What is good about Pop Music?

[blissblogger]

bit more

while writing the last lengthy peroration a bunch of other postings in came through:


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

i like this idea, this is obviously what the pirate radio continuum did, it created a tribe.... not everybody in London within the certain age parameters was a member by any means, and indeed now as woebot is arguing in the thread on urban music, the grime tribe is actually pretty small suggesting that the hard core of it is surrounded by a floating audience who are much less firmly invested but like bits of it along wiht bashment, hip hop, old skool 2step, r&b etc.

HOWEVER the population/tribe wasn't created ex nihilo , it was created out of the actual population in the normal sense of the city, there are certain tendencies that determine its composition -- which can be analyssed on race/class/gender/etc levels, because the music repels some and attracts others

BUT there is also an elective element to this, you can self-select yourself as tribal member... that is perhaps where the grime bloggerati fit in, uneasily, as people who don't fit the profile in sociological or geographic respects but for other socio-biographic reasons are drawn to it and enter into a fanatical relationship with it

for many grime-bloggerati the attraction is probably 98 percent sonic maybe, but for me beyond the sonic attraction it also has a political dimension (which is what seems to bother--i mean, genuinely perturb and upset--a lot of people, causing them to invoke concepts like liberal guilt, social worker etc) *

the political dimension i would characterize using a word that is totally unfashionable and i'm sure will be seized on by piranha-like hordes for ridicule but it seems like a totally apt word and the word is:

SOLIDARITY

and here i'm just ripping off John Berger** who was interviewed in the observer over the weekend discussing how the word had dropped out of favour and that was the measure of our decline (our i think meaning the Left)

i am just curious why it is considered so inconceivable and and unseemly that an oxbridge-educated off-white person from hertfordshire might feel some kind of connection and empathy (and also admiration) vis-a-viz mostly black youths in london

what a sad fucking world when this is considered intrinsically absurd, don't you think?

isn't that what the power of music is all about -- connection?

this is why i like the metaphor of science because science is based around curiosity -- for me the idea of liking music and not being curious about the people who made it and the nature of their lives is inconceivable


* liberal guilt and social worker:
interesting, isn't it, how 'liberal guilt' has become the shameful thing, as opposed to the actual things -- inequality, deprivation, injustice etc-- that inspire the liberal guilt in the first place. chalk that one up to Thatcher and 25 years of post-socialism

interesting how 'social worker' went from being a respected and even noble profession -- typically pursued by idealistic young men and women with an interest in things like social justice, enabling people to improve their lot etc -- to being considered interfering do-gooders. Chalk that one up to Thatcher and 25 years of post-socialism. incidentally, Simon Frith told me that the Tories hated sociology--in the 70s one of the most popular courses for students--considering it a hotbed of socialism and moved swiftly to supplant it with business studies etc


* *
and yes i'm aware that john berger moved to rural france to live among peasants. but no worries, i'm not moving to stratford any time soon. no nostalgie de la concrete for me.

 

[tek tonic]

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

What is this latterday pop-ism of which you speak? All I hear popist defenders saying is that not being 'authentic' is not a deficiency, which sounds like Frith 101 to me:

Simon Frith says:

My critical principle has always been that a great record can come from anywhere and anyone at any time. It is still possible that the Rolling Stones will make the greatest track of their career, that a Pop Star will put out a single that I'll want to live with daily. The great pleasure of the radio (though increasingly denied by its formats) is that one can hear something without any trappings and be immediately hooked by it. What you call my sympathy to discredited artists really just means that I've trusted my ears first--run out to buy Robbie Williams' "Angel" or the Blue album before realizing how naff it is.

EDIT: WHOOPS - XPOST

 

[dominic]

and i don't feel represented

which is not to say that i even want to feel represented

if anyone can be said to represent me and my experience, etc, it'd probably be the james murphy figures

and i don't want that (not that i'm anti-dfa, it's just not my elixir)

and i suppose that goes some way toward explaining why i'm so addicted to early rave music -- why i keep repeating the same damn pleasures -- b/c the music does not purport to represent -- certainly not *the* reason why i keep listening to it -- but it's one of the main reasons why i've never fully enjoyed subsequent musics, like crunk and dancehall, which are o/w strong contenders

certainly i like the "flavor" that an mc brings to the proceedings -- i.e., the voice going on about something over the music

but once you add mc's to the equation, seems that all they want to do is represent or sell-out (b/c those are the terms of the game)

so when it comes to the representing business -- which means representing, first, class & racial identity, and, second and more important, a certain take on the nature of the real -- i'd say i'm pretty much in sympathy with k-punk

but at same time my reaction bothers me as i know that this is the typical white middle-class reaction to the way that grime & hip hop artists represent the real -- it's as though i've been made to play a game that i don't want to play

i miss the pyschedelic agenda of rave music

 

[dominic]

off-topic this --

interesting how 'social worker' went from being a respected and even noble profession -- typically pursued by idealistic young men and women with an interest in things like social justice, enabling people to improve their lot etc -- to being considered interfering do-gooders.

-- but yeah it's why i'm trying to get into union-side labor law -- openly antagonistic -- no do-gooderism

 

[Melchior]

the test: what is the best pop song of the last ten years?

Wat about Crazy in Love?

 

[k-punk]

What is this latterday pop-ism of which you speak?

This is the most tiresome aspect of this discussion: as Matt established in the opening post on this thread, Popism is everywhere, but especially on NYPLM and ILX, if you want to be specific. The fact that no-one there or elsewhere would define themselves as Popists because, hey, they are more 'complex than that' and they don't 'want to be defined' is only proof of my point earlier that Popism is an ideological pressure, not something anyone can actually live up to. No-one can ONLY enjoy Pop, that's why it has to be imagined that there is someone else somewhere else who can and does.

Simon:

I don't think I'm more rockist than I suspect ---- but then again I don't think you are rockist either. Think Mark S was right a while back when he said on k-p that Popism IS rockism, in that it privileges/ fetishies certain ways of producing affect ----

You and Kodwo moved this discussion on in the 90s --- why retrench now?

Glad you agree with me about the Pope --- it's obv been as intolerable in the US as it has been here by the sounds of it...

 

[scissors]

there is a certain kind of popist "disregard for community" that makes me wonder about the community/population tangent here. can't this "disregard" ostensibly be enacted as a form of ruin against or at least outside the identikit community representations? which is to say it's not a disregard at all but a pretty intricate reflection/navigation process after the net gives way. most (would-be) popists i know were pop fans who had to learn rockism, then abandon it, and then listen to rachel stevens or whoever (some were even teenage girls once!). and this is not w/ a settling into solipsism but w/ a strong sense of inquisition. "what's the roadmap now, what's the criteria now" w/ tomorrow melting into now.

thing about that is it seems to imply a failed personal entry into a community and a slightly mournful if agitated aftermath. insofar as popism does not command subcult-reverence & locality, i think this very looseness gives it a unique fertility, a sense of possibility, a space free of petty bias for exploration, calibration, alignment. i know i know, curators, yuck, pick n mix, yuck, but i dont think social dimensions go away in these cases even if the need for authenticity might. it is thought and analysis and confrontation of contradictions and doing away w/ consumer models. i dont know if i'm talking about popism anymore, i was thinking about the ipod units thing in the original woebot post.

the slight scare for me is wondering where this goes: is it inconceivable that one could become heavily invested in producers of music who are not concentrated and constituted as a community? production-wise it sounds like a formula for record-collector musicians but what of that mode of production and possiblities for populations? i am not entirely convinced this mode of pursuit is mutually exclusive w/ connectivity and even that thing, solidarity, but then again it seems to spell u-n-t-e-n-a-b-l-e.

 

[scissors]

another note: i was reminded a lot about the 90s japanese artists in shibuya when blissblogger called lcd soundsystem 'record-collector' music. cornelius and them, enthusiastic people clustered in a sense of locale ("shibuya-kei") yet it was a 'knowing' pop derived from irreverence, 2nd handness, etc... the fetishization of rootless comsopolitan surfaces as productive community. kinda slight in the long run of things but thought id mention it.

 

[DavidD]

i think reading through this thread (and i am a lil tips so maybe my conclusion is suspect but) i've decided that no one has really defined "popism" the way I think anyone on ILM/etc "practices" it. I still think there is a popist strawman that has been constructed that does not reflect anyone's actual engagement with music.

 

[k-punk]

i think reading through this thread (and i am a lil tips so maybe my conclusion is suspect but) i've decided that no one has really defined "popism" the way I think anyone on ILM/etc "practices" it. I still think there is a popist strawman that has been constructed that does not reflect anyone's actual engagement with music.

1. Can then, as I have repeatedly asked for over a year now, someone provide a definition of Popism that would fit the ineffably complex and too-sophisticated to be pinned down position that IS practised on ILM

OR

2. accept my point that the reason that popism is not practised anywhere it that it is an ideology of consuming Pop that has nothing to do with how ppl - even the solipsists on ILM - consume it. The strawman is therefore the strawman constructed by Popists themselves, and the reasons why ppl like myself object to Popism is precisely 'because it does not reflect anyone's actual engagement with music.''

 

[k-punk]

Thing is, the one group that definitely are Popists are the people controlling the music industry and reality tv. (This is a very British perspective I'll grant you...)

The reason why it is relevant to bring up the example of teenage girls liking Japan and Roxy is not because teenage girls are the ultimate arbiters of anything, but because it is evidence that audiences will consume material that is far more challenging than the current Popist hegemony will allow.

The assumption of the industry is that teenage girls will only ever like a certain kind of narrowly-defined 'Pop' act. That assumption has real effects.

Of course another issue is how it is that demographo-mongers and PR inanities have managed to regain control of the industry - and that, fundamentally, is about a consumer logic replacing populcation dynamics. It's absurd to say that there was a pre-existing glam community waiting for Roxy to represent it. In many ways, genius IS scenius: Ferry was able to mobilize potentials within people from which a new glam population could be produced. But that population then had further effects on the sonic and image production of the groups. Cybernetics, feedback.

The industry now operates like any other: with 'consumers' defined and packaged according to criteria defined by marketers.

 

[blissblogger]

sixties/retrench

picking up on a couple of kpunk points:

>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.

i can understand your generational impetus to make a break with the Sixties, but your idea of what the Sixties was is a construct i think -- a lot of sixties stuff was very glam -- the whole milieu around Syd Barrett for instance -- the way groups like the Byrds or Jefferson Airplane dressed (grace slick virtually is siouxsie sioux) it's very stylized and not scruffy at all, and many performers of that time were totally about glamour in the olde sense of witchery -- think of the shamanic thing that jim morrison had going, or jimi hendrix -- even a group like incredible string band are not 'natural' or 'folksy' in any simple way, their music is a hybrid and their image was intensely stylized
-- and what about the mods -- or think of how tyrannosaurus rex turned into T-Rex

what you're contrasting glam with, i think, is a specific turn away from psychedelia and glamour that occurred in the last two years of the sixties -- the blues boom -- also the influence of the Band with this kind of Americana sepia-tone daguerrotype image and woodsy sound (Ian macdonald has a very good essay on the impact of the first Band album)

i interviewed manzanera once and he said it was the kind of bands that were around at the very end of the sixties and very early seventies -- blues bore bands, festival bands, heavy rock bands -- that were very shabby and beardy that Roxy were a reaction against

the psychedelic era seems proto-glam to me in a lot of ways --

also think that to make Roxy a total break with the sixties leads you to over-emphasize Ferry and downplay the role of Eno and Manzanera, both very much children of the Sixties

>you and kodwo... why retrench

i don't see it as retrenchment but more identifying what you really value and what are the sources of the things that excite you -- and part of the 'retrenchment" actually came from reading More Brilliant than the Sun and being ultimately dissatisfied with its vision

after all More Brilliant does a similar thing to the Pop-ist tendency, jettisoning the biographical/social/historical/political axes (the baby with the rockist bathwater) to focus entirely on the moment of collision between the decontextualized sonic artifact and the decontextualized body-mind of the listener

it's an extreme form of aestheticism, an auteurism that disposes of the actual flesh-and-blood, historically situated auteur

what's seductive about it is that Kodwo does this jettisoning of all other criteria as a strategy of intensification -- extreme focus on the thing-itself -- perhaps c.f. Tim F's formalism

although i think again that this very insistence on intensification means that kodwo's actual sensibilty is rockist -- in so far as it's about intensity, vision (he draws up a canon of auditionaries, as i think he coins it), quest -- about seriousness and the refusal of irony -- a passionate commitment to these moments of aesthetic breakthrough and discontinuum -- also rockist is the strenousness aspect -- the idea that you submit yourself to aesthetic experiences that are quite punishing (breakbeats so densely tangled they twist your bodymind and turn the dancefloor into a battlezone zone of rhythmically maimed dancers), there's quite a lot of masochistic imagery in More Brilliant Than the Sun

rockism, i think people get confused cos they think it's got something to electric guitars -- rockism as i'm using it and revalorizing it predates rock'n'roll

 

[tek tonic]

Think Mark S was right a while back when he said on k-p that Popism IS rockism, in that it privileges/ fetishies certain ways of producing affect ----

Right, and then went on to say (and I quote) "I also think the "popist" is totally a strawman, really: though it's true that, somewhat for forensic *and* critical-strategic effect, at war with the world or with myself, I find it helpful to take as read that every #1 is BY DEFINITION "good pop", whether or not I personally like it or think it's significant or fun-revealing-exciting-annoying-truthseeking to talk abt..."

As mark s sort of argued, there's a world of difference between being resistant to rockism's strictures (as many people are, myself included) and thinking that chart success/50 million elvis fans can't be wrong/the industry as it functions/whatever is somehow the greatest or only arbiter of music that they will personally like.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't this popist strawman arose out of a question of whether pop could have bad years or patches - the 'poptimist' question? Somewhere in there, I suspect the strawman make the jump from arguing that being pop produced by committee or whatever is not a deficiency, to arguing that being "produced for imaginary communities" is somehow a virtue in and of itself, which I can't recall having seen anybody argue on NYLPM or elsewhere.

 

[joeschmo]

blissblogger sez:

"i am just curious why it is considered so inconceivable and and unseemly that an oxbridge-educated off-white person from hertfordshire might feel some kind of connection and empathy (and also admiration) vis-a-viz mostly black youths in london

what a sad fucking world when this is considered intrinsically absurd, don't you think?"

Begging the question... if an oxbridge-educated etc person can show solidarity, why can't a St. Martin's-educated person?

 

[k-punk]

On Simon's points:

the Roxy stuff is a bit OT I suppose, it shd have its own thread.... But, briefly, there's a world of difference, surely, between Roxy and someone like Syd Barrett... and yes, that is to do with Ferry, who is the breakthrough/ break-out figure for me.. Eno was always very adept at fitting into whatever milieu he found himself in... (Just been reading that [relatively] new Ferry/ Roxy bio, always find myself siding with Bryan not Brian...)

As for auteurism: I'm a kind of poststructuralist auteurist really.... I tried to develop this on alt.movies.kubrick in relation to SK... I mean, what we are talking about when we are refer to an auteur is not a biographical person but a set of semiotic traits and singularities. We're only interested in biography because of those traits, those singularities (and not vice versa). So I'm inclined to think that auteurs are never 'historically situated'...

I know you disagree with Kodwo on many points, but the 'retrenchment' I'm referring to concerns retreating from what was learned through rave etc.... That moved things on beyond this stale rockist-popist binary....

 

[blissblogger]

wee bit more

>Begging the question... if an oxbridge-educated etc person can show solidarity, why can't a St. Martin's->educated person?

well i suppose it all depends whether you consider Arular an act of solidarity innit...

>Bryan vs Brian

i guess that's where we differ mark, cos for me to the extent to which Ferry's vision triumphs over the others is the extent to which Roxy get less and less interesting as something to listen to

>what was learned through rave

well i think those lessons (i first typed lesions!) are still there (the scenius idea mainly), but i guess you're talking about radical impersonality, machinic processes etc etc.... a lot of that, i think, was really sustained through the E-haze, those kind of perceptions, which doesn't mean they're not true (they might be truer) but they're less sustainable in the everyday, sober life.... and i think it's not just me that's woken up from the haze and returned to "reality" with a grim sickening bump, it's the scene -- look at Grime -- the return of facialisation, personality.... that's another place we disagree, your impersonalism... i don't think one can understand grime, or hip hop, without reference to ideas of the personality, character, charisma etc

as for dehistoricized auteurism... well i studied history and have never found this way of looking at things especially delibidinizing or whatever... it can be done well or it can be done boringly

whenever you write your (witty, i admit) riff about how nothing is more delibidizing than the phrase "based on a true story" i'm afraid the cliche "truth is stranger than fiction" always springs to mind

plus, you occasionally do this self-situating thing -- e.g. your references to being working class! i guess radical impersonalism is a rocky road with many lapses on the way

 

[k-punk]

>

>Bryan vs Brian

i guess that's where we differ mark, cos for me to the extent to which Ferry's vision triumphs over the others is the extent to which Roxy get less and less interesting as something to listen to

But that begs the question about what Ferry's vision is; for instance, he thought that the first album and FYP were the best, so I think this is more complex than it might at first appear. (Eno, unbelievably, thought that Stranded was the best Roxy album). And in a way, this is precisely the point: the decline of Roxy was almost entirely down to cultural factors, not to Ferry's individual vision. And: what is called Ferry's vision was only possible during a certain moment of population coalescence.

>what was learned through rave

well i think those lessons (i first typed lesions!) are still there (the scenius idea mainly), but i guess you're talking about radical impersonality, machinic processes etc etc.... a lot of that, i think, was really sustained through the E-haze, those kind of perceptions, which doesn't mean they're not true (they might be truer) but they're less sustainable in the everyday, sober life.... and i think it's not just me that's woken up from the haze and returned to "reality" with a grim sickening bump, it's the scene -- look at Grime -- the return of facialisation, personality.... that's another place we disagree, your impersonalism... i don't think one can understand grime, or hip hop, without reference to ideas of the personality, character, charisma etc

The point is not, and never has been, that there is no such thing as personality; nor that there are some things that are personal and other things that are 'impersonal'. The point (of Spinoza, Marx, Freud, structuralism, cybernetics, Lacan... ) is that the personal IS impersonal: that the personal explains nothing but itself requires explanation. Such explanation can only come through structures which are not themselves personal...

as for dehistoricized auteurism... well i studied history and have never found this way of looking at things especially delibidinizing or whatever... it can be done well or it can be done boringly

I wouldn't quite say it was delibidinizing, I'd say it was libidinally false. Genuine libidinal situations are always indifferent to context and posterity. Auteurs are interesting not because they express history, but because they escape it. They create their own precursors, as Borges brilliantly argues in his essay on Kafka. If this seems to contradict what I said above about populations/ culture, I think that is only superficially; in a seeming paradox, then are moments in - it would be better to say 'out' - of History, capital H, in which it is possible to get to Now...

There's a Nietzschean Last Man-type quality about historicizing analysis; one of Nietzsche's most prescient points about postmodern culture was that it would be killed by an obsession with the past, with its own 'positioning'. Such contextualization can only lead to the melancholy conclusion that all things pass, that everything that people once invested so much in is now dust etc. By contrast, Roman and Greek cultures were indifferent to history. They thought they were the only cultures.

whenever you write your (witty, i admit) riff about how nothing is more delibidizing than the phrase "based on a true story" i'm afraid the cliche "truth is stranger than fiction" always springs to mind

But that always puts Lacan's idea that truth appears in the form of fiction into my mind. Truth isn't opposed to fiction, far from it. Truth is opposed to the empirical.

(btw it's not only me who thinks that; such films almost always do extraordinarily badly at the box office... that's only a point of information obv, appeals to popularity being fallacious)

plus, you occasionally do this self-situating thing -- e.g. your references to being working class! i guess radical impersonalism is a rocky road with many lapses on the way

But references to class/ sexuality/ sex etc ARE 'radically impersonalising' ---- what is class if not an impersonal force? Recognizing it is recognizing the degree to which you are the product of impersonal machines, surely.

More generally, what I'm wanting is for it to be accepted that the popist critique of rockism was well-put, but that popism itself, insofar as it exists, is parasitic upon the rockism it affects to disdain. What I'm waiting for is a new position to be articulated that not only actually reflects how ppl DO deal with Pop (both rockism and popism fail on this score) but also dares to specify what is positive (socially, libidinally) about Pop. One of the annoying things about Popism is its pretence of pure description: too much 'is', not enough 'ought'. I think such a position wd have to draw upon the Dance music paradigm rather than be sucked back into binaries from twenty years ago.

 

[dominic]

Auteurs are interesting not because they express history, but because they escape it . . . . If this seems to contradict what I said above about populations/ culture, I think that is only superficially; in a seeming paradox, then are moments in - it would be better to say 'out' - of History, capital H, in which it is possible to get to Now...

There's a Nietzschean Last Man-type quality about historicizing analysis; one of Nietzsche's most prescient points about postmodern culture was that it would be killed by an obsession with the past, with its own 'positioning'. Such contextualization can only lead to the melancholy conclusion that all things pass, that everything that people once invested so much in is now dust etc. By contrast, Roman and Greek cultures were indifferent to history.

this is perhaps too cheeky by far -- and i don't want to take this conversation off topic, i.e., i find conversations like the present one far more productive (and thoughtful) than conversations over in the thought section of dissensus -- but the impish & needy child in me can never resist opportunity to score petty points -- so let me just say it now: doesn't the above passage remind of the argument of heidegger's "being and time" -- which of course grew out of h's reflections on n's "uses and abuses of history"

 

[dominic]

getting back to the community vs populations distinction, i'd like to salvage this point that blissblogger made . . . .

the population/tribe wasn't created ex nihilo , it was created out of the actual population in the normal sense of the city, there are certain tendencies that determine its composition -- which can be analyssed on race/class/gender/etc levels, because the music repels some and attracts others

yes -- but w/ rave you had the sense that the scene was a newly open & contested field -- and so you literally had people from all kinds of musical & music scene backgrounds rushing in to stake their claim -- rock 'n' rollers, punk rock vets, industrial music people, ja soundsystem people, hip hop people

and not just people who had actually made rock n roll or hip hop, but people who identified with such scenes or at least preferred this or that kind of music

and then all at once -- in a kind of "population" explosion -- all these people staked a claim to being members of the raving massive -- or in the case of the balearic crowd, they claimed for themselves a kind of elite status, i.e., part of the scene but above the scene, arbiters of the new sounds

and in a very complex process people both shed their previous identities and yet remained determined by those previous identities = hardcore ravers were working class, the balearic crowd middle class, etc

and there was a real battle that went on to establish who had the best claim to "rave" music, who the real leaders of this revolution would prove to be . . . .

and only retrospectively is it apparent that certain hip hop & ja soundsystem veterans captured the essence of the music in certain 90/91/92 productions

there was simply too much tumult and clamor at the time to even know

BY CONTRAST -- with grime we already know who the stalwarts are, we already know in advance who has the best claim to the field of production

BUT there is also an elective element to this, you can self-select yourself as tribal member...

and yes -- it was not simply the case that working class kids from east london went for hardcore rave music, or that middle class kids from brighton went for balearic sounds, or whatever --

there was a great deal of freedom amidst the tumult of 90/91/92 to select your own tribe, to shed your previous loyalties and affiliations for entirely new clothes

that is perhaps where the grime bloggerati fit in, uneasily, as people who don't fit the profile in sociological or geographic respects but for other socio-biographic reasons are drawn to it and enter into a fanatical relationship with it

again -- w/ rave this was not an issue -- but you tell me, you're the expert!!! -- i for the most part wasn't even there!!! -- but there was no insider/outsider divide based on "real world identities" to navigate -- you had a lot of freedom to choose your tribe -- though obviously those who championed a sound for the longest time had the most cred w/ partisans of that sound -- or those who had been going to the right parties had the most cred w/ partisans of those parties -- but the point is that here everything depended on one's *own actions* and one's *own decisions*-- and very little depended on one's real world identity, one's place in the social structure, or even one's prior life history

but with grime it matters whether a person is working class or middle class, black or white -- such that for the white middle class person getting into grime is more like a show of solidarity than true membership in the scene

for many grime-bloggerati the attraction is probably 98 percent sonic maybe, but for me beyond the sonic attraction it also has a political dimension (which is what seems to bother--i mean, genuinely perturb and upset--a lot of people, causing them to invoke concepts like liberal guilt, social worker etc) . . . . the political dimension i would characterize using a word that is totally unfashionable and i'm sure will be seized on by piranha-like hordes for ridicule but it seems like a totally apt word and the word is . . . . SOLIDARITY

again, w/ rave it wasn't limited to solidarity

rather solidarity seems like a gesture people now make b/c having been swept up in rave, or having had their musical compass determined by rave sounds, they recognize the grime massive as the rightful inheritors of the rave scene -- and so the show of solidarity is more like an acknowledgment or display of recognition of the grime people's status as the rightful heirs

what had been an open if highly contested field is now a closed field w/ acknowledged owners

and surely the fact that nobody owned "rave" goes a long way toward explaining its success as an export to america and other parts of the world

whereas with grime it's more like a case of buying that which you can never own

 

[dominic]

and i should add that this is why i still give my loyalty, at the end of the day, to the dance scene

i'd say that w/in the cosmopolitan dance scene that people of afro-carribean descent are regarded more as firsts among equals, or that it's recognized that they have a special claim or relationship to the music . . . .

and yet i know serbians, italian gypsies, moroccans, etc, who have full membership -- you simply have to "get" the music and "understand" what the scene is about

even white middle-class americans are allowed membership . . . .

if they elect membership, they get membership