History is Bunk

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I have a new Pitchfork column up - if it seems like ages that's because it's been ages! (not their fault or mine - standard skip week plus festival reports pushing things back).

This one is about pop, history, and what a history of pop should or shouldn't include (hint: no actual music).

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/142636-column-poptimist-17

It was born out of listening a lot to the new Girl Talk album, though as is the way of these things Girl Talk then vanished from the piece completely while I was writing it.

Comments

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in hearing more details as to how you got from Girl Talk to History: what did you hear in the new album that made you think about the subject? (I can sorta guess but can't be certain I'd be right.)

As for the album itself, it's a mystery to me: I can't point to a single thing it's doing wrong, I can't think of any obvious distinction between it and the last one, and yet I find it unfun where I thought the last one was a gas. I wonder if his shtick (or to put it less pejoratively, his concept) is something that can only effectively be put into practice once.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This is quite possible since I haven't heard the last one!

Remind me to elaborate on the GT/history thing later!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yikes i better get my history of rockwrite proposal in soon :(

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

History is an act of selection, a mixtape or a Greatest Hits album: presenting its topic in a particular, tricky light, cutting away irrelevance, leaving fans to quarrel about what got left out.

I LOVE YOU!!

Thank, this is a *great* article - would you mind if I linked to it from my journal?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

No problem at all! Link away!

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'd bet a lot of money that Our Island Story>>>>>>>Feed the Animals.

Where are your titles?

[koganbot]

Tom, where did the titles to your pieces disappear to? There's no title to this piece other than "Column: Poptimist #17," and when I do searches for your old pieces (e.g., "Column: Poptimist #7"), they no longer have titles either. But, in fact, they once DID have titles. "Poptimist #7," for instance, was "Bury the Past, Empty the Shelf: How to Destroy Your Music Taste." So, where did the titles go?

Re: Where are your titles?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Wow! I thought that they'd just missed this one (which is "No Weak Men In The Books At Home") but no, they've all gone. I think I was unusual in having titles, I assume that it's a formatting thing with the column content template, since in between the last one and this one they've changed the back end round.

[koganbot]

Seems to me that a history of listening that doesn't take into account what is being listened to would be incompetent (also impossible), would be sociology at its worst. In any event, listening itself involves taking into account what you're listening to, and quite often talking about it.

Also, it sure seems to me that, e.g., Real Punks Don't Wear Black and Psychotic Reactions And Carbureter Dung and The Accidental Evolution Of Rock 'N' Roll (to name the first three that come to mind) have lots about listening. And conversely, someone who can't grasp the music isn't likely to grasp its audiences either.

Of course, you're talking about Overview Histories Of The Whole Thing, none of which I've read (unless you count the Jim Miller edited Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll, first two editions, which actually is pretty damn good, though it's essentially an anthology of artist-based critical essays by a number of different writers).

I still like Robert Warshow's lines from his Introdution to The Immediate Experience:

The sociological critic says to us, in effect: It is not I who goes to see the movies; it is the audience. The aesthetic critic says: It is not the movies I go to see; it is art... A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.

[koganbot]

But also, any halfway coherent and readable history is going to have some theses and assumptions, not just about what has changed over time but what generally has stayed the same. E.g., if you think social class was important in 1955 you're likely to think it's important now, too.

So an idea for a future column - or for future poptimists threads - is: what theses and assumptions about the history of popular and semipopular music have been put forth by others, and what theses and assumptions would you yourself use/make?

E.g., Nick Tosches' "The Punk Muse" and Lester Bangs' "James Taylor Marked For Death" and Richard Meltzer's intro to Gulcher (1970, 1971, and 1972, respectively) all have lots to say about what was going on Then ('50s and '60s) and what is going on Now (early '70s).

An assumption I've occasionally perceived on poptimists about the history of rock criticism goes "rock criticism created rockism but now we know better than rockism," which is a wrong assumption in a whole number of ways. (E.g., I don't know better than rockism, and anyway I don't see what great insights we "poptimists" have nowadays that the early rock critics didn't already have back then.)

A hypothesis of mine, that a number of people might find surprising, is that, while two technological changes have had a crucial effect on music - these would be the invention of the microphone and the invention of sound "recording" (I've put "recording" in quotation marks because what's happened isn't simply recording sounds that were already present but changing their character) - none of the others have. Well, maybe radio too. So the inventions I'm saying haven't had a crucial effect include LPs, distortion pedals, cassettes, synthesizers, digital samplers, CDs, the Internet, and mp3s. Which is to say that the form and content and how music is used over the last 90 years has been culture driven rather than technology driven. Song length has been ridiculously static (and short), the tension between song and groove has been longstanding (with song form being surprisingly resilient), and the innovations I call "recombinant dub" (a catchall category that includes disco, hip-hop, techno, house, etc.) were already underway in the '50s. And the words that people sing continues to veer towards romance and romanticism (or romance versus romanticism) as does what people use the music for (romance and/or romanticism?) and how they justify it.

Much that I'd say about "technology" I'd say about "cross-marketing" as well; which is that the subject bores me unless the people talking about it talk about the content of what's being cross-marketed and the content of the marketing itself (what stories the marketers are telling the people being marketed to).

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the dub thing required editable electronic recording audiotape as a medium, as opposed to analogue groove-recording (but obviously these both fall under "recording", so it doesn't make you wrong)

and "microphone" has to include the whole technics of electronic amplification, not all of which works from translation of sound-pressure waves into electrical impulses (a guitar pick-up is strictly speaking a bit different from a microphone) (which is why you can't usefully sing into it)

with those provisos i think you're right -- digitisation has allowed a reach of vertical and horizontal integration of information that probably does have qualitative effects, but i think they're still all second-order

stockhausen had an interestingly dotty -- and unprovable -- theory about the time-lengths we favour as listeners, (hich i think he called temporal octaves): i should look it up

other books i should possibly finish: my history of music and technology :(

[koganbot]

The way I'm loosely defining "recombinant dub" is "you scoop out the front and center of the music and insert anything else you want without necessarily reestablishing a center." I assume one could do such "scooping" - and that some Jamaicans actually did it in the '50s - simply by lifting up the needle or turning off a switch while making some other sounds in some other way. I wouldn't be surprised if there were other equivalents of getting rid of the center in other musics I know less about, jazz and "serious," for instance, and probably some equivalents in the visual arts. You'd know this a lot better than I.

I think the distinction I'm making is "what would have been done anyway" (even if not so easily) versus "stuff you hadn't even realized you wanted to do" or the doing of which was generally considered subordinate to more central stuff. I might have to give some thought about what I think it is that falls into the category "stuff you hadn't realized you wanted to do" that microphones and sound recording opened up. Musical equivalents to the close-up in the narrative film, for instance, or the ability to shift scenes.