POPFITES! 13, 14, 15 and 16!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Because I was too busy to do a POPFITE yesterday you get FOUR clashes today, to finish off the first round. In previous fites JARVIS won a convincing victory over CHRIS LOWE, and MICK JAGGER won out against HANK WILLIAMS.

As for today's fights, words cannot do them justice (i.e. I am starving and need to upload this and go get a sammich).


[Poll #780065]


TICK POWER!

Comments

[cis.livejournal.com]

Indie is not an important genre, it's not a big genre: it's, if you like, a vocal-minority of a genre, because the kind of people who want to talk culture-critically about popular music usually come from some form of indie background. When people say 'indie' they are referring to one of several definitions, some of which are mutually contradictory. It's important to know which one is being used at any given time because they all have different connotations and can't be used interchangeably.

Maybe you have to have actually been through a period of immersion in indie culture to get this? It's hard to explain because it's very internalised, for me, so that I understand without it needing to be said what it means when someone calls Keane (who are very popular) indie, as opposed to what it means when someone calls Smog (who has a different kind of popularity) indie.

You're being far, far too binary: you've invented a definition of indie (which isn't even workable) and are now saying 'pop is all the things which what-i-call-indie isn't': essentially, you're denying pop the right to be itself, and to have its own rules. Pop is not some creative reimagining of rockist criteria so that all that was once considered bad may now be thought good: pop music is a lot more than that.

What's yr difference between pop and r&b?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

My defns of both pop and indie are man-in-the-street Joe Public type definitions - the vast broad umbrellas by which someone who neither knows very much about nor cares very much about the fine points of genre boundaries will classify a particular song into POP or DANCE or ROCK and not much else. The kind of shorthand which gets bandied about all the time - eg in round-ups of the Mercury shortlist you'll see Franz Ferdinand called "indie heroes" by the BBC or whoever, and ILM will point and laugh but regardless that is what they are called by the average consumer. (This is partly because our defn of pop - "anything in the charts" - is useless to most people, because music not in the charts does not exist for most people; their musical categories are there to divide up what IS in the charts.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"man-in-the-street Joe Public type definitions" :D :D :D :D

of today lex-nonsense = NONE MORE ON-STILTY!!

[cis.livejournal.com]

But where you fall down is that the man-in-the-street definitions do not see a binary difference between pop music and indie music. Yer man in the street is not going to say "i like that indie, like U2" because yer man in the street recognises that there are different categories - rap, rock, dance, pop Indie is a subset of rock, in main-in-the-street definitions, it's not a primary set of its own. Go into a high street HMV and the categories are: Rock&Pop, Metal (which includes all hard rock and punk), Dance, Urban. Man-in-the-street indie (one of my housemates described herself to me as an indie kid and said she liked the Arctic Monkeys and the Magic Numbers, I think that's a useful workable def) is found under 'rock and pop', not divisible from it.

If you're using man-in-the-street defs be consistent: yer man-in-the-street pop listener thinks the beatles were a pop band as much as a rock band. Yer man-in-the-street pop listener would not agree that "pop is about not playing your own instruments" because the question is not important and does not come up.

I don't think there's anyone who'd actually argue with FF being called 'indie'? The fact that some p'mists think certain FF songs are pop songs (can't hear it myself) does not prevent FF from also being an indie band. they're on domino, you know.

Also, people are allowed to just not like r'n'b, you know. It doesn't mean they're racists, it just means they're suffering from a serious taste deficit.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I could understand, i dunno, a metalhead not liking r&b. But I can't understand people who like pop arbitrarily not liking a certain section of it! Bar a couple of formalisms which I can't imagine making a fundamental difference, I just don't see how pop and r&b are all that different.

I def think men-in-the-street (not to be confused with kidz-on-the-street) see a difference between "pop" and "indie" - I think it's primarily sonic though also to do with where the artist "comes from". (eg Arctic Monkeys and Magic Numbers are indie sonically, but guitar-based Kelly Clarkson is a known ex-Pop Idol so she is pop; Goldfrapp are probably thought of as pop due to sonicz too.) I mean, they WOULD see a difference between the Killers and Rachel Stevens.

[koganbot]

Personally, I don't understand how rock fans can stand most indie.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think most r&b IS pop, it shares a broadly similar aesthetic ideology with only a few formalist differences. I really really don't understand this widespread antipathy to r&b-as-genre hence hissy-fit post (which didn't provide me with any answers! why don't poptimist-type people like r&b-as-genre?!)

[cis.livejournal.com]

what kind of music is alicia keys? I would call her r&b yet the ideology which surrounds the music she makes centres on her fluency at the piano, it's like that of norah jones. what kind of music is norah jones? no-one would call her indie, she's surely not pop. but michelle branch was pop, right? so how is one girl-who-plays-piano different from another girl-who-plays-piano? what are the aesthetic criteria at work here?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

alicia keys = soul I guess?
norah jones = jazz
michelle branch = pop because she was overtly making music for teenage girl audience whereas both keys and jones flaunt 'maturity'

[koganbot]

Wait, so did Michelle Branch. She was touted as a singer-songwriter. Also, she was making a play not only for the teen girls but for the adult contemporary charts.

[koganbot]

And also, what makes you think that teen girls don't ever buy into "maturity"?