-- and shall kogan be king?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

when i brought the netroots into my previous post, it's true i was primarily looking at finincially sustainable systems, rather than "similar content"

but another element of overlap was (i sort of felt) actually content-related -- which is that the netroots gather round a cluster of highly critical pundits (viz atrios) whose energy and lure derives from the stubbornness with which they say NO to established media structures, habits, cliches and (this last important obv but not i think overridingly so) actual partisan political positions

so i was interested also -- less clear-headedly, somewhat intuitively -- in the idea that a broad self-generating structure could exist (and, to the point, already perhaps semi-exists) in which kogan-esque commentary MATTERED, precisely bcz a key part of his thought manifests as REFUSAL

i feel within what frank is asking is a potential conflict -- he wants DDR to be all-encompassingly open to types of voice and types of topic, and yet a lot of his personal project does in fact consist of saying (usually correctly) [xxx] IS ACTUALLY STUPID AND UNHELPFUL; in other words, while radically inclusive in one sense, it is also very much defined AGAINST something already in existence (or rather, two related things: what cultural journalism has become; and what the academic humanities have become)

my gut feeling has always been that this apparent contradiction, far from being disabling, has enormous potential gathering energy and liberating attraction, IF YOU CAN SET IT UP RIGHT (my motto when i wz editor of "the wire" was after all "have fun starting arguments")

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The thing with refusal (or irritation, in the less charged world of music discourse) is how well it handles the inevitable counter-refusal, especially in communities where the quickest way to make a mark is to work out exactly how much you can successfully reject an orthodoxy without getting ostracised. In political communities, because there's a notional external goal and focus, this may happen less, but let's take an idea from ILM as an example:

1. A founding idea of ILM (not the most important one, but probably the one most easily picked up on) is "Music criticism should spend more time thinking about music that has a wide audience. Currently it doesn't do this."
2. Founding idea gets simplified in practise into "Let's talk about pop not indie."

Now even of step 1 is a good idea, step 2 isn't a very good way of turning it into action because it invites endless (mostly) boring arguments about what pop is and what indie is and is there even a tension between them, all of which detracts from the central point of step 1, which is to spend more time thinking about the wide-audience music itself.

So step 3 is counter-refusal: people turning up in a community and joining the community to react against it. And I guess the problem comes in the different ways counter-refusal happens. The unhelpful way - "Ahhhhh You have just set up your own set of values ahhhhhhh" - which isn't untrue but doesn't move anything anywhere. OK, fine the idea's been demolished, now what? And the more helpful way - "Right, this isn't working, let's see how we got bogged down and where and see if we can work out how to improve things."

So much of my time on ILM seemed to be spent dealing with the first. It would be nice to have more of the second, which Frank does seem good at providing. Like I say, the first isn't *wrong* in what it says (well, not always), just tends to a kind of stasis in which the community trends towards other communities rather than away from them into its own thing.