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

[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.)