Poptimist Books?

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I've just finished reading Pet Shop Boys: Literally, which I rather liked. It felt wonderfully anachronistic to sit on the tube with 1989-era Neil and Chris staring out from the cover, and, as the PSBs were the first band I really liked back when I was wee, to get little insights behind the songs and image. They do come across as a pair of big whiny jessies, though. Guess it goes to show how quickly one gets accustomed to the money and the tedium of popstardom...

Anyway, it's made me want to read more pop books. Trouble is, I feel I've either read all the good ones or can never find what I'm looking for on the library shelves. Past favourites have included:

Feel by Chris Heath
Lost in Music by Giles Smith
Living Through Pop, ed. Andrew Blake (read this for my degree, but it's a good mix of academe and the anecdotal)
The Shoe by Gordon Legge (a novel, but sums up the effect of music on a young boy's life better than anything else I've read)
You Don't Have To Say You Love Me by Simon Napier-Bell
The Look by Paul Gorman
Tainted Life by Marc Almond 
Love Is The Drug, ed. John Aizlewood (I'm quite fond of the Dexys chapter)
Hell for Leather by Seb Hunter (approx 1000x more entertaining than I expected) 
EDIT:
Forgot The Nation's Favourite - one of my favourite books ever, for shame - and Bill Drummond's 45, which isn't really all about music but does have nice pieces in about Crystal Day and the Bunnymen's rabbit ears tour.

I have Saint Morrissey, Rip It Up... and England's Dreaming sat on my shelf, taunting me. I'm after something a bit more, well, suited to reading on the bus in the morning, though. 

What's your favourite pop book? And, even better, what made you throw it across the room with irritation?

Comments

Re: 32 comments...

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Adorno would've liked Morrissey. Thankfully, my course tutor agreed with me in this.

Re: 32 comments...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

!!! But this is just not true!!!

Re: 32 comments...

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Music of the outsider, no?

Actually, maybe I meant the Velvets. I have eaten too much Swiss chocolate this morning to come up with any coherent thoughts on something I wrote at three am four years ago.

Re: 32 comments...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

TWA: "when we root for the underdog, we root for the system that makes him an underdog" (my paraphrase)

adorno's wagner book should be in this list though!

Re: 32 comments...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha i once wrote long ago a review for MARXISM TODAY of a slightly wanky book on music by edward said in which i stated that adorno would have liked DEATH METAL

Re: 32 comments...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

!!!

Re: 32 comments...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Adorno has a principled objection to pop music, and there is no way on earth Morrissey -- or the Velvets, TBH -- transcend pop! In fact I think Adorno would hate indie MORE than most pop, since he doesn't have a particular beef with pop, he just doesn't think that pop can do what art music can, whereas he really dislikes pop with artistic pretensions.

Re: 32 comments...

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Doesn't some indie come under 'art music', though - wilfully 'difficult' or uncommercial?

Re: 32 comments...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

But that's precisely why Adorno dislikes it -- it's 'artiness' is its main selling point. (But this is also a problem for ANY artistic enterprise, which is why so much art fails (i.e. there is no such thing as dis-interested). Art music is my term not his, but I think it makes more sense than 'classical' since some of the modern music Adorno liked would get sniffed at by classical buffs, while he is basically romantic rather than classicist in the fact that he believes art should face forward rather than backwards). For Adorno the difference between 'popular' and 'serious' music is a question of musical structure, and of the relationship between the parts and the whole of the song (the development of the whole cannot be determined from the parts, whereas in most pop we know it goes 'chorus / verse / chorus / verse' etc... although it is possible that some forms of rock might move towards 'art' forms in the sense of challenging popular forms, their place in the mechanisms of production and distribution of popular music would vitiate their artistic aspirations. (But the same could equally be said of most 'modern classical'). Part of the difficulty is that for Adorno the emphasis is not on saying which piece of music is good and which one is bad, so much as the process of reflecting on the (already self-)critical process we go through in making any such judgements.

Re: 32 comments...

[mippy.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm just seeing it through late 20th-c. eyes, then, or those of one for whom 'music' is synonymous with pop/non-classical.

Re: 32 comments...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Well it's true that his musical idols are Schoenberg and Beethoven. But what makes him a distinctive figure is his refusal to transfer the ideals associated with the romantic artistic traditions onto popular culture (the basis of rockism, IMHO) while at the same time refusing to say that art music is automatically 'better' than popular culture. For both art and popular culture the key question is something more like 'why does this fail (to emancipate people)?'

Re: 32 comments...

[koganbot]

refusal to transfer the ideals associated with the romantic artistic traditions onto popular culture

I don't understand this, not having read Adorno recently, or much. Seems to me he's judging popular culture on the basis of those ideals (e.g., failure to emancipate). Also, the word "transfer" is problematic, implying that the romantic artistic tradition is one thing and popular culture another and that the latter can only get the former secondhand.

Re: 32 comments...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think TWA's assumption would be that (present-day) popular culture DID get the "romantic artistic tradition" second-hand -- ie that it wasn't something springing up out of the cutural-economic conditions of the day (day=1740-1870 or whatever) but rather something encountered in books, in movies, at college etc

he *is* judging PC by Romantic ideals; he declines to believe that they operate at an organic layer within PC, and that -- insofar as they are invoked -- this is a sales pitch not an inner drive

Re: 32 comments...

[koganbot]

This is quaint: As if Adorno were saying "When we do it it's romance; when you do it it's commerce." As if marketing something necessarily involved reducing it and misrepresenting it. (If that is what Adorno believed.) By the way, some of my complaints c. 1987 about hardcore punk, postpunk, and alternative read very similar to this, my gripe being that the (post)punks were letting the symbol stand in for the event. But I didn't assume that this was a necessary outgrowth of how the music was made and marketed, just a particular observation I was making about how punk was being used by punks - musicians, audiences, marketers - in the mid '80s. Which is to say I was making an observation and judgment but assuming that, if my observation/judgment were correct, it still needed to be explained.

Adorno when presented by others (and prob'ly by himself as well, but as I said I haven't done the reading) comes across as dogmatic: "I've worked out in principle that popular music can't surprise its listeners, and lo and behold I'm never surprised by it."

What if Guns N' Roses "It's So Easy"* were a later and more interesting version of romanticism than the romanticism of the 1740s?

(*to name a song that surprised me)

Re: 32 comments...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(discussion tumbles down a GOBLIN'S HOLE (http://community.livejournal.com/sukrat/36380.html?mode=reply))