John Peel = ultimate Poptimist?

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

With the exception of Julie Burchill, this post isn't intended to call out anyone in particular, but the fact that that John Peel thread went the way it did *this far* into the existence of Poptimists depressed me more than anything else I've read here. The Peel-bashing seemed to only undermine the sort of arguments this community has been making, and reinforcing the sort of arguments this community has been defending itself against, for ages.

By which I mean that 'Poptimism' as ideology, if it even exists, is about making the case for what you like regardless of critical consensus. That really Poptimism isn't about going 'OMG GIRLS ALOUD IT'S AMAZING' or 'you MUST LIKE this Mariah Carey album otherwise you're not a true Poptimist' or 'it doesn't matter that people say The Beatles were better than Aqua, it's all ephemeral pop and whatever you like matters', or whatever gets levelled by over-committed and under-researched bloggers. It's about making the case for what you like and risking indifference or ridicule. If not, why have we been bothering to share all this African hip-hop or German dancehall or Scandinavian dentists rapping about how ecstacy will mash your life, stuff that no one is ever going actually buy in this country? And I'm struggling to think of anyone who did that for music, ESPECIALLY on a national pop platform like Radio 1, before John Peel.

As a mid-90s indie rock kid, my abiding memory of listening to John Peel is one of dissatisfaction. Because from 94-97, it was mostly not indie rock AT ALL, it was all drum and bass or happy hardcore or thrash metal or obscure music from Peru I didn't have a clue about. I thought it was mostly rubbish, if I'm honest, but in hindsight I'm grateful for the opportunity to have heard it. This, after all, was one of the first DJs to play jungle on Radio 1 who later saw his own show shortened to make way for a dedicated drum and bass slot.

Julie Burchill attacks Peel for being hippy, or middle class, or more pointedly ignoring black music, when in fact he played lots of it. Does it really matter if a critic, genuinely, doesn't like a single black American hip-hop or rnb record of last decade, if they're instead bigging up music from South America or the Middle East or Eastern Europe or, well, anywhere that gets TOTALLY IGNORED by the most vociferous of accusatory Internet crusaders.

Not to mention the fact that Burchill is, as dubdobdee suggests elsewhere, more responsible than most for the current musical climate. The inability to get over punk in particular - when the history of NME is told by IPC these days, no one mentions Mark Sinker or Ian Penman or even whoever wrote for them in the 1950s and 60s, it's all Burchill and Parsons and hip young gunslingers.

It's possible that my picture of Peel is heavily rose-tinted here, just as my picture of Burchill is as reductive as the argument I'm attacking her for. But really, despite what your fans want to hear (or what consensus polls tell you they want to hear), isn't playing whatever you love pretty much as Poptimist as it gets?

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I'm kind of glad I never listened to Peel though - I was the sort of po-faced teenager that took music WAY TOO SERIOUSLY and knowing about Peruvian dentists might have sent me even more up my own arse. Or perhaps it would have gone the other way and I would have been less snobbish when I arrived at university clutching my Elastica records and little else.

Actually that's all bollocks - I'm glad I never listened to Peel because I don't feel I have to defend or attack him, having absolutely zero basis for doing either. Phew.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I've a lot to say on this which will wait until I'm bored at work tomorrow morning - I will say that you are quite right on how much Peel was HARD GOING in the 90s. He was a LOT easier to admire than to listen to because he'd pretty much abandoned any attempt whatsoever to find a thread between the music he liked - if anything he rejected the idea.

I think he feel into the same punk trap you're talking about - so identified with it and then with indie that it didn't matter what he played. He was Mister Indie and it's that caricature that his basher(s) now seem to be buying into.

But it's not totally fair to say "oh they've just got the wrong end of the stick" cos clearly he was important to the indie nation. The thing about indie in general is that it's always made up of two (at least!) tribes - the dudes who listen to nothing but indie and the dudes who listen to indie and other stuff, but find common ground in indie. I think 90s Peel served as the conscience of indie, or at least this second type of indie, keeping it honest by playing all this other stuff too. I dunno about the ultimate poptimist but he was one of the last Reithians at the BBC.

(This has MASSIVELY helped me crystallise my P4K column so thanks Matt!)

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

I was going to post on the festive 50 thread about how I got onto Peel at the right time for me (mid-late 90s)!

It seemed pretty clear to me at that point that the whole point of his show and the ethos behind it was to represent the (and at that point still a necessary and useful) alternative TO the top 40/daytime playlist whilst remaining vaguely/broadly representative of pop music conventions (on a global scale) at the same time. I regret not listening to his shows more - I always felt that I should. The festive 50s are a bit different - they seemed to remain heavily indie-centric right to the end, suggesting whatever dance/black music got played became tokenism for the audience.

But let's not forget this was also the man to propel 'Cognescenti vs Intelligencia' to the #2 spot. NONE MORE POP.

[dzilinebisa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this. You've written what I think better than I could have put it. Peel, to me, pretty much was the ultimate in what I regard as Poptimism; the idea that I didn't have to be ashamed to like what I liked.

[cis.livejournal.com]

I listened to Peel in the nineties/00s, liked him then, and still basically like him now, as an idea as a mythology and as the memory of a radio personality -- but I really hate the idea that anyone should go unquestioned! Especially on the grounds that he was some kind of proto-poptimist fellow traveller: "making the case for what you like and risking indifference or ridicule" is pretty much my poptimist ideology, yeah, but it's not all of it (for one, i love tartini more than kylie but pmists is the place for her and not for him), and I'm not sure it's everyone else's. I think it's fair to say e.g. "using a listener-voted list as a platform from which to attack John Peel of all DJs is frankly ridiculous; attacking Peel for these reasons is ridiculous" (although there's an interesting question there about why Peel couldn't get his ideology to stick on his listeners); I don't think it's fair to say that Peel should not be attacked.

About the line "went the way it did *this far* into the existence of Poptimists" -- do you think we're meant to be changing each others' minds in pmists? That it's an ongoing project? I sort of do, but... I dunno, it'd be interesting to ask poptimists if they think their attitudes towards music have been changed by being in pmists for any length of time. Not whether they're listening more to x or y or they have a new perspective on z but whether their personal ideologies about music have altered or are undergoing a process of alteration since joining pmists.

(In my opinion, the version of the indie past that's in current use is interesting because of the way it defangs both Peel and Burchill. He became some kind of cuddly eccentric uncle who played all this unlistenable tosh ha ha ha but brilliant in his own way dontchaknow even if we don't understand it (and -understood - are better off thus), not a conscience so much as an indulgence, in the Catholic sense; whatever they're called, those monks you can pay to pray for you, to do the devotions so you don't have to. And emphasising the 'hip young gunslinger' Burchill image, emphasising the punk thing that she's now so blase about, implies that she's someone trading on past glories, or she's a pop culture miss havisham half-dressed in punk's petulance. They both become meaningless.)

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

(Yes I think part of my complaint is that the past is being viewed through the prism of an indie present that does defang, of shave off the awkward edges of both of them - and this applies as much to Peel canonisers as Peel haterz). One of the things about retrospective polls even from a particular year is that they, by virtue of being all about consensus, shave off all the awkward or interesting bits as well, whether on Poptimists or Idolator or the Festive Fifty.

(I'm also not sure I 100% agree with this Peel as ultimate proto-Poptimist argument but its an interesting rhetorical position to take as a basis to argue from. I think it sits a lot better than Peel as hardcore conservative rockist though)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

My open-mindedness about pop probably only kicked off around about the time this community did - it certainly hasn't hindered it! I'm much more likely to give a song a chance to impress me these days - it's absolutely fine to hate on a song, as long as you give a reason why. Same for liking a song! EXPLAIN THYSELVES.

[the-roofdog.livejournal.com]

Yes, I listened to Peel intermittently from 1997-2000 and I couldn't reconcile my memories of his show with what was being discussed in that thread at all. From what Burchill writes it seems unbelievable to me that she ever listened to it (at least in the period I was listening to it).

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

This touches on something I've been faintly uncomfortable about in the community for awhile; whilst clearly a lot of people say 'aha indie kn0b b0ll0cks' about bands in an at least semi-ironic manner, or even a usefully descriptive manner when it's talking about NME-indie (as a genre, meaning Scounting For Girls, Pigeon Detectives, Libertines, etc.) there's a sense that I'm not sure we wouldn't come across as a bunch of indie kn0b b0ll0cists ourselves, by appearing elitist. Which is, y'know, not the point. Indeed, appearances are not the point at all; I kind of view poptimists as being (and excuse the mild stud3nt kn0bbi5hness of this statement but I am a stud3nt kn0b and as such can't help it) similar to a seminar. You have a set of people all taking Popular Music Studies Or Whatever and they come to the set material, whether it's this week's sexy hot new hits or everyone's thoughts on John Peel etc. and then have to have a fite about it. The joy is the entire lack of consensus and the fact people here are actually capable of holding up opposing points against each other without descending into the intellectual equivalent of playground 'my song is bigger than your song' idiocy like the crap on the p0pjust1c3 boards.

Burchill is, of course, a kn0b on such an epic, gaping scale it's hard to begin describing my distaste for her other than in units of Tony Blair (about 2.3tb, currently but this is largely because I haven't read anything by her for a fortunately long time) and I just wish she would GO AWAY and SHUT UP and stop ruining QUITE LITERALLY EVERYTHING but there is the severe danger of ending up a Burchill by accident as soon as anyone starts making dogmatic assumptions about music or indeed anything. I assume she didn't actually design herself as the intellectual equivalent of Tila Tequila, after all.

I stayed out of the Peel thread because I didn't listen to him for half the length of time a lot of people here may have, however, I always found that his attitude of taking joy in the music he liked rather than raining piss on the music he hated was a really fantastic thing. I didn't like all the music he liked at all but I did enjoy listening to the show, usually when I was half asleep (seeing as he died when I was still in sixth form) purely because I liked the way he spoke about music. He was a geek, just like the vast majority of us and really, it's the geeks who are punks; the people who do what they do and if anyone else runs a convention about it that's a bonus etc.

Poptimists is philosophy-punk, I guess is what I'm trying to say and it's stuff like the John Peel thread that occasionally exposes hairspray-punk tendencies.

Bleh. Why do I always post to poptimists when I am working and not really awake? I think I pretty much just reiterated what everyone else has said. Meh.

In answer to what cis said, I think there is a clear ideological shift in my music taste upon poptimists' entrance. Partly because I was still messing about with my music taste then (well, I still am but more dramatically at the time) but also purely because it forced me to reassess a lot of music I simply wouldn't have had any access to otherwise. koganbot's pimping of the Ashlee Simpson back catalogue, as an easy-to-think-of example considerably altered my perception of the entire of that sector of teenpop, which I probably would have just overlooked otherwise and thus cheated myself of some ace stuff. Poptimists gives people the access points into music (by which I don't mean mp3s and stuff, I mean writing like 'I really like this because [x]') in the same way that all good music writing does or should. If you divert from that, you're just becoming Kerrang! magazine.

Ugh. Back to the dissertation.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, that isn't some kind of raging attack on The Lex or indeed anyone in particular. Like most of my late-night dribblings, it's more self-criticism than anything else, probably of the most wallowingly obnoxious breed.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

You have a set of people all taking Popular Music Studies Or Whatever and they come to the set material, whether it's this week's sexy hot new hits or everyone's thoughts on John Peel etc. and then have to have a fite about it. The joy is the entire lack of consensus and the fact people here are actually capable of holding up opposing points against each other without descending into the intellectual equivalent of playground 'my song is bigger than your song' idiocy like the crap on the p0pjust1c3 boards.

Yes this is broadly my 'philosophy' of community design I guess, which is why I agree with Cis that there's no need to paint Peel as a latter-day saint (NB I don't think the Peel thread was especially hostile to him - the Lex aside! The Lex is an odd and valuable member of Poptimists because it's hard to think of anyone who trolls it so much and it's also hard to think of anyone who gives it so much. Which is awesome!)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hmmmmmm. I'm not familiar with Peel or Burchill -- but I do think that one thing I like about Poptimism is that someone can make as reductive or contrarian (or whatever) an argument as they like and there's a sort of peer review process in the comments! Which is why I don't think (as it runs now) there's all that much that can "happen" to Poptimists as a community as long as a lot of people are posting here and keeping each other in check.

My mind has been changed a lot by the conversation here (and yes, I think that changing minds is a big -- good -- thing that can happen here) and I've had a lot of what I thought coming in reaffirmed too. But there's a much bigger potential for my mind to be changed here than elsewhere -- there's a context in which I'm ready to have my mind changed about something. I can't say that about many places -- either my defenses are too high or the provocation is too low.

I really hesitate to call any of this ideological, though. Ideology suggests a hardened, codified way of looking at the world, and I think that ideologies for the most part don't enter into discussion here. Sensibilities, yes -- and open-mindedness. But not necessarily open-mindedness as some kind of cogent platform; people tend to be open-minded about open-mindedness too! Meaning it's OK to slag off something everyone generally agrees is crap, but at the same time we don't (tend to) come in slagging something off without having even listened to it, which is what most people do do with, say, Ashlee. (Or not giving any clear sense that they've listened.)

Not sure if this directly relates, but actually I think that Kate Nash being (seemingly) the most hated hated hated artist in the recent history of Poptimists says more (to me anyway) about the community than a lot of the run-of-the-mill boring Pigeon Detective-style guitar rock slag-offs. Because Kate Nash isn't really a "them" that I can identify -- meaning, it's not like if you draw a line in the sand with Kate, you've adequately drawn a line in the sand with a discernible audience group. So the ultimate Poptimist enemy turns out not to have much to do with these sorts of "camps," or ways of thinking that generalizes communities of listeners into the "us" (Poptimists members) and "what's wrong with music" (fans of the hated music).

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

It's about making the case for what you like and risking indifference or ridicule.

Well, a big difference is that the ridicule is usually not too widespread -- the indifference can be off-putting though! Knowing that no one cares about what you're talking about is a surefire way to kill the conversation you were trying to spark by default. But at the same the indifference and ridicule here I don't take personally. One reason I can make the case is because the community is supportive -- we could talk about identical subject matter and if the community wasn't what it was (if the conversations weren't what they are) I wouldn't feel comfortable here, no matter how quick or confident I was to make a case for ______.

[cis.livejournal.com]

I consider a conscious commitment to open-mindedness to be an ideology!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Kate Gnash is a weathervane because i) loads of people on the community like at least one or two of her songs ii) she has a LOT of identifiable character, it's easy to talk about WHY she's dreadful.

My attitude to her has become a kind of love-to-hate thing by now I think. I'm glad she's around in a way I wasn't 6 months ago.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

There's a total disconnect between what defenders of the Sainted Peel use to protect him and what his actual legacy was though! So he played esoterica from all over the world: does anyone, anywhere actually remember so much as the name of any of those tracks? He's associated with stuff like the Delgados and Joy Division for a reason. This was probably because of his refusal to try to make connections or draw lines between anything he played: it seemed to be cherrypicking on a grand scale, there was never any indication that you could go and submerge yourself in the drum'n'bass or Peruvian nose flute scene; the attitude was that you should sit in your bedroom and listen to them alone and in a vacuum. It was never about people. Quite apart from hating everything I ever heard on his show - and tbh I only ever heard indie! I suspect all of this glorious world music I keep hearing about was entirely mythical - the entire premise of the thing seemed to be somewhat antisocial. I guess that's fine for teenagers.

No, Peel's concrete legacy did far more damage than any of his vain/half-hearted attempts to diversify what his fanbase listened to. Why, if Peel was such a proto-poptimist, did her end up with the nervous, hand-wringing, conservatively minded fanbase that he did?

I loathed him before I'd heard of Burchill (and loved her way before I knew she hated him): I hated his smug, patronising, faux-avuncular voice; I hated his passive-aggressive gentility; he seemed to me a bit like a butterfly collector, and never aware of music as a vehicle for living emotions. And I hate him even more because of the Chuck D/Elvis factor: after hating him for all those years I found that he was apparently a hero to everyone else, but he never meant shit to me.

Burchill on the other hand is a longtime heroine of mine, notwithstanding the fact that she's now just repeating her four default columns over and over again. I think she's an amazing writer, dogmatism and ego included. The core of most of her writing is always totally on-point, and I love that she then decorates it with opinions ranging across the entire length of the lunacy spectrum, just for fun.

Does it really matter if a critic, genuinely, doesn't like a single black American hip-hop or rnb record of last decade, if they're instead bigging up music from South America or the Middle East or Eastern Europe or, well, anywhere that gets TOTALLY IGNORED by the most vociferous of accusatory Internet crusaders.

well, yes it does! totally! are you a critic or an anthropologist, basically.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

also, it's BURCHILL whose writing is essentially poptimist! especially around the turn of the century. when I get to work I shall find links.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

Haha yes but why do you immediately dismiss everything else as 'anthropology', when listening to Trina might as well be anthropology if you are a teenager living in suburbia somewhere in the Midlands.

I suppose part of the appeal of Peel was that he was a lifeline for people who didn't automatically have recourse to a 'scene', or a scene they felt they wanted to be part of. Listening to music alone in your bedroom in a vacuum is the only way of listening a lot of people have! Especially in the 70s and 80s, I'd imagine.

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

(Also I don't agree with you because I don't believe anyone SHOULD feel a compulsion or obligation to immerse themself in a scene, because I don't believe there's anything wrong with being a dilettante, or cherry-picking, or whatever)

[awesomewells.livejournal.com]

Also ALSO conflating Delgados with Joy Division doesn't make much sense because association with the Delgados in the mid-90s = pretty conservative, association with Joy Division in the late 70s = not conservative at all!

Also also also he ended up with the legacy he did because history is rewritten by the victors. Admittedly Peel did a lot to encourage some of those victors but he did a lot to kick back against the rest of them as well - what's interesting about Peel is often the indie or rock he left out (his show felt like an anomaly during Britpop for example).

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

There are a fair few posts on this community which provoke interesting and useful thoughts, but very few which give me the "You read my brane!" feeling this did, so ta.

That's not to say I don't think alexmcpherson has some excellent points, esp re Burchill - she's not *all* toss, she is occasionally very smart, her articles on classism and the word "chav" and how murder is worse than rape being two which stand out strongly in my memory for their tone of sense. But on the point that;

"Why, if Peel was such a proto-poptimist, did her end up with the nervous, hand-wringing, conservatively minded fanbase that he did?"

I don't think you can really hold any artist fully to account for their fanbase, because once their thing is done and out in the public domain, they have little control over it. That doesn't mean I don't think it was a terrible shame that Peel became such a safe person to like (not least because of his 'nice uncle' image, which I found mostly sweet if occasionally frustrating - as I'm sure he did, because he did try and undermine it often with hints of curmudgeon), because his very safeness, esp in the 90s, made it easy for people to dismiss him as the dear old hippy playing Bolivian bongoes. So they could like him without having to pay too much attention to what he was actually saying /doing. Which, I believe, is the provennce of his hand-wringing audience.

[cis.livejournal.com]

"he did try and undermine it often with hints of curmudgeon"

surely hints of curmudgeon are what MAKE the image of nice old hippy uncle!

Annie

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Sod John Peel - what about Annie Nightingale? When I was a teenager I used to listen to her show straight after the top-howevermany countdown on Sunday evening on Radio One back in the day. But not that many people in Poptimists will remember that.

I guess the problem with non-Peel Radio One is you never know how much is playlist and how much is the presenter's tastes. But Annie never seemed that much of a playlist person and a Sunday night show isn't going to be too constrained by playlist. Well not back then anyway.

Re: Annie

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

annie was the sound of my A level homework :-) she's still active and dance mad innit

she was never as broad as peel, and much more a student pleaser.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

I was a huge Peel fan for 20 years or more, and I loved him in the mid-90s when it was D&B and techno and so on more than indie. On the other hand, I totally disagree with the view of him as 'poptimist' in inclination. He was always far more keen to play obscure stuff than popular stuff, even when he loved the popular stuff - I recall him enthusing about the Pet Shop Boys, but taking the position that until daytime radio started playing Beefheart or someone like that, he wasn't going to play the Pet Shop Boys on his show. He was also a little too inclined to the self-consciously worthy a lot of the time, I think, over the silly fun.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Also, re: Peel and his responsibility or not for his audience, a little context can be added when considering the case of mid-80s (dubdobdee-era) NME, which offered its readers Ornette Coleman, Dwight Yoakam, King Sunny Ade, Yellowman and T La Rock, and were choked to find that the people who bought it stubbornly preferred a steady diet of The Smiths balanced by the occasional dose of the Housemartins, thus producing the blueprint for today's dismal paper.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

What is worst about this whole thread is how everyone seems to hate J Burchill :( She's probably the most - maybe ONLY - formative writer on me. I absolutely love the way she'll fling opinions at a situation with scant regard for what makes sense (boring!) or even what she believes, and then never ever back down or admit she's wrong. I still love her despite you HATERS.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

IOW she's a good troll!

I don't think Burchill's bad - I dislike the way she provokes debates then basically doesn't stick around for them (by not responding or going 'oh bored nao' or whatever) but credit to her for provoking the debates in the first place: she has a good eye for currently sacred cows sometimes. What people are hating on this thread is your selective reading of her I think - you have been quoting some particularly dim stuff!