murkage

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I was gonna post this on my own LJ but it's a welcome counterpoint to that k-spunk article from yesterday, I think. The other week, I went to a symposium on the hardcore cuntinuum at the University of East London, which is WAY WAY WAY OUT EAST, Cyprus is so far out but I love the DLR so it was all good. I missed k-spunk's talk because I was interviewing Tori Amos (and tbh her academic babble is so much more preferable) but that didn't matter - I was there to support Dan Hancox and Joe Muggs and they were both excellent, v funny and incisive in debunking the cuntinuum. I don't think either has put their speech online but I was particularly pleased that Dan brought up the issue of dancing, which ~for some reason~ is rarely discussed despite the cuntinuum consisting of dance genres. ANYWAY, my friend Melissa Bradshaw (who is the kind of smart, knowledgeable writer who should be linked up all over the place, rather than fauxthorities like k-spunk and SR) was in the audience with me, murked k-spunk at one point and has now written about it, as well as comparing the symposium to the soca aerobics class she left early to go to, and a vg read it is too.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Well, I think we actually agree: by "primary source", what I mean is that the artist necessarily leads the conversation. And all of us can take it wherever we want, but if we start somewhere too removed from the primary source, I don't think anyone will get anywhere worthwhile.

I don't think writers and journalists are any less real than dancers and average fans, but they DO have...a historical responsibility, I guess, to be accurate to the empirical evidence. At least at a certain level. It's why we (technically) (bloody economy) get paid, but the dancers have to pay to get in the club.

[koganbot]

No we do not agree. The "artist" doesn't necessarily lead the conversation, unless you define "artist" as "anyone in the room I think has something to teach me, or whom an attempt to understand may lead to surprises." And even there, how much they "lead" - how much I attempt to start with their terms rather than my own - depends a lot on who the are. As I said elsewhere on this thread, I think K-Punk's view is distorted. How much do I let his distortions lead the discussion? I don't notice, in your interpreting K-Punk or Reynolds or Asher Roth or 3OH!3, that you seem particularly eager to let them lead the conversation. There are some pathological liars I came across on ilX who may be worth the effort to understand, but I'd certainly want to take into account that they are pathological liars. In any event, being accurate and letting someone lead the conversation aren't the same thing, and I don't see how one class of people (the artist) gets to have accuracy bestowed on it and gets to be lauded as a primary source in priority over everybody else.

"Journalism" to me is a bunch of bigoted and unexamined prejudices about who is considered important and who gets to lead the conversation. Whereas what the best story I have to tell and who or what the subject of that story should be are something I discover, not something I know in advance.