You think you know me?...
Aug. 24th, 2007 06:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbot posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poptimists...What others tell you won't be true.
Since it came up yesterday on the big board, I feel justified in letting you guys know where you can read my Las Vegas Weekly columns for yourself. (Despite what the numbering system implies ["twelve"], there have been fourteen so far, starting at the beginning of June.)
Links to all my columns
Page two of the links to all my columns
We discuss these things every week on my livejournal (most recent discussion here).
And briefly, I want to say several things about what I think I'm trying to do in them:
First, my social map simply (or complicatedly) does not contain the words "rockism" etc. That is, I can't find myself on the map that uses those words. I don't think rockism exists, I don't think rockists exist, I do think there are antirockists (that is, people who talk about "rockism"; and I don't believe they're talking about nothing or that there's nothing interesting to talk about there, but they'd do it better if they'd stop using the word), I don't believe that popism exists, I don't believe that popists exist, I don't believe that poptimism exists (except as a club night), I do believe that poptimists exist (e.g., people who post to this community and have similarities and dissimilarities; also people who don't have much to do with us but who have embraced the word as their critical stance [I think there are several of these in the U.S.]). But I'm not going to argue those particular points today; I'll just point out that I can't tell from anything anyone has ever said about "rockism" whether I'm a rockist or not, and the confusion is the concept's, not mine.
But the significance for my pieces is that they never - never - should be read as someone from one position ("poptimism") criticizing something else ("rockism") of which he is not a part.
Anyway, I'm going to link a few in particular, not necessarily the best (my favorite is probably The Rules Of The Game #7: Hero Story), and say what I think is most crucially going on in them - though usually there are a multiplicity of things going on and what's most crucial to someone else will depend on his or her own interests and ideas; in fact, I'm curious as to what you think is happening in these pieces:
The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In
The columns do more or less follow and extrapolate several lines of thought, and most of them are built around questions that I don't have a quick answer to. This is the first column, and the question it asks is where does taste come from? More specifically, since people tend to like music based on their individual visceral responses to it, why and how is it that their tastes - their visceral responses - cluster along class lines?
The Rules Of The Game Followup #2: Paris Is Our Vietnam
This is about how my wanting to align myself with some people and disalign with others opens me up to taking a particular political position or responding favorably (and viscerally) to a particular album. I'm not saying that the merits of the position or the album play no role, but that the initial opening up might have nothing to do with the merits. (Scott Woods and I talk further about this on the comments thread underneath the piece.)
The Rules Of The Game #3: Feelings Change
This is where I recommend that we distrust our visceral responses.
The Rules Of The Game #5: What's Wrong With Pretty Girls?
The Backstreet Boys piece.
The issue - "they don't write their own songs" - is a stand-in for something else. But this doesn't mean that there is a clear but unspoken Real Reason behind it that we can easily ferret out, or a set of Underlying Beliefs of which the reason is an expression. What stand-in issues do isn't so much to conceal some Real Issue as to leave issues and ideas inchoate.
So what this piece is fundamentally doing is taking a stick and poking around to see what some of those inchoate issues and ideas might be. (So it's not not not primarily concerned with refuting someone's idea about how authorship makes a piece of music valid or invalid. Rather, it's interested in understanding how the idea came about, what the idea thinks it's trying to accomplish, and what the idea evades. And - to reiterate - it doesn't assume that the ideas and issues are someone else's but not mine.)
Since it came up yesterday on the big board, I feel justified in letting you guys know where you can read my Las Vegas Weekly columns for yourself. (Despite what the numbering system implies ["twelve"], there have been fourteen so far, starting at the beginning of June.)
Links to all my columns
Page two of the links to all my columns
We discuss these things every week on my livejournal (most recent discussion here).
And briefly, I want to say several things about what I think I'm trying to do in them:
First, my social map simply (or complicatedly) does not contain the words "rockism" etc. That is, I can't find myself on the map that uses those words. I don't think rockism exists, I don't think rockists exist, I do think there are antirockists (that is, people who talk about "rockism"; and I don't believe they're talking about nothing or that there's nothing interesting to talk about there, but they'd do it better if they'd stop using the word), I don't believe that popism exists, I don't believe that popists exist, I don't believe that poptimism exists (except as a club night), I do believe that poptimists exist (e.g., people who post to this community and have similarities and dissimilarities; also people who don't have much to do with us but who have embraced the word as their critical stance [I think there are several of these in the U.S.]). But I'm not going to argue those particular points today; I'll just point out that I can't tell from anything anyone has ever said about "rockism" whether I'm a rockist or not, and the confusion is the concept's, not mine.
But the significance for my pieces is that they never - never - should be read as someone from one position ("poptimism") criticizing something else ("rockism") of which he is not a part.
Anyway, I'm going to link a few in particular, not necessarily the best (my favorite is probably The Rules Of The Game #7: Hero Story), and say what I think is most crucially going on in them - though usually there are a multiplicity of things going on and what's most crucial to someone else will depend on his or her own interests and ideas; in fact, I'm curious as to what you think is happening in these pieces:
The Rules Of The Game #1: Joining In
The columns do more or less follow and extrapolate several lines of thought, and most of them are built around questions that I don't have a quick answer to. This is the first column, and the question it asks is where does taste come from? More specifically, since people tend to like music based on their individual visceral responses to it, why and how is it that their tastes - their visceral responses - cluster along class lines?
The Rules Of The Game Followup #2: Paris Is Our Vietnam
This is about how my wanting to align myself with some people and disalign with others opens me up to taking a particular political position or responding favorably (and viscerally) to a particular album. I'm not saying that the merits of the position or the album play no role, but that the initial opening up might have nothing to do with the merits. (Scott Woods and I talk further about this on the comments thread underneath the piece.)
The Rules Of The Game #3: Feelings Change
This is where I recommend that we distrust our visceral responses.
The Rules Of The Game #5: What's Wrong With Pretty Girls?
The Backstreet Boys piece.
The issue - "they don't write their own songs" - is a stand-in for something else. But this doesn't mean that there is a clear but unspoken Real Reason behind it that we can easily ferret out, or a set of Underlying Beliefs of which the reason is an expression. What stand-in issues do isn't so much to conceal some Real Issue as to leave issues and ideas inchoate.
So what this piece is fundamentally doing is taking a stick and poking around to see what some of those inchoate issues and ideas might be. (So it's not not not primarily concerned with refuting someone's idea about how authorship makes a piece of music valid or invalid. Rather, it's interested in understanding how the idea came about, what the idea thinks it's trying to accomplish, and what the idea evades. And - to reiterate - it doesn't assume that the ideas and issues are someone else's but not mine.)
