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

[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.