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

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Audio quality appears to be, arf arf!

I've always thought of quality as "go on, feel the quality of the production/recording/years and years of training!" IE something that should be imposed on the actual experience of listening er experiencing the song, the whole "No, it's a much better record than it sounds" b0ll0cks, IE actively anti-poptimist.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

The poptimist concern is DEFINING quality.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't even understand the comment. Quality = whether something is good a bad = this is a concern of...all but the most undiscerning, surely?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

For me the ultimate horizon of poptimism is certainly one in which quality disappears. It is a necessary postulate but it is also absolutely impossible, and unliveable. Quality is not objective but this does not mean we can just throw it away, i.e. quality = value FOR something, and we can accept that there are different 'uses' for music, including the unusual aesthetic 'non-use' use. But a world without quality would be a world without uses, and things without quality would be things without any differentiation, ergo impossible to conceive of. For me, poptimism means flirting with the impossible possibility of this disappearance of quality. It is not an ethics (a way of living) because it is an experience of the impossibility of ethics (i.e. of venturing towards the disappearance of liveability as such).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Change "DEFINING" for "SPOTTING" in Kat's post and we're getting close to what I feel (not that I can speak for "poptimists").

The 'optimism' in Poptimism is usually taken by its critics to mean a Pollyannaish "Pop is great! Now is great! Everything's great!" attitude (the word was originally coined during the course of a long and not very edifying blogfite about whether 2003 - or was it 2004 - was any good or not).

I think this doesn't go far enough - the Poptimist project is to be optimistic about *everything* it encounters, to be able to ask how to listen to a thing in order for it to become "good pop", and how pop is flexing and changing to accomodate what's popular within that umbrella. Usually, because good pop is interesting, the question "What's interesting about this?" is a good starting point.

but what is quality?

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

It's difficult for me to dissociate "quality" from production values, although lots of the stuff that, for example, Frank writes about is clearly high quality and clearly "pop" by sound and construction, and yet totally uninteresting to me. At the same time I guess there are things that lack that level of songwriting craftsmanship or fine production, that I go crazy about ("Maps" is what's coming to mind at the moment, although I'm not sure that's a great example).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

there are two versions of quality doing battle --

i. = characteristic (someone is totally undiscerning = can't tell one song fron another)
ii. = value as linked in to a particular discussion-sphere

(ie re ii.: if you argue that LOUD = ROXOR, then high volume is a desirable quality and sign of value)

i think the poptimistic tic is to be on the alert for CHARACTERISTICS YOU ARE DRAWN TO over and above (and in fact prior to) VALUES YOU HAVE COME TO (or been taught to recognise) as "qualities acknowledged and sought after by the cognoscenti" -- of course bcz the latter move in and out of fashion, the characteristic you are drawn to MAY (in former times) have been a quality acknowledged and sought after by a now-dispersed or vanquished cognoscenti; and it may actually be a quality acknowledged and sought after by a current ruling cognoscenti you just happen not to be in with

(what i'm getting at is that the judgment "this is good bcz it exhibits a thing that those in the know KNOW is a sign of being good" -- the sense of comparing it to a approval checklist -- is NOT poptimist: you are checking your own responses come what may, and then -- afterwards -- pinning down what it is yr responding to)

viz "everyone is saying this song is bad bcz TEH LOUD is WHERE IT'S AT, but what *i* like about it is that there are five Ks in the title!"

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

There is no quality, and there shouldn't be.

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Or quality as objective measure, is what I mean.

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.

[koganbot]

Er, what is this conversation about? (Not a rhetorical question, but not one I'm going to try to answer right now.)

Judging stuff - songs, ideas, people - good and bad is obviously a huge poptimist concern, since that's what the people at the Poptimists livejournal community spend a lot of time doing.

It is not our only concern. And it's not as big a concern for Alan as it is for most other poptimists.

Finding a universal measure for EVERYTHING (songs, ideas, people) does not seem to be a goal of anyone here, which is good because such a measure would be inflexible and dysfunctional (even a single-celled organism has to respond differently to things depending on its internal state and its needs of the moment).

It does not follow that all measures - local and contingent though they are - are equally good.

If people here would stop using the words "objective" and "subjective" (I mean, stop using them ever, for the rest of their lives), they would not be doing themselves any harm, or making themselves stupider.

Alex wrote this above: "But a world without quality would be a world without uses, and things without quality would be things without any differentiation, ergo impossible to conceive of. For me, poptimism means flirting with the impossible possibility of this disappearance of quality." I have no idea what his second sentence ("flirting with the impossible possibility...") means much less why he or anyone would find "disappearance" of quality" desirable. "Disappaearance of quality" = disappearance of anything's having an impact on anything else or being distinguishable from anything else = end of universe. This does not actually seem to be a poptimist goal, or Alex's.