Absolutely nothing

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

K-punk appears to have declared war on us.

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Nope, still blocked at work.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm requesting a summary or quote or anything!

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Precis: k-punk thinks Kogan is irrelevant, outdated. Rest of us are anti-intellectual public school toffs who appear on clip shows and enforce kapitalist hegemony and generally oppress the masses. Finishes with this:

Contrary to the ‘it’s only hedonic stim’ deflationary move that both Stekelmanites and Popists share, popular culture remains immensely important, even if it only serves an essential ideological function as the background noise of a capitalist realism which naturalises environmental depredation, mental health plague and sclerotic social conditions in which mobility between classes is lessening towards zero.

A class war is being waged, but only one side is fighting.

Choose your side. Choose your weapons.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

apart from his eternal attempt to second-guess, and miss by a mile because of his own weird projected psychosis, what 'popism' might be about, is there ever any point to any of his popism-centric articles?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The point is to get approving noises from his cronies and wannabes. He'd say the same about Kogan I'm sure.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I know its probably a forlorn hope, but I rly want to get a handle on what his actual points are and how they apply to what it is that we do/are supposed to be doing here, if only in a know-thine-enemy sort of way.

[perfectputsch.livejournal.com]

to be fair, a lot of you in here do think you're cleverer than you really are for liking Avril Lavigne...

this is a problem i have with Popjustice, which is a good site but can sometimes go a bit up its own arse about hating any band with a guitar, which is just creating another silly criteria against which to judge music... where kids used to say "i only want to listen to bands who play their own instruments/write their own songs/are 4 real etc" now kids say "i only want to listen to bands who have been manufactured especially for my enjoyment" as a way of railing against daddy's punk records.

the fear of accidentally agreeing with a 50 year old radio 2 listener is as ridiculous as the fear a 14 year old goth has of liking anything in the top 40. alright so no one wants to be pushed into liking this or that music but you can like what you like and stand up for it without making big declamatory statements of "i hate indie" or "i hate real music".

cant you?

maybe you cant on the internet. but back in the real world i find that my mates and i all like music because we like it, and this popist and rockist shit is reserved for people who dont really live in the real world much of the time. personally i like both the Libertines and the Sugababes and thats my radical big YOOF statement, and that of most of the people i know, who cant be fucked with being told what to listen to by popists or rockists.

i suppose when i joined this community i didnt realise "poptomists" meant popists, not just people who kind of liked pop music...hum.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of us *do* fall into lazy knee-jerk patterns sometimes but that's why we need new people in the community! eg there used to be a lot of "LOL EMO" stuff and posters like Ms_Bracken and Piratemoggy and Cis have pretty much turned that around. At the other end of the scale lots of 'old radio 2 music' gets taken very seriously too.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

anybody thinking it's clever to like avril lavigne - stand up so we can count you

[zenith.livejournal.com]

but back in the real world i find that my mates and i all like music because we like it

Oddly enough this is also true of the vast majority of people who post on Poptimists - this is something k-punk/Reynolds have never really been able to acknowledge, possibly just because of the name. Of course, people here also talk about the how and why of liking the music they like, because if they didn't, there wouldn't be much to talk about, no?

personally i like both the Libertines and the Sugababes and thats my radical big YOOF statement

Liking both or two such bands is again something a lot of people who are members of Poptimists do.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

'to be fair, a lot of you in here do think you're cleverer than you really are for liking Avril Lavigne...'

we need names! the 'to be fair' is totally inappropriate there...

i think your argument is a bit out of date as far as poptimists goes. 'my mates and i all like music because we like it' and a subscription to the concepts and conflict of rockism vs popism aer not mutually exclusive.

i don't get this 'being told what to listen to' thing either - who is doing this really?

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i cant on the internet all the time...

i'm always i might suspicious of using "live in the real world" as an argument, i'm not quite sure what you mean. k-punk, for all he appears to be a cartoon, is a flesh and blood person, i've met him at a party.

the point is, it's fun to argue about all this stuff, reading different people's viewpoints on music(film/art/sandwich fillings/whatevs) you may have dismissed. even if they don't change yr mind the cut and thrust of discussion makes you think about why you do like things, and that's got to be good right?

also some ppl in here rly are very clever (not me), there's nothing wrong with being clever.

[koganbot]

What about the fear of agreeing with a 53-year-old rock critic?

In any event, Avril Lavigne did come up recently in these parts (quotation is from girlboymusic:

Why all this trust for Avril, who's been slammed multiple times by multiple co-writers for plagiarism and/or laziness, but not Ashlee, who's got a whole television show documenting her involvement in her album? At some point, you didn't know what Avril looked like, either. When did you decide she means what she says? (Unless when you say you know Avril, you mean you actually know Avril, in which case...well, feel free to tell her how much I hate her.)

[koganbot]

i suppose when i joined this community i didnt realise "poptomists" meant popists, not just people who kind of liked pop music...hum.

Don't worry. I'm not a popist, but they let me stay.

OFF TOPIC: A moderator speaks...

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hello & welcome to poptimists!

A bit of background: a fair few of us here know & socialise with each other in real life (the more vocal, London-based crew at any rate), and so our freedom to like what we like crosses from the safe meritocracy of the interweb over to the pure joy of playing out the banging acid house Macarena remix at the Poptimism club night - we've all got over the 'guilty pleasures' thing a long time ago (ok for me it was only about 4 years ago but I am super-young compared to most of the chaps here AND used to be in a trendy indie band so whatevs) and we can concentrate on searching out the tiny specks of wheat in the vast oceans of chaff. Or floundering in a wonderful sea of wheat with only the occasional chaff raft floating by, depending on your point of view.

Basically, slag a piece of music off, or say it's great - either is fine as long as you say WHY! And there will usually be someone on this community trying to persuade you as to the opposite viewpoint. Or say "YES OMG if you like that then check THIS out!"

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

"The once-challenging claim that for certain listeners, the (likes of) Backstreet Boys could have been as potent as (the likes of) Nirvana has been passive-nihilistically reversed"

this argument cropped up on ILX loads too, idiots like jess and deej and that terminally unpleasant Alex in Baltimore person all made it on the Hilarity Duff carcrash thread. are they seriously saying that popism has won to the extent that you'd be taken seriously among not even critics but the general public if you casually opined that Backstreet Boys or Hilarity Duff were superior to Nirvana? seriously? I mean...if so they must go out even less than I thought.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think the 'general public' thing is important - not that Poptimists or its members has some kind of amazing connection to the common man but the frame of our discussion is often (not always) the people we know, talk to, music as we encounter it in everyday life. Every thread I start here comes out of another conversation, most of my FT posts that aren't part of a big series do too.

Whereas the K-Punk end of things tends to focus on i. the tides and opinions in criticism / the blogosphere as they see it and ii. a wider cultural and political picture. We pay attention to i. too, we're doing it now - and often those threads get self-indulgent or defensive or weak - but it's true to say we stay away from ii. So in that sense Poptimists is "anti-intellectual", reactive and conversational rather than proactive and um manifestational. And that can look like a position born out of complacency and privilege - it IS in a global sense (you think it's tough now - come to Africa).

[zenith.livejournal.com]

k-punk covers this - I mean, he does so in a style that combines excruciating prose style, grievous bad faith and all-round "this isn't really even annoying or funny, the guy has some serious problems" eye-bleediness, but he does cover it:

Even if the ‘Nathan’ with whom Kogan debates exists - and I’ll be honest with you, I’m finding it hard to believe that he does - his function is a fantasmatic one (in the same way that Lacan argued that, if a pathologically jealous husband is proved right about his wife’s infidelities, his jealousy remains pathological): for popists to believe that their position is in any way challenging or novel, they have to keep digging up ‘Nathans’ who contest it. But, in 2007, Nathan’s hoary old belief that only groups who write their own songs can be valid has been refuted so many times that it is rather like someone mounting a defence of slavery today – sure, there are such people who sold such a view, but the position is so irrelevant to the current conjuncture that it is quaintly antiquated rather than a political threat.

So, Kogan has made up his friend saying that about the Backstreet Boys. But even if he hadn't, he would still have essentially been making it up. If there are people out there saying pop is shit they are not worth arguing with - unlike the Popists who are all posh and run the media and the US and UK governments. Lacan namedrop Spinzonan videodrome just like New Labour burble burble.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

also, can we unlock this so he can see it please? the main thing that annoys me is his reluctance to converse about any of this, just posting rants, he mayaswell be shouting at his bedsit wall...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I concur!

Argumental flaws, dissected

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Blimey, reading that is like wading through treacle. Mr Punk appears to be doing the sort of sums where 2+2="dude where's my scapegoat" instead of 4. Plastering over his points with hand-waving about Blair or public school gives me the impression he's not at all confident in his points and doesn't really understand what we're on about. If this thread is unlocked I'd be interested to hear his responses to the following:

Example 1: "Debating the merits or otherwise of a boring heiress" - surely the fact that there IS a debate invalidates the 'boring' adjective? A minor gripe but this is the essence of what Frank's writing, encouraging debate and finding the interesting points in canonically-overlooked (or otherwise) topics.

Example 2: "The problem is the idea that saying this is in some way news in 2007" - Frank's column is based on his thoughts and opinions. Was this ever claimed as news? The Backstreet Boys may not be new, but Frank/Nathan's thoughts on the matter were, if not new, then processed into a new opinion?

Example 3: "motivating factor with British popists is, overwhelmingly, class, with Americans it might be age" - Where the did this come from? On what is he basing the class/age assumption?

Example 4: "they don’t seem to realise that, if there is an establishment, it is them" - why is this a problem? Are establishment residents incapable of independent thought?

Example 5: "The old high culture disdain for pop cultural objects is retained; what is destroyed is the notion that there is anything more valuable than those objects." - I am struggling to grasp the point of this paragraph. Are us poptimists disdaining of high culture or not? Do we assign greater value to lower culture, or vice versa? The point evolves halfway through into something different, I would like K Punk to expand on what exactly he's getting at here.

I could go on but I'm late for dinner.

Re: Argumental flaws, dissected

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Something that baffles me a little in the current outbreak of anti-poptimist feeling is the idea that someone like me is somehow unaware of or in denial about being a public schoolboy and (relative to K-Punk anyway) 'establishment'.

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

golly.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

KP attacks the titling of Kogan's piece "Paris is our Vietnam" but in the end calls us to choose "our weapons" oh my!

Some interesting intersection with stuff from Penman and Morley...

Read "Words and Music" a long while ago but surely the point, insofar as it had a central point, ws to re-establish the listening of his youth as in listening and having a go at and considering it all (not that I ever do enough of this). He likes Penman but he has yet to respond to Penman's attack of Simon's (and, by extension, KP's) over-use of Hauntology (which is proving to be a master key to every single LP he has ever liked and will like until his dying day, oh "the poverty of theory"), or of what I suspect the fact that Penman would defend Paris Hilton, or at least defend PH against the ppl that attacked her, found her worthless. In fact I remember a great post of his where he did that.

There ws a hilarious line on a prev post of his that basically placed most of the ILM crowd in the same 'establishment' box as well (he probably read the K-punk thread on ilx).

I've been actually enjoying KP, and the back-and-forth between him and his (made up?) readers on class, etc.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

As far as I know NOBODY replied to that Penman post!

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

Ha, any guesses on which Kelly Clarkson post he couldn't get to the end of?

Everything I have to say about this is totally unhelpful, but man oh man.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

He's thinking of me (if you're referring to the piece you wrote for Idolator). Simon linked to my "Kelly Clarkson Is the New Paris Hilton" post on Blissblog; K-punk then proceeded to say some really shitty things about me/Bedbugs that I decided not to take too personally, hence not responding much to this post.

(Except I do enjoy being in Ashlee Simpson's position after reading his claim that I'm so pathetic and overly earnest that it "provokes pathos" in him -- "Don't feel sorry, don't feel sorry for me (w/ snarl)!"

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

You know, I have to admit that when British people start talking about class, education and their attendant shames, my brain kinda turns off. I don't really know how else to put this, or if I'm making sense, but discussion about these subjects seem like a mere hobby -- sort of like putting ships in bottles or collecting Beanie Babies, only without their real-world relevance. They only get talked about because everyone knows they don't really matter.

[giddyoldgoat.livejournal.com]

I don't think you have to be K-Punk to find the suggestion that class+education "don't really matter", or that chat abt same lacks "real-world relevance", to be complacent reactionary bollox

it's difficult to critique the middle class/public school assumptions of much popist discoure w/out sounding like a knee-jerk class warrior, but some of the more hardcore poptimists really do seem to be suggesting that any form of crit that does not wholeheartedly celebrate hedonism/materialism - or still keeps some kind of faith/interest in class conflict and the social/political - is old skool/old hat/body-hating funkilling rub. bah

[jel-bugle.livejournal.com]

Let's stop choosing sides.
I like Slayer.