It's the tunes that got small

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"thebopkids esp.will (rightly) note existence of a actual real live danbcing till dawn community who believed that what constituted indie in (say) 1984 was the same as and would again soon be pop's idea of pop"

sez Mark.

I was thinking the other day that the Poptimist position is kind of like a civil servant's - you have to work with whatever regime the public hands you, however reluctantly. The alternative is a fannish secession as outlined above, keeping alive an idea of 'perfect pop' (cf also Bomp! fanzine in the 80s). You can work out for yourself where this leads.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

if this is correct then I am the Sir Humphrey of poptimism, ie I may pretend to work with what I am handed but really my goal is to CONTROL IT ALL

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

You actually want to control how it is perceived = you are the ALISTAIR CAMPBELL of Poptimists.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

please don't start him off on AC...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

1) alastair with an a
2) YES
3) OH YES
4) ETC

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Interesting analogy. The problem with the 'pure pop' revivalists is their denial of the historicity of pop -- i.e. that works may become more or less pop in time, and there is no going back! Foolishly thinking they may bend the forces of pop to their will they in fact ghettoise and destroy the pop-ness of their chosen icons, so that if they do re-emerge from the precious hipster circles it is in a horrible form i.e. we get Teenage Fan Club and the Thrills. (Does this apply to non-rock pop? revived old-school hip-hop or R&B? I wonder if there are different ideas of time and history in different genres (just as there are different ideas about love, loss, art etc.), which mean different relations to an idea such as 'pure pop'.

[(Anonymous)]

Quick jotted down thorts:

You could quite sensibly argue that lots of Britpop stuff conformed closely enough to the model of mid80s indie, to mean that that idea of perfect pop did come around again.

It seems to me that pop musics have a strong enough demand for novelty that ideas do come round again and again (albeit in modified forms).

So the civil servant position is a perfectly tenable one (and probably the one I would choose right now), but it's possible to see the alternative as being like a comet: every so often its orbit intersects with pop's, but it carries on doing much the same thing at various distances from pop.

Pop requires true believers to keep doing their thing in their various suburbs (better word than ghettoes I think), in order to keep itself fed with ideas. True believers require pop too, in order to have something to fight against / aspire to.

Just because we ("we"?) don't much like TFC or the Thrills doesn't mean all returns are necessarily in a horrible form. Or, rather, the new form is only horrible from the point of view of the ancien rather than the nouveau.

(It may be that my branch of 80s perfect popism was unusually prescriptive, mind. Certaily there was an almost Leninist pleasure in writing off aesthetic miscreants who's drifted too far off into Rock.)

[(Anonymous)]

that was bopkids, you'll be amazed to hear.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Wow, great post!

a) Britpop -- really? I'm not sure about this. Lightning Seeds would be an interesting test case I guess; Oasis as ver Slade; Blur bits of glam also?; dunno guv. b) Love love love the comet analogy. c) Yes suburbs a better word than ghettoes. c) Badly chosen examples on my part, and probably not thought through -- the carbon copyists won't return since 'pure' repetition is impossible, but repetition with difference very familiar. i.e. MJ reissuing his singles = flop, but oldie which has been featured in an tv ad and has therefore been transformed = success. d) lol @ leninism.

[(Anonymous)]

Purism and bastardisation are often the same coin though, yes? Taking my teenage world as an example, we were precious indie purists who thought we were holders of the torch for (say) The Smiths and The Byrds and The Subway Sect and Orange Juice and The Undertones and like a zillion other bands. Pretty much every single one of those would have seen our thing as a revival in a horrible, bastardised form. Just look at the indie / emo comments on FT, where effectively the Triggerists are being told "GET LOST GRANDAD! HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THE WORD INDIE?" Which is a version of what I'd tell fools of OVER 25 YEARS OLD when they had the temerity to compare the Razorcuts unfavourably with The Byrds.

I suppose what I'm saying is that it's necessary to remember the energy and ignorance (the good kind of ignorance, sometimes) of them Young People.

(bopkids)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The really interesting thing about the get lost grandad comments, though, is that the article *does* accurately describe something the commenters all recognise.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, very interesting! Not to get all dissensus but there are a lot of theoretical implications that flow from this, especially with Max Weber, although Weber would actually work against the analogy sometimes--if the state has a monopoly on violence, and we are "working" for the state, who is the state in this scenario? The music industry? This suggests that the indie counter-argument would be that the labels that release pop do not have a monopoly on distribution and therefore we are actually choosing up sides even though we think we're not.

It's especially interesting to me since here in the US we've been seeing over the last 10 years one party pretty much purge all the civil servants that don't agree with (or are related to, or gave money to) them. Wonder what the analogy would be to this in music history? Is there essentially a purge going on now with rock's death?

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Although Weber also supports the poptimist stance. From his Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber):

A politician must not be a man of the "true Christian ethic", understood by Weber as being the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, that is to say, the injunction to turn the other cheek. An adherent of such an ethic ought rather to be understood to be a saint, for it is only saints, according to Weber, that can appropriately follow it. The political realm is no realm for saints. A politician ought to marry the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility, and must possess both a passion for his avocation and the capacity to distance himself from the subject of his exertions (the governed).

Pop is no place for purism!

*;;*

[charltonlido.livejournal.com]

or, is pop, its own purism? a purism of outcome, rather than a purism of source...but, one that overrides the source?

as in, whatever is brought to the door, must be left behind, once the pop hall is entered, and the big boys rule come into play, the differences dissipate...

...and you are left with pure pop, purist pop, the differences small now, irrelevant, did we even remember them, what subgenre this one popped out of? no. pop supplants difference, as it must, or, rather, it renders them irrelevant, its the big canvas

Must Pop be Popular?

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Yes!

All a bit theoretical for me, at least for after midnight. I see where freakytigger is pointing with this, but I don't entirely agree. I mean, you do have to work with what you're given, but at the same time, I think we should consider the results of the Now Polls. (The industry is changing too rapidly now to try to work seriously with something like sales.) Some pop is simply Not As Good As other pop -- the highest peaks during one era might struggle to reach the middle ranges of another; some songs retain their power for years while others are forgotten within months. To

[(Anonymous)]

The easy answer is that the pure pop position was massively delusional – and at many times in the years since I would have agreed without hestitation. Dave Cavanagh's Creation book is good on the apparently unbridgable gulf between what Alan McGee and Jim Reid thought pop was, and what the Radio 1 programmers knew it to be. BUT... history will say that the delusional outsiders do sometimes win, as in the recent BBC4 Tories series, following the tiny groups of extreme free-market economists swimming completely against the tide in 1948 who lived to see income policies and credit controls driven from the earth. Now, the pure pop dream never reached hegemony, but refracted bits of it cropped up in the charts repeatedly over the years – the Primitives, the Stone Roses & the Inspiral Carpets, some of Britpop (although Noel's Pastels obsession never that obvious in Oasis's music), the Thrills (dull & vexing as they are) and onwards. And even the production anti-standards, the biggest factor perceived as having doomed indie's 80s crossover attempts, made it to the mainstream: there's no way that the June Brides or the Loft sounded any tinnier that The Libertines. - Mark M

Incidentally...

[(Anonymous)]

Has anyone made the connection between early Creation's psych + punk formula and the dreaded Thom woman? - Mark M