boiling blood etc
>Who are Woebot or Reynolds to say what genres an artist can use.
what a silly comment! who is anyone to say anything about anyone? the corollary of an artist being free to do whatever they like is that a pundit -- professional, amateur, anybody at all--is equally free to explore their feelings of being unconvinced, unimpressed, ambivalent, only partially-swayed, cringing, whatever
>blood boils
for me the primary and initial level of response is always one of feeling. so i would twist what Matt said around and say the problem is that the MIA records don't make my blood boil. listening to 'destruction vip' makes my blood boil -- with excitement. it makes me wanna do crazy stuff, throw embarassing shapes in my living room, smash it up a la Damned.
so the interest then becomes to analyse that lack of a visceral response where a response ought to be, and where it appears to be for other people.
the second and third and fourth levels get more meta, dealing with hype, audience response, and critical reception (i totally concur with stelfox's point re fans being a legitimate subject of discussion, aren't the popists after all ALWAYS saying it's the moment of consumption that defines the pop artifact, not the producer/auteur's intention?).
Now hype is not something to reject per se. after all i'm in the business of hype in a sense, and all artists are also hustlers to some extent. and think how there's a big big grime tune at the moment called Hype! Hype! on one level hype is just creating a buzz, transmitting excitement. nonetheless i am amazed at how quickly MIA has become a kind of sacred cow artist. As a journalist I've seen this happen before, it's particularly the case in America seemingly. a critical machinery gets set in motion whereby the artist is enshrined as a Major Talent who both transcends the genre they represent and is taken as an emblem or stand-in for that entire genre. (Funny this, i remember me and Sasha Frere Jones together arguing with a bunch of other rock critics against that very same process happening to Goldie vis a vis jungle). Moby is a good example re techno. MIA is on her way, in the US, to being the poster child for a whole bunch of genres (that grime meme will stick, i can guarantee it). More broadly, the process is in motion for MIA to be one of those critical touchstone -- a la Bjork, Beck, PJ Harvey--especially as she has the talent/charisma to possibly sell a lot of records (which critics here love because they are usually populists, in the sense of looking for someone to redeem popular music.) So if you question that process early on, it's like you're a spoil sport or something.
>antipop
i thought this one of matt's most acute points. how it's almost taboo these days to take an anti-Pop position. notice how rhetorically, "pop" is often used as an argument ender. As in "But it's pop!". so that makes it okay, then. Weird, this utopian investment in the word 'pop', when you consider the lamenesses perpretrated in its name through the ages (i almost wrote "cultural crimes"). You couldn't do the same with "rock". "But it's rock!". No, wouldn't work.
i tried to pinpoint this is in the originally piece by identifying the opposite of a pop approach --ie one that took into consideration content/context/intent. That is rockism (you could also consider "form" as the fourth cornerstone, the idea of musical progression as an important element of rockism, but more popists believe in that one too and claim it for pop). "Pop" might be the giddy dizzy relief felt when that particular bubble of framework bursts. The euphoric lightness of being when all that's solid melts into air. "Pop" also has a democratic charge, because it's available to everyone. How the mass media as they are currently constituted, owned and operated, etc, get conceived as "democratic" is a mystifying to me, as is the rhetorical swerve by which the undergrounds (which involve genuine self-organizing activity etc) get conceived as elitist (for not wanting to "go pop") and their celebrants as "snobs"