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

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Haha I thought I hedged my bets there by saying "open-minded about open-mindedness." I think a "conscious commitment to open-mindedness" would end up looking kind of pathological in practice! Most of us are "open-minded" by default, because we listen to lots of different music from lots of different places. That is, it's conscious, but not a commitment in and of itself; open-mindedness arises from other various commitments, like listening to lots of music (because it's there, maaaaaaan). (And I'd hate to think that just plain listening to something before vocally dismissing it has to be an ideological stance to get people to do it.)

[cis.livejournal.com]

Okay I should probably make it clear that sometimes the thing I mean by 'ideology' might be more like 'ethical framework' or 'idealised cultural norms' (there's a japanese term, 'problem consciousness', that i particularly like), and that I don't believe in the existence of a human being who doesn't have and use at least one personal ideology in order to relate to the world. I think we necessarily develop ideologies very fast, since the world is too dizzying without them: generally we use the short-cut of just adopting at least the outline of the nearest hegemonic ideology and fill in details, or switch up entirely, when we need to. So it's not as if we have the option of not having an ideology. But maybe I don't think of it quite as the hardened thing you do?

The state you describe -- where we 'hedge our bets' and fall into a state 'by default' and wait for our attitudes to 'arise from' other things and listen to music 'because it's there' and aren't intentionally open-minded so much in a state of something having opened our minds -- the way that coheres conceptually around the idea of being passive-receptive, I'd say that reflected an ideology, at the very least an ideology that requires we not appear pathologically committed to any of our beliefs; an ideology that requires that we deny the existence of ideology because the act of taking an ideological stance feels like too much to ask of a person!