Strawman Poll

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hello -- long time listener, first time caller. (I'll be posting a big mostly-American teenpop project thingy in a week or two, and then I will go back to lurking the comment threads.)


Here's a paragraph that I wrote to koganbot a couple days ago in the K-punk fallout (I was the blogger who moved K-punk to K-pathos with my K-patheticness), though my comments weren't about the post itself, which was more confusing than anything else (I'm sure he'd say the same of my posts -- I doubt either of us really does his homework).

This [angst] is well-covered territory. But it's really frustrating, especially as I'm approaching an academic program that's going to be much more time-and-mind-consuming in an unrelated field and probably won't be able to write for outside venues regularly. I just want to WANT to talk about this stuff. It shouldn't be *that* hard; I really love talking about it! But I feel like public discourse keeps finding its way to some kind of underground secret society sh1t that really rubs me the wrong way -- locked LJ posts and even LJ itself, which often feels like the catacombs of internet pop chat.

So a few questions that I'd like to elaborate on here:

(1) Is one of the appeals of Poptimists its unique sort of exclusivity? I'm relatively new to LJ (and rock crit/conversation in general, really), but one of my goals has always been to open up conversation and, frankly, get people to notice me. (In that sense, any publicity is good publicity, but any conversation isn't necessarily good conversation; tricky balance sometimes.)

(2) If others feel like they want to explode this conversation into the world, how do we do it? How do we send up flares? This relates to Frank's evolving DDR idea, but I'm asking in a more immediate sense: how do we (or, maybe with less angst, how ARE we) keep(ing) the conversation going and expanding?

(3) Do you feel the conversation needs to expand and grow to survive, or is that not what people take from the community -- and by that I mean, is it more of a comfort zone, a sort of conservative space that can occasionally, without ridicule/nastiness, entertain radical (or at least provocative to use a less loaded word) ideas? (Somewhat related: can it expand and grow and remain a comfort zone, or are public disses the equivalent of growing pains? I notice that the teenpop thread on ILM, for instance, has dwindled since a few posters defended -- and fairly successfully, I think -- the thread's existence to non-contributors.)

(4) Are these questions for the larger community, or for individual Poptimist members who have an interest in breaking out into the morass of pop-critdom writ large?

(5) Was it silly to post this on a Saturday night (US EST) when everyone's about to go on holiday?

Should add before/if there are comments that I've started visiting my LJ network and Poptimists first in my internet routine, and I really love the community here. I just wonder whether or not it has anywhere to go -- or if having no particular place to go is actually desirable to most members. I guess I'd call it a guilty pleasure, myself -- sometimes you wanna go where everyone knows your alias. But for all the collective insights and singular minds (& vice versa?) on display here, I'd also like more Poptimist writing to bully its way into more eyeballs, even if some eyeballs are less likely to actually read it carefully -- or at all -- than others.

Comments

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

claim for discussion: the openness of ilm was more than its members were able to handle.

(but 'exploding this conversation to the world' was essential to the way ilm thought of itself, at one time, and it thought the openness was essential to that.)

IMO

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I think poptimists has a heavy paradox about it, insofar as although there may be enthusiastic talk of things like the DDR, what holds people here and brings most of the glee/enthusiasm for talking about muzak, is the orgafun and polls. Everyone loves a good canon etc. Thus I'd conclude that 4) is probably both but with a lot of angst and a sudden bout of relief when a new NOW comes out.

Other thing is, a lot of the members have other places they write and poptimists is the place they harvest ideas and/or y'know, just come for the fun and because there are some ace people here.

Final problem with the idea of poptimist thortz exploding across the internets' collective eyeballs is that, as has been mentioned a lot post-Kpunkgate, there is 0% (0 votes) poptimist consensus; the polls demonstrate well the utter disparity in between not only our ideas of pop music but our ideas of good music around, in and beyond that. The Open was very interesting for that, to me, cus people have been producing the most extraordinary stuff. Not to mention that even in the cases of total agreement things like 'Umbrella,' there've been detractors. The nice thing about the community is we can all disagree and no one gets cross and calls anyone else a retard or at least if they do, you know it's limited to that discussion.

I'm not sure the membership is closed in any way but we do have our own language around here innit. Took me months to understand dubdobdee at all.

I nearly made the community my homepage awhile back but then I changed to Opera so it now sits happily on my ...whatever you call that thing with the 9 homepage options. :)

Good ol' LJ

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Agreed - I'd say 75% of poptimists members just like filling out polls and finding out about awesome new music. The other 25% also use it to explore their ideas further/defend Fergie to the death/find material for their latest column :-) but those 25% like ticking boxes just as much as anyone else. Hence the suitability of the LJ format. The threading is annoying but if you're that interested there's always the comment tracking option for each post (best invention evah!). BUT those 75%/25% aren't static - the idea-explorers may be having a busy day at work and just need some poll-ticking escapism, or one comment by a casual ticker may feature a great point regarding Chart Dance 94-96 which starts off a whole new thread.

Technically speaking we do moderate who joins, but all this means is I'll have a look at your user info and see if there are Any Bands At All on your interests list (or are friends with someone already on poptimists), if not I'll click through to your journal and see if you mention music somewhere. And that's only to stop people posting spam on the community or getting antsy about mp3 posts - non-members can still comment to their heart's content!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it has taken me years to still not understand me, moggy

Do not read if you hate meta

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One thing I find weird is this idea that you've been a lurker here for ages, Dave - this is just not true, you may not have started a thread but you've been a very visible commentator!

Anyway, lots to say and not really any time to say it as I have to go shopping. Poptimists isn't a closed community - but a lot of people don't like LJ and don't want to sign up. This is partly because LJ is coded young and gothy (and female maybe) in a way that's embarassing to some: I've been AMAZED by what an effective screener simply "being on LJ" has proved to be actually in terms of trolls etc (& the name helps). We still have 160-ish members tho, even if most are lurkers.

Being on LJ has other disadvantages too of course - comment threading at 50 and the way old posts just drop off the radar distorts the way ex-ILMers in particular have to do things and I know I've never really adjusted well.

Poptimists was an experiment to see how an LJ pop community could work - rly well in some ways is the answer - and the specific circs of its creation, mid-July 05, very much balanced "seize the day" and "I need comfort". It's also a post-ILM board (in the same way Dissensus is, and the Noize Board is) - positive online energy is nomadic. BUT I also always thought someone ELSE wd be the person to build the next big place I wanted to hang out so Poptimists was kind of meant as a stopgap before that particular Hacienda gets built: meanwhile I am still tapping my watch and waiting for the builders while the stopgap puts down its own roots (hurrah) (metaphor crisis).

Something that really enthuses me about Poptimists is the range of age, experience, enthusiasms we have here & also most of the people in it are younger than me and (it sounds lame pointing it out but it's important, specially compared to ILM) there are lots of women posting, proportionally a lot more than on other music discussion places I've been. So it feels like a much more fertile place than ILM for starting projects, personal or group, and I think my imagined Haciendabuilder is much likelier to come from here than there. (no pressure like).

Re: Do not read if you hate meta

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The other big "Poptimists is not ILM" thing is that ILM has ILE next door having a perpetual party - Poptimists has "the rest of your friendslist", which is a lot more about locked posts, private conversations, and you don't know exactly who is reading what. Very VERY different dynamic.

Re: Do not read if you hate meta

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Haha I would not call ILE a party exactly!!

Re: Do not read if you hate meta

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I wasn't even thinking of "lurker" in its online connotation...meant more like a (talkative) troll beneath the bridge.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Poptimists was kind of meant as a stopgap before that particular Hacienda gets built

I guess this is part of my frustration, itching for the Hacienda! But then you might always enjoy hanging out in the smaller clubs with your friends more anyway -- I wonder if it's even possible to have it both ways (part of the angst).

0% (0 votes) poptimist consensus

I think this is a good thing, and presents (perhaps) another paradox, which is how do you "explode" a conversation full of people who disagree with each other (in productive ways)...in my own experience it makes more sense letting people kind of stumble in as they see fit, looking for other clubs and people who don't usually go to clubs to try one out and get hooked. But it also keeps things a bit nomadic as a few people pine for the Big Place that'll somehow combine all the best elements of all the little places (and, subsequently, bring in new people).

And there's another question, which is how can we be sure that the people who are even remotely interested are going to be more interested with a Bigger Place? There's no way I could have the interests I have and not eventually find, say, ILM (and there was no way for me, having found ILM, not to find Poptimists). Where are these missing people, anyway?

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

To me, all the K-Punk/Simon things show what happens when the conversation does get expanded, and it's generally not good. The kind of things we're talking about seem to require a safe space, if you will, to grow--somewhere ideas can get thrown around, tested and developed without have people taste the half-baked product and declare the whole process a failure. Once there's a certain gestalt it can be brought wider, but arguably poptimism/popism/whatever publicly peaked too soon, came out too early, and has been henceforth damned by it. Like Roe v. Wade, kinda.

There's this idea of pluralistic ignorance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance) and that could basically be the internet's motto as far as I'm concerned. One of the ways to win a message board argument is to convince the other party that no one agrees with them, and if you yell loud enough, it's easy to get that impression across. But the opposite is often true. Making this happen necessarily requires an amplification of attitudes (I can't really believe that Mark actually thinks that writing about Paris Hilton is a shot fired in a class war) which really warps the debate. Simon's idea of critical jousting is tied to the context of commercial publications being the site of critical conflict, not free-for-all message boards, which is why it feels so outdated. There's a moderating force with editing that keeps the extreme closer to the center in publications, whereas in the internet, the social economy rewards pushing further and further out toward the margins. Even crazies get more attention than rational centrists, and that seems wildly unproductive.

This would all be different if poptimists didn't contain a whole range of ideas and discussions weren't spirited and productive, but they are. Things will come out of it, and it's nice to attract more parties to it who can benefit from it or help build it, but until something comes out that really sets the whole thing out, I don't know how useful it will be to let people see how the sausage is made.

[mooxyjoo.livejournal.com]

the safe-space-to-grow and the commercial-publications-stratification you're talking about sound a lot like the structure of academia: the concept ALWAYS has some kind of 'community', no matter what level, but each level always has a number of implicit and explicit limitations on who or how many are involved, so that a) bonds of community can form, b) work can be shared and discussed before it's ready (for the next level or more outside kind of community), c) people can't get in who will ruin the community.

(emp conference actually = a conference serving just this function, though generally people don't have pop music departments to go back to in order to kick around their ideas before the next big conference.)

(and of course academia and publishing intersect in lots of ways.)

which is, i assume, partly why the idea of a university, or a department in a university, is so attractive to frank's DDF. (and the problems of access to universities present the bad side of that option.)

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

It's interesting--I was previously involved in an effort to form an online community that was very careful and self-aware about when and how much it was going to go public (which is where I get my thinking about this in part), but it was so careful that it failed. Poptimists works well because it is self-policing--if you're the kind of person that's going to see a Wham! poll and go "ugh!" then you'll probably unsub and everything will work out. ILM, in contrast, had such a concentration of energy (both in terms of the quality of the conversation and the status of the people involved) that it became its own center of gravity and drew in anyone in its nearby orbit.

The big difference between this and academia, I guess (and something Frank's big on) is that there's no explicit hierarchy on the internet. Sure, in any community you can lose status for acting a certain way toward certain members, but it's not explicitly bad for your career like in the academy. Gatekeeping is a lot looser here but it's also unclear where the next step is, which is why I'm curious to see how these ideas get into the larger world; I guess there's Stylus and Plan B which would be the music-crit equivalent of scholarly journals, except that the ideas have to get converted into reviews for most venues (Stylus being an obvious exception) so it's not quite the same, and there seems no equivalent to the semi-popular nonfiction work or syllabus standard as of yet. (At least from the current generation--obviously Frith and Kogan have gotten to this level. But Frith is in the academy!)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

re: 'comfort zone' - yes, for me this is very much the case, though I wouldn't put it like that. Poptimists has the same private-in-public feel that, say, chatting in the pub with your friends does, and that's exactly the tone I take. (And really a big reason it exists at all is because for reasons of distance/time/silly demands of paid employment, we can't actually chat in a pub all the time!) It's somewhere I can type without thinking too much, somewhere I can throw ideas around without having to think through all consequences and ensuing refutations, and just see what sticks. Some does, I've gone through my old poptimists comments to find phrases and ideas before, but the only reason that was written in the first place is because of the amount which didn't stick.

I don't think the conversation does need to expand, actually, other than in the usual sense that these conversations are always expanding, just by...talking. Poptimists is a curious community (not in lj sense, in woder sense) in that there really doesn't seem to be a...centre. I don't think there's even a single broad point around which everything is based (yeah OK OK "pop is good" but everyone has different ideas of what pop is). Which is nice, it gives it a less rigorous and more chatty feel, and I think this is partly what keeps enemies and frenemies alike from actually homing in on what's said here, as happens on ILM: on lj it's a given that what's posted isn't meant to be set in stone.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think of poptimists as a place for like-minded people to enjoy conversations about shared interests rather than as a place where some kind of pop-crit manifesto is being hammered out - if k-punk knows we exist (since although he uses the word poptimist he doesn't seem to be meaning poptimists be anything other than what it is? (I don't really see how 'conservative' and 'radical' are working in the question either.) One of the things that niggled at me about ILM after a while was the way it became an echo chamber of the rock-crit establishment, so it's a bit of a relief to me to be talking somewhere slightly more detached. And obviously plenty of people on this community also look at ILM and have certain kinds of conversation there, in a 'more' public forum. So I feel some of your questions are a bit like asking 'why isn't a piece of toast a steak dinner?' but it's interesting to hear how people do think about what's going on here.

I also don't think there is anything as coherent as 'Poptimist writing'. Sure there's writing by members of poptimists, but for me the experience of poptimists is about ways of responding to music and interacting with other people around music which aren't based in the model 'critic publishes review or writes feature or interviews musician'. I think a few years ago I would definitely have empathised with the idea that we might go out and change the world of rock-write, but these days my ambitions don't really stretch that far. I guess that could be linked to an argument that poptimists itself is a space of retreat from some kind of engagement, but I think that would be unjust!

Also: my biggest niggle with the LJ format is that I have more time to think and engage with posts evenings and weekends, but most poptimists traffic is UK weekday office hours.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

AAARRGHGHHH!

Huge chunk of my first paragraph has disappeared :-(

The missing points should read something like

'if k-punk knows we exist he hasn't bothered to find out what we talk about or how we talk about it'
'comfort zone sounds perjorative but why expect poptimists to be anything other than what it is'

But the real point I'd want to make is in para 2.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Should clarify my own position a bit -- I do mean the writing of individual Poptimists (and collective insights emerging from comment threads), not some kind of overarching "Poptimist platform," which I've always argued against (and is the main reason the recent attacks don't make any sense -- you really need to project pretty hardcore in order to find a coherent "theory of pop(tim)ism).

Conservative I mean in a less charged sense, though radical might have been a noverstatement -- I simply mean that this is a comfortable place to be (I like that about the community, and maybe my discomfort/suspicion in being comfortable is my own problem), and that the impulse is to keep things stable and let conversations play out naturally. I basically mean that, as Lex says, Poptimists functions kind of like a pub; you can say some ridiculous and/or provocative things but never endanger your relationship to the people around you, and you never have to question the venue itself (the structures of the LJ community can stay intact). But do you organize in the pub (make the sausage?) and then take it somewhere? (To the streets, maaaaan!) Or is the pub itself sufficient?

To use your metaphor, if I'm understanding you, I wonder if anyone ever hankers for a piece of steak, so to speak. And where one would go to eat steak (i.e. if LJ is [awesome] toast [n.b., I'd eat toast every day if I wasn't so diabetic] and ____ is steak [which I would NOT eat every day even if I could], what is ____?).

By now I'm hugely cynical of changing rock-write (trying to be less cynical, since there are still venues to write challenging criticism without restrained format/word count), but I still have (maybe misguided) notions that people at large are more open to changing what they already think about music than they are in other fields (politics, say, which seems to be pretty hopelessly splintered on the internet). I feel like good conversations and provocative opinions can make a difference in this sphere in a way that they don't seem to challenge the political blogosphere (where information/coverage keeps things going). This may simply not be true -- hence my observation about the more realistic idea that people kind of stumble in as they come, often through chance -- but something in me WANTS it to be true.

Don't want to suggest that Poptimists is a retreat from anything -- I think that its own goals are modest (not meant pejoratively; modest tends to be what I aim for, even if I can be a blowhard sometimes) and, more importantly, effective in sustaining a unique community and also sustaining a conversation worth having.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Sounds like we pretty much agree then!

people at large are more open to changing what they already think about music than they are in other fields

'cept here I wasn't sure whether 'people at large' means 'internet music nerds and / or bloggers' (and I include myself in this) or 'that section of the public that is interested in reading and talking about music' or 'everyone, including the majority who don't give a rip what anyone else says about the music, except possibly their pals'. For either group, is it about people changing what they think or how they think about music? And I'm still pretty sure that most people react to music before they think about it, so changing the way they think rather than the way they hear may be bolting the stable door etc. If we agreed that was what we wanted to do -- but I feel that if poptimists has a critical strand, it's to do with undoing the restricted ways in which music is talked about 'critically' and 'in public', i.e. the 'opposition' is not 'people who listen to music' but 'people who write about music in banal ways'.

I reckon ILM and Freaky Trigger in their day both did have some impact on rock and pop crit discourse, but then the largest issues constraining old media rock-write are economic / commercial rather than ideological, and for me the web has yet to evolve satisfactory new zones where the kind of long form essays and critical think pieces can appear (presumably because, well, critics need to get paid and no-one's made this work yet. Most of the sites I've seen that do try this are still at fanzine / student rag level, but I'm pretty much running dry on places on the web to read about music, I check here and ILX and, erm, that's about it.)

Department of Dilettante Research

[koganbot]

(1) There is a poptimist near consensus (a few dissenters), at least among people who post a lot, which is that Fergie Ferg et al. are worth more than either just a hurrah or just a sneer (even if on a particular day many of us don't have time for much more than a hurrah or a sneer). But then, this has been the attitude of any interesting rockcrit from the get-go: change "Fergie Ferg" to "Shangri-Las," and you've got the 1965 (or so) attitude of Richard Goldstein, Paul Nelson, Richard Meltzer, Nik Cohn, Simon Frith, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, etc.

(2) I've been at this a long time - I mean, not just as a rockcrit but as one who went for the group discussion format, which I did before writing reviews and which I prefer to writing (or reading) reviews or essays. Why Music Sucks (my zine) and Swellsville and Radio On were ilX in germ form. But I was never satisfied with the convo even then. Fact is, in WMS I wanted sustained intellectual discourse intertwined with smooching and giggling and catfights and confetti contests (my idea being that the giggling etc. would help to generate ideas and that the intellectual discourse would help to generate smooches and confetti etc.). What I got was a lot of intellectual discourse intertwined with smooching-giggling-fighting-confetti, but the intellectual discourse was hop, skip, dip in here, concoct idea there, which is to say it was flash of ideas but little follow-through. So the intellectualism was frequent but the discussion of particular ideas was not sustained. And this failure wasn't because of the format (though only coming out twice a year was an impediment), but because most music critic types and fan types just don't do sustained intellectual discourse. (My guess is that this holds true in cultural studies and sociology departments as well; that an individual may sustain a project, but for practical purposes he or she is on his own.) Actually, when I brought back WMS in a different format - people writing their personal experiences or their immediate responses to blindfold tests (not unlike the League Of Pop and the Pop Open) - the magazine overall got better. But it pretty much abandoned the social and musical analysis I love.

(3) If we don't do it (sustained intellectual discourse) no one else will, but that doesn't mean we should do it here. So my idea isn't to try and turn poptimists into ddr (the Department of Dilettante Research). But that doesn't mean I want something that's a nonpub (people who can't sustain a convo in a pub probably can't sustain one in a seminar room either). And in saying "if we don't do it no one else will" I don't mean that I don't want to draw in new people, but rather that we can't expect the new people to do what we're not willing to do ourselves.

(4) "New people" might be people whom we value 'cause they know stuff we don't know, might include people who don't realize that they're gonna be interested in Fergie Ferg, might include people who don't know there is a Fergie Ferg.

(5) Speaking of non-follow-through, I've got to go.

Re: Department of Dilettante Research

[koganbot]

Well, before going: my need for "new people" means I've got to stop looking in the same old places if I'm always disappointed with what I find. In other words, rockcrit just doesn't have the talent pool.