poptimists | The Decade In Pop

freakytigger.livejournal.com posting in

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

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."

From:

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"

From:

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?

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

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.

From:

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

From:

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.