luka

Well-known member
a new territory is opened up in a series of daring raids and incursions, then it is thoroughly explored and mapped, then it is settled.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
the Ezra Pound quote is true, and actually related to the Wyndham Lewis quote that I quoted you the other day Luka, about how if you cannot make distinctions between first-rate, second rate and third-trate you can't say anything useful about art.

but (on the wood rather than trees level), the dilution phase of a music's evolution - which its dispersal phase also - is the sign of its success.

it's actually gone out into the world and it's changed the world.

I use this term "positive unoriginality", which is to do with this syndrome of When the Radio Changes.

And it applies actually to pirate radio as much as to mainstream radio

but i'm thinking of mainstream radio really, which is when a group or producer comes along and their new sound is so potent that everyone has to copy it.

Timbaland is a great example

but you could also say Nirvana / Butch Vig's production

or Giorgio Moroder

or Niles Rodgers

and I call it "positive unoriginality" because on the one hand, yes, these second-rate artists are derivative etc

but by doing good work that's heavily impressed by the signature or trademark innovations of another, they are helping to establish the innovation across the culture

so it's stops being just one quirky supercreative individual's sound, but a property of all music (or at least the dominant music of an era)

so dilution / over-saturation is the triumphant outcome of an innovation

that's why innovation and originality are not the same thing necessarily

"positive unoriginality" sounds a bit like Eno's scenius, but it's not really, because acknowledges the existence of and the germinal role of geniuses - it's not actually claiming all innovation comes through collective processes, but for them to be successful innovations, ones that "take", they need to be collectivized. which means that the figures that Pound sneers at are actually playing a useful role, they are like craftsmen, they have musical skill - they can do good work, once they've been shown the way forward
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
From mind blowing to crowd pleasing

What "bravery" has to do with it is another question.

Arguably there was bravery in the Beatles experiments because they were previously a pop band with a clean image, and because nobody was necessarily going to be receptive to something so strange as Tomorrow Never Knows.

Sometimes, though, it surely isn't bravery but boredom that inspires experiments, and is excitement not courage that fuels creativity.
 

luka

Well-known member
positive originality is the phase of thoroughly exploring and mapping the newly discovered territory. it's vital. it's the best stage in a way. slightly less heroic than the initial incursion but even so.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
the figures that Pound sneers at are actually playing a useful role, they are like craftsmen, they have musical skill - they can do good work, once they've been shown the way forward
And who is to say that they might not have been the innovators if only they had come along a little earlier? The fact that someone is technically skilled in a particular genre doesn't preclude their having the ability to innovate too. But in general there is always a tension between the innovators in a sound and the followers, I often think that people often venerate people who made "proto" something more than those who made the actual thing, but without that actual thing developing into a genre then there would be nothing to venerate them for creating.
 

luka

Well-known member
yes i think we are all in agreement. the exploration and mapping phase is a vital, fertile and exciting phase. but the thread is not about mapping. cultural cowardice is something different. what can be lumped under retromania. is stagnation not the free-flowing water.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
that's assuming that the people who were into Big Beat were the same people who had been into rave and then retreated it from it

in fact i should think there was virtually no crossover

the people who had got into Big Beat were probably in large degree people who had been (and still were) into Britpop

so in a certain sense that is a forward movement for them, into some form of beats-and-bass-and-samples culture - a rock'n'roll version of it for sure

meanwhile no one who was actually into rave / hardcore is retreating from - they are actually following its logic through with jungle, drum and bass etc

actually that's not entirely true

the cowardice move there would be people who had been into rave /91-92 hardcore and then went back to softer option of club-oriented house - handbag, funky house (the original kind), progressive house

i think the idea of a cultural retreat is based on an idea of there being a single unitary pop culture

whereas in fact the kind of people who never accepted or had any time for rave remained non-accepting

they weren't up for it, and then suddenly not up for it


What about those who got into hard techno? not exactly hardcore rave but not totally separate from it either.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
thirdform loves it when i quote ezra pound so here we go

"When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:

Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.

The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.

The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.

Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. For example, men who wrote sonnets in Dante’s time, men who wrote short lyrics in Shakespeare’s time or for several decades thereafter, or who wrote French novels and stories after Flaubert had shown them how.

Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.

The starters of crazes.

Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees’. He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library of beautifully printed books, bound in the most luxurious bindings, but he will never be able to sort out what he knows to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.

He will never understand why a specialist is annoyed with him for trotting out a second- or third-hand opinion about the merits of his favourite bad writer. "

yeah well, that sounds like 18th century enlightenment french salon shit.

no wonder he became a fascist. he was obsessed with existence being an actual predicate rather than mediated through the subject. he was even behind Kant on this. he cannot prefigure the future and his avantgardism becomes conservative for exactly this reason.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
both realism and fantasy (as genres) are the enemy of a theory of aesthetics.

this is why i got really depressed after reading zadie smith's white teath earlier this year. and why i haven't read a book since. Absurdist realism is not a positive hardcore. it is only so for a certain type of cultivated bien pensant liberal.
 

luka

Well-known member
yes, this is why i am trying to hammer this idea of psychedelic literature into the collective dissensus
head. it really is there and the best expositor of it is the groupname for grapejuice blog.
me and him discovered it independently. literary modernism is a psychedelic movement
culminating in finnegans wake.
 

luka

Well-known member
yeah well, that sounds like 18th century enlightenment french salon shit.

no wonder he became a fascist. he was obsessed with existence being an actual predicate rather than mediated through the subject. he was even behind Kant on this. he cannot prefigure the future and his avantgardism becomes conservative for exactly this reason.

you would be better off chewing your food before swallowing.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
u shud read j.g ballard, naguib mahfouz, tayeb salih, toni morrison for some real shit. maybe some Ursula Le Guin aswell.

All of them would be considered diluters by Pound but then his idols admired the british raj. It's crap this theory of aesthetics, it's basically platonic forms for secular atheists. i think an aesthetic theory of good taste is necessary but even Adorno started off with the wrong premises. i like stuart hall for this instead, too much marxism sees culture as topdown culture.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you would be better off chewing your food before swallowing.

allow that. food is of really bad quality these days i remember the days when i lived off one stop chicken tika microwave meals for nearly 2 years. i had to smoke spliffs every time i ate, even if i had meetings and i looked red eye.
 

luka

Well-known member
i've just realised that there is an assumption buried in all this that i should probably make explicit;
it's the notion that consciousness is a shared space, a commons.
i think this is where some of the confusion is creeping in.
porosity is my watchword.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you would be better off chewing your food before swallowing.

the problem with english literature bods is they want us to identify with characters and personalities that psychically underdeveloped us, and through their art. this makes sense for an academic. But I'm self taught. Literature is a wound for us. I don't even think it's possible for us to love the cannon in the same way an oxford don would. But then again if I have the misfortune of having kids in this country then who knows.

Not that I want to go back to the middle east either, and if someone said to me, thirdform, here's your home, will you accept it? with a great sense of melancholy and sadness i would have to say no.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like, i cannot read a text from the vantage point of the death of the author.

but neither can i read it, as a form unto itself.
 

luka

Well-known member
do you think there is such a thing as altered states of consciousness?
modernism is about those states. it is not about characters and stories.
 
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