The History Of Jop Part 10 aka I had a feeling I could be someone

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

1988 - and it's a winner! (Also possibly your only chance ever to vote, vote, vote for the Wilburys in a Poptimists Poll)


[Poll #835009]

1987 - What The Jop Was Going On?

1=. Sign O The Times (33 votes)
1=. Pump Up The Volume (33 votes)
1=. Bring The Noise (33 votes)
4. Faith (29)
5=. U Got The Look/Housequake (24)
5=. It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) (24)
5=. I Know You Got Soul (24)
8. The One I Love (22)
9. Don't Dream It's Over (19)
10. Luka (18)

MARRS and PE got 6 'best' votes each, Prince got 8.

Comments

Re: Meanwhile in Britain

[koganbot]

This isn't the place where I'm going to go into my spiel about why the word "rockism" is a barrier to thought and why people shouldn't use it; I'll just say that basically what we've got are society-wide impulses and tensions that already existed for at least 100 years (if not 300), so you don't have something creeping into the media but rather just something that gets expressed in the media - but what gets expressed isn't an attitude ("rockism") that some people have, but rather tensions that pretty much everyone has. E.g., your phrase "trad rockism" is itself unstable, since rock is not at all comfortable with the idea of "trad," given that in rock's hero story the music is birthed in originality and rebelliousness and wildness. But these are praise words ("wildness" etc.) that people will affix to all sorts of different music, different people choosing different musics. As for the P&J votes, the most valid choices from the point of the view of the Hero Story are Public Enemy and Eric B. & Rakim and Salt N' Pepa; black people w/ beatboxes more acceptable actually than Hollywood sleaze metal. The big surprise for me at the time was the high showing of "Child"; my guess it was a "guilty pleasure" vote for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise touch hair metal with a ten-foot pole. Check in vain year in year out in Pazz & Jop for Def Leppard (whose "Pour Some Sugar On Me" was the teen favorite of the year, and is better than "Sweet Child O' Mine"), Bon Jovi, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Slaughter, Poison, Kiss, Warrant, etc., who were as much the teenpop of the '80s as New Edition and New Kids were. In fact, "Sweet Child" is something of a Pazz & Jop anomaly, and you don't anything like it again until, um, "Since U Been Gone."

But then a vote can mean different things for different people. Amongst the hair-metal fans themselves, Whitesnake and GN'R could embody all those great rock values of importance and resistance; for a mainstream pop fan, Whitney Houston might not be dancey dancey pop so much as she's soul traditionalism and legitimate vocalizing (or might be all three). Some of the praise I hear for Paris Hilton today (doesn't care what you think of her, is willing to let people hate her) are exact matches for what was bestowed on the Rolling Stones in 1963. And there's nothing wrong with that.