The Pop Open Group E: RESULTS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Here are the results for the violence group - I'm putting them all up at once because I may be summoned away from my PC (or I may equally faff about on it all day long).

First Place: Motor - "Black Powder" (Track 1, 8 1st place votes, 30% of total points) - katstevens wins.

Second Place: Pizzicato Five - "One Two Three etc Barbie Dolls" (Track 5, 4 1st place votes, 23% of total points) - skillextric qualifies.

Third Place: Loretta Lynn - "Fist City" (Track 2, 5 1st place votes, 21% of total points) - lisa_go_blind qualifies.

Fourth Place: Speedy J - "Patterns (Remix)" (Track 4, 4 1st place votes, 19% of total points) - freakytigger is OUT.

Fifth Place: James Kochalka Superstar - "Monkey Vs Robot" (Track 3, 2 1st place votes, 9% of total points) - jel_bugle is OUT.

Congratulations to Kat, who gets to pick which group she is in for round 2 - there are still - IIRC - places in 50s and Before, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. She also gets to pick which lisa_go_blind lands in, and then skillextric's fate is determined by the Randomiser.

Thanks to all voters, especially those discerning individuals who voted for track four.

This week's group is RELIGION, and is up tomorrow with results next week. Then the Pop Open goes on vacation until mid-September, giving the 24 players in Round Two a month to get their tracks in (and me a chance to go on holiday myself!). We'll fill the orgafun gap in some yet-to-be-determined way. I'll also put up a special post of POPOCRYPHA - the tracks people sent in for Round One but then changed their minds on.

Comments

[cis.livejournal.com]

[i haven't thought this completely through but want to make sure i've replied to some extent. will flesh out in a bit]

oh oh certainly not! I tried to cover this with 'sonically alien to the pop of today': one can make pop music that is recursive to earlier forms of pop music and also conforms enough to the sound of today's pop, people do all the time! Modern pop, when it draws on older pop, adapts it to current sonic rules; 'pure pop', drawing on older pop, is for whatever reason (lack of resources, desire to sound authentic, sheer innate indieness) incapable of transplanting it into the new sound.

P5 are an interesting case-in-point becayse they aren't drawing on, or aping, one specific time - in fact their music is quite intentionally out-of-time, it's a highly mannered invention of... perhaps sixties soft pop, I don't know? But it's not trying to recreate exactly a previous form of pop: it's nodding to various previous forms, producing something which sounds like them but is not them, and isn't modern pop either. It could perhaps be classed a loving recreation of a fiction (okay all loving recreations are of fictions: this one however is brazen, an honest fake of an honest fake).

I don't understand where I'm supposed to have said that indie is ever bad, or recursive music bad either! It's not even particularly problematic. Maybe I shouldn't have used 'aping', it has a kind of chimpanzee glee to it in my head that might not exist anywhere else.

[koganbot]

OK, I shouldn't have projected my own negative connotations of "indie" onto what you were saying. But I don't see how P5 are not part of the sound of today (well, the sound of the 1990s, which is when I'm guessing this track was recorded). "Alien to the sound of today" may well be the sound of a particular day, if a lot of people are playing styles that signify "alien to the sound of today." But I don't feel that that captures P5 either: the whole copy, refer to, sample-the-sound-of-the-past thing was a part of international club music during the time of the band's existence. Plus (I just checked this to make sure) P5 were best sellers in Japan in the '90s, which makes them the sound of today [their day] whether they want to be or not. And actually I still believe that my examples are more apropos than one might think. That is, only by hitting big did Backstreet Boys, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters get to be the sound of their day. Your phrase "loving recreation of a fiction" might pinpoint the different sensibility. But then, with the Stones and Dylan and several others, there wasn't a sound of the day that they were integrating into; it was a sound that was created by their success.

By the way, I'm not trying to knock down your idea. I feel that it's heading in the right direction. "Indie" might be the wrong word for P5, and P5 may be not so relevant to "indie pop" or "indie dance," not because of P5's commercial success but because its natural home would seem to be in the dance clubs. (Whereas indie dance's home would be in the indie clubs. This is assuming I know what I mean by indie dance, which I probably don't.) Am I wrong about that? That's where I imagined Arling & Cameron, whose music was sometimes called "club pop." There is something bohemian-sounding about P5, so maybe "indie" is appropriate, but I don't think I'd want to label the bohemian wing of dance "indie."

I think what I'm balking at is the idea that what P5 were doing necessarily makes them not pop. It might make them cold or overstudied or irritating (all of which are adjectives I've applied to them in the past, but I might be willing to rethink P5), but why can't there be pop that's cold and overstudied and irritating? And I don't see why a band like that couldn't have a Rolling Stones-like impact on popular music. (More likely to be a Rolling Stones-like impact than a Backstreet Boys-like impact, because it's more likely to appeal to hipsters.)

[It's also hard to argue that indie isn't to some extent the sound of today, and isn't to some extent pop. But I can understand why someone here might want to resist calling The Automatic "pop." So I seem to be talking myself in circles.]

[cis.livejournal.com]

Right. I think I've scooshed about three different things together: I'm trying to make some kind of general unified point when the situation's not that simple (or at least it needs to get complex before it can become simple). So: it's not all indie I'm describing, here, it is mostly the "perfect pop" strain of indie.

I think there are three basic recreations-of-past-sounds at work here:
Type 1, which attempts to capture a previous sound and style, in aspic if at all possible. This is "perfect pop": which I consider to be representative of an indie sensibility, and which I think describes the P5 project very well, regardless of how well their records sell. (and I doubt their sales were a patch on, say, Namie Amuro's when she was queen of avex! everyone was a best seller in nineties japan!)
Type 2, which draws on older styles to produce an amalgam, either of various older sounds or of older sounds with the current sound. all your examples belong, I think, here.
Type 3, which adopts signifiers of a previous sound, but within the context of its own established sound, so that-- that Spoon song is recognisably Motown if you understand the language of indie rock enough to be able to filter it out and just hear the Motown flourishes (which someone who regularly listens to Spoon and similar bands, a 'native speaker' if you like, will do without thinking). A lot of sampling falls into this category, I think.

Your 'backstreet boys' example is completely apropos for me, because the BSB sound wasn't a loving recreation of a specific sound, it was an amalgam: it mixed the previous Boyz II Men r'n'b with a certain Europop sound. In fact, the thing is that I believe quite strongly in the presence of some kind of "sound of now", a noise common to records from a certain period that we don't notice at the time, being immersed. It might just be a change in technologies: the compression on records, the way a guitar is amplified, the noise of a synthesised note (stuff made nowadays that's aiming to sound 'eighties' doesn't, you know? I imagine synthesised notes from the eighties were made out of moulded plastic, they're solid, analogue: the synthesised note of now sounds both more digital and more organic, grown in petri dishes from fractals. nb this may be fanciful talk that bears no relation to real sound).

[koganbot]

This is a different point, but I can imagine someone (though not me) arguing that a latter-day Pizzicato Five* would be much more contemporary and modern in their sensibility than Kelly Clarkson or Ashlee Simpson or Aly & A.J. are, even if Kelly et al. are more popular (and they don't seem to be holding onto their popularity anyway). The argument would be that the latter three are basically throwbacks, mixing old line singer-songwriter moves into basic '80s rock forms, whereas the P5 types are still the wave of the future, even if there hasn't been a "Pump Up The Volume" hitting recently.

*I'm not paying close enough attention to know who a latter-day P5 would be. I was real disappointed by last year's Arling & Cameron album.

[koganbot]

Sorry for the multiple posts, but remember that this subthread starts with Alex saying that the votes for P5 represent both the good and the bad side of poptimists taste, and he goes on to identify the bad side as "indie" or "being indie about pop." So this is why I raised the idea of indie being problematic (even if you don't find it so). Of course you and Tom are the only ones likely to see my posts at this point. But what you say along these lines might end up crystallizing for other people what they find problematic about indie, even if that's not your goal.

[cis.livejournal.com]

Perhaps... something that characterises many members of poptimists is loving pop while having an indie sensibility, which is the kind of attitude that so often leads to curatorial "perfect pop". But I know I use 'poptimism' (whatever it is) as a way of getting past the ideology that comes as a corollary to the indie sensibility: if not removing it utterly, at least working out where it is and isn't needed. So it's not the indie itself that's problematic, it's "thinking indie" and what that leads to.

[cis.livejournal.com]

which is what alex said upthread more succinctly WELL DONE ME

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I don't hear P5's 'aping' in the same way as I would a British band doing the same thing: I think their J-ness is a bit more impt than their approach to whatever they think Pop is? I remember you once telling me about this Japanese girl whose fashion style was total punk, or something, band T-shirts and everything, but she'd never heard of it or any of the bands? I think I misremember slightly. But there's that J thing of magpieing rather than aping, the disregard for what their loving recreation means, ie it's not trying to signify 'authenticity' or 'realness' whatever, just...the surface.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

How true is that actually, though - my problem is that my impression of 'fashion and pop culture in Japan' is very unfortunately influenced by the twitchings of Momus' ballsack and the theories he spins to legitimise them.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I basically pretend that Momus doesn't exist outside of the ILM archives. I don't believe he's a popstar or a 'celebrity', I don't believe he's made music, he's just some appalling internet character. I have a similar reaction to a lot of J-pop to you - though I actually expect it to suddenly click one day! - so everything I know is from Cis. Which is nicer than having it from Momus.

[cis.livejournal.com]

Well, that's a nice mental image, isn't it.

I've known quite a few people who have a similar line about Japan as does Momus, you know, and tempting as the yellow-fever argument is I think it is more... aesthetic? It's a delightful image to have of Japan, of this amazing pick'n'mix culture that just doesn't care for your authenticity, that practices syncretism in everything it does, that has retreated from the horrors of the modern world into a careful cocoon of caring very deeply about very unimportant things and nothing else, where things are more exquisitely done. And I'm sure some of it's true, too: but mostly it is just very, very appealing, and once you've started reading it into Japan - no matter whether your 'in' to the country was women or shib-k or manga or whatever - it's tempting never to stop. Especially when the Japanese are spinning it just as hard back at you!

[cis.livejournal.com]

Which also is to say -- having hitched your wagon to 'things Japanese' you are rather stuck if you turn around and say '...which aren't really so different from things elsewhere in the world' because the question then becomes: so why aren't you focusing on elsewhere in the world? Obviously i for example have the perfect comeback in 'nowhere else in the world did peasants express dissatisfaction by breaking into rich people's homes to dance' but the fact remains that if i'm so up on peasants there were plenty in europe to concern myself with. It's in my best interests to maintain that Japan is special: I can know this consciously and fight against it, but I also know this unconsciously and have built its barricades deep inside my brain.

(my impression of 'fashion and pop culture in japan' is kind of tragically indebted to marxy, whose thesis is rather more pessimistic than that of the mome, i believe.)