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

[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.