The History Of Jop Part 9 aka Every other story is tellin you somebody died

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The Pazz and Jop poll for 1987, revisited. You get nine choices.


[Poll #832067]


1986: The Jip-Jop Wars (Poptimist Version)

1. West End Girls (38 votes)
2. Word Up (35)
3=. Walk This Way (33)
3=. Fight For Your Right To Party (33)
3=. Papa Don't Preach (33)
6=. Kiss (31)
6=. Walk Like An Egyptian (31)
8. Manic Monday (25)
9=. Rise (18)
9=. Nasty (18)
9=. Addicted To Love (18)

Comments

Dean's Essay

[koganbot]

"Radio is a good, weird machine," Greil Marcus insisted last year, and this year the theme was reflected in the singles lists of many critics who've never met--for instance, Frank Kogan, Rob Tannenbaum, Chuck Eddy, and Ted Cox. All were Amerindie partisans five years ago, and to an extent they still are, with Cox and Tannenbaum in the Lobos-to-Hüskers tributary and Eddy and Kogan down with noise bands like White Zombie and Pussy Galore. But for singles they listen to the radio and get off on getting manipulated. Cox and Tannenbaum go for pop-to-schlock, Fleetwood Mac or Eddie Money, while Eddy and Kogan list a lot of street-rap. But all fell for diva/girl dance records that five years ago they almost certainly would have dismissed as, dare I say it, disco: Whitney Houston, Deborah Allen, Company B, Exposé.

(PRAISED as disco, more like.)

But if Eddie Money and Spoonie Gee are blips, they're blips that add up to something. Cox and Tannenbaum move from meaningful, sonically distinct Amerindie songcraft to pragmatic, factory-tooled songcraft to physically manipulative (but liberating) dance-pop; Eddy and Kogan move from desperate, sonically enraged Amerindie noise to streetwise, beatwise noise to physically liberating (if manipulative) dance-pop. All respond to rhythm as meaning--or at least as a component of rock and roll's musical vocabulary that the various unmistakable Amerindie sounds fail to account for. And all confront rock and roll's significance-deadening crisis of overproduction by moving beyond mere critical consensus to the pop consensus at its most democratic, anonymous, and perhaps even arbitrary. Being critics, they may well get into the lyrics of their favorite disco songs as well, although not as spontaneously as Brian Chin gets into "You Used To Hold Me." But it's fair to say that the elation they feel is the elation of escape--not just from their troubles, as Cox believes, but from a critical dead end.

As someone who's always believed the stupid pleasures of mass culture deserve more respect than they get from intellectuals of any political stripe, I'm very sympathetic to this tendency. I suspect it's prophetic, too, which doesn't necessarily mean it will ever be fully reflected in the Pazz & Jop consensus. But it does partake of a certain voluptuous beat-me beat-me passivity that I find suspicious as the reign of Reagan drags to its enervating close. And insofar as it represents a programmatic rejection of the quasi-literary song aesthetic (as it does for Eddy), I'm not ready to go along. Just in case it seems I've been saying there are no more good songs any more, let me emphasize: I've been saying there are more than we know what to do with. Maybe, just maybe, we can solve this cognitive problem, and we definitely shouldn't give up on it yet. I mean, every day I hear songs that not only mean something but get me off. That effect rarely endures the way it's supposed to, sometimes because the song (words and/or music) wears out, sometimes because it's rendered moot by the competence and worse of the LP where it appears. The thing is, why should it endure? As a peculiarity of a novelty-obsessed youth genre, the belief that rock and roll should get you off forever--that is, change your life on an approximately semiannual basis--has essential uses and attractions. But it's also a romantic delusion. As Randy Newman put it: "Everybody dies."

Re: Dean's Essay

[koganbot]

All right, this is one of those times where Xgau hovers near an idea without quite getting there. In other words, I don't altogether understand what he's saying. But among other things he's projecting an internal tension of his own onto me (at least) and onto rock criticism: That is, he, Xgau, thinks (thought) there was a tension between significance on the one hand and pleasure on the other, so he is working hard in his essay (and in his work in general) to overcome that tension. And one of his problems is that he hasn't thought through what he means by "significance," so he uses it as a stand-in for a vague constellation that can mean anything from "socially significant" to "poetically impressive."

(Whereas I was working from different maps altogether; not "pleasure" vs. "significance" but stuff like hallway vs. classroom [though I hadn't come up with that metaphor yet], and I wasn't buying into the classroom's right to define "significance" or the hallway's right to define "pleasure" - whereas I think Xgau fell whole hog into those def'ns, and then worked with difficulty to extricate himself.)