Bits To Read

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

New Pitchfork column about the "test of time" - big debts to Dubdobdee and Koganbot and a big uncredited debt to epicharmus who is the LIVING CONSCIENCE OF DAVE MARSH and has kept the quote that starts the column alive. I'm glad I remembered it as it gave me a framing device that much improved the piece, which even so isn't one of my favourites.

Meanwhile, earlier this week on Poptimists we talked about the return of UPBEAT POP and the Grauniad today includes not one but TWO bits about this - Jude Rogers' column about whimsical bands (mentions the accursed WOMBATS who I had somehow forgotten), and this intriguing piece on Radio 1 ditching rock for pop. Caroline Sullivan (for it is she) obviously disapproves. You probably will too given that by pop they mean Scouting For Girls. (Not that I'm denying that's what SFG are). Readers may remember that SCIENCE predicted the pop revival some months ago and now here it is.

Comments

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

I notice that Caroline doesn't go as far as using the phrase "MUMROCK" even though that is *exactly* what she's talking about.

also i thought it was slightly rude of jude to nick yr idea without a credit, HELLO JUDE :)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

the test of THYME!!!!!!

dere lord ;) it was all going so well up to that point as well :)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Haha yes I should really have put a warning on.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i like the "haha, those last two paras were gibberish" bit

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

so it is GEORGE ERGATOUDIS who is the enemy, then. what a cunt.

jude is lovely!

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

I don't get that Radio 1 article at all. They're ditching rock, by which they mean The Enemy, for pop, by which they mean The Wombats? Hardly a Bannister-style shakeup, is it. From what I've heard of R1 over the last 12 months that's going to be no change at all apart from they have decided they're officially going to start calling the Klaxons "pop".

Roffle!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

"Morrissey is the master of melancholy because he always tempers it with wit, but these days he's repeating the same sentiments like a malfunctioning Furbie."

[koganbot]

Really well-written piece, Tom. I'm starting to get jealous.

But I have a lot of trouble with your last statement: "what I believe is that being wrong about music should never matter." First off, this seems to equate being right about music as standing the test of time, and that liking something for very immediate and contemporary reasons is a personal and social context isn't right.

But also, being wrong about music can have bad aesthetic and social consequences. Being wrong can matter. I don't think you should fear being wrong about music, or ideas, since, if there is a good enough discussion going on around you, what's novel or intriguing or challenging about your "bad" choices - what's good about them, that is - will be taken to heart, and what's foolish won't cause much harm. But that's a big "if." And it also seems to be invoking a "test of time" argument itself, one that isn't necessarily bad: in the long run, people are intelligent, and the power of discussion and the collective mind will not allow the good ideas to languish forever. Isn't any intellectualism based on this kind of faith?

But I wonder about my "faith." Practices such as the "hard" sciences seem to bear it out, though maybe I think so only because I'm not a scientist and don't understand it and am just assuming that, in the long run, the science guys know what they're doing.

You see, it seems to me a lot of my "minority" tastes have stood the test of time in that the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and the Dolls have all been embraced by the rock-critic intelligentsia and are revered founding fathers of punk etc. The problem is that being canonized has made their music worse, taken it out of the contexts in which it lived and roared and instead put it into the hands of people who use it as a bulwark to fend off and a club to beat down intelligent dance and pop music, while puffing up mediocre indie rock. --I realize that that last sentence is a big exaggeration (the Dolls' incipient canonization in the '80s helped to inspire good music by Poison and great music by Guns N' Roses, and it's not as if the original content of Dolls music and lyrics has totally dissipated over time). Also, I'm not sure what choice we have but to canonize what we want to preserve. But my point here is that there is such a thing as being wrong about music, that the context that extolls the Dolls now is being wrong about music, even if I think the Dolls are truly great and deserve to continue to be heard, and that the context is a descendant of what back in the '80s I was calling the indie-alternative PBS Lonely Hearts Club. Frank Kogan, February 1987: "Despite our marginality, we have an effect on music as a whole. We can't get everybody to listen to our music - but we can be arbiters of taste. E.g., I can imagine some pour soul abandoning Teena Marie for Talking Heads, then abandoning Talking Heads for Sonic Youth, then abandoning Sonic Youth for me - and doing it all as a status move." I remember at one point, recounting my own struggles to make good music, I said that people were mistaking my paralysis for integrity. And that's been my long-standing rap against the indie-alternative thing, that indie-alternative extols mediocrity by calling it integrity, but not just that, indie-alternative attains so much cultural weight and fits in with the broader culture's own PBS tendencies to such an extent that other musics start to emulate indie's bad aspects. So other musics start to go down, too. (I don't know if the latter fear has been borne out by, er, history, but the former sure has. You could say that my ideas have stood the test of time - ha! - despite very few people having paid any attention to them.) Obviously, these are not the only things that are going on in indie; and, my having struggled as a singer and musician to find my "voice," I appreciate why it can make sense at times to forgo received competence in favor of not knowing what you're doing. But there has to be achievement, eventually, rather than an insistent mutual massive pat on the back for one's intentions.

But the point here: the indie-alternative PBS Lonely Hearts Club's being wrong about music hurt music.

[koganbot]

liking something for very immediate and contemporary reasons IN a personal and social context

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The last sentence was too glib, I agree (it was an attempt not to end with the test of thyme pun!).

I will really try and engage with/reply to this post - and unpack what I might have actually meant about right/wrong - on Monday when I'm next online - about to leave work now. Lack of web access is killing me at the moment :(

[koganbot]

Have fun. And yes, your piece is excellent.

[koganbot]

A confused statement that Simon Frith made back in WMS #5 might be instructive here, since he was simultaneously opposing and endorsing the test of time:

My concern is the aesthetic inconsistency of pop culture - pop sounds are only valuable in their moment; "good" popular taste is by definition entirely contradictory. Which is to say that I don't care that Patti Smith and Brian Wilson have made new LPs (even though I was obsessed with both of them in their time). If either of them were still any good (which they're not) it would be to do with the present, not the past. One of the more satisfying aspects of being a rock critic is that our work can, in principle, go on being interesting and relevant; rock musicians' work, in principle, cannnot.

Now, that last sentence is dogmatic and stupid, and the words "principle" and "by definition" are just babble. How is writing eternal but pop music ephemeral? Writing is just as contextual as pop music, and is therefore just as likely to lose or retain its interest over time. Simon is using "pop" as a mystificatory term, as if its cultural rules were somehow different from anything else's.

What Simon should have said was that pop (and writing, and anything else) doesn't have to be eternal to be good - and that whether something is good beyond "its time" will depend on how future times use it. What I said in my last post about my not liking how the Dolls, Stooges, and Velvets are being used by the present doesn't have to do with some principle (what principle?) that says that such music can't be used well beyond its time, but rather with how a specific class of people in this time are using it. Maybe in 30 years the Dolls et al. will be being used wonderfully. And I think I still use the Dolls and Stooges well in my writing.

But my message here is: Don't mystify pop by saying that it works in a special "pop" way that makes it immediate and personal and contextual as opposed to other cultural stuff that's not immediate and personal and contextual. All culture works in personal and social contexts, and whether this working is accompanied by historical perspective and self-consciousness simply depends on whether the people in the activity are being self-conscious about it. There are no principles that govern this, no special "pop" rules.

i know it's so cliche

[pony-meat.livejournal.com]

but i just can't read anything by pitchfork

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

The other thing about the "test of time" is that it is based on a poor understanding of history – ie a failure to understand the debate is never-ending. Which is to say: Caravaggio was the buzz artist around Rome 400 years, Caravaggio is the subject of a big BBC documentary once every five years. False deduction: over the stretch of four centuries, Caravaggio has been considered one of the very greatest of artists. In fact, for huge chunks of that time he didn't make the cut at all. Even with Shakespeare, the supposed gold standard for this kind of stuff, you'll find that critical consensus about which of the plays justify his reputation changes constantly. 'History' has no one judgement (or I guess not unless we actually reach Judgement Day).

ILM weighs in

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=41&threadid=61239#msg51

I'm not sure Tim F's opening presentation of Tom's piece is terribly helpful, but most responders appear to have read the piece anyway.