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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/

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From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

writing two sentences, thinking "I wonder what K-Punk's being wrong about at the minute?" and abandoning the endeavour.

Maybe these things are connected somehow?

And anyway, now that you're not staring at a daunting blank RTF document, which is the worst way to try to write stuff, you should elaborate on what you mean by "music criticism is not a fandom" in these very comments, because I'm interested and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

From:

piratemoggy.livejournal.com

Oh, they definitely are. I am describing Simon Reynolds as a massive fandom wankstain so there's a certain amount of necessary linkage. I am thinking of calling the first article 'Wank? In MY fandom!' but suspect this is perhaps too obscure a meme since no one sane reads

pastede, (apols to sane people who read

pastede)

From:

dubdobdee.livejournal.com

some of the prob with "theory-dependent" crit -- not just music crit either -- is that there's a deferred fandom going on: viz yr "allowed" to be critical of tarantino but you have to treat eg foucault [but basically insrt guru of choice]* as if it's a different level of thinking; there's a very hierarchical and reverential (and frankly religious) attitude towards the "texts" you are using to interpret, at the expense of the texts you being "critically" interpeting... it's all so relentlessly one-way

i once said to one of the dullards-in-question that i was frankly more interested in interpreting kierkegaard in the light of crazy frog than vice versa: result = a nervous larf, and mark's "joke" filed under "contrarian anti-intellectual populism" i expect

*of course within "theory" you get to cast your chosen anti-gurus as strawmen-to-pitch-into, which is then confused with being "critical" of theory -- but the relationship of desire and fascination among thinkers really can be explored by treating it as a (very unself-aware) species of fanboyism, in which ilxish laundrylists of facts are wheeled out to smother unbeleivers in jargonised scorn...

From:

piratemoggy.livejournal.com

Music Criticism isn't a fandom, in a classic sense because it has no defined area and it doesn't and can't move as one, unlike the way that, say, the whole Harry Potter fandom might mobilise if someone assassinated JK Rowling or something (O hi dere, too much Ken Waltz during degree) but it internally behaves like one; eg massive amounts of fanbeef and internet paranoia (hem hem not that obv. am referring to real events involving anyone we know etc.) and "ship wars" re: 'no rock is blatantly the OTP not hip hop because hip hop would never get off with an acoustic torch ballad OR SUTTIN') and really I haven't thought any of this through AT ALL since I think what I mean by 'Music crit is not a fandom' is that it actually IS a fandom but still.

From:

koganbot

It's fandom where you're allowed to dislike what you like.

From:

petronia.livejournal.com

Many people in Harry Potter fandom dislike Rowling's books immensely. *g*

From:

alexmacpherson.livejournal.com

yeah isn't the impetus behind a lot of fanfic "we like the characters, but we can do the stories so much better"? (i don't know anything about fanfic really, this might be small-minded of me but i am slightly terrified of it.)

From:

edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com

Oh, you can definitely dislike what you like in fandom. Some of the most epic (as in long, not necessarily good) fics are the result of people saying things like, "The X-Files jumped the shark in season seven, so I'm going to write an alternate season seven which doesn't suck."

Fic is also a way of criticizing or exploring certain aspects of what you like. For example, confession: I wrote a metric fuckton of Battlestar Galactica femslash, and most those fics grew out of conversations about the lack of (a) queer characters on BSG, and (b) meaningful relationships between women on BSG. I also wrote something called doppelcest, where you basically make the character and the actor have sex with each other, and that was just because I was interested in the ways in which characters and actors could intersect. I mean, in my experience, fic is just a critical discussion masquerading as a story.