The Decade In Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

My enormous Pitchfork piece on "The Decade In Pop" is up: http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7703-the-decade-in-pop/

Spotify playlist to go with it here: http://open.spotify.com/user/freakytrigger/playlist/6cudPLlniOyOrpX5M5Dnnz

Comments

sorry i've just been readng marcuse

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i don't care terribly much about "private life" -- it's not a guide social context anyway, because it all manifests in tweakable media, it's better to think of it as "part of the work", lady gaga style -- but really do care about sound: and choices made in respect of sound... in lots of ways i think this is the big nervous unspoken in what dave's calling the "pop-auteur critic" mode of discussion: it focuses on the interplay of voice and word, and treats the rest as inflection or colouring, backdrop basically

but it isn't just this for everyone, not at all: in fact, the quasi-autonomy of this "backdrop" realm seems as important to me as the "pure musicianship" autonomy of "proper" musicians, establishing a territory they can communicate without being bossed about and diagnosed and dissected by the verbally adept: a key to the pull of all music in the modern world is that those who are good with words, and thus a bit too cosy with the administrators and bureaucrats and legalists, don't get to boss it around, to pre-plan or second-guess it -- there's an unspoken comity between the semi-inarticulate listener and the semi-inarticulate drummer/guitarist/producer which cuts out the bloody preening singer and his/her smug pal the critic with his bloody all-purpose eloquence, just a for while, sometimes...

i like this!

[cis.livejournal.com]

there's an unspoken comity between the semi-inarticulate listener and the semi-inarticulate drummer/guitarist/producer which cuts out the bloody preening singer and his/her smug pal the critic with his bloody all-purpose eloquence, just a for while, sometimes...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

It's Adorno sorta-kinda (but you have to work hard to dig this out of him)

[koganbot]

semi-inarticulate drummer

[koganbot]

Also, this is a different point that probably has nothing to do with the discussion, but any critic eventually if he's a sound guy he needs to put the sound into some sort of story - whether music theory or the sound in relation to the song or something. But can one isolate the sound in a way that rebels against the various stories? Here's the sound and it takes us out of the world, even the world of the melody and the rhythm and the rest of the song. (I doubt that this is possible, but perhaps there's a way to take the sound and put it into a story that seems to flabbergast anyone who is in the groove of the stories that are already there.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

it's back to my usual thing: the workings of the democracy of everything that's present -- the question isn't so much can you invent a parallel and distinct story for [element x] as what happens to the whole if you treat the story of [element x] as the dominant story, and the seemingly dominant story as minor incidents in it

my shorthand for this is manny farber/termite art/the funny little character actor you only see for a moment

democracy is of course a highly idealised tool of forensic analysis but so is the seignural aristocracy of auteurism: is this one wo/man's dream or the passage of a fellowship?

[koganbot]

"Democracy" seems the wrong word, because not every vote gets to count, and majority doesn't rule. I'd think the Farber-Kogan point would be that while you might have a dominant story, or several dominant stories, those stories don't govern the entire works, which have a potential infinity of associations and tangents, and the main stories aren't immutable, either, as they get pulled and shaped by the little critters nipping around.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the correct word is "harmolodic caucus" but it saves time if i point at this far-off distant thing which people think they understand in the hope that they will be somewhere near the thing i'm actually talking about (that they don't know the name of) when i need them to be :)

[koganbot]

But people won't understand, since "democracy" has too much of a goody-goody-pants connotation, as if we're making the music a better fairer place and the result is good etc. Like, saying that the solar system is a democracy because every asteroid has gravitational influence hardly seems right, and there's no reason we'd want the solar system to be a democracy anyway. What I said in one of my country critic ballots - "in general I like music that overspills its container, though for this to work well there has to be a good container in the first place" - doesn't translate into "democracy" (or "aristocracy" or any other form of making political decisions) in any way that makes sense.

[koganbot]

Speaking of sound stepping out of story - which is a story itself, so is impossible - what do you think of the lyrics to "Come Clean"? Tom's analysis stopped short at the chorus.

Let's go back
Back to the beginning
Back to when the earth, the sun, the stars all aligned
'Cause perfect didn't feel so perfect
Trying to fit a square into a circle
Was no life
I defy

[CHORUS:]
Let the rain fall down
And wake my dreams
Let it wash away
My sanity
'Cause I wanna feel the thunder
I wanna scream
Let the rain fall down
I'm coming clean, I'm coming clean

I'm shedding
Shedding every color
Trying to find a pigment of truth
Beneath my skin
'Cause different
Doesn't feel so different
And going out is better
Than always staying in
Feel the wind

[CHORUS:]
Let the rain fall down
And wake my dreams
Let it wash away
My sanity
'Cause I wanna feel the thunder
I wanna scream
Let the rain fall down
I'm coming clean, I'm coming clean
(rain fall down)
I'm coming clean
(rain fall down
rain fall down)
Let the rain fall
Let the rain fall
I'm coming clean

[CHORUS:]
Let the rain fall down
And wake my dreams
Let it wash away
My sanity
'Cause I wanna feel the thunder
I wanna scream
Let the rain fall down
I'm coming clean,
I'm coming clean, I'm coming clean, let the rain fall, let the rain fall, let the rain fall, I'm coming clean

Let's go back
Back to the beginning...

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I was listening to this on the bus after reading Tom's essay this morning, and it struck me that Hilary's diffidence isn't a million miles from...Neil Tennant, of all people. It's glimpses here and there rather than actual parallels, but I can hear Tennant singing a number of these lyrics...which, I also realised today, is a not-so-veiled coming out narrative. (Change "going out" is "coming out" and it all makes sense. Plus, the whole digital-stutter leading to Hilary's voice being deliberately cut off after "I'm coming---".)

Re: sorry i've just been readng marcuse

[koganbot]

But my James Brown analysis in "Death Rock 2000" is auteurist to the hilt, and I don't get why auteurism would necessarily focus you particularly on the singer, anyway - in my version, it doesn't even have to focus you on this or that author, so I'm one ahead of everybody: well, seriously, the fundamental idea of auteurism - any auteurism, even it it's an archaeologist facing a pot fragment or a homicide dick trying to figure out who done it - is that music (and everything else cultural as well) is the result of choices, sound X is here rather than sound Y, beat W instead of beat U, etc. - and by coming to understand what difference the choices make, you understand something about the world that makes it. The Cahiers auteurists were trying to come up with a way of talking about the whole setting rather than just the explicit plot or what the main characters were saying, etc. And Americans like Ferguson and Farber expanded the setting to the world, not just what's on screen.

Re: sorry i've just been readng marcuse

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

auteurism treats the (entire) work as a unity -- which (following 2000 years of smart critical practice, back to aristotle) is a powerful tool; but it's also an error: or better say, there's a shadow side to it which should also be explored, to chase up its limitations

the countertreatment looks at it as an intersection of autonomous unities: a collectivity that hasn't yet discovered its unity -- which any given critic unavoidably unifies within their own treatment, except this treatment also only exists at the intersection of a bunch of rival treatments

Re: sorry i've just been readng marcuse

[koganbot]

auteurism treats the (entire) work as a unity

I don't know why you say these things, but it's not true. When you tell a story, you try to make it as coherent as possible, but that story can easily be the story of an interplay or squabble among a number of stories. "All choices make a difference" is hardly equivalent to "all choices are part of the same story."

Re: sorry i've just been readng marcuse

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Farber expanded the setting to the world, not just what's on screen

OK if you decide Farber is an auteurist then obviously I'm wrong: but I think his expansion changes auteurism into something different -- I don't know what you'd call someone who treats the entire world as the setting, a holist maybe?

But can one isolate the sound in a way that rebels against the various stories? Here's the sound and it takes us out of the world, even the world of the melody and the rhythm and the rest of the song. (I doubt that this is possible, but perhaps there's a way to take the sound and put it into a story that seems to flabbergast anyone who is in the groove of the stories that are already there.)

"put it into a story" = "treat it as a unity"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Oops I posted before I was ready there -- the last line should have a question mark after it, and I was going to propose alternatives.

Actually the basic alternative is to leave it as a raised question: do all these elements go into one -- complex, tangly -- story? Is that what we should be looking to do?

[koganbot]

Well, if you remember this convo early during my time on ilX - What! You don't remember every convo that took place on ilX - er, actually, now that I look at it, I thought it contained something it didn't, but anyway, search for "Bazin" and see what I say. But what I'd thought I'd said and didn't was that Bazin the headwaters of one kind of auteurism and Ferguson the headwaters of another. Bazin didn't consider himself an auteurist and Ferguson died before the term was appropriated for film criticism, but that doesn't matter at all. Bazin leaned towards analyzing a film for the filmmakers' vision of the world, while Ferguson leaned towards analyzing what the filmmakers are doing in the world. The two tendencies are hardly exclusive, of course. "Filmmakers' vision of the world" can be shortened to "filmmakers' vision" without pegging it to Bazin's plumping for realism (that is, the world on screen doesn't have to be the one we live in, it can be a world with its own character, a world with conflicting characters), whereas the world of doing is our world, though some of what the filmmakers are doing is getting you into their world. But there's nothing in any of this that requires films to be unities, an artist's work to be a unity, only one vision per film, only one way of doing things per film, only one vision per artist, only one way of doing things per artist, only one artist per film, the artist be a single person (as opposed to a collective, a studio, a social set, a culture, a zeitgeist). All that's needed are choices, a setting for the choices, and some smarts as to what the choices tell us about the choosers and the setting - which of course can be thought of as an interaction between the choosers and the setting, the setting including, you know, people (who themselves behave in the world...).

I've got the Hillstone ppbk. of Negative Space, called Movies, w/ Bogart, Sheridan, Raft on the cover. Lots of blurbs on the thing, including Jonas Mekas saying Farber was the first person, before Bazin, who brought him to consciousness of the auteur theory, and someone named Maurice Peterson, writing in Metropolitan Review, saying that Farber originated the auteur theory.

Perhaps my favorite Manny Farber line: "Siegal's movies are spiritually as opportunist and crafty as the grafting cops, cheating wives, and winged hoods who make up the personnel." So Siegal's movies are doing to us what the characters are doing to each other.

[koganbot]

Basically, as critics we tell any story we can, including our own, as we're living our life on the (Web)page. Good, though, if we let the stories we tell about our subjects interact with our stories rather than merely reflecting them.

[koganbot]

The reason I asked you about the lyrics to "Come Clean" is that the the verses describe stories that aren't working, then the chorus brings us an intervention.

Still don't get why, upthread, people assumed that auteurism would focus us on the singer.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think it's more the confusing confluence of two different conversations: did anyone out and out say this? i certainly don't think it -- if anything auteurism should pull us away from the actor to the colour of the curtains or the way the edits work, or at least put them all in dialogue, or multiple monologues; my argument is that it's writers, being somewhat shy of the various logics and languages of music in ways the musicians and producers and indeed singers are not shy, tend to order their discussion so that the singer is the focus of the story, or the producer when the singer seems to be too flimsy to hold the writer's preferred kind of story -- when the singer is the curtains, in fact

this is a shyness that doesn't arise in film-related auteurist crit, really: except maybe films where the inner logic of music is a dominant character, which is very few films that i can think of, certainly -- it's specific to the oddity that so many pop- and rock-write ppl are all but musically illiterate, some of them proudly... you're not unmusical, in the sense that you used to be in bands and made music, but, while i think this has honed your ear in various ways not available to many, you almost never discuss things from an openly musicianly perspective

[koganbot]

Ah, right, I am sort of conflating two things: Tom in his post seven months ago said "Strand 2 was the emotional argument: you should like pop because its content is rich and affecting. This put the focus back on the performer. A typical Strand 2 argument would praise records like Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography or the first Marit Larsen album." So he didn't mention auteurism. (I find the word "emotional" odd; not that the argument is unemotional but generally there isn't a lot to say about feelings.) And then Dave, writing from memory and thinking that Mike had said it, not Tom, wrote: "the other being the "ideas and auteurs" type (auteur being the closest shorthand I can get to a less-distancing idea of "persona," or "artist-object" or something)." So emotion turns into ideas, and he adds "auteur," but with qualifications.

I don't remember if I told you about my "Thomas Magnum" variant on auteurism. My idea is that the auteur of Magnum P.I. is the character Thomas Magnum, rather than the actor Tom Selleck or the producer Donald Belisario or the directors or scriptwriters or set designers or setting. Obviously all the others played a role, but the character and his way of being and his interactions jelled so quickly and solidly, and the characterizations and the way those characters generated what the actions had to be (four main characters, good people but something unformed or stunted in each, and then a pushy messed-up guest star who runs Magnum in circles and exasperates and involves him, leading to danger and action through which all the main characters transcend themselves [I had a post about this, damned if I can remember where]) pulled something persistent and good out of the people who worked on the show (actors, writers, etc.) that they'd not have achieved otherwise. And in I want to say "Ashlee Simpson" the character as 19-year-old-on-the-cusp draws something out of John Shanks and out of Kara DioGuardi and out of Ashlee Simpson the singer, and maybe "Ashlee Simpson" is one of the auteurs of Rolling Teenpop 2006 and of my Bob Dylan article for Paste. But Ashlee the performer had to jettison the 19-year-old girl, and her reinvention has a way to go now.

I really have trouble bringing the music into the discussion; aural is a lot harder than visual or verbal. The reason I cited "Death Rock 2000" is that I actually was able to use the form of the music as a metaphor for what the music was doing socially.