thirdform

pass the sick bucket
eh, as you yourself said, futurism has always been imaginary. surely we can agree that the value of the book doesn't rest on his ability to make nostradamus style predictions about the next big thing. "but never underestimate the power of myth, they can be thousand years out of date and still provide great works of beauty and horror." great line imo it applies here.

Oh agreed. I just want him to er, how do I say this without sounding a bit battymanbarty, stroke my intellectual faculties with a smooth, gelatinous layer of compact consistency. But of course my desires run contrary to repeating books.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
thats all i got third, tbh i just think you should write a book yourself. his is one vision yours is another, and i think they intersect in places. same with other life.

Unfortunately I need a proper medieval musicologist to sit in a room with a turkish musicologist and we all split a 27 strip of acid between us. But seen as that will never happen I'll be restricted to the disconnected style of vignette writing, which serves klaviercentrism.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
a weird thing about barty or mackintosh, whichever of those two totally distinct people wrote this, is that he never seems to get the same feeling a lot of us sometimes get listing to popular music, which is "this is cool, but it doesn't go far enough". he seems to think that pop music contains the entire spectrum of experience, which is both interesting and frustrating.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
a weird thing about barty or mackintosh, whichever of those two totally distinct people wrote this, is that he never seems to get the same feeling a lot of us sometimes get listing to popular music, which is "this is cool, but it doesn't go far enough". mackintosh implicitly seems to read pop music as containing the entire span of musical/aesthetic experience, which is both interesting and frustrating.

Yeah tbf I really wanted to talk about this, ribbing aside. It's something I've been trying to wrap my head around. Because I don't dislike barty music, which is a common criticism deployed against me. The problem is I think its intellectually cool but it doesn't make me fall in love with it.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Like I don't think acid techno is futuristic in relation to vocal psychedelia today, that would be absurd. What I feel is that acid propells me into a state of alien cognition, that for instance I don't get from trini dancehall. I don't feel this enveloping sense of near orgasmic rupture, an overloading of my conception of the possible.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I do wonder why that is because I do feel like I could have been more charitable to bartintosh when he was on here. But I always tended to feel underwhelmed. like yeah I'm glad you're highlighting this but make me bin all my creel-pone records and compilations for the love of God almighty. Because by god I want a year 0 reset.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
a weird thing about barty or mackintosh, whichever of those two totally distinct people wrote this, is that he never seems to get the same feeling a lot of us sometimes get listing to popular music, which is "this is cool, but it doesn't go far enough". he seems to think that pop music contains the entire spectrum of experience, which is both interesting and frustrating.

Couldn't you argue @blissblogger also has a similar thing, albeit much more muted mainly cos he was in the right place?

N.B to Simon I don't actually fully believe this, but I'm agnostic on it all.

Or put another way: 'what is so good about pop music?' Why should we be rockists or poptimists?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Obviously, I'm not going to go full Adorno here and say we should all be listening to 12 tone serialism and become devotees of Schoenberg. But why is that approach seen as old, white and conservative whereas the popular culture approach is seen as cosmopolitan, open, meaningful, and multicultural?

Or put my question another way. Suppose Adorno grew up black, and he saw Coltrane and Anthony Braxton as the pinnacle of our zeitgeist and could only appreciate pop music on a strictly compositional level.

Then we would have a case of snobbery, fine. But pop must possess, in its constitution which hints at something beyond, something transcending the inverted snob. Because for the likes of say, Cardew, it was a disavowal of their prior avant-garde commitments rather than a true embrace of popular music.

So this is what I want to get at. If the future as such is omnipresent, if the avant-garde itself has become basically completely and utterly spent (which would of course be bartintosh's contension) then pop music has realised its promise of once mythical unattainability. Where to go from here, not in terms of predicting the future, which would not be fruitful anyway, but in reorienting ones framework towards listening?
 
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luka

Well-known member
a weird thing about barty or mackintosh, whichever of those two totally distinct people wrote this, is that he never seems to get the same feeling a lot of us sometimes get listing to popular music, which is "this is cool, but it doesn't go far enough". he seems to think that pop music contains the entire spectrum of experience, which is both interesting and frustrating.
also doesnt seem to get the sense of horror and disgust at it, the sense of it being this gnostic artifact a plastic replica in a plastic replica universe, inextricably linked to Belsen and Hiroshima
 

luka

Well-known member
'robo-bumming' for those that dont know is the phrase third coined to describe the type of music he likes
hard, fast, metallic, mechanical, punitive, piston-pounding, in-out sex, without any 'wiggling' or 'swing' BAM BAM BAM BAM!
 

other_life

bioconfused
'robo-bumming' for those that dont know is the phrase third coined to describe the type of music he likes
hard, fast, metallic, mechanical, punitive, piston-pounding, in-out sex, without any 'wiggling' or 'swing' BAM BAM BAM BAM!
come play with me in the dialectics thread
 

luka

Well-known member

All the post-Trotsky theory Watson loathes, from poststructuralism and postmodernism to cybertheory, has been sympathetic to Nietzsche's liquid worldview, so in flux that it makes Marxism look hopelessly stiff. The avoidance of Nietzsche thus becomes something of a strategic silence (if you can't beat them, ignore them), but for someone who prides himself on sparing nothing or no one from the grinding wheels of dialectic materialism, it looks messy.


Of course Nietzsche's thought, with its interests in flux, splintering of truth, and reaching beyond preconceived ideas of what it means to be Man, has proven to be more adaptable to the realities and speculations of a technological society. With this in mind, it suddenly becomes clear that Watson has a technological blind spot. Good old Marxist technophobia rears its ugly head, especially when music is discussed.


This technophobia colludes with a question that has undoubtedly fascinated philosophers since the ancient Greeks: can politics and pop music mix? It is a question that haunts not only Watson's book but two recent others as well: Simon Reynolds' techno genealogy Energy Flash and Kodwo Eshun's history of black futuristic music More Brilliant Than The Sun. Three clear-cut positions are presented here: Watson makes the preposterous claim that every vital musical form of this century has had its origin in the working class (so you can forget about Miles Davis, Can, Chic, Kraftwerk and Jeff Mills being any good). At the other extreme, Eshun makes the daring assertion that 'the streets,' as an emblem of authenticity, have had nothing to do with the making of true radical black music. In between these positions, Reynolds, the good nostalgic socialist decadent, argues that working-class musicians using the drug-technology interface have always been pushing music further out, without effecting any significant social change in the end.


The inability of all rave-related music to effect mass change means that Watson has to dismiss all techno music as middle-class dabbling in pseudo-radical aesthetics. And thus Watson becomes the latest addition to the tiresome canon of music writers who mistakenly rate punk over disco. Indeed, the so-called politics of punk have always been its most overrated feature. Its strength was never in the shallow politics of The Clash (who were nice middle class boys, after all) but in the amoral will-to-power that exploded in the music of the Stooges and Sex Pistols. Ironically, when Watson looks for Cleavage, the aesthetic rupture of social order that goes beyond reflection, representation and entertainment, he passes over the only worthy contender in contemporary popular music.





When dealing with rave-related music, Watson makes some baffling observations that may seem like nitpicking on behalf of the techno trainspotter, but which in fact alert us to the way he forces music to be worthy just by virtue of its being made by oppressed minorities, even if these observations contradict earlier statements. Original Chicago House music is celebrated as the exploited worker's seizure of machinery eventually perverted by Teutonic Techno. It is strange that house is deemed worthy by someone who shows his disdain for disco throughout the book, since house was one of disco's direct continuities; in fact, house intensified disco's pleasure principle to an ideal instant gratification, oblivious to any notion of exploitation or social utopia beyond the NOW!





It is a gross mistake to view the relationship between house and techno as one of perversion, since it has been well-documented how both musics continually fed off each other's influences. And as much as black Detroit producers worship the shrine of Kraftwerk, it is another well-documented fact how Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin were the main inspiration for the creation of Acid House, a truly radical music which, incidentally, makes all free jazz look like aimless farting noises made by grown-up men (without an audience). Cyberdandy Kodwo Eshun brilliantly reverses this myth of the eternal perversion of black music by white imitators when he observes that in the case of black Techno, Düsseldorf (home of Kraftwerk) played the same historical function as did the Mississippi delta in blues.
 

luka

Well-known member
what Kit should do now is to pick fights with music writers on twitter. and thus position himself on the game board.
 

luka

Well-known member
if he was able to embrace the role he could then join in the darwinian-playground struggle and go round picking fights and pulling pigtails which would bring him to the attention of The People and then he might sell some books and then he might get to write some more books and so on. so my advice to the mysterious kit mackintosh is pick fights. but not with muggs who is beneath anyones attention and whats more will fight dirty by trying to hide behind what he calls 'black voices' and 'women'.
 
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