What is good about Pop Music?

The following tidbit got lost somehow:

“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 the relation between the listener and the music, and thus rarely even attempts to explain it. Which means it does pretty much the exact same thing which you accuse popism of doing: allowing individual enjoyment to escape criticism (nothing shows this better than the rockist conception of "mindless sheep listening to top 40 pop music" - rockism is so totally uninterested in the concept of individual reception/enjoyment that when it is confronted with examples of the latter that disobey its precepts, it convinces itself that there <i>is</i> no relationship! There is no critical mind at all which is engaging with the music!

Simon seems to say something similar when he suggests that M.I.A. fans are just flinging out justifications for their enjoyment which are not actually grounded in the enjoyment itself - their enjoyment is by implication <i>meaningless</i>. And something which is <i>meaningless</i> strikes me as also being rather <i>mystical</i>.

This is a little off track from the 'is popism a danger concept'(I like Tim's thoughts on this) but I'd like to hope that all sides gained something from the MIA wars. I hope Simon realizes that the harsh reaction to his piece from many (o.k., at least me) was because it read as more than just dislike for an album. Rather than simply suggesting as he later did, that M.I.A. was simply less successful than the Slits (or even David Bowie on ocassion) in adapting elements from a local scene or genre, Simon initially seemed to be suggesting that outsiders from 'nowhere' (especially a terrorist-chic invoking Sri Lankan art school student) should just blog, as the purity of a genre scene, grime, needed to be protected. That was my impression and I and others might have misinterpreted. I don't understand why Simon seems to like LCD Soundsystems's borrowing from various genres more than M.I.A.'s. Is it Murphy's musical songwriting skills or his lack of 'revolution' invoking verbiage, or both or neither (Doesn't he come from nowhere even more than M.I.A.)? I'm not sure how it fits in the 'pop' discussion, but I'm trying to understand why "Sandinista" and M.I.A. rebel-chic lyrics seem to enrage Woebot and Simon more than say sexist or homophobic ones (maybe it's just cause the Clash and MIA are embraced by middle-class liberals), and I don't understand Simon's current views on popism and MIA in the context of his praising various rock and hiphop videos on his blog over the years, and his pro-Ludacris/anti-Prefuse 73 take. I guess one can like some pop without being a popist, but I wish someone could explain that to me. Also, I'm curious for more details from Woebot on how popism has strangled music criticism.

steve-k said:

I'm curious for more details from Woebot on how popism has strangled music criticism.

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me too! i found that a bit baffling to say the least.

right. have i gone mental or does this basically boil down to:

- some people react to music without analysing its cultural context

- some people insist on taking cultural context into account

- most people decide what they like without adhering consistently to one or the other

- some historian/journalists believe that inconsistency is bad because it lacks intellectual rigour

- or they detect inconsistencies in themselves and hence feel unrigorous = fail exams = let everybody down = parental disappointment



proportionally speaking i should imagine that as much pop music is 'good' as non-pop music

quotes from Woebot:

I've been quite honest about this since day one. When I discovered that by Pop music people meant "music for imaginary rather than real communities" I was depressed for about a month.

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This is quite liberating: one should only listen to music from real communities, not imaginary ones. It doesn't matter which community you're from, and how imaginary it is: as long as the originators live in a real one.

That people could consume Grime as "Pop", that they could do the pick'n'mix shake and vac ting and "consume" something oblivious to its source, well for me it just didn't bear thinking about. That all music could be subjected to the whim of the consumer like this, that there were people out there for whom all music was essentially reducible to a quotient of it's entertainment value (a mark out of ten, an "A" minus, a four star rating in their iPod ratings menu)...... sad innit. Each song becomes a unit, an equal unit, stripped of anything approaching life. How murderously void.

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There is no contradiction between listening to something as pop and thinking about its source. Not all pop comes from the same source! When it hits the chance, it becomes pop, though. When Dizzee Rascal makes a music video, he enters the pop arena, but he also brings his 'source' with him. But all you're doing is changing what is consumed: you want to consume things with authentic sources. This argument is v. Leavis innit?

Modernism wasn't ahistorical. Andy Warhol, Le Corbusier and Jung were ruptures but they weren't abandoning history. Warhol with his tondos, Le Corbusier's fanatical love of ancient Greek Architecture, Jung steeped in Alchemaiacal lore, none of them simply wrote clean of the past. Furthermore it's a corny adage, but without embracing their past they couldn't have been free. To turn this on the mechanics of Pop appreciation: meaning is always dwindling in Pop, it's never accreating in the way it does in the underground rhizomes.

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I don't know what this even means (meaning is 'dwindling'? -- you have to expand on what this means, or could mean), but it takes cojones to enlist Warhol as a paragon of historicism and anti-popness. I guess he 'real community' was New York boho, but why should that interest me more than the 'imagined community' of X-pop act? Surely the 'real community' of ATL is now part of the 'imaginary community' of pop '05?

Tim

Thanks for a wonderfully detailed and typically elegant response... but I think you have simply substantiated my initial conjecture, that you are NOT a Popist....

That's partly because, as I said above, NO-ONE is a popist... in precisely the same sense that NO-ONE can meet all the demands of the super-ego. What is Popism, in fact, but the Pop music reception theory that restates the superegoic compulsion to enjoy... But that injunction to enjoy is actually incredibly sterile and austere... because it means ONLY 'enjoy', with enjoyment defined solely in vague, sensual terms ... ONLY enjoy means: don't think, too... which also means: you are not allowed to enjoy thinking....

Like all populist creeds, Popism's egalitarian pretensions boil down to a depressing, resentful (in the Nietzschean sense) levelling: something like the Geezaesthetics manifesto (the most concise manifesto of contemporary Popism) is a fascinating document, in that it is basically a restatement of bourgeois values (no-one is above anyone else, the 'pub conversation' as the model for all discourse). The social reality of this is usually middle class managerialists convincing themselves that getting drunk and listening to Kylie is the best you can expect from life (and anyone who talks about something like 'intensity' is spoiling their enjoyment... and, worst of all, most unforgivable of all, being elitist...)

But Popism is also an example of the syndrome that enjoyment is the enjoyment of the other. Popists don't straightforwardly enjoy Pop, they enjoy through a simulation of what they take to be another's enjyoment... Popist enjoyment is predicated on the notion that there are 'unsophisticated' people (the figure being imagined here is usually a teenage girl) who, unlike them (or 'us') straightforwardly enjoy.

The thing to take from Popism is its breaking down of the rockist focus on the records or the perfomance alone: quite clearly, the enjoyment of Pop encompasses photographs, fashion, interviews.... Rockists insist that Pop is essentially music... But I would argue that Pop is in no sense 'music'... The whole concept of 'music' is a reterritorialization of sonic intensities; music is what can be notated .... but you simply cannot notate Pop, because it is all about timbre.... (That's why your formalism, Tim, is of a quite different order to the formalism of classical musical criticism...)

But conceiving of Pop as 'entertainment' (as Popism insists) is no better than thinking of it as 'music'. One issue is, to quote the Bryan Ferry biography I'm reading atm: is Pop entertainment or culture? I want to maintain that it is culture ... but culture is about POPULATIONS... which is something we learned from dance music surely, and which allows us to retrospectively think all Pop in those terms, rather than in terms of audiences/ spectators/ consumers.... (Popism's superegoic imperatives are nowhere clearer than when it advocates more consumer efforts in downtimes... great Pop is out there, if only you make MORE EFFORT to find it... this image of Popists alone in their cars/ living rooms as the preferred mode of Pop consumption is also highly depressing of course...)

Another reason that you are not a Popist, Tim, is that your writing quite clearly makes no attempt to disavow the enjoyment of analysis.... Analysis of Pop does not destroy it; on the contrary, as Kodwo says, it intensifiies it... Both rockists (producer Romantics) and popists (consumer Romantics) are suspicious to the point of total hostility of analysis....

Hm - Poptism also seems supremely individualized though; not just about pleasure, but about MY pleasure, above and beyond any notion of 'our' or 'their' pleasure. This is something fairly consistent throughout Tim's commentary; the producer literally disappears under a Deleuzian concept of 'art' or metaphysical concept of power via Foucault. This happens a bit in Skykicking too - with the ontological emphasis on sonic-analysis, experience, emotion and so on.

Like the individualizing informational networks from which the poptimistic position has been constructed and articulated, I think Simon is right on this thread to associate the culture of downloading (somewhat indirectly) with the controversy over M.I.A. - this places her in a somewhat stranger context than Madonna, I think. Obviously, peer-to-peer is by definition an individualizing mode of information exchange, but socially it's also described as 'stealing' - this sets off questions about theft, and stealing identities.

Possibly, another key category here is citizenship - the US position being that to consume is patriotic, a democratic necessity (whereas a more European mode would rely equally on forms of cultural citizenship, say). What's interesting about P2P, is that the user's defined outside citizenship since it's illegal, yet paradoxically is able to articulate the ultimate mode of hyperconsumption.

Being outside the nation-state resonates on many levels throughout the 'shanty-house' theory, but also surrounding the practice of file-trading. M.I.A. taps into this through her individuated transnationality; she remains outside community ('missing-in-action') unlike the resistant multitudes of the favela, for instance. Social isolation through theft is certainly a theme - piracy funds terrorism.

fascinating debate

been out of town on a story and missed the fascinating turn in this debate, some very elegant arguing going on here

chipping in belatedly


Tim F:
>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

>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.


bunch of things to say here, one is related to a common tendency in many disagree-ers to have this slightly comical view of me with this sort of chart on my wall, or diagram, or tablet of rules or something, and assigning things into their categories before even listening to them.

actually it happens much more like this, cds and records come through in a steady flow, promos, things i've bought, burns from friends, music hits my ear via the mass media, and i listen to as much of it as i can and a proportion of it excites/stimulates/grabs the ear.

after you've been doing this for a while though, you notice certain patterns in your taste/responses, ... and if you're a fairly reflective person you might start to speculate on what underlies these consistent responses, (and that might be an introspective reflection: who am i, why am I , what are the conditions that made me with these audio-erogenous zones and deaf-spots, etc, or it might be outwardly focused on the source of the music, context, the intent behind it, how its consumed by its core following etc

and if you're even more reflective than that you might feel driven to extrapolate from the observed patterns-in-taste and the speculations thereof pertaining as to why and venture to construct some kind of meta-theory of how music works, its relation to society etc etc

MIA is a test-case artist because reading about her in advance i had every reason to believe i'd be incredibly blood-boilingly excited. and i wasn't, i could see some of what was good about the music, but there were elements that were offputting and overall just a deficiency

so the interest became to look at the hype and the shortfall

and here we come to the nub of it, and why i still do not honestly understand the outraged response to that piece:

here is a record that is SLATHERED, CAKED, with signifiers of authenticity -- overt allusions , sonic/lyrical/design etc, to street music, the subaltern, ghetto communities, guerrilla struggle, and then surrounded by a critical discourse that quite breezily took it as genuine street-level world music (something like that -- i forget the specific SFJ quote that pretty much set the tone for all later celebration of the artist)

and YET when a critic actually pays scrutiny to the very credentials that are being FRANTICALLY BRANDISHED by the artist and its label (ALL OVER new york right now there are posters advertising the album with the slogan 'pull up the people, pull up the poor') this is supposed to be an off-color (boom-boom) thing to do! an imposition of criteria and "pre-conceived notions" that could not possibly be more inappropriate and uncalled for!!!!

and perhaps i am conflating a bunch of different responses to MIA but i dunno, it does seem to me that some people have beat a pretty fast retreat from the 3rd world uber-babe angle to the canny pop madonna-in-the-making angle

here we have a pop artifact that is limned with all this stuff to do with race and class -- but if you discuss it in these terms that's what, somehow racially insentitive or inverted snobbery?

i would have thought pointing out that a record that makes like it's from the projects but is in actual fact an art project (that's what she calls it! the MIA project, and in some old interview with justine f it's referred to as "her MIA project" -- her meaning Justine!), i would have thought that was a fairly salient point. i would have thought that would have been within the bounds of legitimate comment.

>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

i think this metaphor of the Law is interesting here because it indicates to me how the Pro-Pop discourse is ultimately still an extension of Rock Discourse...

Rock is supposed to be anti-Law, it breaks rules... therefore the ultimate rock move (and it's been made time and time again, even Morley wasn't the first to do it) is to point out how rock has become hidebound by its own rules, become as blinkered as the parent culture it originally defined itself against.
therefore the ultimate rock act of trangresssion is to move into the truly lawless and renegade space of Pop, where we have no prejudices or blinkers or preconceived ideas

(what's so wrong with preconceived ideas incidentally? if you've reached your mid-twenties and you've not formulated some basic ideas about the world you're not doing very well!)

so the ultimate dialectical bad-boy move is to ... embrace teen girl music.

this position, the Pro-Pop position, is a latent and integral structural component of the rock discourse. it's always been there as a possible stance -- Dylan saying Smokey Robinson is the best poet in america might actually be the first instance of it.... Richard Meltzer give him his due was also very early on the case, talking about if you value illegitimacy in music then the first thing you have to confront is your own ideas of what's illegitimacy, e..g the illegitimacy of ballads to your taste.

it's also generated because any community, even if founded on resistance, rebellion etc, inevitably is also a community, with codes and conformisms, and therefore you get the familiar construct of the individualists-who-are-sheep (punks, goths, ravers, etc) and then what you could call the Chuck Eddy reflex which is to point out how these so-called rebels are actually conforming and have their own traditions and are just as closeminded as the straights or even more closeminded etc

that is why Pro-Pop, nine times out of ten, is a stance taken by people who a few years before were indie-rock partisans or some such other alt-culture group.... it's a reaction against their own past blinkeredness and self-dramatisation against those former fellow-travellers still caught in the group think

as a move in the dialectic it's a perfectly understandable and to an extent laudable move

to me though it ultimately throws out to the baby with the bathwater

and again the general tenor of that way of relating to music tends to make inexplicable and slightly ludicrous all the kinds of music based around strenuousness, commitment, belief etc etc... i don't know how, within the pop mindset, you'd be able to account for the surprising persistence of ideas of commitment, community (if every community becomes herd-like, sheep-like, then the only alternative is the atomised individual pop consumer isolate), real-ness, autheniticty, and the persistence of auteurist concepts of intent, formal progression, expression (i've just interviewed a bunch of grime people and these ideas are very much alive and kicking)

paradoxically it seems that a pop-ist would have to argue that hip hop fans, metal fans, grime fans (not meaning bloggers but the actual, er, real ones out there in London) are actually deluded, gripped by false
consciousness

the weakness of pop-ism is that its emphasis on the moment of consumption cannot explain what on earth motivates the producer to go to the considerable bother of doing it... why would a bunch of kids go every sunday evening to a dank basement in east london and shout into microphones, and not only not get paid for it but actually PAY fees to the station to do it

steve k
>I don't understand why Simon seems to like LCD Soundsystems's borrowing from various genres more >than M.I.A.'s. Is it Murphy's musical songwriting skills or his lack of 'revolution' invoking verbiage, or both >or neither

this is one of your weaker arguments steve, the two artists are not commensurate on any level -- LCD is a retro-dance artist, nearly everything he borrows is from the past
--he also does not push himself forward as 'street'... in fact his shtick is a sort of pained can't-help-myself-being-ironic-but-wish-i-could-escape-it-wish-i-could-stop-being-so-knowing persona that is utterly true to himself in its authentic i-be-hollow-man-ness


steve k again
> I don't understand Simon's current views on popism and MIA in the context of his praising various rock >and hiphop videos on his blog over the years, and his pro-Ludacris/anti-Prefuse 73 take. I guess one can >like some pop without being a popist, but I wish someone could explain that to me.

at the risk of repeating myself, here we see again the strength of the rockist value-frame, in that its set of evolving criteria are perfectly capable of explaining why great things get in the charts fairly regularly and appraising what's great about them -- it doesn't need to posit some mystical essence of "popness" to do so

Some really interesting points being made, but I'm suspicious of Simon's assertion that popism throws the baby out with the bathwater, discarding the blinkeredness of belonging to a community like indie, while ignoring its virtues. Like he said, popism is often embraced by ex-indie fans, which means that most of them are at least in their mid-twenties and probably done with school. Having left an environment where indie fans (or hip-hop fans or metal fans) can easily connect with each other, ex-indie fans turn to popism because in a social sphere like any random house party, trying to strike up a conversation of about AMM is positively anti-social. If you want to talk about music, any music, then popism certainly broadens your pool of possible conversation partners, whereas doggedly pursuing an underground obsession quickly becomes untenable outside the confines of your group of likeminded fans.

more to say later, perhaps

ADDENDUM: to summarize, maybe popists reject subcultural community because they don't have access to it anymore? clearly most blogger-type popists aren't afraid to engage with their music on a critical or intellectual level, they'd just rather not do it using the tired cant that tends to go along with underground scenes.

I think the assertion that popists tend to be reformed indie kids or something is wrong. When I think of the people I know - and yes, this is anecdotal but i think it is representative of a wide swath of people - who listen primarily to pop music, they tend to be "normal" girls who are not at all "reformed indie kids." Yes their tastes may have changed since they left high school (don't really listen to n'sync any more, now listening to Kelly Clarkson or Usher or what have you - i had so many requests for "my boo" when I DJ'd one college party) but they still listen to pop radio and dance to pop music and i think one major thing that ties it all together is the common language it gives people. They don't intellectualize "popism" the way one does on dissensus or ILM, but they largely approach music this way. Not to say they don't have occasionally rockist ideas! But thats only because they haven't given into that rigorous intellectual process to destroy the rockism they have gathered over the years.

The point is, I don't think that popism is some sort of aquired reactionary thing, i think it is the way most people relate to music.

I would argue that rockism is a mess of social constructions, popism is a deconstruction of rockist biases, or the way someone reacts to music if relatively unimpinged by rockist constructs.

blissblogger said:

been out of town on a story and missed the fascinating turn in this debate, some very elegant arguing going on here

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yeah tim definitely raised the bar

doubt that i have anything essential to add

so i guess my concern is to figure out the areas of disagreement

(1) music versus culture versus pop image

i realize that k-punk detests phenomenology as willfully naive -- and i suspect that i'm about to put the wrong words into k-punk's mouth -- but k-punk seems to say that if we're going to be true to how we experience and relate to music, then we have to be popists of a certain kind

and this means avoiding the rockist reduction of the phenomenon to just the music

k-punk therefore advocates a twofold restoration of the original phenomenon

first, k-punk would have us take seriously the photographs, fashion statements, and interviews that we encounter with and alongside the music -- i.e., the pop image

k-punk said:

The thing to take from Popism is its breaking down of the rockist focus on the records or the perfomance alone: quite clearly, the enjoyment of Pop encompasses photographs, fashion, interviews.... Rockists insist that Pop is essentially music... But I would argue that Pop is in no sense 'music'

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second, k-punk speaks of cultures & populations -- i assume that by the term "populations" k-punk has in mind the grime massive, the jungle massive, the punk rock massive, and so forth

though in speaking of populations isn't k-punk necessarily advocating a move to eppy's pop-2 & pop-3?

and yet the locus of pop image is pop-1 -- perhaps k-punk could clarify his meaning

and would blissblogger & woebot disagree w/ k-punk on either of these two points -- i.e., the importance of image and populations?

granted blissblogger does emphasize purely musical considerations, as when he says this --

blissblogger said:

and the persistence of auteurist concepts of intent, formal progression, expression (i've just interviewed a bunch of grime people and these ideas are very much alive and kicking)

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but blissblogger is also the great pop-2 and pop-3 advocate -- though he calls himself a rockist

blissblogger takes the position that music that comes from a scene or belongs to a massive, i.e., music that has the active commitment of populations, is more powerful than music which does not -- all too conspicuous in music that comes from "nowhere" is this lack

therefore to be a rockist in the manner of blissblogger means to treat not only the music and musical considerations, but also the scenes and populations that constitute and belong to the total phenomenon --the massive which the music must win over, the scene which supercedes the distinction b/w producer and consumer

indeed for blissblogger it is the popist who cannot account for scenes and populations --

blissblogger said:

the general tenor of [the pop] way of relating to music tends to make inexplicable and slightly ludicrous all the kinds of music based around strenuousness, commitment, belief etc etc... i don't know how, within the pop mindset, you'd be able to account for the surprising persistence of ideas of commitment, community (if every community becomes herd-like, sheep-like, then the only alternative is the atomised individual pop consumer isolate), real-ness, autheniticty

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but if i had to fish for points of disagreement b/w k-punk and blissblogger on this general area, they might be --

first, that blissblogger seems to favor music made by "real" or "authentic" members of the massive -- whereas k-punk seems to like music made by masters of pop artifice ("aristocrats"), not anonymous members of the massive

second, k-punk seems to take the images & fashion statements & photographs of discrete pop acts more seriously than does blissblogger -- and this might also be extended to how members of the massive dress -- though i think blissblogger has elsewhere argued that codes of dressing, ways of dancing, etc, are indicators of a scene's power and strength -- though this can get a bit tricky as there's no one-to-one correlation -- but certainly at the stage of the original phenomenon this is all integral, i.e., recall the opening pages of "generation ecstasy" where blissblogger discusses his first rave experience and how taken he was by gaunt adolescent boys and blissed out girls and their weird ways of dancing etc

moving on to the next issue

(2) the nature of false consciousness

k-punk treats popism as an ideology -- i.e., there is no such thing as the pop way of relating to music

popism for k-punk is prescriptive, not descriptive

now blissblogger would likely agree w/ k-punk's account of popism

though it might be said that the pop theory of music reception ultimately distorts actual reception, precisely b/c the theory is in fact prescriptive -- which is why blissblogger speaks of the pop mindset as though there actually were such a relation to music

but where i think blissblogger, woebot, and others here (including me) diverge from k-punk is in their doubts about the validity of their own consciousness

that is, b/c blissblogger & woebot valorize pop-2 and pop-3 music -- b/c they privilege the massive -- they cannot help but worry about their own status

woebot captures the predicament --

woebot said:

He is cautious about aspiring to belong to subcultural groups (like, er, Grime) on the basis that he's Middle Class, White and Old. But really no-one gives a toss and what's the alternative anyway? To accept something less-threatening and fake in some compromised quasi-ironic manner. To give up on the real because it underlines the uncomfortable reality of one's own situation?

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k-punk is untroubled by his lack of membership in this or that particular scene or massive or population

nor does his taste seemed geared toward music with any such appellation (check his end of the year lists)

perhaps this is why k-punk calls himself a popist of a certain kind

and why blissblogger & woebot call themselves rockists

that is, perhaps the rockist values political (communal) membership more than the popist does?

that is, it's not enough for woebot to be a connoisseur of wines -- a part of him longs to be a peasant working the land, mashing the grapes, getting drunk at the village feast

and this is why blissblogger thinks it valid to argue thusly

blissblogger said:

. . . . paradoxically it seems that a pop-ist would have to argue that hip hop fans, metal fans, grime fans (not meaning bloggers but the actual, er, real ones out there in London) are actually deluded, gripped by false consciousness

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and yet at the end of the day blissblogger and woebot know that they belong to no massive

nor do they wish to belong to the more cosmopolitan dance scene (even though they could easily claim membership)

ultimately what they're into is music pure and simple

therefore the rockist figure values music more than scene

and yet the rockist values both of these more than the popist does either

which leaves very unclear what the k-punk/skykicking popist values -- or is it simply the experience of the total phenomenon -- w/ no dissection of the phenomenon into ordered parts, i.e., music vs image vs scene -- but w/ such experience including the "raising" of the total phenomenon into thought

next issue

(3) differentiated experience versus formal articulation

tim writes --

tim f said:

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 . . . . 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

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to which blissblogger has a ready reply --

we know what mia is trying to pass herself off as, and we don't buy it

blissblogger said:

if you've reached your mid-twenties and you've not formulated some basic ideas about the world you're not doing very well

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and among the rules that blissblogger has discovered is the rule that the most powerful music comes from rooted scenes, populations, massives

and to this rule there are exceptions (to be really cheeky, at the moment kudu)

and yes, the massive is itself a construct

put aside the construct and we see that the massive is not undifferentiated -- some members of the massive are hardcore, others are peripheral, still others the leading edge -- and though we tend to imagine members of the massive as having a "real" relation to music, surely each member relates to the music & scene in his own way -- some make the music, others only support it on the dancefloor or by tuning in their radio or by buying 12" records -- and each member of the massive also has relationships with music that is outside the massive's zone of cultural production, e.g., music in the pop charts, classical music, jazz

so yeah, the massive is a construct

but it's also a reality

and i for one am sympathetic to blissblogger's position

by which i mean that i'm inclined to take seriously the articulation of "what is" into parts, types, classes, figures

but of course this is not the kind of question (form vs chaos, identity vs difference) that can be profitably discussed in a forum like this, i.e., it's an eternal issue of philosophy

DavidD, I can't speak for anyone else, but my idea of a 'popist' is not simply someone who likes pop. My definition of a popist is someone who believes that all music is worthy of equal consideration in the marketplace, regardless of how much money, time and effort were put into making and promoting it. For example, Kylie Minogue and Dizzee Rascal are equally worthy of a popist's attention, even though Kylie is a hot girl singer supported by a massive marketing budget who doesn't write her own songs, while Dizzee is a ghetto kid who fought his way up from poverty and obscurity, who writes his own lyrics and who is connected to the underground. M.I.A. gets no points from a popist for being the daughter of a Tamil tiger, but neither would a popist chastize her for co-opting shanty house sonics when her connection to them is arguably dubious.

(And please god let's not a) open the MIA thing again, or b) get into a debate about what popism is, or I'll start whipping out links to ILX threads that will keep you occupied for weeks...)

See, but I think the ave. pop music listener DOES give equal opportunity to the music that they hear - they just don't spend as much time searching out music. It certainly would explain why the pop charts tend towards diversity more than critics lists do, as a general rule! (this is a pretty big assumption on my part, i agree, but i think it's mostly accurate, with a few exceptions)

the test: what is the best pop song of the last ten years?
a) "Hey Ya"
b) "Hit Me Baby One More Time"
c) "Where Is The Love"

If you answer X then you are Y:

a) ex-indie popist
b) blogger popist
c) unreconstructed popist (i.e. an actual teenage girl)

dominic said:

first, that blissblogger seems to favor music made by "real" or "authentic" members of the massive -- whereas k-punk seems to like music made by masters of pop artifice ("aristocrats"), not anonymous members of the massive

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I can see why you say that, but I think it is a false opposition... As Simon himself has said, pop stars themselves, much to their cost often, are very loath to see themselves positioned as part of a massive... Roxy in the seventies went out of their way to say they weren't 'glam'.. and look what happened to Goldie.. and to some extent Dizzee, tho he has been very careful not go the Goldie route... the result tho is a kind of splendid isolation... no longer rooted in the massive, but not incorporated into the mainstream either...

second, k-punk seems to take the images & fashion statements & photographs of discrete pop acts more seriously than does blissblogger -- and this might also be extended to how members of the massive dress -- though i think blissblogger has elsewhere argued that codes of dressing, ways of dancing, etc, are indicators of a scene's power and strength -- though this can get a bit tricky as there's no one-to-one correlation -- but certainly at the stage of the original phenomenon this is all integral, i.e., recall the opening pages of "generation ecstasy" where blissblogger discusses his first rave experience and how taken he was by gaunt adolescent boys and blissed out girls and their weird ways of dancing etc

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This may be a point of disagreement, but I don't really see that Simon has ever made much of a point of EXCLUDING discussion of image, far from it... The main disagreement between Simon and myself as I see it concerns 2 things:

1. The role of the sixties. My key reference points I take to be BREAKS from the sixties... and part of that is, yes, the embracing of the artificial, the image, as opposed to the authentic.

2. The role of analysis. For me, the whole Dionysian emphasis is a way of disclaiming the role of intellect and analysis in the enjoyment of Pop. I find this idea of intellect versus emotions, of 'real' response as opposed to an 'instinctive, thoughtless' response bogus, but I think that Simon holds to this 'only' ideologically, in that his writing undermines it, since it is quite clearly intellectual. Why deny it? It is intellectual, but (why but, tho?), it is also enjoyable, and it augments the enjoyment of the sounds.

but where i think blissblogger, woebot, and others here (including me) diverge from k-punk is in their doubts about the validity of their own consciousness

that is, b/c blissblogger & woebot valorize pop-2 and pop-3 music -- b/c they privilege the massive -- they cannot help but worry about their own status

woebot captures the predicament --

k-punk is untroubled by his lack of membership in this or that particular scene or massive or population

nor does his taste seemed geared toward music with any such appellation (check his end of the year lists)

perhaps this is why k-punk calls himself a popist of a certain kind

and why blissblogger & woebot call themselves rockists

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Perhaps that is because they are middle class in a way that I am not.

Believe me, my coming to think that anything I have to say could have ANY validity has been a long, hard struggle... That's what being working class is about, nothing glamorous about it, it's about feeling that anything coming from your own 'consciousness' is by its nature secondary and worthless...

Therefore, I wouldn't say I was 'untroubled' by not belonging to any group... but at the same time, part of the reason that I'm not a full-on grimesta is that I feel excluded and threatened by that mode of aggressive masculinity.. It's not something I could ever feel comfortable with, nor do I want to feel comfortable with it.. It is too 'realistic', in the sense of belonging to what the accepted order, the reality principle, would count as empirical... The Pop I privilege is about escaping that humdrum world.... Hence the importance for me of the opposition in Lacan, Badiou, ZIzek, Zupancic, Copjec between the empirical-real and the Real... the Real being what is IMPOSSIBLE within any given empirical regime....

As for my end of year lists, if they have an affinity with any group atm, it would be gay. If you go to GAY (the most popular gay night in London), you'll hear almost all of the k-punk end of year picks there. But while I share the taste, I fundamentally disagree with the (consumerist) ideology, which seems to me neurotically hedonistic. You are simply not allowed to be serious..

But this notion of 'really belonging' to a group is surely only something that can be attributed to the other, never experienced by oneself... They really belong... I don't... Doesn't everyone, secretly, feel like that? (One lesson of Sartre that's worth holding onto).

Also, I really think that the notion of communities is fundamentally reactionary... Populations are not communities...

Finally, I want to say something about this 'real consumer of Pop' thing. Again, it is always the other who bears the weight of this discourse of authenticity. This notion of authenticity carries with it a patronising notion of 'normality': 'normal' ppl (not us) consume 'uncritically' and without theoretical presuppositions.

I obv have a lot of contact with teenagers at work, and almost none of them would admit to liking 'Pop'. Unlike for me, 'Pop' has a very specific sense for them, perhaps associated with younger, pre-pubescent teenagers. (The only students I teach who would admit to liking Britney, for instance, are gay.)

One of the saddest things at work is seeing how racially and culturally divided teenagers are. There isn't much inter-group aggression; in many ways, it is worse than that, just a mutual indifference.... This isn't a reflection of their belonging to different 'communities', more a testament to the ways in which ppl have been dragooned into identifying themselves with a particular consumer demographic. Something like Roxy, which had a relationship to black music, to rock, to art, to 'gay', is of course quite inconceivable now...cf Grace Jones, the whole postpunk thing.... When Pop has been powerful, it has PRODUCED populations, not 'represented' already-existing organic communities...

tek tonic said:

the test: what is the best pop song of the last ten years?
a) "Hey Ya"
b) "Hit Me Baby One More Time"
c) "Where Is The Love"

If you answer X then you are Y:

a) ex-indie popist
b) blogger popist
c) unreconstructed popist (i.e. an actual teenage girl)

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But this really is missing the point about Popism. These imaginary 'actual teenage girls' are not Popists; only Popists would say that. Imaginary 'actual teenage girls' (IATG) are what Popists project as the litmus test of what is acceptable to like. If the IATG 'wouldn't' like it, then it has to be thrown out. But the reality is that actual actual teenage girls have, in their time, been into all kinds of things, from the Beatles to Roxy to Japan....

btw, the only ppl I know who like 'Where is the Love' are ppl my own age or older .. For me, it's a classic for still-indie types to 'allow': it's not rock, but hey, it's got real lyrics, so, y'know, it's good, isn't it...

OK I'm feeling a bit out of my league here so forgive me if I'm missing something but

k-punk said:

But this really is missing the point about Popism. These imaginary 'actual teenage girls' are not Popists; only Popists would say that. Imaginary 'actual teenage girls' (IATG) are what Popists project as the litmus test of what is acceptable to like. If the IATG 'wouldn't' like it, then it has to be thrown out.

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This sounds like an Imaginary "actual popist" to me! (IAP) Who are these people who JUST like what they think teenage girls like?

But the reality is that actual actual teenage girls have, in their time, been into all kinds of things, from the Beatles to Roxy to Japan....

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Which is why i think teenage girls are really popists! As a generalization, of course. There are lots of teenage guys who are popists too. Like all those kids who were really into pop-punk, balls to conservative "real" punk! Just because they have a subcultural focus (even a "made-up" one) doesn't mean that they don't like music because of how it sounds.

k-punk said:

But this really is missing the point about Popism. These imaginary 'actual teenage girls' are not Popists; only Popists would say that. Imaginary 'actual teenage girls' (IATG) are what Popists project as the litmus test of what is acceptable to like. If the IATG 'wouldn't' like it, then it has to be thrown out. But the reality is that actual actual teenage girls have, in their time, been into all kinds of things, from the Beatles to Roxy to Japan....

btw, the only ppl I know who like 'Where is the Love' are ppl my own age or older .. For me, it's a classic for still-indie types to 'allow': it's not rock, but hey, it's got real lyrics, so, y'know, it's good, isn't it...

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I agree with you. When I was teaching in Singapore last year, all my teenage students loved "Where Is The Love" and made fun of Britney endlessly, which is why I jokingly made the distinction. I don't know any blogger types who like "WITL", but anyone on ILX who didn't like Britney back in the day used to get a lot of stick. I maintain that the ultimate 'classic for still-indie types to allow' is "Hey Ya", but otherwise I think we're fundamentally in agreement, save one thing:

This notion that popists base what is acceptable to like on the tastes of a teenage girl is the real strawman. I don't know of anybody who thinks this way, honestly. The only place teenage girls really figure into the equation is when rockists ask 'how can anyone like Britney when her music is obviously made for stupid teenage girls?' and the popists laugh. Where are you getting this from?

the real bane of my existence

forget the pop-ists, it's been the bloody Pope-ists this last half-week -- jeez the endless mopy pious coverage! thank god for terry eagleton's brutally rigorous dissection of the pontiff's crimes in the Guardian i think it was

[sorry that should probably have gone on another thread]

more sensible commentary on pro-popism and its discontents:

big up ya chest dominic for typically scrupulous analysis, i must say though i don't like this word "rules'"that people keep using. Rather than a metaphor based around the idea of a legislator -- not how i see myself-- i'd prefer to think in more scientific terms -- i don't forbid myself any pleasures, but i have learned to map out where the pleasures are most likely to come from -- so i would say not 'rules' but more like observed tendencies that have--so far--not been significantly countered by my experience. up til now the evidence keeps reaffirming the theories, by and large. however it's totally possible that the entire edifice will crumble in the face of some wonderously unfamiliar new musical phenomenon ... new evidence will smash the edifice... and in fact that would be a quite desirable outcome.

(and indeed on the everday random sense it's thrilling to be seduced by things that you can't account for, that come out of your personal left-field)

the scientific metaphor appeals because it posits an objectivity -- these artifacts exist as objects, they are the work of cultural agents with motives and motivation ... situated in a historical/social context ... the objects and their makers exist independently of my consciousness of them...

enquiry then becomes a question of trying to understand both what the artifacts do to and for me, and what they do to and for the audience they were actually primarily intended for, and also what was on the minds of the people who made them -- to ascertain the forces that shaped the people who made them, and what shaped the people they were made for

it's this objective and social aspect of the music artifact that is diminished by pop-ism's focus on the consumer's privatized delight

or rather, Simon Frith -- one of Pop-ism's grandfathers, read Sound Effects a huge amount of the creed is in there, possibly mediated by the fact that book was a big influence on Chuck Eddy and probably on kogan too -- WAS right to emphasise the importance of consumption as where pop meaning is made and un-made (as a corrective to the producer-focus, auteurist-intent bias, of trad rock criticism)

... but being a sociologist he was also interesting in how the primary intended audience for any given form of music actually used that music, the social meanings (and social pleasures) they made out of them

that aspect is missing from latterday pop-ism which--taken to its logical conclusion, as opposed to any actual exponents of it on this thread or elsewhere -- would involve a radical subjectivism, an utter solipsism

* * * * * *

i'd agree w/ k-punk re. the role of non-sonic stuff -- pop-etc (and rock, and hip hop, and grime, and...) is more than just music, it's a hybrid mish-mash of sound, image, lyrics, audience reception, dance moves, performance, gesture, persona, charisma, discourse, hype, fashion, context, etc... i wouldn't eliminate anything from consideration.... these are all lens for analysis, and facets of pleasure/excitement/intensity .. although in terms of my own enjoyment sound has a privileged place, perhaps -- a residue of the days when i used to bang on about Sound > Lyrics, which was a strategic struggle relevant at that time (shaking off the dead hand of postpunk in the late eighties as it happens, but now of course i've come round the other side of that cycle)

but rock as i said above has all these aspects going on just as much as 'pop'

i think also that k-punk is more rockist than he realizes.... in sensibility above all...

k-punk said:

When Pop has been powerful, it has PRODUCED populations, not 'represented' already-existing organic communities...

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yes yes yes -- you've made a key point that i hope others will take up

i suppose that my use of the term "massive" has obscured this essential difference

the raving massive = a produced population

the grime massive = an already-existing organic community, i.e., the streets of east london, even if multi-racial

and it's why i too am not altogether keen on hip hop, grime, dancehall, etc -- despite recognizing the dynamism of the music

or perhaps i'm too attached to my "real world" identity to get down with the program

so each side shuns the other, i.e., they represent, and i don't feel represented

HOWEVER, i'd argue that when you say "population" rather than "community," you obscure the fact that what is produced is a community of feeling & taste

and that's why i feel as though i somehow "belong" to a dance music community -- b/c the dance music explosion of 90/91/92 produced a community of feeling & taste, a shared language of celebration

OR would you argue in turn that the reason the so-called raving massive fragmented so quickly and into so many disparate scenes was precisely b/c the raving massive was a produced POPULATION and never anything like a community

which is why the micro-scenes that came to constitute the rave diaspora were in fact representative of already existing organic communities (at least to some extent -- certainly there was a great deal of population production involved as well)

i.e., produced populations fragment quickly b/c there are no "real world" bonds to keep them together