Poptimist rountable: Why don't you like what you're supposed to like?

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

[koganbot  has been answering this question, originally posed by poptasticuk , in his column here, and talking about it on his journal here. I thought it might be in order to continue the conversation today. Personal anecdotes welcome! I'm off out, but I'll be back to talk after 2.]

When I was 12 I was a member of a Scout troop based on a housing estate a little way from the comfortable middle class suburb where I lived. I was just discovering music, and particularly loved the Beastie Boys. (Obviously my mum never let me steal a VW badge, but I was allowed to write and ask for the little replicas they gave out in an attempt to keep kids away from their cars.) For a while I was allowed to share this enthusiasm with other members of the group, until one day they decided that as a 'square' kid from a posh school, I wasn't supposed to like the Beastie Boys, and clearly was only doing it to 'fit in'.

Around the same time my dad was a director at a merchant bank in the city. One day he overheard a much younger colleague saying 'you know Mr T******? You'd think he was into, you know Vivaldi or something. But he likes Iron Maiden!' (And WASP, Helloween, etc. it transpires. Partly because he was lending money to a company that was involved with those acts, but hey, why spoil a good story!)

A year or so later I was in my first year at boarding school, and I had (via my dad -- not how this is supposed to happen!) got into metal. I remember one of the older boys (who subsequently ended up as a maths teacher at the school, I wonder where he is now?) walking past, noticing that I was listening to 'Kill 'em All' and saying 'Metallica: pretty hev (heavy) for a junior'. This time not liking what I was supposed to like was a good thing, and he let me have free run of his cassettes to learn up on all that other heavy stuff. (Result! Cheers Simon!)

Obviously this still goes on -- I think a large chunk of the 'poptimist' experience is about this: deliberately liking what you're supposed to dislike; finding yourself in transgression of 'supposed-to's of various sorts; and of course encoding new 'supposed-to's. (Aren't all the polling and games intended to recognise and disrupt the natural formation of 'supposed-to's?) Most of my IRL pals in Edinburgh like what they're supposed to like (although I think everyone has a couple of things they like that don't fit -- maybe this is the limit of the 'supposed-to' model), and are happy like that. [But I was playing tunes when we had people round for C's birthday and pretty much every track prompted a 'what! you can't play this' from someone -- but there was always someone else who thought it was ok to play it, so clearly all sorts of 'supposed-to's were clashing in the room.]

Anyway what annoys me most about music radio for example is how obviously it enshrines 'supposed-to's: you know, Radio 1 is for 'new music', as long as that doesn't include too much dance music etc.; 6music for 'music that matters'. But then I guess that 'supposed-to's are how the cultural industry works -- fixing and solidifying the 'supposed-to's that are already there in the social world. So the battle for autonomy is the battle against 'supposed-to's?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I listened to The Toby because I wasn't supposed to, and then the wind changed and I got stuck like it.

The above statement is about 50% true, but the 50% is not concentrated in any one piece of the statement.

bopkids

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Country is surely the biggest and most long-standing "shouldn't like", though?

[sbp.livejournal.com]

music radio ... enshrines 'supposed-to's

Commercial music radio certainly does - that's how they sell advertising space.

I dunno. e.g. many of my close friends are into indie *and* minimal techno. I wonder if you get into any genre there are supposed-tos, but that must reflect the superficial (top most) layer of the genre. Once you get into the genre more deeply you realise either that they're supposed-to for a reason, or that there's so much other good stuff that you don't care about the supposed-tos anymore.

And "I Will Survive" has just been followed by "Stayin' Alive" on the office jukebox....

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

minimal techno IS indie, obv ;)

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think it's about more than genres: some genres are exclusive, others permit association with specific other genres (not everyone likes hip hop AND r&b, but no-one really raises an eyebrow if you do: but very few people I know (young professional, white, living in Scotland) like either so liking one or the other or both raises eyebrows [R&B most of all, since indie kids have had a hard-on for certain very specific ideas of hip-hop for a long time]). It's also true that genre-leaders (Frank's opinion-formers?) can be accepted as having much wider taste, since they keep introducing new things into the genre. (Does the same thing happens when e.g. Radio 1 decide that ELO or Elton John or Leo Sayer are 'OK' to like again?)

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

At school I was the "rocker", though the other metal kids didn't really accept me coz I liked Poison and Megadeth at the same time, and expressed a liking for T-Rex, and like you're not supposed to do that. I guess I'm supposed to like boring indie music like the Smiths, which thankfully I never will.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

If you like metal are you supposed to signal it in the way you look?

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

'Metallica: pretty hev (heavy) for a junior'

Nyaaaw! :)

TBH this idea of "transgression" is an old chesnut and very close to wilful contrarianism (which is GRATE in of itself obv) to strike at straw men (not so GRATE) - esp in these circles! Or perhaps is seen as transgressing without actual investment in the act of transgression (dabbling in waters you don't really like for the sake of it). However on saying that I can't really draw any meaningful conclusion! Hurrah for me!

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's more about working out what you really like without (much) reference to what other people would expect you to like. So it's only transgressing against ridiculous assumptions, which is THE SORT OF CONTRARIANISM WE LIKE.

bopkids

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I was very worried as a teenager about what I should and shouldn't be listening to (indie snob phase). But most of the time this went the opposite way - I knew that the Manics were rubbish and their fans were ridiculous and and and... but then I bought the Holy Bible and it was actually good. I think it was from around about that point that I loosened up my disdain and was more open to liking previously dismissed stuff (eg Spice Girls), though it would be some years before I was brave enough to 'go public'.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Like umlauts on Frank's LJ thread, I have no idea what other people think I'm supposed to like, and have no anecdotes to share :(

From my perspective, I do like exactly what I'm supposed to like! I am guilty of contrarianism at the margins. But I don't support bad music as some sort of rebellion against 'supposed-to's.

Dr. T is right that poptimists has a tendency to enshrine new 'supposed-to's, and that worries me sometimes. But since I like 90% of these things anyway, it's hardly worth rocking the boat.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

It means the poptimists hivemind is RIGHT! :)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

"Supposed to like" has worked on numerous levels for me, most of them at odds with each other!

There's the usual thing of acquaintances, on first discovering that I'm "into music", assuming that this means critically-approved indie rock. I usually have to repeatedly, loudly and baldly say things like "I don't like indie", "that's not my thing" and "I like hip-hop and dance music" for my actual tastes to even vaguely filter through - and THEN they get confused when I say I like PJ Harvey! Similarly liking mainstream music as much as non-mainstream music tends to be a source of confusion - possibly along the lines of "but if you devote so much time to digging around for obscure acts how can you possibly keep an eye on the charts too". There's definitely this thing of...people wanting to peg you down, initial assumptions are willingly replaced by more assumptions. And as a music journalist I've often found that people want me to like hyped up-and-coming bands esp those that they themselves have discovered, in order to validate their taste or something - examples here include JACK PENATE and JUST JACK :o

Separately people who know my general tastes are often surprised when I express dislike for things within the umbrella-ella-ella I've set out for myself eg not liking Justice et al when I've said I like dance music, not liking (or not expressing much enthusiasm for) Outkast when I like hip-hop, not liking Mika when I say I like pop (actually the last is inaccurate, no one I know thinks Mika is anything other than a massive twat HURRAH but also who on earth is buying his stuff).

And then I often feel that there's music which I'm "supposed" to like as a gay man - and I do love a lot of this music (MADGE), but I've often found that people are MOST surprised whenever I don't conform to these particular expectations (other gays are MOST AT FAULT here, if I have to endure another gay man telling me off for liking hip-hop and dancehall I will commit a HATE CRIME on them).

What it boils down to, I think, is that people like to believe in social tribes and those demographic groups which are given prominent placings on the BBC site on slow news days.

torchwood meme alert

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"i am saucy jack"/dalek the ripper ect ect

i faithfully promise to carry on teasin my public till
i. i finish this stupid piece
ii. the plain ppl of the I/W beat me to death with my own lamest avatar

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Lex, you're bang on with your last para there. Even though when we know our own (and our friends') music tastes aren't neatly categorized, we have a mental block when applying this to strangers. I wonder how much of it is down to 'trying to think of common topics for conversation in awkward social situations'. Working where I do, this can be v problematic :(

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Aren't we in K-Punk sneaking fags behind matron's back territory here? ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, for all values of "territory" where K-Punk = matron.

bopkids

deliberately liking what you're supposed to dislike

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

"; finding yourself in transgression of 'supposed-"

sort of. i think my take on this poptimist crusade with the world in general is to make it known that YES it is possible that to like (appreciate, etc) Girls Aloud, Spice Girls and be sane and reasonable. because ppl assume so much about who you are - badging you up with the supposed-tos - making them aware when they are wrong.

it's 'consciousness raising' akin to tilting at prejudice in the more general sense. oh noes, i will lead to musical political correctness gone mad

more unhelpful analogies

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

like sid vicious wearing a sw4stik4 cz he WASN'T a n4zi!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately my participation in this v. interesting thread was interrupted by the work I'm "supposed to do", which I can't usefully transgress against.

There's a big area, isn't there, between "supposed to like" and "not supposed to like"? In fact an area that mostly overwhelms "not supposed to like" - a kind of "respectable to like" zone, where the music isn't being made *for* you but your liking it is an acceptable, even honourable move. A lot of the time this is racially coded.

This area is where Frank's "creation myth" happens - hip white kids listening to black kids' music, which of course still happens today. At various specific times this listening has been transgressive but these days it's generally respectable and acceptable - most hip-hop no longer really fits into "not supposed to like", for instance. Notoriously, world music NEVER has!

Outside the respectable zone are musics that are seen as lumpen or redneck (metal and country), commercially oriented but not targeted at you personally (teenpop and kids music, contemporary easy listening), associated with naff elements in culture (filk, Christian rock/pop), or associated with socially unwelcome attitudes (dancehall, some grime and hip-hop still)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

But investigating these musics is mostly a beaten *critical* path even if it baffles various mates - as Frank says, there's nothing new about what Poptimists do, and individual Poptimists explore any/all of these areas (maybe not filk but let's face it we're on LJ so the potential is surely there).

Clarification / self-correction re: transgression.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think I should have tried harder to avoid the word 'transgression'; like 'subversion' it has never really seemed meaningful to me, and I think I was using it sort-of in inverted commas. i.e. you find yourself in a position which appears to be a transgression to the sort of people who think that's a useful term, and see boundaries as much more 'real' than they actually are. Or else I was just explaining myself too quickly.

I think you can be a contrarian deliberately -- I know I am, on occasion. If you do act that way I think it's also important to be contrarian against yourself too. (I think I'm agreeing with Tim that this is the only way to find out what you like.)

Or: the struggle for autonomy is internal rather than a matter of just positioning yourself against other people (being an individual just is conformism as we see over and over on the FT Emo comments thread!). Being a contrarian in relationship to other people's perceived standards / norms isn't a matter of proving oneself radical or 'transgressive' i.e. it's not a positive value, but more about showing up that there ARE norms.

e.g. I will proclaim Paris H to have made the best album last year only to people who will be shocked and our upset that someone they see as 'one of them' would say that. (Genuine response = 'last time I saw you was at a Kid Loco gig [NB I swear this is A BIG LIE] and now you're going on about Paris Hilton!' ha ha ha! job done.)

Basically I'm too much of an anarchist about taste to think that there can be such a thing as transgression.

But poptimism won!

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Is an argument that has been bandied about on ILX as an act of repressive tolerance: i.e. we are all eclectic now, so stop fussing. But this is surely only because within some forums for internet music discussion, listening CAN be stripped of *some* social contexts, which can lead to a blindness towards the (more or less latent) social positioning within practices of listening to music. i.e. the 'supposed-to' has become 'don't mention the 'supposed-to's'.

Re: But poptimism won!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

If anything I think poptimism has lost and just b/c uptight indie dorks can now admit they like the occasional big pop single does not change that!

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

People always think I will like metal. I do like metal, sometimes but not fvcking Opeth good god. This is sometimes made worse by the fact I mishear the word as 'Otep' and go off on one about how the singer from that band emailed me once and it was brilliant until their album was shit.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Oh for christ's sake when will I learn that using the music control things on my keyboard whilst browsing in Opera makes it post stuff I don't want it to yet.

Anyhoo, I was going to say that I quite enjoy no one knowing what I listen to unless I want them to. I hate all this 'ooh I listen to X so I must be Y' business that goes on with Young People Like Myself and am quite comfortable being Y and thus listening to X.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

Were it not for how unique I think my personal anecdotes of this are, I wouldn't share it. But my first musical transgression was probably in 6th grade when Rachel (the hot girl, whom everyone wanted to date) asked me what I was listening to on my cassette player. I think we were on a bus on some field trip at the time. In order to spare myself the humiliation, I told her she wouldn't be interested in it. Which, of course, only made her more interested (I guess she thought I was listening to something completely transgressive for a 6th grader - like Metallica, or something. At the time, everyone cool was listening to Green Day.) Eventually she persisted enough that I admitted I was listening to the Les Miserables Broadway OST. She quickly lost interest.

There was definitely this feeling that your class standing (pun intended) was partially determined by the music you listen to. (The coolest people listened to Green Day. Some of the slackers listened to hip hop. Losers listened to Silverchair and Bush. The alternative kids were listening to Oasis...) But in listening to Broadway, I wasn't just rebelling against some upper-class that listened to pop-punk. I was removing myself from the system completely. Who listens to showtunes in 6th grade? It wasn't a conscious decision, but it alienated me from the system nonetheless. Which might be a part of poptimism - not rebelling against the canon, but rebelling against the idea of a canon. (This obviously isn't Sanneh's definition.)

The second time I remember off-hand was when I was in Yeshiva. This meant that most people were listening to Avraham Fried, MBD and Shwecky. If this names mean nothing to you, but you still want an idea of the genre, try MostlyMusic.com. Anyway, during sefirah (a period of time on the Jewish calender when many Orthodox Jews don't listen to instrumental music), they listened to a band called Lev Tahor, which was an acapella group. I listened to Charming Hostess (which was arguably Jewish - they were on Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture label). But Charming Hostess had numerous problems for a Yeshiva boy - first of all, in my Yeshiva you weren't supposed to listen to women sing. Second of all, they have radical politics. Third of all, they aren't Lev Tahor.

During the school year (when it wasn't sefirah), I listened to Nickelback. It was when they just came out with "How You Remind Me." It seems so ironic in hindsight that I was being transgressive with music by listening to the most popular single in the world at the moment. I remember going into a non-Yeshiva run store and hearing the song on the radio. I raved about it in front of a Yeshiva friend, and got looks from the proprietor of the store (who probably thought I had the uncoolest taste in the world). But my Yeshiva friend just thought I was being willfully anti-canon. If you wanted to be "cool" in my Yeshiva, you listened to Blackhattitude (Jewish parody rap). In order to emancipate yourself from the system completely, you needed to listen to radio music. (Which is really just a spin on the first point I was making.)

Jeez, now I realize I could go on forever with anecdotes, but scrolling up, I see I wrote a ton. So - sorry for the screenroll.

[spittake.livejournal.com]

If this names mean nothing to you

Haha, they actually DO, oh dear.

[koganbot]

Several points from my columns that maybe are getting lost here:

(1) No matter what their motivations, people simply can't get themselves to like what doesn't sound good to them, but what sounds good is definitely mutable.

(2) My answer to Jessica was basically that I do like what I'm supposed to like, though the supposing is done by intellectual mentors I carry around in my head, old heroes, etc.

(3) A crucial point of my piece was that Britney Spears was able to have a punk effect only because she isn't punk. (So a condition for being punk is to be not punk.)

Seems to me that a service I can perform for poptimists is to remap the '60s and early '70s for you, or give it a different meaning. E.g., if I like Ashlee's singing of course I'd be a Jefferson Airplane fan. If I fall in love with Ashlee of course I'm still in love with Miss Lonely, her ancestor. If I'm disappointed with Paris under fire for blowing her opportunity to be Keith Richard or Robert Mitchum, well, I'm disappointed with Keef for getting into a rut for 30 years. If I like "Rush" and "Chemicals React" of course I'm going to like "Raw Power." If I'm suddenly taken by frazzled, slashing Britney, well of course Grace Slick had been the one chick singer on my teenage wall, amidst all the boys. (Great moment from 30 Seconds Over Winterland: Paul, singing "Crown Of Creation," intones seriously his John Wyndham quote, "In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our minds." Grace - probably potted - pipes up with: "I can't, either.")

[poptasticuk.livejournal.com]

I was trying recently to make a playlist for a party I'm throwing before I go abroad, and the only thing I could think of that no-one would object to was the Moomin theme tune! I think there is more a clash of 'not supposed to' than 'supposed to'. It's hard to find music that no-one will object to, even within a group of friends, although mine are quite mish-mash - for example several are into metal, while all the rest detest it. They're all quite open to silly pop, though, as students tend to be, and I wouldn't befriend anyone who was snobbish about it.