Poptimist THORT For The Day

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"quality, though it exists, is not a poptimist concern"

So sez jauntyalan - what say you?

(The Poptimist TFTDs will be drawn from that text poll I did last week about "Poptimist Tenets")

Comments

I was doing quite well with this before I started talking about beans

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think the statement depends on what you perceive the definition of "poptimism" to be. If we're people who are promoting the pop cause in the face of utter apathy and Razorlight, then we're only drawing genre lines and thus quality does become irrelevant. (Not, 'is it any good at all?' but 'is it any pop at all?' if yer follow me, placing no inherent value on pop-ness but merely seeing the purpose as being to do the apparently impossible and define pop)

On the other hand, there is an element to poptimism (as I would very much perceive) that there is nothing, literally nothing, not even Razorlight which you can't like if they bring out a good song. Or, well, like the song, not necessarily them. The idea of there being no guilty pleasures and therefore things are judged solely on quality.

On the other hand, since quality is a wholly subjective concept (I, for instance, find the quality of Somerfield Simply Value baked beans extremely pleasing in a diabetic shock sort of way but some people prefer Branstons' beans, because they pretends to have some sort of fibrous superiority that they consider amounting to 'quality'*) then perhaps it is wholly correct to say, as jel_bugle says, far more succinctly and without any sort of mention of beans, quality become irrelevant as a concept, leading solely to the creation of the sort of black-and-white 'this is good, this is rubbish and that is THE LAW' sort of discussion that I generally assume isn't The Point of poptimists.

I am, to be fair, completely off my head on cold medicine as I type this comment so don't judge me too harshly.

*Heinz beans were deliberately excluded from this virtually totally irrelevant study because everyone knows that they are what is longed for in the darkness of your heart.

Re: I was doing quite well with this before I started talking about beans

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I quite like talking about baked beans - more than I like eating them, which is admittedly not at all. The people in marketingland are all in a tizzy about Branston's Beans, because it's come along and done the impossible and dented Heinz' beans monopoly, and nobody can quite work out how they've done it, other than somebody at Branston's thinking "Actually, let's face it, it's a bit boring only having one kind of bean."

This is the principle on which pop's worked for years, of course.