce a state of critical privation (eg. "is this catchy?" being the only correct critical question to ask of a crunk song). I agree that popism encourages a suspension of the usual application of critical concepts, but it is not a permanent stricture so much as a strategic delay. I don't believe that any critical concept (let alone ones as intrinsically dubious as auterism) is watertight enough to be enforced a priori; they're valuable insofar as they can be applied when attempting to explain the effect of a particular piece of music after the fact. This is why the entire structure of the M.I.A. debate kinda put me off a bit: the increasingly polarised nature of the argument made it a choice between localist purism and cosmopolitan dilettantism, as if either of these concepts can be designated as "good" or "bad" in relation to all music ever (what an amazingly limiting way to approach music, whichever side of the argument you fall on). On the other hand, the question of whether M.I.A.'s music makes either concept <i>appear</i> positive or negative in the light of her music is a thoroughly valid object of discourse.


What concerns me about this thread and many of the recent meta-narratives and debates put forward of late is how increasingly there's an insistence that people take a universalist "position", that they ascribe to a set of rules governing which music they like and how they seek to articulate their enjoyment.

And I'm sorry Mark, but using binaries like "pleasure/jouissance" kinda adds to the problem in my view: Barthesian or Adornian attempts to distinguish between "real" art and repetitive commodity art may have been more tenable several decades ago but postmodernity/late capitalism (as opposed to postmodernism) pretty much obliterates the possibility of making this distinction - all music, be it Britney or D.E.E. or Ariel Pink, is vulnerable to the charge of "merely" offering pleasure. I'm personally of the opinion that jouissance is achieved by the investment of the listener's capacities (be it for critique or for aesthetic enjoyment, or indeed for <i>physical</i> enjoyment) in a given piece of music - but this is a relational phenomenon and not something that can be arbitarily assigned to particular pieces of music. In fact I'd go so far as to say that attempting to locate jouissance definitively within a musical object is the height of commodity fetishism! (hence the mindnumbing PR for "jouissant" music one gets on release sheets from Boomkat or Other Music - "this album will change your entire conception of avant garde music/will change your life/will revolutionise yr puny brain etc etc etc.").

This of course means that insisting that chartpop has some sort of inherent superiority is also a pretty stupid thing to do, but then this is something that only Popist Strawmen do. Anti-Popists need to separate out in their heads the following forms of enjoyment: 1) enjoyment of music that happens to be in the charts; and 2) enjoyment of the charts as a spectacle. One can enjoy both these things without it collapsing it into the rather puerile and inflexible position of enjoying all music in the charts for the simple reason that it is in the charts. Sometimes the charts are an enjoyable spectacle because the music in them can be rather awful.

As for the quality of print music journalism, this strikes me as having been fairly stable (for good or for ill) since the mid-nineties, so I'm not sure that the rise of popism has affected it greatly. The preponderance of really undistinguished or flat-out excrutiating writers remains constant whether they're talking about Manic Street Preachers or Girls Aloud.
 

Tim F

Well-known member
"What concerns me about this thread and many of the recent meta-narratives and debates put forward of late is how increasingly there's an insistence that people take a universalist "position", that they ascribe to a set of rules governing which music they like and how they seek to articulate their enjoyment."

I was going to add that Simon's take on popists as people who seek to defend their right to enjoyment at all costs strikes me as a bit cynical and unfair - the implication is that when an anti-popist decides not to like something they're moved by a distaste that is more ethically or aesthetically noble, whereas popists are merely obeying the capitalist imperative-to-enjoy and then desperately throwing up any justification that will prevent them from being confronted by their automaton-like status. Theoretically this fails for me because it misreads the meaning of the capitalist imperative-to-enjoy (which is more about self-improvement than mindless consumption; as a concept applied to music it is more suited to explain why people like free-folk than M.I.A.). Empirically it fails for me because both sides in the M.I.A. debate changed their argument every time it suited them and neither side came across as particularly consistent. Logically it fails for me because the connection between M.I.A. fans who disagreed with Simon and "Popists" as a community is not made out - celebrating terrorist chic or saying "image doesn't matter, it's all about the music" are just as easily done from a rockist perspective as from a popist perspective. Indeed, I've always felt that M.I.A. would be very attractive to rockists as a credible, dare I say "indie" alternative to the vast swathe of female-fronted booty-music more openly nurtured by the corporate dollar (a lot of which I adore). The M.I.A. fans who disagreed with Simon, Matt, Stelfox etc came from all over the popist/rockist perspective, which is <i>precisely</i> why their arguments in favour of M.I.A. can seem so contradictory.

But in many ways I far prefer this to some sort of clean allocation of one aesthetic/ethical position to each side of the debate. The sheer variety of explanations for liking/hating M.I.A. have been kinda fascinating, and made the debate worthwhile even when it became painful to read.
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
Tim F said:
But in many ways I far prefer this to some sort of clean allocation of one aesthetic/ethical position to each side of the debate. The sheer variety of explanations for liking/hating M.I.A. have been kinda fascinating, and made the debate worthwhile even when it became painful to read.

Thanks for a great read Tim. You've basically articulated everything that's been frustrating me about reading dissensus over the past few weeks. I've been trying to reply to Simon R's stuff about the MIA thread almost daily since he wrote it, but I kept giving up.

If this weird dichotomy of rockists and popists describe music listeners and consumers as well as critics, then in my limited experience its the rockists who are liable to consume more than popists anyway. The Radiohead completists (get everything by this side project, get this thing Johnny said was good in Q) will always be out buying more than someone who buys that great Beyonce single they heard on the radio, or that copy of Now That's What I Call Music vol 666.
 
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k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Tim F said:
'I don't believe that any critical concept (let alone ones as intrinsically dubious as auterism) is watertight enough to be enforced a priori; they're valuable insofar as they can be applied when attempting to explain the effect of a particular piece of music after the fact.

Isn't this a form of mystifying aestheticism though that is actually very akin to rockism? 'It can't be explained, the music comes first'... it's just that the mystification has shifted from the producer to the consumer... instead of the producer not having to explain him/ herself, it's the consumer... 'No one can tell me what to enjoy.... If I enjoy it, you can't argue...'


What concerns me about this thread and many of the recent meta-narratives and debates put forward of late is how increasingly there's an insistence that people take a universalist "position", that they ascribe to a set of rules governing which music they like and how they seek to articulate their enjoyment.

Again, a repetition of the same mystification... why is the listener's 'enjoyment' so sacrosanct, so inexplicable?

And I'm sorry Mark, but using binaries like "pleasure/jouissance" kinda adds to the problem in my view: Barthesian or Adornian attempts to distinguish between "real" art and repetitive commodity art may have been more tenable several decades ago but postmodernity/late capitalism (as opposed to postmodernism) pretty much obliterates the possibility of making this distinction - all music, be it Britney or D.E.E. or Ariel Pink, is vulnerable to the charge of "merely" offering pleasure. I'm personally of the opinion that jouissance is achieved by the investment of the listener's capacities (be it for critique or for aesthetic enjoyment, or indeed for <i>physical</i> enjoyment) in a given piece of music - but this is a relational phenomenon and not something that can be arbitarily assigned to particular pieces of music. In fact I'd go so far as to say that attempting to locate jouissance definitively within a musical object is the height of commodity fetishism! (hence the mindnumbing PR for "jouissant" music one gets on release sheets from Boomkat or Other Music - "this album will change your entire conception of avant garde music/will change your life/will revolutionise yr puny brain etc etc etc.").

My reference for the pleasure/ jouissance opposition is Lacan (and therefore Freud, ultimately).

I'm really not sure about how far you can push this kind of relational relativism, especially when the emphasis seems to be on the relativism, not on the relation. It's all to redolent of the depressing postmodern cult studs orthodoxy that insists there is nothing in Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky apart from what the reader puts there. Whilst appearing to be 'defending' consumers/ readers against 'oppressive canonization', it is in fact a joyless program of desublimation which destroys the object that is enjoyed. What are you having the 'relationship' with? Why is enjoyment fetishism better than commodity fetishism? The 'human right' to consume without justifying yourself is surely the very essence of current capital's consumerist ideology. Commodity fetishism would be a problem for it; you might stop consuming if you genuinely fetishise commodities. Better to fetishize the 'having of enjoyment' itself, which then assumes a quasi-sacralized and inviolate status.

To get concrete: the early Scritti, which is 'difficult' but enjoyable itself raises any number of questions about its own commodity status, about what enjoyment means etc. The 'Pop(ist') Scritti suspend all those questions.

This of course means that insisting that chartpop has some sort of inherent superiority is also a pretty stupid thing to do, but then this is something that only Popist Strawmen do. Anti-Popists need to separate out in their heads the following forms of enjoyment: 1) enjoyment of music that happens to be in the charts; and 2) enjoyment of the charts as a spectacle. One can enjoy both these things without it collapsing it into the rather puerile and inflexible position of enjoying all music in the charts for the simple reason that it is in the charts. Sometimes the charts are an enjoyable spectacle because the music in them can be rather awful.

I think the strawman is this debate is the Popist's idea that any anti-popism is directed at a strawman. :) Popism is uncritical consumerism; if you like it, it must be good. Now if the popist position is NOT that, if that is a 'straw man' version of some ineffably complex and sophisticated position, can someone explain how?

Also, Popists must distinguish between their own enjoyment of Pop (which will involve employing of some criteria) and their ideological mystification of that enjoyment. The point is, no-one is a Popist - Popism is an ideology of consumption reactively defined by an opposition to rockism. No one really consumes like that.

As for the quality of print music journalism, this strikes me as having been fairly stable (for good or for ill) since the mid-nineties, so I'm not sure that the rise of popism has affected it greatly. The preponderance of really undistinguished or flat-out excrutiating writers remains constant whether they're talking about Manic Street Preachers or Girls Aloud.

Well, we're agreed there at least. :)
 

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
Again, a repetition of the same mystification... why is the listener's 'enjoyment' so sacrosanct, so inexplicable?

Fair point, yes. I think I can describe most of my forms of musical enjoyment. Therefore they must all have some sort of content.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
k-punk said:
To get concrete: the early Scritti, which is 'difficult' but enjoyable itself raises any number of questions about its own commodity status, about what enjoyment means etc. The 'Pop(ist') Scritti suspend all those questions.

this notion of sublime pop "raising questions about its own commodity status, about what enjoyment means," and so forth, may work for 79-82 post-punk/art-pop movement ------- but it seems unable to explain the greatness or sublimity of other moments in pop history

again, i want a definition that works in the first instance for *both* the 79/82 moment and the 90/93 rave moment, and which might then be applied to other moments

that is, the 79/82 moment and the 90/93 moments are so opposed in many ways, the one being artist-centered, the other scene-centered, the one informed by theory, the other (seemingly) anti intellectual, and so forth -------- and yet as many of us here would rate highly the music from both these scenes/moments, there must be common traits that override these differences

also, to avoid misunderstanding, i don't think the 1993 darkside sound represents the peak of rave enjoyment ----- if it did, then you might easily make an argument that darkside called into question what enjoyment means, etc ------ what i have in mind is the endless riches of 91/92
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
i suppose i've just gone and re-introduced the pop-1/pop-2/pop-3 confusion into the argument -- sorry!

and to again clarify by what i mean by rave -- i don't think that constantly increasing bpm's or chipmunk voices or mentasm stabs etc etc capture the greatness of the scene/moment/sound -- so again i'm skeptical of the "calling into question enjoyment" explanation of the rave phenomenon

and by the "rave" moment i have in mind the balearic strands as well, the soft and slow too -- the total rave phenomenon

or to just give examples of great rave singles: alison limerick "where love lives," altern-8 "infiltrate," genaside ii "narramine," psychotropic "hypnosis" -------- i could go on (and others could take it much further)
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
or perhaps the "calling into question enjoyment" thesis works for pop-1, but not necessarily for pop-2 or pop-3?

btw does anyone else find the pop-1, pop-2, pop-3 scheme helpful? or am i the only one?
 

Tim F

Well-known member
""Isn't this a form of mystifying aestheticism though that is actually very akin to rockism? 'It can't be explained, the music comes first'... it's just that the mystification has shifted from the producer to the consumer... instead of the producer not having to explain him/ herself, it's the consumer... 'No one can tell me what to enjoy.... If I enjoy it, you can't argue...'"

Mark I'm probably not explaining myself very well but this is definitely *not* my argument. I don't at all want to mystify aestheticism and if anything what i've been trying to think about a lot over the last year is a sort of new formalism - ie. trying to break down exactly what is happening when we experience a piece of music from a phenomenological perspective (as opposed to a musicological perspective). This is probably the thing that fascinates me most in music criticism, and it's why most of my writing takes the form of tiresomely repetitive "close readings" of my own experience of any given piece of music.

It is important that people be able to argue over the relative worth of music and I don't advocate cordoning off people's enjoyment as being beyond criticism. What concerns me is when we import incredibly ambiguous concepts like dilettantism or auteurism or cosmopolitanism and just apply them as qualitative terms to a given piece of music, as if there was some sort of top-down relationship that ran from the concept to the musical artifact (in other words the use of Platonic forms). The M.I.A. debate was hinged on this idea of authentic localised cultural expression versus cosmopolitan pick'n'mix dilettantism, as if once we've decided which one of these options is right and which one is wrong we can then pass judgment on all the music falling into these camps upon that basis. And I assume it's the fact that rockism validates the subordination of musical <i>reception</i> (not musical <i>enjoyment</i>, which is not something I particularly want to defend except insofar as it forms a category of musical reception generally) to the application of certain concepts which is behind Simon's partial defence of it as a useful critical ideology and methodology.

At the risk of sounding deeply pretentious, I realised a while back that my own preferred model is handily explained by Deleuze when he talks about art, which means you'll probably want to disagree Mark. I'll explain what I mean, but forgive me if all of this comes off as deeply familiar bleating:

Deleuze writes, “What is an essence as revealed in the work of art? It is a difference, the absolute and ultimate Difference. Difference is what constitutes being, what makes us conceive being.” The function of sensuous signs in art is to bring us face to face with the mass of differentiated intensities, whose aggregation and conglomeration allow us to conceive of stable concepts and meanings. When I say art brings us "face to face" with this stuff, I mean that it forces us to recognise the inescapably differential nature of these affects, rather than proceed straight to the concepts which we have lazily attached to them, and which we imagine to be standing behind them in a signifying relationship. For Deleuze it would be a mistake to assume that art exists to be "interpreted", its signs read in order to discover some message or meaning they contain. This reduces art to a reflection of conceptual generalities - insert "auteurism" or "dilettantism" here. Instead, the function of art is to intensify our experience of difference – or, to put it another way, our awareness of the endless potential for differentiated experience.

I don't think that focusing on difference necessitates returning to mysticism (as per, you may disagree). For myself it means attempting to proceed from the experience/reception of music to some sort of explanatory model which <i>rises out of</i> that reception and takes into account its differential nature. I guess you could vaguely compare it to Foucault's brand of empiricism, and indeed I think someone could write a half-decent paper comparing and contrasting Foucault's take on how power functions and the relationship between a piece of music and a person listening to it (which, perhaps in stark contrast to "pleasure-first" popism, I often conceive as a power relationship). This means that attempting to explain and justify one's enjoyment or non-enjoyment of a given piece of music becomes a more, not less intricate and involved process, because you can't use rockist or otherwise concepts as some sort of deus ex machina to explain what's going on. I wouldn't deny that you can construct a relationship between eg. M.I.A.'s music and trans-cultural cosmopolitan dilettantism, but I think the refusal to recognise that the differential nature of M.I.A.'s music (of <i>any</i> music) gives rise to a variety of often contradictory conceptual explanations is rockism par excellence.

"Again, a repetition of the same mystification... why is the listener's 'enjoyment' so sacrosanct, so inexplicable?"

I hope I've already explained that this is not my position, but to reiterate, it's not that I believe that enjoyment is sacrosanct or inexplicable, merely that I don't believe it dutifully accords with pre-established rules. I mean, rockists approach musical interpretation like it's the Common Law system or something, and every example of musical enjoyment or non-enjoyment merely gives them another chance to expound or elaborate upon a set of laws that have been handed down since time immemorial (the whole concept of precedence being kinda key here). Whereas I think the <I>truth</I> of the matter is much more parliamentarian: music listeners, critics or otherwise, are basically introducing laws of interpretation that respond to and suit what is happening around them (ie. the music they’re being exposed to and enjoying, or not enjoying), and then merely pretending that they’re consistently standing up for some coherent set of “values”.

“I'm really not sure about how far you can push this kind of relational relativism, especially when the emphasis seems to be on the relativism, not on the relation.”

See, I’d see the relation as being my exact point of emphasis: I think the rockist approach is flawed insofar as it ignores

“It's all to redolent of the depressing postmodern cult studs orthodoxy that insists there is nothing in Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky apart from what the reader puts there. Whilst appearing to be 'defending' consumers/ readers against 'oppressive canonization', it is in fact a joyless program of desublimation which destroys the object that is enjoyed. What are you having the 'relationship' with? Why is enjoyment fetishism better than commodity fetishism?”

I’d strongly differentiate what I’m advocating from this sort of thing Mark; Obviously the greatness of Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or whoever resides within the work itself, but I refuse to have that greatness defined or delimited by some authoritarian insistence that the artwork signifies only certain things. The greatness of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky is demonstrated, not undermined by the sheer variety of the critique that has been performed upon it. I don’t think canonization is bad because it constructs a hierarchy of works so much as because it ossifies and restricts interpretation and critical reception.
I love what Bakhtin got out of Dostoevsky even if I’m not sure I entirely agree with it; I’d wager he felt a great deal of jouissance while reading Dostoevsky’s work! And yet what Bakhtin does to Dostoevsky is supremely anti-canonical.
 
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