Real Actual Guilty Pleasures

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

More a mid-week topic this. I mentioned elsewhere (wrt Merritt and zip-a-dee-doo-dah) that it has only just occurred to me that there really is a category of "Guilty Pleasures" - just not the latest gutless variation on "so bad its good". There can be music you really like, but for some reason the song is actually morally wrong or tainted. And not in the indie ("S club Juniors that's so wrong") or mirror-indie ("all indie boys can't sing they should all die"*) sense. The only good example I can think of right now is

Gary Glitter.

I love you love. Leader. SMASHing, real fun songs. Sung by a man with a twisted brane of badness cubed. (Of course there is a whole vein of pa3d0 british pop which we can take as read here.) But what else is there? Anybody here enjoy fascist/nazi/racialist music? dancehall homophobia i suppose. wot sa u?


(* naming no names, cos we're done with that, right?)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

if you treat all "artworks" (however small) as a big old squabblecake of contradictory layers -- or a patch of conversation arguing with itself as well as its surround -- this issue becomes much easier to handle: ie can you separate out the [-x-] and the anti-[-x-] elements in [item under consideration]? can you hear how the [FORCE OF EVIL] is being wrestled with, or allowed to win? (cf also trotsky's useful phrase REACTIONARY UTOPIAS)

on ilm i used to call this the "anti-n4zi hihat argument" (a catchy meme which NEVER CAUGHT ON boo) -- by which i suppose i was implying that (let's say) the political argument of the RHYTHM in n4zi sk4 is at subtle subliminal war with the political argument of the WORDS

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

with shabba (and a lot of ragga) the "ideology" of the words-as-lyrics is NOT in sync with the "physical ideology" of the mode of word-delivery or the ideology of collective dance itself -- hence simultaneous attraction and repulsion

and opting for one OR the other as the "pure truth" of the song sorta kinda misses the conflicted essence (i first wrote "point" there, which assumes shabba would see things my way here, but maybe he wouldn't at all -- however HIS justification of the song's politics isn't and shouldn't be definitive)

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i think this issue (at least in the simple place i've started from) is exactly the point where the songs are intentional creations, are "veridically authored", so the person(s) involved become tangled up in there and this drags in the moral. i.e. more so than if you treat the song as an isolated (internally in/coherent) entity.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ok but where is this true? i haven't followed much of the stepin fetchit er er stephin merrit argt, but even he is a. a strong-version auteurist and b. operating at a cross-fluence of conversations, discourse and er "music tongue-types", some of which he has absorbed totally unconsciously, others he is tussling with guardedly and with ideological articulacy ect ect

there is no such thing as a private language -- this applies to all musics also outside a very lovelorn militant wing of ultra-modernism (which insisted on reinventing the language new with each work)

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

it's true at the point you can feel guilty about liking a song. How can you feel guilty about liking a song? the song hasn't done anything. even bad words you can argue are not in themselves guilt inducing. tho obv a good ol-singalong song that calls for you to "throw the jew down the well" should, but that's already going that bit further into getting YOU to say something, well meant or not.

so where can the guilt be imported into a song? (another way of recasting my initial question) from the people involved in its creation was my initial answer, and was wondering about other ways.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"if you like this song you are one of us"
vs
"to be one of us you must agree with us"

music is NOT belief-sticky, which words (even songwords) are: so the second -- however much assumed or hoped for by some -- fails (personally i am inclined to argue that its NECESSARY failure is one of the reasons music is socially useful: its ability to create gatherings that aren't POSITION-based...)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

So what is at subliminal war in the work of Gary Gl1tter?

I can actually see this more - staying with the same area of crime - with W1ll1am M4yne, the way in his work there's a sense of children as individuals, moral agents and still very 'allowed to be' children. (But then on the other hand the horror of his case is the way that - before it all came out - he struck me as a writer who really understood children. Which then led me to think - really understanding children is a v v useful skill for a p34d0 to have, it's something both - ugh - 'aspects' of WM's life would have tried to foster.)

Somewhat grim thoughts for a Friday afternoon eh!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well i have never LIKED gg's work (in the face of MUCH POPTIMIST HIVEMIND STUBBORNNESS back in the day) so i am inclined to argue that attractions and replusions really ARE present, like, empirically

but actually identifying the strands is the work-not-done that i am invoking (rather than, say, DOING it)

(the kind of work i'm talking abt = like when kogan sez a GREAT musicologist wd be able to link up doors basslines with meltzer's vomit-pill)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

the good side of GG

Green Gartside
Gina G
Gloria Gaynor
GoGo's

the bad side of GG

G*ry Gl*tter
Gus Gus
Goo Goo Dolls

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

I'm with Tigger on this. GG is a very different case from latter day Jacko (cited below), where you can see the 'crimes' he ascribed to him seeping into his work. There was -- drawing on very vague remembrances now -- certainly something lascivious to his songs, but lots of rock n pop is. At the time, no more likely to be a pedophile than, say, David Essex.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well the point i am arguing is one which (for example) sets the ideology of the BASSLINE against the the ideology of the brass section, and in this case it's pretty hard not to find yrself reading bad stuff back into not-at-the-time obnoxious material (tho as i say i ALWAYS found him obnoxious so i have a teenytiny get-out here)

what i once wrote about j.king (http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/jking.html)

one of the reasons i haven't finished my "teach mark s a lesson" about m.bolan's unicorn is that i find the formerly innocent topic of HOT GOBLINISM is these days a bit toxic