A kung fu fighter in a disco

yes!

this is why i am agin attempts to define pop purely in terms just of stuff you like -- bcz the WORLD contains stuff you hate (and so do you and so do i)

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ie "pop" actually means "music"

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no no it's much bigger than that!

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is pop a map of all the other maps?

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jauntyalan.livejournal.com

that wus me

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cis.livejournal.com

are the other maps detailed maps of smaller areas? are they maps of the same area but with different landmarks? are they both?

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BOTH!! ALL!!

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[And then dubdobdee's brain burst, at the majesty that can only be called POP]

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koganbot

So pop embraces not only Israel and Palestine but the fact that they are at war with each other and that they may end up destroying big parts of each other and that some Palestinians and some Israelis probably would be happy to commit genocide.

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yes!! that would not be my favourite area of pop tho :(

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My take on it (http://claps.blogspot.com/2004/02/cuckoo-comments-to-this-woebot-post.html). We're working with different definitions of pop here--yes, from a certain perspective all the music we're talking about is "pop" music (i.e. not classical/jazz/folk) but also pop is, to continue the metaphor, the capitol city on the map, the concentration of all the other areas, where they come to mingle and be seen.

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I like the idea of Pop being the cosmopolitan metropolis.

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koganbot

Eppy, here's something from my book, which was taken from some ilM thread, unfortunately I don't remember which:

"Pop-glossy glorious robotic energetic teenage all-age singing dancing pop-is dead," Tom Ewing wrote in 2001 - and subsequently went right on using the word "pop" to refer to music that didn't resemble his glorious dead era of She'kspere, Max Martin, TLC, Britney, "Bills Bills Bills," "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)." Tom explains (some) of his usages as (1) what's on the charts, regardless of quality, unless other considerations override this ("I'd sooner call MBV 'indie' or 'shoegaze' or something even if their record is in the chart because calling them 'pop' feels like a violation of meanings 2 and 3"), (2) the specific current style of pop, (3) "a personal ideal of mine, a kind of music which individual records and even periods of Pop(2) can live up to but which Pop(1) as a whole cannot," and (4) "one end of a continuum of images, stances, and actions relating to the presentation and production processes of an artist and their music; i.e. heavy marketing, major label support, not writing one's own music etc."

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Yeah, Tom replied to the post at the time, but unfortauntely the commenting system I was using has since broken, so it's gone.

Expanding/refining this is one of the things I'd really like to do in grad school--I'd like to research how genres/sounds move into and out of pop, and where the transition points between high and low culture (which, granted, don't occur outside works now, but do occur inside works) are. I've since made a diagram and everything. But yeah, I think there's value in the way we talk about pop, but it could stand to be nailed down more.

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koganbot

Your Pop-II doesn't always work. Any current music that sounds like the Beatles would be "pop" under Pop-II (and I'm fine with that) but so would any current music that sounds like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols (I don't think the fact that they only charted in England takes them out of the category) and Metallica and Hole, and I don't think anyone is perceiving this is "pop," since other considerations overwhelm the fact that they're drawing on music that was once popular (one of the considerations that, though being "popular," it wasn't called "pop" in its time). Also, obv. there were no charts in the 15th through 18th centuries, but Beethoven and sonata form draw on musical forms that you could call "popular" (dance forms and religious forms), doesn't he? And, also, Beethoven himself was once popular, and it's pretty hard not to think of his being part of popular culture in America of the first half of the 20th century, even if he wasn't hitting the singles charts, e.g. Toscannini broadcasts, biopics of the fellow on TV sponsored by Disney, etc.

And your Pop-III seems closer to "folk" than to "pop" if you're taking the meaning of "folk" as used by, um, forget the man's name (Becker?), by which the archetypal folk song isn't so much "House Of The Rising Sun" (though it might qualify as "folk") but "Happy Birthday"! It doesn't seem to me that much pop music could be performed by amateurs, given that it's made by professionals in studios with state-of-the-art technology. A karaoke version of "...Baby One More Time" might count, with the original record as source material, but I don't see how the original record itself would count as something an amateur could do.

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Now I think including entire bands was the wrong way to go; entire bands can be within a certain catagory, but it maybe more comes down to elements. On the one hand, I think it would be useful to look at a band that does sound like Sabbath as pop, but I also can't think of any bands (admittedly my scope is limited) that do sound entirely like Sabbath did. There are bands that sound entirely like Zepp and the Pistols did (Wolfmother, Green Day) but those bands are pop. Generally bands that don't think of themselves as pop only incorporate some elements of these genreic-but-pop bands, either musically or methodologically, so those elements would still be pop-II. And these bands are very much pop in some ways. I'm not saying their genre roots should be de-emphasized but I also think these elements have made their way into future genres via pop, not subcultures.

As for III, yeah, needs more refining, but I still think it's useful. Amateurs is probably the wrong word; I more meant whatever the opposite of "artist" is. Crafting music to commercial standards/requirements, rather than following your muse etc., or imitating people who once made art to commercial standards. The "old snob" view. I also think it's genuinely worth drawing a line at the age of mechanical reproduction. The historical precedents are useful but are really part of a different world.

Thanks for the thoughts, though, these are all things I need to consider.

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I quite firmly believe that some Metallica ("Enter Sandman" if nothing else) is pop, and in fact planned to mention that in my Chart Championship profile.

I heard "Run to the Hills" over the weekend while (blush) eating lunch at Hard Rock Cafe. It was not Pop then but apparently it is now.

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koganbot

You didn't link to the original source of Mark's statement, so I don't know its context, but the statement sure seems like wishful thinking: what Mark wishes the word "pop" meant as opposed to what it really does mean.

American popular culture is very very good at not only ignoring the rest of the world but ignoring the facets of its own country that doesn't appeal to those who spend most on leisure goods. This latter attribute provides an interesting tension, in that people outside the favorable demographics are the ones who often use entertainment for upward mobility, meaning that there's often something of a split between the creators and their audience.

Anyway, the "PBS" I was railing against in early Why Music Suckses prided itself on being open to the wide world of music, and Op magazine's "indie only" coverage meant that it would potentially cover anything as long as it was on an independent label, hence it wasn't particularly interested in indie rock but rather in all sorts of foreigners and marginals and avant gardists etc. etc. Hence wasn't mapping a smaller area than pop did. Ditto for some aspects of the urban "folk music" movement in the '50s and early '60s: the preponderance of "folk music" was drawn from the specialty musics of the U.S. southeast (country and rural blues), but some folkies (e.g. the Kingston Trio and Folkways Records) used the label "folk" as an excuse to range far and wide over the world's music, including popular musics of other cultures, Asia, Africa, etc. A Kingston Trio record was more eclectic than any of its pop counterparts (and even once threw in a British music hall number). Of course, the Kingston Trio were popular, hence you could say they were "pop," just as Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel have been pop at times.

However, there was something fundamentally dishonest about the folk music movement, and there was something fundamentally dishonest about the indie-alternative-fanzine network of which Op was a part, which is that they were reaching "outward" to the past and to the margins and to the big wide world so that they could avoid thinking through their issues with the broader culture of which they - the folkies and the indies - were a part. The equivalent dishonesty here at

poptimists is the pretence that we are at odds with and dissassociated from something called "rockism." You cannot be intellectually honest and use the words "rockist" or "rockism."

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koganbot

the preponderance of "folk music" was drawn from the specialty musics of the U.S. southeast (country and rural blues)

of the 1920s, that is

is very very good at not only ignoring the rest of the world but ignoring the facets of its own country that doesn't appeal to those who spend most on leisure goods

doesn't = don't ("Where is your grammar?" "She's downstairs doing the laundry.")

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American popular culture is very very good at not only ignoring the rest of the world but ignoring the facets of its own country that doesn't appeal to those who spend most on leisure goods. This latter attribute provides an interesting tension, in that people outside the favorable demographics are the ones who often use entertainment for upward mobility, meaning that there's often something of a split between the creators and their audience.

Not what you were talking about, obviously, but as I was reading this, what immediately came to mind was landed aristocracy in Europe supporting Mozart, Bach, etc. while the overwhelming majority of the population sang God knows what in the fields. How much is specific to America?

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You cannot be intellectually honest and use the words "rockist" or "rockism."

Who is "you" in this statement? (Agreed, btw.)

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one of the things that frank has persisted in ignoring in his war on the word "rockist" is the degree to which it is being used by people (jokily?) of THEMSELVES -- his claim that it is only used to mock or decry "those people over there and their problems" is simply false

of course what he means is You cannot be intellectually honest and use the words "rockist" or "rockism" IN THE WAY I AM CURRENTLY DEFINE IT -- certainly there is a destructive, self-righteous and hypocritical usage at large (which is only of course used haha by "those people over there") (ok and doubtless sometimes by me also), but i'm not sure it's any more destructive than his using tank-command-central terms like "intellectually dishonest" when what he actually (sometimes) means is "cheekily playful and self-mocking" (things he is on the whole very pro, though not always good at finding the best way of encouraging in others!)

(not that i know what the best way always is, either: i suspect some of my ways are what frank calls FILIBUSTERS -- ie "not answering the question", where i feel "answering the question" is little more than being forced to drag the conversation over into exactly the dullness and deadness frank actually wants to avoid and dispense with!) (and i would rather answer it via SHOW than TELL)

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koganbot

his claim that it is only used to mock or decry "those people over there and their problems" is simply false

Change "only" to "mostly" and it's simply (and complexly) true. And the fact that such people (other than Simon R.) are using it self-mockingly rather than seriously pretty much proves my point. People sometimes refer to themselves self-mockingly as Nazis or fascists, but they still fundamentally mean "fascist" and "Nazi" to mean the other guy and to mean behavior that should be avoided. Whereas when I used my PBS metaphor I was referring to impulses and behavior that (1) I shared, (2) I thought were legitimate, (3) were culture-wide (so part of pop not just indie culture), and (4) I saw twisting into destructive outcomes.

Also, the serious convo that I want to drag you into doesn't have to be deadly dull, but in case it is, I don't want to dispense with it. Maybe it was deadly dull for Ticho Brahe (sp?) to work out his planetary locations and for Kepler to focus in on the fact that Brahe's data showed planets off by a little bit from where cosmology said they should be, but this dullness (if it was dullness) led to Kepler revolutionizing cosmology in exciting ways.

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bah but i want to be kepler with his exciting ways!

(fact: tycho brahe had a false nose made of gold!)

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i've made this a bit more fightey than i meant it to i think -- what i'm getting at is that i think what i generally wanted to use the word "rockism" for was intrinsically self-mocking (i guess a bit the way the phrase "politically correct" once was; ie as a flaw exhibited by "our kind of people"?); calling it "intellectual dishonesty" seems to miss this flirty element of deliberate;y provocative self-indicting bad faith, and to respond to the apparent content separate from the delivery (or something like that)

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(oops that was meant to be a qualifier to the "one of the things that frank persistently" post -- converting it into "why i balk at frank's mode of refusal of this word", and away from "let's all use the word rockism a lot again", which i'm not angling for especially

the context was just tom asking us to "say something poptimist" so there isn't a context to miss here -- basically i really DO think of pop as the field rather than any of the things currently on it; when things dominate the field, it's easy to confuse it with them (1, 2 and 4 all do this): my version includes future possibility as well as merely past and present historical-empirical fact

(i am right in the middle of writing a review of a documentary about the secret mainstream of underground movies in the early 70s soo all this is churning around my head rather)

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koganbot

But anyway, the "rockist" thing was only one sentence in my post.

It seems to me that mass audiences respond quite favorably to entertainment and art that plumps for standing against the mass. With or without the word "rockist," ilX and

poptimists haven't done a great job of discussing this interesting fact.

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

The point is that nobody actually thinks of themselves as a mass - even less than they think of themselves as a rockist!

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in the review i'm right now writing (promise today but they're getting it tomorrow) i'm arguing that jim morrison's line "they've got the guns but we've got the numbers" was an actual real element of the sense of (counter-culture) community for a while in the 60s: that mass pop success was her-and-now on its way because a genuine voice-of-the-people democracy is being born (in the charts and in the world)

i think this sense of the charts as a citadel to be seized is something it's quite hard to recapture (if we even want to) -- "we are the world" seems a silly thing to say, but there was a time when it was a potent (not to say frightening) declaration

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

Well it isn't quite true to say that nobody thinks of themselves as "a mass" - it's more that mass-ness is a device people use or discard as necessary to bolster an individual standpoint. But I don't think "mass" is part of many people's core identity, in the way that their gender or ethnicity or job or even hobbies might be.

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at the risk of disappointing my fellow poptimists, some of this discussion is making me think too hard, and in all the same ways that I realized that i was required to think at uni (and came to hate). or, as mark might put it, more brahe please!

how many non-anglo poptimists are there out there? i ask because i wonder how true frank's "mass audiences respond quite favorably to... standing against the mass" holds in other cultures. As I understand it, that was part of tropicalismo in Brazil, and there was obviously a current of it in Russian/Soviet underground rock in the 70s/early 80s. But I honestly don't feel it at all here now. A "cultural" answer is the easy one, although it's always possible that there are youth subcultures so (foreign and) underground that I'm competely missing them.

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koganbot

I honestly don't feel it at all here now.

Where is here?

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

The clue is in the username!

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koganbot

So he lives in one of the blue states! Are U.S.-made action-adventure books and films popular there?

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koganbot

I think you're underplaying the seriousness of your intent, which is to come up with a usable critique of something, not just to playfully mock yourself.

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ok, but as i say, the way i (would now) want to deploy what yr calling a "useable critique" is not to get deep into the technical weeds of why such and such a state of mind is limiting, because by going there you're (over)acknowledging the important of that stuff, when what i'm arguing is not that [xx] is "to be avoided", but that it's limiting and a bad place to be stuck in all the time (or constantly and inevitably hauled back to)

the point of flirty lightness is to act out how there's other ways to look at something: the seriousness here is, yes, that "[xx] is not the only way to see or understand or respond", hence the counter-argument is more [xx]-ish type stuff, but a completely different mode of response

(=i want to be kepler so winningly -- if incoherently in terms of actual-real cosology -- that someone else goes back and fills in the brahe-stuff after the fact) (is science the best model for how the thing will move on? in the art model for epistemic shifts, or whatever they're called, often features artists doing something they don't entirely themselves understand at the time, which other people explain back at them afterwards)

i think it's perfectly fair to say that the discourse of rockism has long stopped being the above, which is why i'm not especially gung-ho to move back into using it a lot

i also wonder if "PBS" ever quite functioned the way you wanted it, outside discussions between you and chuck: i can quite easily see how it also would tumble towards the wrong kind of discussion (ie becoming a discussion of a behaviour or attitude to be avoided, and moving away from yr 1-4); in fact as i recall in WMS it *did* tend to move away from that whenever anyone was using it to reply to you

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hence the counter-argument is NOT more [xx]-ish type stuff, but a completely different mode of response

cosmology

doesn't the art model for epistemic shifts, or whatever they're called, often features artists doing something they don't entirely themselves understand at the time, which other people explain back at them afterwards?

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koganbot

Most certainly the shifts in art and science are somewhat different given that arts never have periods of totally dominant paradigms in the way that a science can ("totally dominant" meaning that if you're not working within the paradigm you're not a part of that science). (Not sure what you mean or gain by the adjective "estemic.") But one point that Kuhn made about the history of scientific paradigm shifts might also apply to art shifts, and that point may be something of the opposite of what you're saying. That is, Kuhn thinks the "explaining back at them afterwards" results in bad history that doesn't help us to understand what the innovator was actually doing but rather tries to fit the innovator into the patterns that his innovations led to, which are somewhat different from the innovations themselves. Which is to say that you can't understand Kepler if you're placing him into the Newtonian cosmology that he led to, and this is because the three laws of his that made it into Newtonian cosmology had meant something different within the systems that he himself was trying to create. They seemed to him to cohere with ideas that other people subsequently tossed aside.

"Art" examples might be the generally lunkheaded way feminists c. 1971 tried to read mid '60s Stones stuff like "Under My Thumb," and also my own misreading to counter the feminists' stupid readings. E.g., the feminist ex post facto reading would be that Jagger had been celebrating the double standard, where woman is responsible and subservient to the man but the man is neither responsible to or subservient to the woman - whereas if you listen to the "Under My Thumb" in the context of their other songs and in contrast to the other music of the time dealt with the romance cycle, you see something very different (i.e., Jagger continually playing untrustworthy narrators who are unable to admit their connection to the people they're pretending to dominate or be indifferent to, but Jagger not necessarily dissociating himself from the urge to be dominant or indifferent). But then you get me c. 1971 saying that Jagger puts switches and shock effects into his lyrics to make you uncomfortable with the male-female patterns he's describing, hence "Heart Of Stone," "Under My Thumb," "Back Street Girl," "Lady Jane," "High And Dry," "My Obsession" are attempts at changing those relations. This reading may not be altogether wrong, but it's certainly projecting the needs of me in 1971 onto Jagger in 1966. (Another reading would be that Jagger in 1966 was ambivalent about how much interconnection and how much independence he wanted - he wanted both! - and that this ambivalence enriched his songs and enriched his life. And that he had - and liked - a certain amount of restlessness in regards to the way things were, without necessarily wanting to tranform anything but without necessarily not wanting to transform anything. That seems true to 1996.)

So "explaining back to you" means telling you you were doing something different from what you did. And people can do this to themselves in writing their own history, writing about their transitional work not as if it were transitional but as if it had fully arrived at the outcome.

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koganbot

"The Last Time" (which Tom should have given a 10) has the greatest - and one of the longest - fadeouts in music, and Jagger's repeating over and over "I don't know" because the narrator really doesn't know whether the relationship should be over or not, and it also contains a threat similar to the one in the song's gospel source ("this could be the last time" means you might not know when you might die, you might not know when your friend might die and you won't see him again, you could meet your maker at any moment): this affair could end any second. This could be the last time. May be the last time. I don't know.

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epistemic = i was thinking of paradigms and meant "paradigmatic"!

(epistemes is what foucault calls paradigms, i think) (except theyre probably importantly different -- however since the only reason i used the word was by mistake i'm not going to bother to find out, at least not right now)

i guess i'm wondering if "bad history" is a problem in art the way it may be in science? (i actually think it probably is, having just created a counter-example about how romero didn't know "night of the living dead" was "about vietnam" till people told him afterwards, and how if he'd know this he wouldn't have been able to make it particularly well -- propblem w.counter-example being a. it's totally made-up (romero was pretty clear about what he was doing and why), and b. the reason this kind of reductive after-the-fact "well actually it's all about [x]" stops people doing good work from the off is because it's very rarely true)

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i ended the "if..." book by saying this: which was a rhetorical device obviously (it's about lots of things), but is a way of saying that anderson's own experience of loneliness -- his commitment to it, in fact -- had a shaping effect on his sense of form; in particular his sense of how to end his film (and of course i was very consciously thinking about how to end my book)

i don't in fact believe this was front-and-centre conscious on anderson's part, at least in the sense that he had decided to "make a film about loneliness" (if he had decided to do that, it would have been quite another film, and maybe not about schools at all): he tended to be fairly (too?) open about what he considered his aims and intentions in any given film

but i think once you start to think about this element in his personality, you see very clearly the impasse his politics and film-making had run into -- why he never again made as strong a film, for example

i think with aspects like form,by which i mean the feeling about when something is well-made, or the "right shape", or completed, or "what you meant", the impulse(s) can sometimes be operating at a very deep, unconscious or intuitive level, which you are resisting when operating in conscious modes: not least because these decisions are being made towards to end of a project, when your will to engage with the things that took you into it may be exhausted (as indeed may you, functioning on instinct getting something done)

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koganbot

Well, yeah, my PBS metaphor was not (yet?) altogether a success, even on my terms, and since I was using it as a term of abuse, there was a natural tendency for other contributors to the mag to say "Not me!" But at its origin, the intent of the metaphor was for us to examine how we actually functioned within culture as opposed to how a lot of people claimed to be functioning against or at odds with a "mainstream."

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