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

[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).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

However he was a big fan of Blur!

The thing w/Peel is that his remit in the mid-90s basically evolved into "the stuff nobody else is playing" - this clearly didn't include R'n'B and hip-hop and crossover indie at the time but DID include happy hardcore, Peruvians, grindcore, roots reggae and tiny jangly bands. If he'd lived he would no doubt be playing minimal techno and running Fuck Buttons sessions. He took this very seriously because it mostly crossed over with his own tastes and inclinations. So it's unfair to criticise him for his legacy - as Mark S has said in the comments Lex keeps avoiding, Burchill is SO MUCH MORE to blame for "indie" the way the Lex hates it - she was, for instance, a HUGE Britpop fan on the populist grounds Lex apparently wuvs her for. Peel certainly wasn't a populist in ANY sense and saw top 40 pop as AT BEST an amusing jest he could make himself the straight man for - which is why reclaiming him as an ultimate poptimist feels slightly off.

This is basically repeating what you've said, isn't it? I will go and reply to one of the other comments!

[martinv.livejournal.com]

^This is good.

Incidentally, I was flicking through some 2000 Peel show setlists following reading this thread and amongst the predictable Hefner/Delgados deluges and the excursions into world/dance music he was also playing things like Kelis, and even Beenie Man shows up in there. I don't think there necessarily were any 'no-go' areas for Peel.

And it wasn't tokenism either, just playing the music he loved.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

But Burchill's attitude towards music, regardless of her taste at any given time, is far more poptimist than Peel's - she's consistently emphasised the importance of glamour, fun, youth, transience and so on, this carpe diem feeling which I think is really key. She criticised Peel for jumping on punk and keeping it alive at the moment it needed to die - one of many anti-canon moves of hers. Plus, I can't imagine Peel writing or even agreeing with these two amazing columns (http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/music/story/0,,952679,00.html). This passage is particularly great:

There is a dark cloud over popular music: it is the shadow of a million middle-aged, middle-class men who can't, or won't, let go of their youth and are thus contributing to a culture that is becoming increasingly bland, homogenised and one-size-fits-all. From Clarkson to Rushdie to Blair, we are all meant to settle down to the same soundtrack: one nation under an arthritic groove. We all love rock and roll now, and the fandom of all is welcome. (Except, of course, that of working-class teenage girls, who just scream. Though why screaming is a less valid reaction to pop than filing CDs alphabetically, or reciting Dylan, has yet to be explained to me.) Maybe I'm immature and over-sensitive, but this state of affairs makes me want to scream and break things and listen to the Goldberg Variations.

And:

For dance music has given popular music back to the young, the working class, the female; all of those shut out of the debates about Bob Dylan and Keats, and none of them giving a damn. Those who can, dance; those who can't, recite reams of rock lyrics in their cups. Youth will always find a way of stepping on the blue suede shoes of the oldsters and letting them know whose party it really is. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,307160,00.html) ()

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No, I can't imagine Peel being so patronisingly reductive about young working class women either!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

That bit is sarcastic!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But the quotes are and ideas are bullshit anyway - the identification w/teenage girls and the ephemerality are straw-man popism in a nutshell. So maybe Burchill is the ultimate poptimist, but only if you take poptimism to mean what Simon Reynolds thinks it does!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I never fully understood what Simon Reynolds thought he meant but I think ephemerality is a v important component of poptimism!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think not using ephemerality as a negative is important, but I don't think inverting it into a positive is. There's a very strong sentimental streak in a lot of poptimist writing, examining the ways in which the apparently ephemeral lasts and has impact; and there's also a strong historical streak too - though again the message is more "use the past to enjoy now MORE" not "use the past as a stick to beat now with".

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

those quotes exactly underline burchill's HOSTILITY to the project of "engaging" with the pop culture round you -- she reduces it to consuming; basically she's arguing that THINKING is something the female white working class are (thankfully) beyond and above, so pure and natural are their instincts

the reason for this is precisely the reason i dislike her: her project was about scrambling up the ladder the people she attacks were offering her, then kicking it decisively down when she was up it

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

"reducing to consuming" IS engaging with it though, it's acknowledging it at least. I don't think she's ever valorised the white working class in exactly those terms (though god knows what she's saying now - I agree that her parochialism is annoying, and it's gotten worse over the years): what she's saying surely is that teenage girls have historically been dismissed because the stereotype is that they scream and consume rather than think - and that even if this is true, there's nothing wrong with it.

[koganbot]

Don't know how relevant these points are, but...

(1) Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" got its first public hearing in a discotheque.

(2) I know people who go on about Dylan lyrics like they're teenpop lyrics. Me, for instance.

[koganbot]

I identify with teenage girls. Whereas Burchill seems to be treating them as the "other."

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

He was briefly a fan of Blur, around the Song 2 era - he virtually never played them before that. He loved Pulp.