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

[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!)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Mmm, I don't think he was a saint in any way and I think there's a lot of really awful bs that goes on around any sort of legacy he might have, orchestrated partly by Radio 1 and partly by people thinking you *have* to like John Peel whether they ever knew anything about him or not. I meant really that I found him quite pleasant and didn't know enough about him to think anything else on it, really.

Agreed on The Lex; he's probably the poptimist I've nicked most music off over the last two years or however long I've been in the community.