Context and Anticontext

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Quite unformed thorts based on Frank K's latest column and discussion of same - see here: http://koganbot.livejournal.com/26897.html

Music has a social context, obv - who else is listening to stuff you encounter, both people you know and people you don't but you assume things (good or bad) about.

It also has an anticontext (erm this is just another part of the context rly but I wanted a snappy name for it) - people who AREN'T listening to it, because they don't like it or because they don't know about it.

But not everyone who doesn't listen to something matters in terms of the anticontext - my reaction to Keane, say, is affected by my imagining Mums listening to Keane, and NME readers mostly not listening to Keane, but isn't significantly affected by Amazon tribesmen not listening to Keane, or by my Great Aunt Betty not listening to Keane. The Amazon tribesmen and Great Aunt Betty are not part of the anticontext here: the NME readers are.

Context and especially anticontext are obviously hugely important in enclosed social spheres, like school or University, and then maybe the anticontext fades from importance a bit later in life.

Here's my theory - the anticontext has shrunk, steadily, since the 1960s. The sense that a random guy on the street, or someone of a different agegroup, or someone not dressing the same as you, is part of the anticontext, has diminished (with occasional seismic flare-ups). And also, MAYBE, the size of the potential context is directly related to the size of the anticontext (since just as not every non-listener is in the anticontext, not every listener is in the context).

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that's quite right - the anti-context has shrunk since the 60s because it's harder to avoid hearing music of all genres, everywhere you go. If you have any vague interest in the music (and hence being part of the relevant context/anti-context) then you will (consciously or not) absorb it wandering round shops, watching adverts on the telly, hearing the person across the office's mobile playing the intro to The Final Countdown over and over again. Music is thrust upon you and it's not just pop - I remember being flabberghasted that a bit of continuity music for 'what's coming up next on BBC2' was off Michael Mayer's Fabric 13 mix!

So perhaps the change has occured in the greater use of pre-existing music for telly/film/ads/hold music/ringtones rather than commissioning someone to write music especially (interestingly this type of music has never been of much interest to the pop music fan other than as a novelty hit, but Great Aunt Betty will probably have a copy of Greatest Bond Themes in her dresser).

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I could include interwebs & multi-channel telly/radio in the harder-to-avoid environmental factors, but a) they have arrived relatively late in the 60s-present timescale b) they require active participation from the listener rather than being a passive side-effect of another action (eg walking into Topshop because you need to buy jeans and hearing an amazing bosh remix of Kiri Te Kanewa).

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

Although you assume an active interest in music there - the anti-context may have shrunk for people as actively engaged with music as us, but I have a lot of friends who merely *like* music and it baffles me how they avoid hearing (or claiming to have heard) things that I presume everyone has heard.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I may well be getting confused with the terminology! I was assume that the active interest meant you were part of the context/anti-context sphere.

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

I may be the one who may be confused. I suppose I was defining it as my own personal context - so most of my friends are part of my context as they who are who I spend most of my time with and in real life have most conversations about music with.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I should have made things clearer - the key thing about the anticontext is that they're the people whose not-listening/not-understanding/not-liking of the music MATTERS from within yr personal context.

eg. "Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones" - this is less powerful if Mr Jones doesn't know what it is because Mr Jones is a 60-year old woman in Ulan Bator.

and: "Of course the real fans aren't buying it" and "Lady if you have to ask you'll never know" - some of the most powerful, resonant mythic rock stances rely on the invocation of the anticontext.

So "not getting" is usually more important than "not knowing about" in the anticontext. But what I'm asking is - was this true in the 60s, or during punk, or acid house, or any other surge moment in which the average man in the street was shifted into the anticontext simply because knowing what was happening felt so significant?

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

Ah, I get it now. I'd agree that the anti-context is pretty big (and even vocal) during polarising new movements in music such as the ones you mention above, and that isn't present at the moment as there is no one current thing so big and new and different for people not to get.

However there is still, in my experience, a very large bedrock of anti-context amongst the man in the street (and I do mean man, largely) in terms of general rockist attitudes to pop in particular.

[koganbot]

Ah, I'm understanding better now. I just was taking "anticontext" to be something like alternative, but I take it that anticontext is whoever I'm defining as the oppositional (or at least contrasted-against) people. (But isn't the "anticontext" still part of the context?)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes it is - I admitted that in the original post! But it's a part of the context I wanted to have its own name.

Rap and country

[koganbot]

But I'm still not sure I'm understanding why you think the anticontext is shrinking. Would it be that there's less of an ability for a genre to stake out its claim "This is our music and these are our fans and the rest of you don't get it"? So there are no great Us vs. Them splits as in the days of yore, since They end up being uncooperatively tolerant and curious. Um, you may be right, but I sure seem to have inadvertantly discovered a huge anticontext when it comes to teenpop. But my guess is that many in the primary audience for, say, High School Musical and Hannah Montana and the Cheetah Girls (which isn't the teenpop that's been winning my heart, for the most part, except that an HSM track got into my P&J top ten last year and a Miley Cyrus track will this year) don't particularly have a sense of an anticontext or get affected by it. But I could be all wrong.

Several performers have created major anticontexts for themselves recently: E.g., Eminem in 2000 and Paris Hilton in 2006. As a genre, hip-hop still seems as if it has the biggest anticontext. And what about country? In '99 Kevin John entitled his fanzine "The magazine of rap and country" because he'd read some alternative-leaning magazine that declared, "We like everything except for rap and country."

Re: Rap and country

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes, I may well be wrong about the anticontext shrinking, though I think maybe the reason it isn't shrinking for people like you and Kevin and Dave and me is that we come from a tradition which is pretty alert and alive to anticontexts - whereas, as you say, the teenpop primary audience aren't so much.

(And actually is the becoming-aware-of-ones-anticontext a defining moment in childhood - the awareness that there are a bunch of people who think what I like is lame (or who like lame stuff I hate) and the reaction to that.)