real men don't eat niche

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

just to pursue this a bit, since it's gone beyond 50 posts and clenched up

reasons for the hardening of niche boundaries:

i. niche-media -- i wz reading a copy of FOLK ROOTS over someone's shoulder on the bus last night, it wz my bugbear 20 years ago when i wz writin abt african pop and sent a shiver of dislike thru me yesterday also... the attention and aprpoval paid artists successful in a niche means (i) they don't have do any work to be paid attention by the "centre"; (ii) the centre can hive off any attention it wants to pay to them -- in other words the success of THE VIBE actually diminishes the likelihood of ROLLING STONE needing to write well about the vibe's target subject (and any interraction) [this can be expanded to niche-business as a policing mechanism, i think, the niche-media as the platform for the niche-market]

ii. relative availability for comparison -- in the 60s, the only ppl who knew how the brit blues boom players sounded in comparison to their sources were the players themselves, which allowed them a scope to develop and change and explore, and make something strong (on its own terms) out of something maybe quite clumsy and bad (on the terms of the stuff it was copying) -- ppl who heard it didn't think "crossover", they responded to merely the phenom itself, not the phenon in relation to its source, and the phenom evolved in response to this (naive, uninformed) enthusiasm, far enough to become a thing in itself... today the source is a download away, you don't need a copy to avail yrself of it and will judge the copy accordingly

iii. the language of "appropriation" and cultural ownership -- this is an understandable response to the depradation of the "quasi-imperialist centre", but it's not, in the long run, a strategically intelligent one (vanguards should want to seize the centre, or to operate from it, not to creep off into their own safge no-go zone)

iv. even so the "centre" is simultaneously ruinously contested and not believed in -- not believed in as a civic value in itself, let alone as an untainted possibility

v. practicaly speaking, platforms-as-centres have dissolved -- newspapers, pop mags, whatever, all hive off their various functions into specialist sections so large that you don't have to negotiate "other material" to reach them -- the physical collage-juxtaposition of newspaper layout (which is a basic structural element in modernism-as-a-new-mode-of-thought), complete with impulse to cut, to crisp up, to shorten, is disappearing as the infinite space of the net beckons

[ok that's my starter for 5]

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

i) is an interesting point and I fully agree - this is why I've always wanted to locate myself in the mainstream, why I never really tried to get a foothold in the various niche outlets which would have made more sense

iii) - again I agree but surely the creeping off into safe zones is a forced reaction to an extent? even now the centre remains v suspicious of subcultures, and would rather pretend that "gloomy misfit white dude" is a subculture of its own

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Lex don't you pretend this a lot?

Is there a vice-versa included in point 1, or is there an inevitability about Rolling Stone being the centre and Vibe the periphery? Is it possible to envisage a pole-shift whereby a niche becomes the centre (I'm kind of thinking here of The Face and the rise of style-mags in the 80s - did they gazump one particular centre?)

(& how many centres are there anyway? Mark's point 5 touches on this)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

in the UK yes i think the single rock-paper centre was shattered -- on one hand the tabloids began writing about pop stuff, on the other hand the style mags took on a lot the things done (but poorly) by the rock papers

in the US the story started about a decade earlier, against a very different demographics background (and unfolding politics: rolling stone was among other things a bit of a billboard for the movement unity between anti-war and civil rights, esp.in the their student-y dimensions)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

but in the UK it wasn't a shift of centre, it was a reorganisation into several neighbouring zones which no longer communicated

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

HIGHEST SELLING RECORD OF 2006: High School Musical
HIGHEST SELLING RECORD OF 2007: High School Musical 2(?)

The future is now! We were so busy thinking about white and black that we forgot about the war between THE OLD and THE YOUNG.

(Julianne Shepherd on Corbin Bleu in Vibe (http://www.vibe.com/juice07/2007/08/corbin_bleu_npg/) versus this picture (http://i.realone.com/assets/rn/img/9/0/0/9/15809009-15809011-large.jpg) that's hanging on our fridge right now!)

[thenipper.livejournal.com]

Point i) reminds me of what people say when they don't give money to homeless people or charities - it should be up to the government!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i'm actually using two rather difft meanings of centre, i think -- centre as in "rolling stone vs subcultural rivals" and centre as in "the broad civic-cultural space everything passes through and everyone contributes to" -- part of what's at issue is the degree to which first (as an institution with its own possibly narrow interests) is assumed to have a controlling lock on the second

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

what i'm getting at is probably a bit unclear given my example -- folk was already a niche and i was unhappy that its "capture" of this lovely afro-pop meant that i was constantly having to firefight the prejudice of "centre" popsters responding to the niche bigotry of old-time folk ideologues -- but what i'm actually thinking more of is the belief i used to have, in the mid-late 80s, that the reason the best pop and rock writers were not at that time really allowed into the grown-up papers except on INCREDIBLY restrictive terms is that if they did their jobs properly, writing abt pop as it could and should be written, then their writing would be a destabilising threat not just to the rest of the arts pages, but to the political and editorial pages also

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ts: lord reith vs jurgen habermas

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

i cut out holes in my rock-papers with rock-paper-scissors

not my joke but HAHAHA anyway

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

makes hand-symbol for GERMS GUNS and STEEL

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

Need to think some more but first response:

is wanting to take over / talk to the centre the Norm or the Exception. i.e. have we gone through extreme times back to business as normal? By 'centre' I guess I'm taking you to mean something like 'the public sphere', and if the analogy is political, then why would a tolerated - or happily thriving - minority community want to or need to expose themself to the risk a) of violence and b) of dissolution (if they win) by making a bid for the centre ground. (Since you can't take the centre, you can only be swallowed by it). (OK my use of centre seems to have slipped towards something vaguer). How important is the experience of both Grunge and Hip-hop 'crossing over' both into the cultural centre and into the marketplace - is central culture the product of an entertainment industry.