Music as conversation

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

New Pitchfork column by me on answer records, fan fiction, music as conversation... thanks to piratemoggy for her help putting this one together!

http://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/7635-poptimist-21/

Comments

[theastronomymod.livejournal.com]

An interesting read, for sure.

I do like that you have picked up on the fact that all these things are part of a continuum - that answer records, mash-ups, remixes, covers, fan fiction - and I'd add fan art - are all part of the same process. The desire to be *part* of music - in that sense of making the artform a conversation, rather than the one-way passive street of consumerism.

I've never read Jenkins' book (surprisingly) - but I just don't think I'd want to read a male perspective on fan fiction, since it is, almost overwhelmingly, such a female universe. (I am actually racking my brain to think if I've ever, actually, read fan fiction by a man - and in 5 years of curating the first pop music fan fiction site on the web, I never did. Men write fanzines, women write fan fict. It's an almost universal dichotomy.) Am going to have to have a think on his taxonomy.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

One of the main flaws w/Jenkin's book is actually that it has no capacity for considering fanfiction written about real people, since either a)it wasn't a very big thing when he wrote it or b)he had no idea it existed.

From something I wrote to freakytigger t'other day (because I am lazy & hungry & can't be bothered to write it all out again; it's not very good really but am not An Expert on these things)-
"On the other hand, what she's talking about there is from a book written when fandom and fanfiction were quite different beasts; seventeen years is a very long time in internet terms. Now, people are applying forms of literary criticism and analysis, through the means of fanfiction, to things that have never been written about; there are no canonical texts about, for instance, popstars. Fanfiction's gone beyond the limits of literary criticism into the wider realms of psychology and philosophy and, despite its self-consciously silly premise, become probably considerably more intellectual; the line between what actually is fanfiction and what isn't is becoming harder to draw, too; if something uses characters from Harry Potter and is written by a Harry Potter fan but is written as an extraction, an analysis (and the extractions are greater now, I have no doubt; whilst I don't know what fanfiction was like seventeen years ago, the advent of the internet and greater communication between fanfiction authors has blown the boundaries wide-open in terms of acceptable distancing from canon, in terms of alternate universe or 'what if' fics) then is it fanfiction any more than, for instance, Marx's critique of Hegel is? Logic says yes, obviously, it is but at the same time, there's aspects of fandom's rampant academia (and particularly its collegiate separations; fandoms are broken down into the faculties of ships and then further into the colleges of particular writing style and attitude, then even further into who rooms with who for which year and who's going on sabbatical for a year in another fandom...) that are beginning to get far more ....well, "out of control" is probably the phrase people would apply, than anything anyone could necessarily have predicted.

essentially, I think that taxonomy's a bit of a simplistic view; it generalises some things ("recontextualisation" is basically applicable to the entire of fanfiction) but then gets oddly specific about others (crossovers, which are relatively rare in comparison to and in no way incompatible with angsty or eroticised fics, in fact tend towards being almost exclusively the latter) without mentioning other specifics... like I said, it's a good list for talking about fanfiction without actually talking about fanfiction, so it'll be fine for what you're doing, I'm sure but as a crummy old fandom anthropologist it has its limitations, for me. So, it's not nonsense, it's just not, err, canon, either."

I have read lots of fanfic by men but poss. that's just peculiar to the fandoms I've haunted. Admitedly am currently hanging around the McFly one & have only seen about two males.

[theastronomymod.livejournal.com]

Oh boy this is much longer than I intended, but once I start going on this, I tend to get in full flight...

OK, maybe that's it - that men participate in fan fiction based around existing stories (tv shows, books, films, etc.) which is something I've never really had much interest in all. And it makes more sense when put in the context of he's not writing about real people fic.

Fanfiction's gone beyond the limits of literary criticism into the wider realms of psychology and philosophy and, despite its self-consciously silly premise, become probably considerably more intellectual; the line between what actually is fanfiction and what isn't is becoming harder to draw, too

Yes, yes, 100 times yes. Because I often, myself, have a really hard time drawing a line between what is my music criticism writing, and what is FF writing. The dividing line is clear when it's "Well, one goes in Plan B and the other goes on LJ, under two very different names." But when writing on messageboards, and joking around in a "fangirly" manner the two things overlap intensely. What is my personal reaction to the music, and the emotions contained within and the dynamics between musicians, and what is FF style fantasy?

But this brings me to what my problem with that taxonomy is. My experience of music is so fluid, and it intersects with every level of my life - my engagement with music, and experiences - both as a fan and an artist - aren't something separate and compartmentalised away from the rest of my life.

And I think this is one of the reasons that Tom had a problem trying to shoehorn his "eroticism" into the article, and finding it problematic. And that's because (at least in *my* experience of FF) eroticism - or at least, romanticism isn't a separate genre, it pervades every single piece of writing in the way that romance/love/sex percolates through every piece of literature in the history of the world forever. Even if something isn't written specifically as a Romance, there will still be a sex/romance element, even if it's the hastily tacked on "hero gets the love interest" subplot or the homoerotic bromance of the buddy film. This may be an overly Freudian view - that EVERYTHING is really about sex - or in a wider capacity - love. It's not something you can separate out into a sub genre and sell in pink book sleeves.

So, to me, the "eroticism" element of a fan's interaction with music is just as all pervasive. There's a HUGELY romantic element to all aspects of music fandom - whether it be expressed in the overtly sexual nature of the Fangirl - or whether it's obsessed in all the weird ways that Fanboys sublimate and repress the romantic nature of their love affair with music. Be that obsessive completism, be that the weird pseudo-romantic dynamics when musicians work together (can you count the number of times that musicians have described their bands as "it's like a four way marriage with no sex"?), be that the row of fanboys who stand in front of DJs and watch their fingers as they mix, the weird ways in which fanboys cry "sellout" as if they have had their hearts broken by the musicians that have disappointed them.

And it overlaps with all of the other taxonomical genres like crossover mashups and slash go together. (Maybe it's the nature of my particular fandom, but crossover stuff was so common that we actually gave up on keeping separate comms for separate fandoms - but that could be just because dance music really lends itself towards remixing, collaborations and "reanimations" and the artists involved work with each other so fluidly that the story lines all get tangled.)

But.. as you well know, I could write an entire column on this subject myself, and already have a couple of times.

[cis.livejournal.com]

this book here (http://books.google.com/books?id=UgZsi_DOKoQC&printsec=frontcover#PPA216,M1) has some v interesting stuff on rpf in the chapter that deals with isilya's 'not based on a true story'.