Poptimism THORT for the day

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

"pop is a map of the world at large (everything else is a map of 1xcommunity at small)"

That one submitted by dubdobdee.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

(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)

[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.

[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!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

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.

[koganbot]

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

Where is here?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The clue is in the username!

[koganbot]

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