Right

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The promised follow-up questions (two of them in fact)

What have you been most right about? (The world may or may not have caught up to you on this)

Does being seen as "wrong" or "right" about music by other people bother you much?

Comments

But what REALLY makes me mad is

[koganbot]

Had this email convo with Carl Wilson, who's doing a short book on Celine Dion, and Carl didn't get me mad but he asked a question that helped me to put into words what's been getting me angry since 1966 or so.

Carl Wilson: "Critical rockism, to use the term very broadly, tends to operate on an updated version of the Frankfurt School slam against pop culture - that it represents a mystification of capital, a corporate attempt to numb and distract the senses of the masses, etc. - more or less the way earlier generations of Marxists talked about religion." [Asks further if there's some intellectual counterweight to this slam other than simple populism.]

Frank Kogan [Long segment where I reject the idea that there is such a thing as rockism and reject the notion that the people who do get called "rockists" - disco-sucks kids and the like - have much to do with Adorno et al.]: "I've barely read the Frankfurt School, but there's no way to associate it with 'rockism' unless you make the claim that rock and its offshoots are not part of culture. How is pop mystification but rock not? Anyway, I won't belabor that point because you can work it out yourself. I'm probably not all that sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, but I doubt that they're claiming that some categories of people - rock fans, rock critics - have critical consciousness and that other categories of people - pop musicians, pop fans - can't have critical consciousness, are necessarily mystified. Insight is something that people work towards, not something they have or lack by virtue of who they are. And now we're back to where we started. Celine Dion is a legitimate object of study because we can't dismiss her on the basis of who she is or what social category she belongs to. Instead, we have to evaluate what she does, and give reasons for our claims about her. This isn't a difficult concept, but it's bedrock, and there's no counter to it that isn't bigotry. And this has nothing one way or another to do with 'populism' (not a self-explanatory term), since the reason she's a legitimate object of study isn't because she's popular but because we don't know her value unless we study her. This applies to anyone."