A kung fu fighter in a disco

Nope, still blocked at work.

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

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Precis: k-punk thinks Kogan is irrelevant, outdated.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.

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haha what a fucking dumbkopf

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Channel 4 if yr reading my clip show diary is quite empty!

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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?

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There is a lot more going on in there, obv, so I am probably being a little unfair. Hell, many of the things that make him angry make me angry too, but the way he lays the blame on 'popism' is utterly maddening.

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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.

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

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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jauntyalan.livejournal.com

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

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it's entirely about social class and the consequent chip on his shoulder as far as I can tell.

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cis.livejournal.com

surely it's always clever to like good music?

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if not clever, def superior - superior of taste if nothing else!

(I def have a superiory complex about my taste)

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SUPERIORITY

I also have a superiority complex about my spelling, but not my typing.

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I am *extremely* wary of using the chip/shoulder arg as a way of dismissing people. Just because someone is exhibiting a lot of (quite possibly valid, in this case) resentment doesn't mean there isn't some truth in what they are saying.

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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.

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Throughout that piece ad hominem attacks on posh people keep popping up in really tenuous places (and constant Burchillesque blowing-own-trumpet boasting about being working class).

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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).

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perfectputsch.livejournal.com

well us young folks like to start an argument when defending ourselves. but you dont wanna box yourself in....as long as your music collection contains stuff thats there because you want it to be there and not because youve been told it has to be, sod what anyone else thinks.

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jauntyalan.livejournal.com

(i'm not getting in to good/bad.)

i think it would be idiotic to discount avril lavigne from yr likes. but i don't think it's ever clever to like pop music X.

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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.

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