Transferrable poptimism?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

When you start exploring a new genre do you make any assumptions about whether the best-known acts/records/choons in that genre are likely to be the best or not? Do you think, for instance, that there must be a load of obscure better records lurking behind the famous ones that the Real Heads know about?

Of course I think for most people the answer is "depends" - but what does it depend on? For instance, here are two statements someone might make:

"James Brown isn't actually that good - there are loads of other obscure funk acts who are way better than him."

"Incantation aren't actually that good - there are loads of other obscure pan pipe moods acts who are way better than them."

I think statement #1 would raise eyebrows and statement #2 would be more generally accepted as likely to be true.

(I started on this train of thought because I realised when answering a thread on sukrat that for all I knew Merzbow might be a huge noise sell out and despised by all the real noise fans.)

Comments

APOLS for the INDIE

[hoshuteki.livejournal.com]

Those kinds of genres like noise tend to attract the kind of people (people I've met through my life, lived with, shared opinions on music with, emulated to a certain extent) who dismiss any act who's famous or in any way 'known' as somehow infra dig. It's certainly a big failing of a lot indie music lovers. My serious phase of music interest started with American indie stuff in the 90s, and you'd have guys like Will Oldham or Jim O'Rourke who in the mid-90s all the hipsters were all over, but by the early-00s it was considered de rigueur to dismiss out of hand (because they were too popular). And everyone chooses their own little aspect of whatever the genre was, to focus on. I personally went for the drone side of indie and started to exalt bands like Labradford or Pan Sonic, and then on to more obscurantist stuff (like the local NZ acts I could list ad nauseam), and someone else might be following through on the Americana side and dig Townes Van Zandt, and then there were the people (mea culpa again) who wouldn't allow any discussion of indie credibility to go by without mention of Tim Hardin, Scott Walker, Phil Ochs, Fred Neil, and the like. This is my experience, I imagine similar kinds of fracturing of hiphop or whatever. And this experience colours my assumptions of any other genre I get into, though I try as much as possible to follow an amended statement #1: "James Brown IS that good, but loads of other obscure funk acts are just as good".