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

[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).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

& this is the problem with the idea of "transgressing" - there's very little transgression against the actual audience of Poptimists (i.e. other Poptimists!), so you end up with these straw-men fights Sarah is criticising.

From my POV I have a genuine fascination with why people like music that I think of as bad - I want them to explore why and explain themselves (& convert me! or change their minds!). The best way to do this is NOT to say "AAAAAAH you like indie*", no matter how tempting it can be.

*or whatever

Muskrats On Parade

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The way the polls and games are set up is designed to confront people with people who don't like the same things they do, and get them talking, but in a ludic context so people a) have an investment in the outcome so they stick around, b) don't have as strong an emotional investment so they don't storm off in a huff.

They almost never work that way of course.

Re: Muskrats On Parade

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

but the polls are an odd way to do this because don't they basically construct some possible illusory version of 'consensus' which allows me and the lex to go 'oh you poptimists are so...' or even 'call yourselves poptimists'. i.e. they provoke in one a sense of whether or not one 'belongs'. Obviously since we all know this is the point it is hard to get upset...

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

If it's worth anything, the idea of transgression has to be context-specific. i.e. it's only possible when faced with a specific situation. Clearly Geir transgresses all sorts of rules about how you talk about music on ILX, but his musical choices are actually perfectly acceptable in that context. Frank's complaint that Poptimists is a circling-of-the-wagons which rules out the possibility of well, not transgression, but something more like the fruitful courting of disagreement, has some truth in it.

[koganbot]

I don't remember making this complaint (which doesn't mean I didn't make it). I think for a while I was pissed off at everyone abandoning ilX, but now this abandonment (which isn't total) makes perfect sense. Rolling country and rolling teenpop ended up as de facto abandonments of ilX for me, though that was far from their original intent. In retrospect a watershed was December 2005 when I decided to take my pre-P&J march and musings to rolling country, which means I was suddenly talking about t.A.T.u. and Kelly C. and Shakira and Madonna and Lindsay on the country thread, because I knew I'd write better there and knew I'd get a smarter response. And one of the reasons the Lindsay-Ashlee-Aly & A.J.-etc. commentary has been so much better on the rolling teenpop thread than elsewhere is that the question of whether we're being transgressive just doesn't exist there. So analyzing Kelly's notes and Aly & A.J.'s lyrical tensions is just something we do, no big deal, no big hurrah, and we can get on with our business. Overall, I'd say potential transgressiveness/conformity enriches music, but man has it become a tired stupid stupid stupid stupid topic on ilX. I mean, sometimes we really can make a wise choice in not talking to idiots.