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

[(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.