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freakytigger.livejournal.com posting in

I have a new Pitchfork column up - inspired indirectly by Frank's series of columns, and directly by conversations with people here, and by conversations ON here dating from ages and ages ago. The column is nominally about the Smiths but not really (also the summary on the front page misunderstands it, so I wonder if it isn't very clear what I'm getting at).

It's also worth having another look at yesterday's Pop Open thread, where an interesting chat has got going between

cis and

koganbot and a couple of other people, on the subject of...well, depending on what you think about the topic you might call it "indie trying to be pop" or "perfect pop" or "revivalist pop". Follow-on post action here may yet occur.

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From:

koganbot

I like your emphasis on THE BIG FACT. A question I'd be prone* to ask about a particular BIG FACT is "Why this fact rather than some other?" So a question we can ask people (incl. ourselves, should the FACT be one that we ourselves are drawn to) is why are they drawn to a particular FACT, just as we can ask them why we like or dislike a particular song. There's an obvious family resemblance between BIG FACTS and what in my column I called "stand-in issues." My working assumption in approaching either a BIG FACT or a stand-in issue is that people who embrace it are trying to take care of something (elaborate on some insight or address some disturbance) without having to upset who they are. (Not that thinking further would necessarily upend them in a big way, but e.g. "Why do I want to dismiss this class of people - Smiths fans, Backstreet Boys girls" is a bit more fraught than "Is Morrissey and fans miserabilists?" and "Did the Backstreet Boys write their own songs?")

Of course, there is a distinction between explaining why I like something and justifying why I think it's good - I can like things that I don't think are so good, and I can dislike things that I think are good. [Insert subsection two of chapter three of Richard Rorty's Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature, where Rorty argues that Locke, by confusing a mechanical, causal explanation of how we arrive at a belief with a justification for holding that belief entangled philosophy in false issues for subsequent centuries.] Not that we can or should totally disentangle "liking" and "justifying" - after all, we don't necessarily all use the same justifications, which means that at some point we have to justify our justifications (if we're serious about our justifications), and at some point (justifying the justifications for the justifications) there's nothing to choose between saying why you like a justification and saying why you justify it. I can't say a lot of people ever get to that point.

But saying that you like something is often safer than saying that you think it's good; but saying it's good is more potent.

*Actually, I'm not prone, merely slouched in my chair. So let's say I'm inclined to ask the question.