harry poptimer and the tides of snobbery

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i read this us blogger cz
a. he is grebt at getting to the nub of wonk-pol debate crisply and amusingly (not unlike freakytigger)
b. his spelling is TERRIBLE (not unlike barnetape

his comments threads (on say race issues, or health policy, or iraq) are generally between 5-25 comments long. This time the sub opened the hatch WHILE STILL SUBMERGED...

Comments

Re: my feelings (having not plunged in to the full thread):

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

OK -

can we define "this argument" - is it as simple as "is mass culture good?" Surely not.

Do you really think there's a "whole entire unsatisfied etc."? - my gloomier prognosis would be that culture has been fenced off as a 'think what thou wilt' zone, so people barrel into these debates not because they want to 'debate' or explore anything per se but because they want to bellow and let off steam - there's an anger at the very idea of critics, of people telling us as culture-consumers what to think. What replaces criticism? - maybe this is the debate.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

mass vs specialist (pop vs rock) is i think a safety-first marker for a much more complicated argument -- the Great Wrong Debate, basically, which everyone sort of knows (hence the venom) but few can get beyond

i. it's about gatekeepers, yes: and gatekeeping is implicitly political, and tied into the power-structure-as-is
ii. the energy i think is "THE GATEKEEPERS SHOULD BE US"
iii. but then it immediately gets looped back into the issues of populism ("how do *I* not get swamped"), and respresentation ("ok the CRITIC is me but i am time-poor hence i designate dubdobdee as my foodtaster") and low self-esteem ("how do i know what is there; how do i know how it works; how do i trust my judgement")
iv. the key for me is our old geezaesthesis friend, the conversation about the thing is as much art as the thing itself -- in fact it may be BETTER art than the thing itself (tho obv it is often worse also) -- and the conversation above all is the thing "we" are the critics of (the gang as the author of the gang, and as audience)

[(Anonymous)]

(Apols for the repetition of pub-talk but there we are). The thread has some great examples of the desperation to be the underdog in this thread (a desperation I've been daftly calling "the will to unpower" over pints).

It kind of goes:

PERSON WHO ENJOYS SOMETHING POPULAR: I find this [popular thing] a rich and valuable experience and I like talking about it.

CRITIC: this popular thing is not as good as another, unpopular thing. It is bad and its predominance is obscuring the better thing.

PWESP: Dude I hate it when you elitist guys don't take popular stuff seriously, it can be rich and valuable

C: the problem is not that it's popular it's that it's rubbish

PWESP: Says who? You're establishing yourself as a cultural elite and keeping me and The Ordinary People down.

C: Shut up! Everywhere I turn people are talking about [popular thing]! It's on the telly and the radio and every conversation in the pub and the charts and everywhere. It's YOU who's keeping ME down (oh and by the way you should know better).

The argument never gets back to being a conversation about [popular thing] or even about the criticism of [popular thing]. It becomes this struggle for the (apparent) moral high-ground of The Oppressed and it sucks mightily. There are many points above where the conversation could be kept about the thing, or the criticism, or both, but no-one can leave an accusation of OPPRESSOR unanswered.

bopkids

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it's a basic meme of the counterculture and (post-war?) "undergroundism" -- which is (this is my dalek argt anyway) the [yuk word alert] recuperation of avant-gardism... viz that instead of be serenely nietzschean/aristocratic/botherd as per old-skool modernism*, it is totally endlessly totally passive aggressive -- it SO wants to be loved, but its strategy is to victim-bully its chosen lover into demonstrating love

cf the 70s dynamic of the politics of victimhood, identity politics ect ect -- i think this totally battened on 60s pop culture's actually quite strange mix of "they have the guns but WE HAVE THE NUMBERS" (we = the people!) and "sumfn is happnin, but you don't know what it is, DO YOU, MR JONES?" (appeal to shared secret knowledge)


*ok this is a bit of an exaggeration -- wagnerism was a pioneer element in modernism, and it had a whole layer of play-the-victim, viz its anti-semitism

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

hmmm logic in second para there very condensed -- will have to think that bit through much more clearly now i look at it written out, think i have chosen rather NON-passive-aggressive quotes to exemplify the contradictory 60s er Thing: which i consider "new under the sun", and the cloud-cover under which we still travail blah blah

[(Anonymous)]

Lotsa proper modernists seemed to believe that their cultural and political activities seamlessly supported each other, something whihc has become more difficult for a whole heap of reasons.

Also popcrit inherited from the 60s counterculture forebears the language of political struggle. Part of the deal is apparent unreason can be justified by the difficulties of underdogness.

Notes again due to 0 time available, sorry.

bopkids