Poptimist #4

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

NOW 100% MORE META: my column for Pitchfork this month, spinning out of a Poptimists post last week.

Comments

A few cents' worth (the remix)

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

A few rhetorical questions I don't have the luxury of thinking all the way through:

Can good pop criticism also prevent certain kinds of conversations? Shouldn't it? Aren't there generally awful, pointless, useful-to-no-one conversations that we (or "we") agree should be avoided?

Can music criticism that tries to shut down conversation actually be better at starting conversations than music criticism that tries to engage the reader on its own polite terms? (I'm thinking specifically of Tom Frank's shitty, opaque, wrong-headed Yum-Yum article in Harper's) Is there never any virtue in sneering at a reader?

Re: A few cents' worth (the remix)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I replied to the unremixed version, luddite that I am!

re Tom Frank - yeah of course bad writing can inadvertently start conversations but I still think good writing does a better job, because with the bad writing there's always a straw man element, a temptation to construct a "they" out of "the people who believe this shit".

Re: A few cents' worth (the remix)

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Clearly, I think, there is sometimes value in sneering. The problem is that there is no collective restraint (at least in the new media, free-for-all world). A lot of people out there want to sneer at the rest of us, and a) it gets tiring, and b) sometimes the sneerers don't have much to go on.

Re: A few cents' worth (the remix)

[koganbot]

Good criticism can prevent or supersede bad conversations by offering an alternative.

But people stay in bad conversations for much the same reason they stay in bad relationships: familiarity with the terms, fear of stepping into unknown territory, fear of abandoning one's coping mechanisms.

Re: A few cents' worth (the remix)

[koganbot]

Virtue in sneering at the reader: Richard Meltzer sneering at the rock fans - e.g. me - for building up rock in fawning art appreciation terms and in effect debasing themselves before it; so the sneer was meant to tear down the debasement, not just the debased. But also, he liked being mean.

Re: A few cents' worth (the remix)

[koganbot]

"e.g. me" meaning that at age 15 when I started reading him I identified with a lot of the rock and the terms that were being used to build it up, not that he was sneering at me by name. (That came in 2000.) He wouldn't have know who I was.