Two acts is a coincidence, three is a SCENE!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

So...

Gwen Stefani
Robyn
Fannypack
Annie maybe??

sure there must be others* - acts making pop music with i) a fair degree of autonomy, ii) a confident consciousness of it BEING pop music rather than s'thing more 'authentic', iii) an immersion in / borrowing from 'street-level' genres. And the examples I can think of are all women, which may or may not be significant too.

This strikes me as

- a good thing! (cos I like them all)
- an interzone between the 'pro-pop' and 'hipster' fields
- a potential way to talk about MIA which both sidesteps and explains the boring disdain for her from Certain Quarters. (NB I still don't like MIA, but I like the MIA-hate arguments less.)

*OK the moves all come from Madonna, but Gwen is maybe more important because after No Doubt she COULD have gone 'serious' for the solo career and went in the exact opposite and much more fruitful direction.

Comments

Re: Dissenting voice.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

In the ear of the listener, yeah! "We reconfigure them to hear the judgement points": This is the Eddyist not the Lamacq definition of a 'scene', a critical deployment that is useful for breaking up and moving on debates (and also for hopefully-liberating card-shuffling in home listening). And if it turns out not to be useful, destroy it.

in other words it's about "Konichiwa Bitches" being a good card in the MIA arguments (where "arguments" = abstruse trading-card games).

Re: Dissenting voice.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think I'm into the Eddyist game up to a point: I can definitely see it's value as anti-rockism, since it breaks up 'natural' genre; and it works best when the reconfiguration makes a glorious absurd sense (and a not so absurd sense, since most of the genres are saturated in the same pop memes anyway). Which I just don't see in this case -- looks too much like Lemacqism. (i.e. criticism as identifying trends of the day; isn't Eddyism more about reconfiguring criticism away from public-voice-of-authority to geek-busting anarchy (i.e. away from keeping up with the times, to seeing pop as huge sprawling anachronistic chaos)?).

Re: Dissenting voice.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah the Eddyism on display in the history book is very much pan-chronistic, cos it's a history book! But on ILM, say, he's more contemporary in his mix-and-matching.

(And I think you can use Lamacqist genres, even macro-genres, in an Eddyist way.)