The History Of Jop Part 8 aka It started with a little kiss, like this

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Away from the Hip-Hop Wars the Pazz and Jop poll moves smoothly onward to 1986 - some great singles here but very few names that had not previously appeared in P&J. You get NINE ticks from these 25 tracks.


[Poll #829550]


1985: The Joptimised Version

1. Into The Groove (45 votes)
2. How Soon Is Now? (40 votes)
3. Raspberry Beret (37 votes)
4. Running Up That Hill (35)
5. Walking On Sunshine (24)
6. The Boys Of Summer (23)
7. Money For Nothing (22)
8. And She Was (21)
9. Smooth Operator (19)
10. I Wonder If I Take You Home (18)

Surprising mass support for VER STRAITS there!

Comments

Re: Your ugly face is going to bland

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha well i would call this an EXEMPLARY anti-rockist statement but i have long despaired of getting across what i appear to mean by the term to you -- which means that it must be useless (bcz i cannot use it to you)

Re: Your ugly face is going to bland

[koganbot]

Well it seems to be using "rock" attributes as a basis for analyzing and justifying everything. Of course I also had some other reasons (other than just my "rock reasons) for liking/disliking nonrock, but you couldn't really tell that from this rant. (And of course the "rock" reasons preceded rock, and will outlive rock.)

Re: Your ugly face is going to bland

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i would say that the values it deploys as a basis for analysing and justifying everything are KOGANIST -- viz explored and justified by YOU -- of course if there were a great kneejerk wave of people who agreed with the attributes you find and favour in the rock you like and assume them to be present generically in stuff they are not present in there would be an issue here but sadly this is not yet the case! (hmmm must pester NLR again)

so are you rockist in yr koganism? sometimes a bit maybe -- your recent anger at the prejudgment of "let it blurt" was (my def) antirockist in essence but a bit rockist in assumption (ie a bit prejudicial about WHY ppl might be making the prejudgement) -- but really pretty rarely

the things you're valuing you would be able to be justified on (your reading of) their own terms here whether or not rock had ever existed -- they are not borrowing rock's "anti-authoritarian" authority to signify; nor are they being used to affirm rock-as-the-genre-which-matters (exactly the opposite i'd say, given yr before rock and after parenthesis); or (which is also part of my defn) to affirm _______-as-the-genre-which-matters*

*i fully acknowledge there is a badly confusing element in the term itself: does it or doesn't it connect more closely to rock than to other genres? erm yes and no: historically the term arose in the context of deciding what genres should be given critical priority, in a magazine which till then had unquestioningly given rock priority; and yes also bz rock occupies a janus-faced position in music generally -- that it was a music which garnered its importance from its unimportance, to be meltzerish for a moment; so that to reach back to pre-rock modes of justification-by-importance to affirm rock against its other challengers was to toss out the importance-in-unimportance clause

but you can discover and energise this same idea in other musics, older and newer -- i would contend it became a BIG TALKED-ABOUT THING in rock first but the same contrary loop certainly operates in jazz, esp.when it was still pop as well as "art"; and in fact all over the place -- so to insist that this insight, this value, this attribute matters because it takes us back to rock is putting the story the wrong way round

rock matters -- or used to? -- because it dramatised the play around this value; but it's the value that matters (if it does); its name is therefore arguably fatally misleading (i used to think "BUT IN A GOOD WAY" but i am no longer at all sure of that)

i think once you pick out something like "outrageousness" as a valued attribute and take it seriously in its meaning (which is not simply musical after all), it helps you here the way other genres operate -- their conventions and code and blah blah -- ie by bringing a strong question into the genre, you put yourself up against and into that genre; it allows that genre NOT to be muffled by other genres

Re: Your ugly face is going to bland

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"it helps you HEAR the way other genres operate"

i am rehashing all this again not to defend "rockism" as a term per se -- it always seems to me a joke insult rather than a real one -- and more to get at the role it plaed in how i think about stuff, and (as you would put it) what is therefore at stake for me in clinging to it long after it (in its frutiful-error way) perhaps got me where i needed to

the "genres muffling other genres" seems to be pretty key to me -- to my aesthetic nerves -- in that i flare up when this occurs: what's THAT about eh?

Re: Your ugly face is going to bland

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(obvious counter: the accusation of "rockism" can be used to muffling effect -- as i don't use it in a genre-specific way i don't think i'm guilty of this type use of it -- i guess i am (by habit by now) trying to elbow space for a non-prejudicial across-the-board pre-appraisal of genre... nothing rejected unheard (even "let it blurt"); nothing rejected by shared assumption; insofar as genre coheres round shared assumption, is "x" within the genre bcz it affirms the assumptions or breaks with them (or both)?

and so on

Re: Your ugly face is going to bland

[koganbot]

Never did get around to replying to this stream, and not sure I understand it (Mark's history w/ term in shorthand, am having trouble deciphering the shorthand). So, to kind of continue on with my thought (at the expense of ignoring the stream?):

As far as I can tell, the only difference between me and the supposed "rockist" (as I am imagining you imagine him) is that when I play the authenticity card I'm probing and restless, whereas when the "rockist" plays the authenticity card he's lazy and conventional. But laziness and conventionality don't constitute an ism or a syndrome or a sensibility or a species or an underlying set of assumptions. And accusing someone of conventionality is rather conventional itself, is it not? Which isn't to say that there's no value in it.

So, anyway, let's say "Typical Rockist" applauds Sufjan for being probing and restless and does it in the context of deriding Ashlee for being conventional. Let's say Frank (who's barely heard Sufjan but has an understandable prejudice against him) applauds Ashlee for being probing and restless (which I have). And I'm applauded by others for being probing and restless myself, but also derided for being a kneejerk contrarian (this has happened). It seems to me we lose a whole fucking lot by calling the other guy "rockist" and me "antirockist" - even if he's truly kneejerk and I'm genuinely probing and restless. And what we lose is that we've sent the conversation off in the wrong direction.

And what we lose is we've stopped looking at the social strength of the phrase "restless and probing." (What makes me genuinely restless and probing is that I wonder about those words as praise words, wonder how they got there, rather than simply deploying them. But I see a family relation to the guy who uses such praise words without wondering about them - and the relation is that WE USE THE SAME PRAISE WORDS, though not always to the same effect.)

What's going on when I, or the poptimist, or the supposed "rockist," plays the authenticity card? (Any time anyone here says, "If you don't like ________ I question your poptimism" - in fact, any time anyone questions someone's poptimism in any way - he's playing the authenticity card.) Or, back to the first page of my book, what do we gain by defining ourselves as potentially compromised and contaminated (contaminated by "rockism," or conventionality, or what have you)? For surely we do define ourselve as potentially compromised and contaminated, every bit as much as the supposed "rockist" does.