What is good about Pop Music?

[dominic]

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.

by contrast, even though the "massive" is a construct insofar as each member of the massive relates to the massive's field of production differently, i.e., some make music, some only listen to the pirates, some only buy records, others do all three but to various degrees, etc -- and also a construct insofar as each member has his own relationship to musics from outside the field of production -- it is also the case that people claim to be part of the massive, they struggle for the right to say that they are members and that others are posers or trend-spotters

so when blissblogger and woebot express an anxiety about not being "real" members of the massive, and so not having a "real" relationship with the massive's music, they don't do so from a position of condescension -- rather they are stating social facts that both they and members of the massive recognize and acknowledge

nobody claims to just like pop music -- that position is always for the other

but people fight for the right to belong to the massive

or else they cede the right to others and wonder what that means for their own position

 

[dominic]

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.

i think that eppy's pop-1/pop-2/pop-3 is a helpful *descriptive* scheme that fits with the experiene of dance music -- but i seem to be the only person here that finds it useful

as for the "ought" side of the equation, surely people at dissensus have views on this?

 

[blissblogger]

hip priest

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). .

interesting ( i suppose we should start a roxy thread for this), that's good taste on Ferry's part -- shame he so swiftly moved away from the 1st and 2nd albums style then!

always thought eno said this to be gracious and not seem like a sore loser -- also it is a very good album, in places

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. .

hmmm, you'd have to explain this a bit more for me to grasp... i thought a lot of what happened with Roxy was purely that they were in huge debt and had to break America to have a chance of making any dosh

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... .

it's true --and pointing these structures and processes out i think is a salutary thing to do, which is why i do it--that individuals are products of these impersonal and structural things -- but that's only going to take you so far i think -- you can take any auteur and subject them to all these different axes of typology and place them and depersonalize them but in the end there's something that eludes that kind of analysis -- can you in the end really explain Mark E. Smith in these terms say? how do you explain grain of the voice or charisma? or the weird vocal tics from someone like D Double E? perhaps they're not personal in the sense that is non grata for you but they're certainly somatic, the product of a specific body.

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... .

that sounds a bit like the pop-ist now, except more jouissance-y than plaisir-y

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..

i agree that describes our decadence... but how do you put the blinkers back on?

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. ..

that's kinda playing a word game with 'truth' innit -- obviously in the sentence 'truth is stranger than fiction' they mean truth as in what actually happened, the empirical -- i'd probably agree 'the empirical is stranger than fiction' -- or at least it can be as strange -- that's what i felt while writing the postpunk book: you couldn't make up some of these stories.

(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) ..

erm, Schindler's List? the aviator? (not making any argument on the merits of either here, just on box office ), there' loads of hugely popular films based on true stories! Deadwood, probably the best thing on TV currently , is partly based on true historical characters

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.

this is a bit too subtle for me mark -- i would say though that it's not a retreat or a retrenchment in so far as 'rockist' has never been used as a positive term before, it's always been an insult, i've used it as insult
for most of my writing career... it's the word no one wants to be accused of being,

it's only recently when i realized that 'rockist' was being used as a word to basically eliminate or delegitimize any axis of argument upon one might issue the judgement "trivial/urgent" that it's struck me that most of the things i like about music are actually 'rockist', and it might be time to reconsider the word

but you know i don't think either -izm is really a particularly precise body of ideas, it's really about sensibility and temperament

i think when you think of 'rockism' you are thinking about ideas of 'depth vs surface' but ... that move some of us made in the 90s whereby we started celebrating the surface of sound etc, it didn't really get rid of the model -- it just turned 'surface' or 'sound in itself' into the new depth !-- by which i mean the thing to base your 'trivial/urgent' assessments around, to get all heated and fired up about

popism would dispose of that because 'trivial/urgent' posits an intrinsic objective quality to the artefact whereas in popism it's all about the ear of the beholder. it's the judgemental tone itself that is anathema

my earlier comments way upthread on consumer rights were tinged with lunacy (i did write them very fast) but what makes me think they have some purchase on reality is actually the whole debate about 'guilty pleasures' -- some people get very offended by this concept, the idea is 'why should i feel guilty about liking anything', which is a short step to 'if it pleasures me, it's good' -- so the introduction of any kind of moralizing frame (by which i mean any criteria whatsoever -- political, etc etc beyond the hedonic) that is rockist, that is wrong, that impinges on my right to enjoy whatsoever pleases me

the temperamental difference is at core between gnostic and agnostic, belief and nonbelief, the idea of truth and the irrelevance of 'truth' as category

which is your recent writings about religions etc have been so interesting as a development out of all this ,

about time i read badiou really

 

[craner]

...

 

[dominic]

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

k-punk can speak for himself -- but i don't think that k-punk has any objection to "charisma" -- on the contrary! -- rather his objection to these charismatic grime & hip hop figures is that despite their charisma they still "represent" the hood, i.e., it's a twofold representation: (1) this is where i come from, these are my people, and i'm representing them, staying true to them, staying true the streets; and (2) this is the representation of the world that i offer, a tough & mean world, of gangstas and playas, posers and sissies, bitches and hos and sell-outs, and i've got the baddest rap so don't mess with me, etc -- and so they remain prisoners of empirical reality who reinforce the bonds of empirical reality

 

[dominic]

the temperamental difference is at core between gnostic and agnostic, belief and nonbelief, the idea of truth and the irrelevance of 'truth' as category

yes yes yes yes yes -- that's it in a nutshell

 

[dominic]

you can take any auteur and subject them to all these different axes of typology and place them and depersonalize them but in the end there's something that eludes that kind of analysis -- can you in the end really explain Mark E. Smith in these terms say? how do you explain grain of the voice or charisma? or the weird vocal tics from someone like D Double E? perhaps they're not personal in the sense that is non grata for you but they're certainly somatic, the product of a specific body.

this is nature at its most undeniable

and it's surely non grata to any good kantian

(k-punk's spinozism perhaps makes him a bad kantian, i.e., perhaps for k-punk the somatic is not non grata)

you can resent it, but you can't fully extirpate it

 

[k-punk]

this is a bit too subtle for me mark -- i would say though that it's not a retreat or a retrenchment in so far as 'rockist' has never been used as a positive term before, it's always been an insult, i've used it as insult
for most of my writing career... it's the word no one wants to be accused of being,

Fair enough, that's certainly true: but as I said before, it's not as if it wasn't used that way without good reason

it's only recently when i realized that 'rockist' was being used as a word to basically eliminate or delegitimize any axis of argument upon one might issue the judgement "trivial/urgent" that it's struck me that most of the things i like about music are actually 'rockist', and it might be time to reconsider the word

Well, that, for me, pinpoints exactly what is wrong with the dominant Popist hegemony. And, before I hav to hear about strawmen again, it's worth stressing that these ideas really are oppressive. Ppl come down on you like a ton of bricks if you dare suggest that X is more worthwhile than Y or that Z is trivial froth, and that trivial froth is bad.... Compulsory relativism, with an attendant obligatory self-deprecation.... 'Who am I to say... it's all just a matter of opinion... Some ppl think that Westlife are as important as PiL...'

but you know i don't think either -izm is really a particularly precise body of ideas, it's really about sensibility and temperament

i think when you think of 'rockism' you are thinking about ideas of 'depth vs surface' but ... that move some of us made in the 90s whereby we started celebrating the surface of sound etc, it didn't really get rid of the model -- it just turned 'surface' or 'sound in itself' into the new depth !-- by which i mean the thing to base your 'trivial/urgent' assessments around, to get all heated and fired up about

Wasn't that Mark S's point about popism=rockism, because both fetishise a certain way of delivering affect?

Having any sort of criteria at all (even delivering affect would be 'too limiting' because consumers might not always WANT affect, lol) is the problem for Popism... and one of the irritating things about it is its pretence that, because it doesn't have a STATED ideology, it is listening without presuppositions....But even saying that is too 'limiting', because their enjoyment might not involve listening.... The ideology is that they just enjoy... Why can't we? Anti-intellectualism is a major part of it (often a feature of middle class ideologies)...

popism would dispose of that because 'trivial/urgent' posits an intrinsic objective quality to the artefact whereas in popism it's all about the ear of the beholder. it's the judgemental tone itself that is anathema

Yes.... the judgemental tone... This for me is cut across by the modernist/ postmodernist thing, and is part of the reason why I've been trying to revive the term modernism recently... I guess modernism is interesting because it is anti-Romantic (cf T.S. Eliot's insistent move of positioning modernism as classicist) but about as far from populist as can be imagined...

think the idea of 'intrinsic properties' is not straightforward, not because everything is in the ear of beholder, more because it seems to me to be more about potentials: texts of whatever kind are sets of potentials that can only be actualised in certain conditions of reception...

my earlier comments way upthread on consumer rights were tinged with lunacy (i did write them very fast)

Only tinged with the lunacy of capitalism, because Popism is quite clearly about consumer rights; that's why it cuts across this mp3 thing so much, which seems to be about the 'rights' to unlimited consumption --- and to hell with producers. Popism is a dream for capitalist ideologues because it is a straightforward statement of capitalist ideology: enjoy, enjoy, work harder at enjoying... so consumer rights actually turn out to be about the obligation to be a good consumer, so that if, for instance, you dare to sugges that Pop might not be so hot at the moment, you are berated for not looking hard enough...

but what makes me think they have some purchase on reality is actually the whole debate about 'guilty pleasures' -- some people get very offended by this concept, the idea is 'why should i feel guilty about liking anything', which is a short step to 'if it pleasures me, it's good' -- so the introduction of any kind of moralizing frame (by which i mean any criteria whatsoever -- political, etc etc beyond the hedonic) that is rockist, that is wrong, that impinges on my right to enjoy whatsoever pleases me

yes, quite, as if these notions of 'me' and 'pleasure' are completely unpolitical and pretheoretical... again, that is bourgeois ideology through and through.... But I think you've also put yr finger on the problem I have with occupying 'rockism' as a positive term... just because Popists say that it is rockist doesn't mean that it is....

the temperamental difference is at core between gnostic and agnostic, belief and nonbelief, the idea of truth and the irrelevance of 'truth' as category

which is your recent writings about religions etc have been so interesting as a development out of all this ,

about time i read badiou really

At the risk of being evangelical lol I would say that you would enjoy it... partly because it is so committed, so dismissive of consumerist triviocracy, so much about fidelity to events, so much about criteria....

 

[tek tonic]

Well, that, for me, pinpoints exactly what is wrong with the dominant Popist hegemony. And, before I hav to hear about strawmen again, it's worth stressing that these ideas really are oppressive. Ppl come down on you like a ton of bricks if you dare suggest that X is more worthwhile than Y or that Z is trivial froth, and that trivial froth is bad.... Compulsory relativism, with an attendant obligatory self-deprecation.... 'Who am I to say... it's all just a matter of opinion... Some ppl think that Westlife are as important as PiL...'

the main fault that i can see in this interpretation of the popist position is that you assume a popist can only allow satisfaction on one level, can only evaluate surface and not depth. what you describe is popism taken to its extreme - things with depth (X) cannot be allowed to have any value, because if they are judged in that way, Y (the trivial froth) is judged as inferior. and of course, rockism taken to the same ridciulous extreme says that 'trivial froth' cannot be allowed to have any value, because then any judgements of depth will be worthless.

my question is, why are the two mutually exclusive? can we not agree that Kylie is mostly surface and little or no depth, John Cage is mostly depth and little or no surface, and that the abundance of one characteristic doesn't negate the presence of the other?

Xgau is one of my favorite critics, because he endorses the marketplace (okay, capitalism) as an arbiter of a certain kind of value, while acknowledging that other music has value that the marketplace utterly fails to recognize. as a critic, i think he shows pretty convincingly that there is a happy medium. what's wrong with having your cake and eating it too?

 

[Tim F]

Too much now has happened since I last posted for me to respond to it all (really liked yr post immediately responding to my last one though Mark), so I'll limit myself to a couple of things for now:

Firstly, since Mark has pretty much come out and said that "popism" as a critical practice is exemplified by Freaky Trigger and Geezaesthetics, I want to question some of the characterisations of this practice. Specifically, that it is geared solely toward enjoyment, that it resists all attempts at judgment, and that it reduces all critical reception to that of a middle-aged manager sitting in a pub listening to Kylie (As a quarter-aged manager who has often sat in pubs listening to Kylie I'm hesitant to accept that the critical reception of such a person is self-evident, but we'll leave that aside for now).

While I'm hardly an expert on Geezaesthetics in particular, from my exposure to it I think Mark is mis-reading it a bit. It's true that there is a certain level of critical "levelling" here which is consistent with postmodernism generally, but it is not, or at least not primarily, levelling in the service of enjoyment. The Manifesto states "We think a meal or a bus ride can be as <i>interesting</i> as a painting or a record" (emphasis mine). Together with the rest of the Manifesto's insistence that "We place a high value on criticism that makes us think in new ways or about new things...We place the highest possible value on criticism that makes us talk more, anything to enhance our conversation," I think it's fairly clear that, for the geezaesthete's purposes, the value of a cultural artifact appears to be the sum total of what can be said or thought of it, the extent to which it can revitalise and rejuvenate discourse. Thus, rather than repressing critical engagement in the name of a respect for the individual's enjoyment, geezaesthetics subordinates individual enjoyment to public debate and critical engagement (for which "conversation" is merely a congenial codeword).

Or, as Alex Thompson put it on ILM: " If I understand geezaesthetics (to which I don't subscribe) it seems to imply that the critical value of art derives from the way it can be invoked and defended in a particular argumentative context. Which is clearly a long way from saying 'anything goes'. Equally the Kogan / Eddy school of thought seems to be about treating popular and non-popular musics as fundamentally equal (in principle) but different in practice (i.e. hipster listening to indie thinking 'I am cool' != housewife listening to mainstream country and thinking 'I identify with that' != kid listening to anything and saying 'I like this' != critic listening and thinking 'what the hell can I say about this for cash") and the differences in practice are what's worth talking about, rather than getting hung up on which is better in principle. (And certainly doesn't stop them judging good / bad within categories, or from being in love with how the categories are constantly changing so bad one thing might turn out to be good something else)." ["!=" meaning "is not the same as"]

In other words, the value of art is directly referable in its potential for social "actualisation" in the form of an articulation of the receptive engagement (in case you think I mean that art's value is the criticism it inspires, I don't, quite; rather that the criticism it inspires is what "inflates" the art with value, as none of this criticism inheres within the art prior to its articulation by a critic). One of the misconceptions in saying that "popism is about trying to hear pop as a 12 year old girl" is that implies that it is some "uncritical" quality to the 12 year old girl's enjoyment which is desirable. To the extent that a 12 year old girl's engagement with pop is interesting to the popist (and that extent is usually overrated by anti-popists I think) it is insofar as the engagement is <i>already critical</i>, as it is engagement within a social context. The Manifesto says similarly: "We are critics as soon as we listen to a record, watch a film, experience any art of any kind. Any reaction, from rapture to depression of the off switch, is an act of criticism. We're not necessarily happy about this, but we're stuck with it so there's no point being unhappy about it either." This does not mean that all such acts of criticism are <i>equal</i> - again we return to the point that the value of criticism lies in how it advances the "conversation" (critical discouse within a certain social environment). I have little time for most 12 year old girls' enjoyment of music if only because it's difficult for me to have a meaningful conversation with them. I tried with my little sister. Now that she's 18 our conversations about music are much more interesting to me. Likewise, the manager listening to Kylie has a critical engagement with the music, but this isn't a particularly salient or notable point as far as I'm concerned: it's what he does next that is interesting to me. Does he start a conversation about Kylie? Does he get up and dance to it, embarassing himself in front of his co-workers?

The irony of talking about managers listening to Kylie is that it's so close to the one easily observable social manifestation of bad "strawman" popism that I can think of, which is that of the gay man who believes that his enjoyment of Kylie's music <i>is indeed</i> a quasi-mystical experience about which <i>nothing further can be said</i>. Kylie's music is auotomatically and as a matter of course enjoyable (regardless of what actual sonic, lyrical or otherwise properties the specific song playing might possess). I like Kylie frequently but I feel very uncomfortable when brought face to face with the sort of enforced, determined hedonism that Mark brings up in relation to the gay sensibility; I am peturbed by the thought that my membership to this community might somehow guarantee my appreciation of a cultural artifact in advance. But of course what needs to be stressed here is that we're dealing with a very "real" community insofar as its members tend to consider themselves to be a community and share certain obvious social and cultural attributes. The gay man who screams when a Kylie song comes on in a club is always at least partially relating not merely to the song itself; he is also relating to his own position within the gay community, his own sense of identity as a gay man. Far from being an example of some fragmented, individualist disavowal of community and social context, this example of strawman popism is in fact a function of how the gay man's enjoyment of music is rooted within their sense of community, is in fact an expression of "solidarity". And my own insistence on the right to be critical of Kylie is equally an expression of my ambivalent relationship to this "community" and its expressions of solidarity.

See below for part 2...

 

[Tim F]

What this brings us around to is a broader point about "real"/"imagined"/"created" communities and pop music. I agree that different music has different meanings and different significance for different groups of people (or "populations" as per Mark); but I think the "communal" nature of these groups is never self-evident, and I therefore have issues generally with an attempt to delineate easily between real and imagined communities. Of course you can point to something like the overwhelming majority of the grime audience belonging to a certain set of racial/cultural/socio-economic categories, but grime is never a straightforward <i>reflection</i> of this anymore than Kylie is a reflection of homosexuality (how can certain sounds automatically/inherently have certain meanings, esp. related to something so sophisticated and historically mutable as social formations?). Rather, the grime community is necessarily an imagined community to the extent that the relationship between the music and this group of people is necessarily imaginary (as per Althusser's definition of ideology as being (simplistically put) how we imagine our real relationship with society). This is how music "creates" communities: it invites us to relate to our real state of affairs in a certain manner through the medium of the music. All music does this, some with more obvious, radical or permanently transformative social impacts than others. And certainly I can share a deep appreciation for how this manifests itself, but any attempt to codify a distinction between real and imagined strikes me as being an unnecessary and false critical tool.

A person who wished to persevere with the real/imagined distinction might jump in here and say, "yes, but, surely a style of music such as grime is only trying to interpellate a certain type of person as a potential member of its community - a person who fits the bill in terms of the following social and cultural categories...". Maybe this is the intention of the creator, but the difficulty is that the music itself doesn't respect such intentions - hence so many of us being "drawn in" by grime! The moment we engage with the music we are simultaneously imagining ourselves <i>through</i> it: being a grime fan becomes as much a part of my conception of myself in relation to society as it is for a black grime fan in Bow.

Now I'm not trying to collapse the distinctions and differences between me and the hypothetical black grime fan in Bow. I understand entirely Simon and Matt's nervousness with regards to speaking on behalf of such a person. There <i>is</i> a meaningful distinction between us, but it is precisely the distinction in how we express or articulate our reception of the music in a social context. The Bow fan is likely to be engaged in certain social practices connected to their engagement with grime that I, being a white middle-class gay Australian, simply have no access to or involvement in. To be fluffy about it, we are involved in different conversations, and I should respect the fact that I cannot speak for him or her, and that I should not <i>speak over</i> her. And I think that this is the absolute ground zero basis of the M.I.A.-antipathy on Dissensus on elsewhere (a position expounded more straightforwardly by Dave Stelfox): a practical concern that certain social "conversations" (by which we mean social practices in relation to a musical scene, including both creation and reception) will be obscured and left unheard due to the calamity surrounding M.I.A.

Crucially though, aren't these very distinctions already anticipated by Kogan and Eddy-style criticism, as paraphrased by Alex above? Isn't a basic respect for and curiosity regarding the fact that forms of musical reception and engagement are not equal (or, more accurately, <i>commensurate</i>) in practice enough to establish why and how the "grime community" is worth thinking about, without having construct some sort of ontological heirarchy? There is a big difference between the two approaches - in one, M.I.A.'s music might be good or bad, in the other it must a priori be inferior at least insofar as it "comes from nowhere") - but I don't think there is anything which is <i>lost</i> in adopting a Kogan/Eddy-style flexibility towards communities. It certainly still allows one to express a preference for certain types of communities, albeit more along the lines of "the grime community is <i>better imagined</i> than the M.I.A. community, and allows for a more meaningful display of <i>solidarity</i> with certain social groups" (it goes without saying I would think that the fact that displays of solidarity might be built upon certain ideological or imaginary constructs does not invalidate their worth or practical effect - see all politics ever).

"think the idea of 'intrinsic properties' is not straightforward, not because everything is in the ear of beholder, more because it seems to me to be more about potentials: texts of whatever kind are sets of potentials that can only be actualised in certain conditions of reception..."

Mark I think this is the central tenet of (my) popism 101!

 

[DavidD]

I love unpackaging yr writing. Unpackaging is the perfect word for it too, i think. I live for that moment of dawning understanding.

 

[dominic]

i think that somehow k-punk's point regarding the difference b/w "populations" and "communities" has gotten lost somewhere along the way

this is what k-punk said --

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

so tim f seems to me to miss the point when he remarks as follows --

A person who wished to persevere with the real/imagined distinction might jump in here and say, "yes, but, surely a style of music such as grime is only trying to interpellate a certain type of person as a potential member of its community - a person who fits the bill in terms of the following social and cultural categories..."

that is, to the extent that the grime scene is populated only by a "certain type of person," i.e., a person "belonging to a certain set of racial/cultural/socio-economic categories," then grime fails as pop

or to the extent that kylie is celebrated and appropriated only by gay men, kylie fails as pop

again, powerful pop produces populations that do not already exist in the "real world"

as for whether all music scenes are merely imagined, such that it is false to distinguish b/w the massive (i.e., the "real" or hardcore constituency -- whose members may or may not correspond w/ already existing organic communities) and fans w/ a more attenuated relationship with the music, i think that everything depends on whether you'd stake a claim or cede ownership

(and yeah i've read benedict andersen's "imagined communities" -- so fine, all communities are imagined -- but knowing this establishes nothing, b/c the community has its basis in shared ways of relating to the music -- and these folk ways are circulated with the music -- but the circulation of these folk ways resists easy description, and the folk ways are not uniformly adopted or anywhere near as compelling in their grip as the music itself ---- I CAN'T DEAL W/ ThiS aT the MOmENT, way too tricky)

and by "staking a claim" i mean something like you'd be willing to die to validate the claim -- not literally, but figuratively

and along w/ staking the claim comes the right to exclude others -- i.e., it's your property, not someone else's property

now with pop-1 music there's very little staking of claims b/c the music at issue is made by discrete artists standing apart from any one scene -- so while lots of gay men may like kylie, no one would acknowledge the validity of the claim were gay men to lay exclusive claim to kylie

(to the extent that gay men make exclusive claim to house music, the claim meets w/ considerable deference, if not outright acknowledgement)

but with grime or punk rock or rave music or any kind of scene-based music, the massive will deny the legitimacy of other people's claim or relationship to the music

they might be glad that you like their music, happy that their scene is getting attention -- but should you claim that your relationship to or understanding of the music is just as valid or equal to theirs, they'll seek to establish their priority

and should you try to diffuse the matter by saying that the massivo's relation and some other person's relation are simply not commensurate -- the massivo will opt for conflict and assert his rank

again i make these points figuratively, not literally

so the massive shares ways of relating to the music

the massive consists of people who join together at clubs or parties or raves or shows to hear the music -- so in relating to the music they relate to each other -- indeed were it not for their shared interest in the music they likely would have no common dealings

and it matters that these gatherings are in the flesh, direct, unmediated -- they are the people on the ground, making the scene happen

and then there are codes that the massive develops for how to dress, how to dance, etc -- and these all relate, ultimately, to the music -- i.e., they relate to the music by affiliating with each other, marking themselves off as members of the same tribe

and then too there are the codes of taste -- i.e., members of the massive will have by and large the same assessment of works produced from out of their scene, i.e., some tracks widely thought wicked, other tracks widely dismissed as boring or whatever

of course there's considerable diversity among members of any given massive on all such counts -- and yet they conceive of themselves and recognize others as members of the massive based upon such factors

they have a common language, common understandings

and they'll exclude to one extent or another anyone whom they do not deem a true member

in short it's all very political

 

[dominic]

also contra tim --

i'd say that the value of music is to be had not in its potential for being taken up critically

rather the value of music lies in its potential to be engaged with politically -- the politics of dancing -- the experience of being claimed by the music -- and the politics of embracing others and excluding others b/c of this experience

the music makes a claim on the listener -- and this claim then causes the listener to make all manner of claims about the music, i.e., claims of ownership and so forth

i expect that k-punk is going to say that i'm being fascistic

i'd say that politics has its ugly side

ALSO, to avoid misunderstanding, i don't deny that critical thinking about music intensifies enjoyment

but ultimately the real intensity -- the really intense intensity (sorry!) -- is to be had in the politics

 

[dominic]

dance around your apartment by yourself -- you're merely claimed by the music

dance around with others -- suddenly this is your music in common with others

play the records that others are dancing to -- you're sharing your take on the music

but just because the music is yours doesn't mean that others don't have a better claim to it

 

[dominic]

i've been rather sloppy in my use of the phrase "exclusive claim" -- i don't have in mind a claim that totally and completely excludes the rights of others

rather i have in mind something like a claim to lordship or something -- i.e., you can make use of this music, but the music is my fief -- so don't get too uppity

and yet i don't want to over emphasize the ugly side of the politics

were it not for the wonderful side -- the feelings of togetherness, of powerful connection to others -- the ugly side would have no justification

 

[k-punk]

Yes, Dom's right: I would really like to re-introduce the communities versus population thing here.

Because 'communities' ARE self-evident, or are held to be, whereas populations aren't.

The concept of 'communities' is wielded as part of the soft oppression of the culture of (proliferation of) differences: there isn't a straight white male 'community' of course, but there is a 'black' community, a 'gay' community etc. It is just a form of othering crying out for Foucauldian demolition. It is no more 'natural' to group people by their sexuality or their skin colour than it is do so by eye colour or eating habits. (I was somewhat heartened last week when one of my adult black students was aghast last week when she picked up a copy of the Nation: 'what, there's a newspaper for BLACK people? Huh?')

(Whenever they are mentioned in the media, such 'communities' always have 'leaders', which prompts me into questioning: who is the 'leader' of the straight white male community? Tony Blair?)

The production of 'gay' has been particularly oppressive, I think. For example, GAY in London trades on what you might call a 'community brand' (a stereotype that is positively invested and commercially exploited). What it provides in terms of 'belonging', it takes away by demanding only a certain type of behaviour and sensibility. The idea that any male who happens to prefer men sexually should be cheerfully superficial, and only into 'fun' and 'froth' is obviously ludicrous. And yet....

The point is that there must be many 'gay' men who now feel that, not only are they not 'straight', they have in some sense failed to be 'properly' gay.

Foucault's arguments in History of Sexuality 1 have never been more relevant, never been more ignored - precisely because gay is now so mainstream. The cost of normalising 'gay' - making it into a genetically-determined lifestyle choice lol - has had the effect of de-queering the social. In other words, it is the (concept of) the normal that has benefited from this consumption/normalization of homosexuality.

Now, to come back to Tim's very well made point about gay men screaming when Kylie comes on. Yes, this is very much about 'positioning' and 'identity' (verily, a cult studs dream*): very much about one wing of Popism.

How does this relate to the het wing? There couldn't be a term less 'gay', more horribly evocative of beery straightness, than 'Geezaeshetics', surely?

It seems to me that they are two ends of a continuum rather than a simple opposition: both the solitary straight consumer and the community member belong to the pleasure principle, to a reactive REaffirmation of particular prescribed affects. Which is different to Pop which PRODUCES populations, i.e. which estranges and uproots people from the sociallly-ascribed identity that they have learned to think of as everything they can be.

*One interesting thing about Popism as described by Tim/ Alex Thomson is that it has a kind of concealed aggression about texts AND consumers that, precisely because its ATTENTION to consumers (and I hope that such attention can be somewhat more nuanced than saying, a 'hipster thinks "I am cool"') is actually very different to how most consumers think about pop. One of the biggest Popist no-nos is 'knowing better' than someone else: but of course these cult studs types 'know better' than the consumers, because they 'know' that the consumer response is more important than the text itself.

 

[mms]

i think there are quite a few gay london clubs and events opposed to mainstream gay culture, such as the duckie performance art club at vauxhall tavern,http://www.duckie.co.uk/
alternative's to gay pride like gay shame that ran at the same time etc
my friend denise is duckies official photographer http://www.docutage.com/essex.html

they are endlessly creative nights .

 

[Tim F]

I certainly wouldn't seek to suggest that either all gay men or all gay scenes uncritically adored Kylie. However at the ones which do encourage it there is a collective denial of this actual diversity, <i>as if</i> Kylie was the authentic music of the gay male experience. I should note that as a matter of fact I've never met a gay man who <i>detested</i> Kylie who I liked, but this may be a chance thing (though I've of course now met many people in both camps and in between).

"It seems to me that they are two ends of a continuum rather than a simple opposition: both the solitary straight consumer and the community member belong to the pleasure principle, to a reactive REaffirmation of particular prescribed affects.

Mark, how do you consider Geezaesthetics to be particularly affirming the pleasure principle? Do you entirely disagree with my stab at what I thought geezaesthetics was about or do you consider it irrelevant or...? And is the straight consumer solitary or in the pub? Which is it? I think you're missing the social quality of geezaesthetics, and playing down the distinction between critical engagement and enforced mystical enjoyment which you were one of the first people to make on this thread - is it <i>only</i> the fact that the person being discussed in the pub is Kylie which makes what is going on a function of the pleasure principle? If the discussion was about Roxy Music would it be okay? 'Cos discussions about Roxy Music would I imagine certainly fit into the Geezaesthetic brief. Actually it's always been implied that if there is a geezaesthete "consensus" artist/band it's Dexys Midnight Runners...

"*One interesting thing about Popism as described by Tim/ Alex Thomson is that it has a kind of concealed aggression about texts AND consumers that, precisely because its ATTENTION to consumers (and I hope that such attention can be somewhat more nuanced than saying, a 'hipster thinks "I am cool"') is actually very different to how most consumers think about pop."

It would strike me as a very strange point in the discussion to start defending what the average pop consumer "knows" about their own enjoyment. And if you *do* think that popism is precisely "defending what the average pop consumer "knows" about their own enjoyment," then perhaps geezaesthetics (as Alex/I see it) falls outside yr negative definition of popism?


"rather the value of music lies in its potential to be engaged with politically -- the politics of dancing -- the experience of being claimed by the music -- and the politics of embracing others and excluding others b/c of this experience

the music makes a claim on the listener -- and this claim then causes the listener to make all manner of claims about the music, i.e., claims of ownership and so forth"

Dominic what then is the value of Ariel Pink - music which is certainly not pop in the sense it's being used here, but which is almost inevitably geared towards individual consumption/engagement? Most of the music that I like could "pass" under yr restrictvie definition of value, and you're also talking about my absolute favourite way of experiencing and engaging with music, but if I'm understanding you correctly then I think there's a lot of (often very rockist!) music and music fans who are left out in the cold.

 

[Tim F]

By the way Dominic I agree with pretty much everything in your first post responding to me (the one that starts with "i think that somehow k-punk's point regarding the difference b/w "populations" and "communities" has gotten lost somewhere along the way"). I understand entirely the point Mark is trying to make re "populations". I think you're talking more about rave than all scenes eg grime and dancehall though - the point with grime and dancehall is that the music appears to signify and be linked to a real actual pre-existing community that is not merely created by the music, and this appears to be the basis upon which Matt/Simon distinguish them from pop/M.I.A. Rave is in another category, and that is actually quite a crucial point because it means that, in the split between rave and gay men who like Kylie, <i>grime is on the side of the gay men who like Kylie</i>.

You might say in response to this that the distinction between the grime scene and gay Kylie fans is (as you said before), gay men don't stake a strong claim of ownership in Kylie. Have you ever seen Kylie perform live? I think you'd find that the sense of stepping into a particular sub-culture's territory would seem near-overwhelming. It's like gay pride day. In fact the gay "ownership" of house is much less strong, at least outside of the US. The deference for it says more about the attitudes of dance fans generally (who are obsessed with the origins of scenes) than it does about the gay community's willingness to defend its claim.

"(and yeah i've read benedict andersen's "imagined communities" -- so fine, all communities are imagined -- but knowing this establishes nothing, b/c the community has its basis in shared ways of relating to the music -- and these folk ways are circulated with the music -- but the circulation of these folk ways resists easy description, and the folk ways are not uniformly adopted or anywhere near as compelling in their grip as the music itself ---- I CAN'T DEAL W/ ThiS aT the MOmENT, way too tricky)"

This was my point exactly though, I thought.