Cultural Cowardice

pattycakes_ said:

This just in: mass popularity = the objective best.

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Obviously not the case

But equally, obscurity and failure to crossover doesn't guarantee that something is the superior music in its genre.

The model I have attempted to sketch out doesn't work for every kind of music equally

For instance, owing to the vagaries of record distribution and market segmentation, the relative lack of marketing muscle of reggae labels, etc, it would be absurd to say that the best reggae tunes were the ones that charted in the UK. Apart from anything else, the chart return system whereby shops contributed data to Gallup or whoever it was did not incorporate enough specialist reggae stores into its tabulations.

Yet occasionally a really great reggae tune would cross over - "Uptown Ranking". "Police and Thieves" was a hit (on a rerelease I believe).

And this model does work well when the underground music in question is close to overground pop values

So for instance, Janet Kay's "Silly Games" is both an exemplary lover's rock tune and it got to #2 in the UK charts. What made it great lover's rock is also what made it a great pop single.

2step is another case in point. A lot of the best tunes were also the biggest mainstream hits. Some great ones fell by the wayside, but not for lack of trying - more because there were just so much excellence being produced at that time.

I've always thought that knee-jerk undergroundism is as misguided as knee-jerk poptimism. The chart is not the measure of all excellence, but it is not a barren zone that nullifies the inherent qualities of the records that enter it.

With all due respect to blissblogger, I don't know how to approach a discussion with someone who claims to have the definitive opinion on any subject. Music is one of the most subjective things I can think of. Are you telling me the shit which sells now is the best? Justin Bieber? Guess what, Bieber is 'the best' to millions of people. But it's irrelevant. Good taste is bollocks. Ego stroking, peer group hierarchy, I know more than you nonsense. What works for you works for you. If you're a hardcore disco lover then you're probably sick of the Bee Gees and you want Let No Man Put Asunder or I Can't Turn Around or the shit Padraig posted. That's the shit that gets you, deep inside your body. It's a spiritual thing. No way to objectively analyse it. I agree that valuing music on how obscure it is is useless. But I don't think anyone was arguing that point anyway. It's about what speaks to your mind, body and soul. This is what so much black music is about.

Having said that, you can be objective about Don't Stop Til You Get Enough.

im very wary of this word 'subjective' i believe in it less and less and less.

i think its the narcotic fumes of the soul lulling the intellect into a stupor. stay awake and you can analyse anything.

I believe in instincts more than intellect

i beleive in self as cybernetic system with no function having superiority. also as self as part of larger systems. and i beleive consciousness is a shared territory.

any one function can be, and very often is, misleading. instincts and intellect equally.
or rather neither is misleading but other forces take on the guise of instinct and intellect and mislead us that way. so that prejudice disguises itself as rationality say, or an ego-defence mechanism poses as an animal instinct.

it's too simplistic to beleive we have an uncomplicated relationship with our instincts, a clear channel and perfect reception. we dont. things are always appearing in the garb of other things. we have to keep unmasking and unmasking. any complacency leads to stupidity and venality.

im highly suspicious of and antagonistic towards this 'it's just feelings man, it's all subjective' dodge. again i think it is an excuse for not wanting to examine ones own motivations and ones own psychic and emotional organisation and it's a way to avoid the possibility that one might be completely and utterly wrong about something. an ego defence mechanism.

Taste is subjective.

the subjective doesnt exist. it's a way to hide. to pretend the interior experience is private and inviolable. a turtle inside it's shell.

The turtle has no choice

look i grew up in the '90s. i know where you're coming from. i've got sympathy with it up to a point but i do think we've outgrown this as a culture at this stage. the model you're propounding had it's advantages, primarily the idea of an underground or a subculture as a viable and self-contained alternative to the corporate mainstream. i think there were merits in that model, but it's been superseded. this happened at the tail end of the '90s.


it was a traumatic time for a lot of us!

so much of the underground was rooted in the mythic (but not completely imaginary) conception of the black man as rebel, antipathetic to the mores of capitalism and western hegemony. an outsider by choice as much as by oppression. it was that archetype which came under attack at the end of the '90s.
a lot of us invested in that superhero very strongly (and naively, in an unexamined way)

This has me thinking of Borges's 'Circular Ruins'. The magician dreams into being a human being and at the climax of the story:

"With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him."

It's fascinating that a great piece of music can seem so instinctively, obvious great to you (like a sunny day or an ecstacy pill) and yet can leave somebody else bored or underwhelmed or even disgusted. Are the instinctive feelings you have present in then, and quickly blocked by their beliefs? Or are they simply, for whatever reason (physiological/genetic) extremely diminished or even absent?

And you can "observe" this even in yourself. Once upon a time I loved Oasis. LOVED them. Now I can hear a song by then I used to love and my mind almost instantly kicks in to pour scorn on my instincts. Same goes for all manner of music I've 'left behind'. One of the things I love about music is how sometimes it can catch you off guard, slip past your defences and absolutely hit you in the sweet spot.

the idea of resistance has almost completely vanished. that, in my reading, is what you are lamenting.
i think you see blissblogger as kowtowing to the logic of the market and that in itself being a symptom of this surrender to capitalism.

In other words, if someone hates 'Dont Stop Til you Get enough' is there a moment when they respond to it as someone who loves it would, before they bring down the drawbridge? Or is that just the arrogant belief of somebody who can't imagine another person not sharing, at some level, their love of it?

Corpsey said:

In other words, if someone hates 'Dont Stop Til you Get enough' is there a moment when they respond to it as someone who loves it would, before they bring down the drawbridge? Or is that just the arrogant belief of somebody who can't imagine another person not sharing, at some level, their love of it?

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interesting question isn't it? what do you think?

luka said:

me and sufi were talking about this. the best thing about the mp3 era was the end of obscurity as token of moral virtue. the fetishistic quality records gained by dint of rarity and expensiveness. that's been utterly exploded by equality of access and the horizontal landscape.

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spotify and youtube destroyed that proto-communistic impulse to an extent. sometimes if im feeling masochistic i wanna bump the mp3 ethics thread.

Corpsey said:

In other words, if someone hates 'Dont Stop Til you Get enough' is there a moment when they respond to it as someone who loves it would, before they bring down the drawbridge? Or is that just the arrogant belief of somebody who can't imagine another person not sharing, at some level, their love of it?

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how do you think it might relate to frigidity, sexual inhibition and impotence?

where do you draw the line between dysfunction and difference?

what needs a cure and what needs understanding/tolerance?

it's fraught territory.