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

[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).