Testing Testing

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

At the EMP music seminar last year dubdobdee presented a paper in which he contrasted - or promised to contrast - the "test of time" and the "test of space" when analysing (not just pop) music. I can't remember exactly what the "test of space" is in this schema but ANYWAY I wanted to ask the question (for a P4K column most likely) of why an artform where instancy is apparently such a big element attracts so much 'test of time' rhetoric, and also which OTHER tests one might apply.

Comments

[koganbot]

Let's say that pre-1964 or so most or many people believe* a false dichotomy:

the context of popular music (incl. all of blues etc.) is entertainment
the context of criticism is school
school is antithetical to entertainment

Obvious problem with my assumption is that probably many people did not think of popular music as mere entertainment, just as they did not necessarily think of dating or adopting social signifiers or testifying one's great passion - for a human? for a diety? think of gospel-based music - as mere entertainment. (Does a teenager attend dances merely for "fun"? Is the experience limited to "fun"? Is it necessarily fun at all?) Also, I don't assume that popular musicians and listeners were entirely lacking the social do-good and social self-improvement motives - this nonlack probably more evident in movies of the '50s than in rock 'n' roll, but I'd hypothesize that the do-good/self-improvement role takes subterranean forms '50s rock 'n' roll, "crazy man crazy" maybe coding as stepping out of one's social role, and even if this was not called "moral self-improvement" but something very opposite it might well have sometimes played that role anyway.

*Also, calling something a "belief" is problematic when it's something that most people give barely any conscious thought to, is evidenced in their behavior only inconsistently, and would be contradicted by other parts of their behavior. That is, when people explain or justify their own enthusiasms and distates etc. they reach for socially sanctioned "reasons" that don't jibe with their own actual behavior. So someone could, on the spur of the moment, say to someone else, "This is just entertainment; you shouldn't intellectualize it so much," when in fact in their behavior they're treating it as a lot less trivial than "entertainment." (My own prose is somewhat misleading here, since it assumes that "entertainment" is trivial, whereas of course people can entertain themselves by discussing politics or cosmology etc.) So what I'm calling a "belief" is actually a set of clichés that people can get away with invoking whether or not the ideas that the clichés reference to are confirmed or contradicted by the people's behavior.

But anyway, "believing" the dichotomy, someone may well feel that (i) popular music is lacking something (by not being serious), (ii) has a special spark owing to its not being serious, and (iii) school terms (critical terms) can therefore both validate and destroy popular music.

I'm putting aside the question as to whether the school terms of the 1950s or of now are good for understanding popular culture. I see no reason in principle that the school terms couldn't be good, whereas if I believed in the dichotomy I'd think that the school terms were bad by definition and that critical terms that derived from school were inherently a contaminant. But "school" terms often are bad, because "intellectuals" often have their heads up their butts. Also, the reason I suddenly put "school" in scare quotes is that the term as I've been using it in this post is wrong. What I should be saying is "ideas taught or generated in the classroom." Of course, there's much more to a school than the classroom. But the dichotomy pretends that school or work are antithetical to entertainment and leisure, so the dichotomy reduces "school" to the classroom and pretends that entertainment and leisure are unaffected by school.

an artform where instancy is apparently such a big element

So I'm saying that when one is claiming that instancy is a big element in popular music one is doing so in a context where classroom terms are seen simultaneously as validators and contaminants.

By the way, is the "test of time" invoked all that often? I mean, I know that there are girl group box sets and that there's a rock 'n' roll hall of fame, and that there's a claim to permanence - e.g., "if Louis Armstrong and the Beatles are still in play so much now, we can assume this is owing to their inherent value and that they will be in play 200 years from now." But that doesn't necessarily mean "test of time" and claims of permanence play a big role in people's actual listening to Armstrong or the Beatles.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

That's the thing - I don't think it IS invoked often as a fait accompli - "this music has stood the test of time ergo it is good" - more as a means of justifying current tastes. I noticed a lot when looking at discussions of end of year lists that people criticising them would often do so in terms of "are people going to be listening to this in five years time". The claim that things will/won't stand a ToT is one made as a bet rather than as a fact.

I think I meant 'instancy' not so much as in 'instant appeal' but in the fact that the experience of most pop music is brief and intense - packing a lot of information into 5-6 minutes, and then it's gone.

[koganbot]

I think you're right that ToT appears often appears as a bet, "we will be listening to this in five years." I remember someone saying in the comments in Pazz & Jop 1999 that none of the current pop would be listened to twenty years hence; and I took this to be not "as opposed to the rock of the present, which will last," but "as opposed to the girl group etc. pop of yore," so it wasn't anti-pop from the point of view of rock but anti-Max from the point-of-view of Phil.

But I still don't hear ToT being invoked that much. But that could be because I'm not hanging around the people doing the invoking.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think I was looking in vulnerable places - and also of course discussion of end-of-year lists are inevitably ToT-baiting because in a sense they're a time capsule for the future.

The interpretation of ToT depends on its nuance - I see both "as opposed to other stuff now" and "as opposed to then". I am probably more sensitive to the former because it annoys me more.