A Box Ticking A Human Face FOREVER!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

POPTIMISM: THE DEATH OF POP CRITICISM

O Rly?

Caution to byebyepride: may contain Adorno citations.

What a lot of posts today!

Comments

Time for an injunction methinks

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

You DID register your club name with the Patent Office, right?

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

A bit much for me to digest on a sunny friday afternoon.

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

And here I was thinking that "optimist" is part of "poptimist" only because it made an awesomely stupid pun. (Most "poptimists" are actually depressives: discuss amongst yourselves.)

"I'm sorry; I know that comparison is way over the top." = "I'm sorry; I am incapable of expressing this without lying."

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

he responds to one comment with
"So I think the least important thing a critic can tell me is whether a work is “good”. To paraphrase another important late-20th century philosopher, That’s just, like, his opinion, man. The analysis directed toward defending one’s taste, “proving” that something is good, seems like wasted effort, because it can be refuted by the Lebowski corollary. Such writers are plainly jockeying for power, and I don’t have odds in that fight."

but that's as much as most poptimists want. so he actually concedes most of the ground. hurrah we win.

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

This guy is responding to an IDEA he has of what he thinks "poptimism" probably is like, but his idea only has a shaky relationship to the thing itself and how it actually plays itself out in the world. Most self-described poptimists I know are actually very attracted to the questions he claims they totally avoid re: capital, ideology, culture and subculture, but they also don't believe their (or his) answers to such questions necessarily invalidate the worth and meaning of the subject; plus, they're interested in many other kinds of questions as well.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

This is what I posted in response:

Wow this is such total nonsense. If you 'have in mind' the Frankfurt School, you might take the trouble to read what 'they' have to say about this sort of thing. And if you hadn't swallowed the 'culture industry's' portrait of the Frankfurt School (e.g. that it is a 'school of thought' not a series of debates and arguments between the thinkers you label as some kind of unity) you might get somewhere. The first thing you learn if you actually pay attention to what Adorno is saying is that the culture industry has swallowed everything (by definition -- it's more than just the entertainment industry, Adorno almost uses the entertainment industry as a metaphor for what all cultural systems (education, religion, etc.) have become). This makes it self-deluding nonsense to say 'I'm outside the culture industry but those others are in thrall to its devious and manipulative machinations'. And obviously the FIRST move of the culture industry is to SELL you the idea that you're somehow free of it. What the only poptimists I know mean by that term (which they're joking with, by the way, playing with the idea that you need manifestos and schools of criticism when obviously those are part of the trad construction of 'rock') is that what Adorno calls the truth-value of a work of art cannot be prescriptively restricted to certain kinds of artwork. Of course, Adorno also saw that because of the culture industry there was no such thing as a successful work of art, and that this logic of failure was built into art as a whole (and for pop/rock, as commodity music with in some cases artistic aspirations, it's not immediately clear whether these terms are even the right criteria to apply). Might not poptimism be an appreciation of the fact that what Frank Kogan calls 'contamination' is everywhere, but that the kind of defense mechanisms by which you tell yourself that certain types of music are a priori more worthwhile than others, are redundant (i.e. you'll get further if you recognise them for what they are, and open your ears and your mind)? No poptimist rejects all rock, just as no poptimist thinks that all Top 40 music is great. That would just be stupid, as you point out. (So you're right there, although it's a straw man). But to do the opposite is equally dumb, isn't it?

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

dude, i think he's gone off to cry into his pile of spin mags ;)