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.)

[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.

[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!

[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.)

[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]

I suppose this is why he seemed more of an irrelevance the more accessible music became over the 90s and early 00s, that it was easier to break out of the vacuum, and easier to immerse yourself in a genre, than ever.

[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]

(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)

[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).

[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.

[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!

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

"he seemed to me a bit like a butterfly collector, and never aware of music as a vehicle for living emotions"

this may be true, but it's not a reason to hate. the reasons you do pick out are his voice, and a certain base of his more vocal 'booster' fans. his role, what he did and how he did it, is still very much poptimist. like him or not.

[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.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Which is which? One of my big issues with the Reynolds/Woebot scene when grime was surfacing was how much of the criticism seemed to be anthropological. As Matt says there's a massive anthropological element to liking American hip-hop if you're British. And actually anthropology is very HARD to do with pop where you can't speak the language - most Western listeners responding to African pop are doing it with only the most basic grasp of its listenership, role in society etc. Is Cis' J-Pop fandom critical or anthropological? Is Sarah's?

Other than that I think you DO crystallise some points in the anti-Peel ledger. The kind of wideband listening he stood for is a privilege, or at least WAS - this is K-Punk's beef with 'poptimism' you're using, but that doesn't make it a bad one. (K-Punk is the new Burchill, basically.) There's an argument that economically working-class Blackburn listeners couldn't afford to experiment with tastes as much as middle-class Peel ones could - I think it's quite a patronising argument (especially if someone brings in the Reynoldsy look-at-the-workers-living-for-the-weekend angle in) but it's not neccessarily untrue.

Except I think the internet has changed that to an extent - the sort of "long tail" fandom Peel was an outrider for has become more of a norm, and is also changing the idea of radio listening as a lonely pastime, shifting the imagined community that broadcast listening has ALWAYS evoked into a real community.

The avuncularity is certainly a matter of taste - and I think his friendliness helped trap him a bit by the end (Mark's argued this point pretty cogently on the other threads.)

[martinv.livejournal.com]

"never aware of music as a vehicle for living emotions"

Hadn't spotted this comment before. Can anyone reading this that ever listened to Peel talking about music really believe for a second that this was true?