Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

(ok, maybe not *all* the time, but enough of the time. I think we do that already though?)

I question this.

>So, for instance, it's a rockist opinion that pre-stereo-era blues and country are interesting less in their own right than because they anticipated rock, or that Run-D.M.C. and Alison Krauss are notable because their virtues are also the virtues of rock, or that Ciara's Goodies isn't interesting because it fails to act like rock.

...because it crystallized something in my own hearing habits (not listening habits). I don't find it interesting to unpack a sample-based pop or hip-hop song in the same way I find it interesting to pick apart the various instrumentalists' roles in even the most basic hard rock record. In the past four weeks or so (I bought three on April 12 and three last night) I have purchased six remastered Grand Funk Railroad CDs, and they're a perfect example because a) their music is commonly derided as super-primitive knuckle-dragging white teenaged blues-rock crap, and b) there's a ton of separation in the mix on all these albums. I am much more interested in listening to the individual instruments on a Grand Funk album, and figuring out how they work together to create the cumulative organic effect that is a Grand Funk song, than I am in figuring out a Bomb Squad track, or a Mike Jones track (though I greatly enjoy listening to the Mike Jones album, which I bought a little less than a week ago). But I don't think of rock as "normative," I think of it as "ideal." This is, to me, the best that pop music has to offer. I don't like symphonic pop - Brian Wilson does nothing for me, and neither do the Beatles. I think simple hard rock, and hard-edged prog made by a fairly small group of instrumentalists (1972-74 King Crimson, Yes), where each instrument sounds like itself and you can pick the tracks apart and listen to how each player is listening to the others and complementing them with individual contributions, to be the ideal rock/pop musical form. (I also prefer string quartets to orchestras, and small-group jazz - six people or less - to big bands.) Electronic-based, "beat-centered" music like hip-hop, which usually doesn't feature much in the way of organic musical interaction, doesn't interest me as much from a structural standpoint. Does that mean I view it as a lesser form? Not in the sense that I'm incapable of recognizing its virtues, no. But in the sense that I find that I have less to think about when listening to it, yeah.

Thanks, Ian.

we've all spent so much time unpacking this thing (got me trippin) that i really do wonder what someone who's never even encountered the word "rockism" must think of it. (i suspect they don't give a flying fuck, but hope springs eternal.) i don't entirely agree with douglas, but i do agree it's a good framing.

Don't even get me started on that.

haha xpost

by the way matos i'm not ignoring that piece you sent back to me, honest I'm not, my computer's all fucked up and i hate my writing hollaback

but the word "rockism" still applies to all, as to the indie/undie hip-hop spit of say four years ago, where "real" sometimes meant inst ruments and sometimes meant sampls instead of synths, or certain sampled drums rather than others, etc.

that more subtle process, even if first worked out via discussions of "rock" can't just be about rock, or even rock-centric.e

my daughter, this morning: "Dad, what does 'hollaback' mean?"

haha no Haiku I mean I emailed you

That rockism is a normative discourse is Wolk's best contribution to the debate.

My question would be: Where does the pleasure lie in all of this? Rockism seems so much more about the head than the body. It's a raced, classsed and gendered form of normative discursivity and process of legitimation which elides some of the more important dimensions of popular music, which are consequently seen as frivolous or trivial.

The debate will no doubt continue.

What is wrong with this perspective?

(xxpost)

I'm one of them and yes, this piece works quite well for me.

it's too sexist/violent/homophobic. gimme someone like mia who sez something.

There is a definite value judgement there--that it's okay to be gay, women aren't for debasement and violence is 'bad.' these are common, modern american values. and i agree with all of them. but i am not Everyman.

It's more the last part of the sentence that bothers me, though. It's not saying "I like MIA" it's saying "What you listen to is bad because it is NOT like MIA." It implies that music that does contain homophobia/sexism/violent imagery DOES NOT say something, which is quite false. It does say a lot of things. You just don't like them.

xposts.

(n by xpost)

One can dream. They'll probably do it on dissensus, but I'm not feeling that board completely yet.

xpost

Gotcha, good point then.

(I hope that didn't sound too pretentious, I hardly claim to be some sort of philosophy expert or something, i'm just trying to explain my thoughts in the best way i know how.)

I've been biting this paragraph from the "pop thread" on dissensus and showing it to people for like a week now, but I think it's a very good explanation. I hope I'm not changing the intended meaning by removing it from context, and I've been all quoting Tim on ILM lately which probably makes me a weirdo, but Tim F. said:

Deleuze writes, “What is an essence as revealed in the work of art? It is a difference, the absolute and ultimate Difference. Difference is what constitutes being, what makes us conceive being.” The function of sensuous signs in art is to bring us face to face with the mass of differentiated intensities, whose aggregation and conglomeration allow us to conceive of stable concepts and meanings. When I say art brings us "face to face" with this stuff, I mean that it forces us to recognise the inescapably differential nature of these affects, rather than proceed straight to the concepts which we have lazily attached to them, and which we imagine to be standing behind them in a signifying relationship. For Deleuze it would be a mistake to assume that art exists to be "interpreted", its signs read in order to discover some message or meaning they contain. This reduces art to a reflection of conceptual generalities - insert "auteurism" or "dilettantism" here. Instead, the function of art is to intensify our experience of difference – or, to put it another way, our awareness of the endless potential for differentiated experience.

"There is a definite value judgement there--that it's okay to be gay, women aren't for debasement and violence is 'bad.' these are common, modern american values. and i agree with all of them. but i am not Everyman."

Why does someone voicing an opinion have to speak for Everyman?

* "gimme someone like mia who sez something."

"It's not saying "I like MIA" it's saying "What you listen to is bad because it is NOT like MIA." It implies that music that does contain homophobia/sexism/violent imagery DOES NOT say something, which is quite false. It does say a lot of things. You just don't like them."

That's kind of semantic hairsplitting. It's fairly clear what the person means by "saying something." The person is saying that there's more value in the words. (Yes, more value for himself or herself personally.)

"and no one has the right to tell anyone else what to like."

Expressing an opinion /= telling other people what to like

this whole discussion is awful. go back to graduate school.

I know, I was just saying that was the part of the article that stood out for me the most and trying not to get bogged down in the current morass of discussion.

And, uh, no offense but your definition doesn't exactly make it more clear.

If the point is that the person saying this is generalizing too much about hip hop/grime/dancehall then, yeah, it's bullshit.

I'm talking about the "value" that the music itself holds for the person making this statement. MIA has use value for the person -- they buy the CD and they play it. The music they don't like has no value for them -- if someone gave them the CD, they wouldn't play it.

If you ever read a reggae reviewer talking about the music in terms of "good" or "bad" or overall quality, then they are probably missing the entire point, severely. It's not that kind of genre and it doesn't abide by those kinds of rules, so following them won't get you anywhere.

I think the useful questions are ones like: What shouldn't work but does? How does this artist or producer do so much with so little (or so little with so much)? What does a crowd of moving bodies in front of a massive soundsystem understand about this tune that a person sitting alone in from of their home stereo might never, ever get? Why are these electro-Caribbean gangster entertainers so puritanical on certain issues and famously libertarian on others---and might it be possible to pin this on a heat-warped vestige of British colonialism? Are all or just most of the leading studio producers semi-closeted gays? Will US stars ever follow Elephant Man's bold lead and develop a new dance move with each new single? And so forth...

Although he's talking about reggae specifically, I think it works beyond that. There is so much to talk about with music; I guess my least-favorite music would be music that doesn't leave me with much to say, not in the sense that it leaves me speechless (which is more like an overload of things to say that i can't readily put into words) but that which does not provoke me in one way or another.

So the reason they like the album is because they like the album?

According to Derrida, "logocentrism" is the attitude that logos (the Greek term for speech, thought, law, or reason) is the central principle of language and philosophy.1 Logocentrism is the view that speech, and not writing, is central to language. Thus, "grammatology" (a term which Derrida uses to refer to the science of writing) can liberate our ideas of writing from being subordinated to our ideas of speech. Grammatology is a method of investigating the origin of language which enables our concepts of writing to become as comprehensive as our concepts of speech.

According to logocentrist theory, says Derrida, speech is the original signifier of meaning, and the written word is derived from the spoken word. The written word is thus a representation of the spoken word. Logocentrism maintains that language originates as a process of thought which produces speech, and that speech then produces writing.

So when applied to music, it is logocentrist to expect/value "meaning" in music?

Sorry, I don't quite understand the correlation between logocentrism and rockism.

If I wrote a review about two power pop albums and talked about one accomplishing something that the other does not, am I doing the same thing?

If I wrote a review about two power pop albums and talked about one accomplishing something that the other does not, am I doing the same thing?

This is way too vague of an example, but what I'm trying to say there is that the accomplishment made = effect on me as a listener, expressed through my writing. Some music has a stronger pull for me, and I can say so; but saying that 'it is my opinion that mia's politics are the 'correct' politics, ergo her music is better' does not fulfill the kind of expectation i have from music writing, i guess. I want someone to explain the music to me, not turn music into a simple represenation of "good" and "bad" politics/belief systems/structures.

is what i'm trying to say, i think.

(I know that these qns are what everyone is sort of asking but I felt framing them explicitly might provide a focus. Also I keep on asking this in conversation and email myself.)

Or write as subjectively and temporally as possible about the experience of listening/seeing as it happened.

Rock
Rap
R&B
Pop

Then ask yourself: is the rockism debate really that important? And arent you guys too wrapped up your own asses? No offence.

darin, think of a stereotypically Rockist straw statement like "Artist A doesn't write their own songs/play their own instruments". Fine. Now analyse what somebody's saying when they say that those are "bad" things.

Excellent.

Then ask yourself: is the rockism debate really that important? And arent you guys too wrapped up your own asses? No offence.

Trouble is, one of those four genres is a genre that the "anti-rockists" simply want to disappear. They feel that enough rock is already made, and that nobody should ever make any rock anymore ever.

This comment intrigues me. I've heard it expressed from others involved in the 'scene' there (on that 'Berlin Digital' DVD) that things may have 'peaked' in some sense. Care to expand on this? What's going on in your opinion? Too much fashionability or some other negative factor (coalescing of expectations around musical creativity etcetera).

"You're only in it for the cred--I'm in it because I genuinely like music."

Also, re: rockism, Spencer is OTM about it being like logocentrism. And, like logocentrism in literary studies, music critics should recognize that everyone is "rockist" in the sense that they have normative values about music. No one is exempt. In fact by declaring yourself "anti-rockism" you are (obviously) taking an ideological position too--it's just that no one in music crit is calling each other "pop-ist" or what have you.

Not only. The average Status Quo or AC/DC fan is probably a "rockist" as well.

Geir, was "Love Me Do" rock or was it pop?

(really enjoying all the discussion of this here...)

xpost about binaries

Right now, the rockists have been out-lefted by everyone. Now, all the anti-rockists are starting to out-left each other. This will continue until everyone is exhausted and recognizes that their own positions are all beholden to certain underlying aesthetic / political / ideological positions. At that point things will settle down and everyone will feel free to appreciate the music they like, etc.

Douglas / Tom: Sure, rockism is ingrained in language just like misogyny is arguably ingrained in language, I agree. But I *don't* think people are willing to admit that their anti-rockism positions are just as normative, capitalist, or what have you as rockist positions, which is what they are. Example: the "white guys with guitars" thread.

Lovelace inadvertantly otm in that this conversation would be trivial if rockisme were constrained to Rock. But per TV's Mr Noodle Vague's quite elegant elaboration in this thread, no genre is exempted. Valorizing "Straight Outta Compton" for it's unflinching portrayal of yadda yadda is patently rockist (Ice Cube = the new Dylan!). Much of the "Madonna Studies" genre of academic pop culture studies can be classified as not only radically rockist but almost charmingly naively so.

TV's Mr Noodle Vague offers a classically deconstructive approach to nonrockist discourse (this approach is sometimes described by both adherents and detractors as "sawing off the branch you're sitting on." Another approach, still Derridean but more poststructuralist than deconstructive, would consider the recording/performance/text specifically in its relation to other recordings/performances/texts, proceeding from the perspective that a performance/recording/text has no unique existence in any other context.

NB that this approach risks opening up an equally sticky conversation around the rockism inherent in discourses of resistance. oboy...

I'd call it bad pop.

Spencer: yeah, the neatness and economy of Douglas' argument is Classic.

And I'm enough of a rockist (folkist, really) to object when people use Dylan-as-the-great-lyricist as an exemplar of rockism.

"Normative" does not equal "capitalist."

Geir Hongro = Ronald Thomas Clontle.

who still sez this and is taken seriously by anybody anywhere pleeze?

okay, maybe it is said all the time and i don't read those papers.

Honestly scott, I have this argument every time somebody spots my Britney badge.

I did point out it was a straw man position, tho.

We just have to recognize that conviction about and empathy with music should be a more fluid thing that's less bound up in self-image.

Haha, too bad we can't all afford proper Lacanian analysis!

HAHAHAHAHAH..except it's what.. "rock", "rot", and "pop!"

Spencer Chow otm. That said, the final paragraph of the article concerns me. A lot.

One word for reading widely and maintaining awareness of other discourses and other touchstones is "responsibility." But another word for what's described in the position that we ought to "stage raids on other kinds of culture criticism: great writing about movies, about literature, about food" -- dilettantism.

That "great" may be the most troubling moment, as it ::dear god, I swore I'd never use this word again:: reinscribes another normative discourse on top of the one it seeks to erase. Replacing old touchstones with new ones solves nothing -- reliance on touchstones and criteria for greatness represents the very foundation of rockism.

xpost - which is what mrjosh is getting at a couple posts up - damn this thread is moving quickly

I don't know, I think in saying that you want things explained or that you want to explain it is totally all about meaning. See, I don't have a problem with the idea of meaning, though I do have a problem with the idea of a correct meaning. I mean, logos = truth; I think Deleuze is better understood in saying that we don't want to erect a monolithic interpretation and to understand that there should be a proliferation of interpretations, which is sorta beneficial and stimulating to everyone involved.

I agree with this; I meant I want them to explain their interaction, not some universal truth about the music.

Yeah, but I meant critic-wise. But then I remembered that I used to live in Philly and that I sometimes read Tom Moon's reviews and that he was probably guilty of this. And the last time I got seriously pissed-off by an article (other than Hornby's fuckin' nightmare in the NYT) was Moon's thing in Esquire ot GQ where he dismissed R.Kelly as someone who didn't have anything to say to anybody. Anything REAL. Anything POSITIVE. Then he went on to lionize whatever neo-soul titan was floating his boat that week. Someone suitably noble and full of grace.

But I did call Baltimore club music the new Dylan! Wait, maybe that is rockist. Now I'm all bugaboo!

Reasons why auteurist theory falls apart.

I'd be interested in getting to more of what I was talking about upthread - the ways in which critics use rockism to control discourse, and how we can use deconstruction to map out how critics create this heirarchy that says the Beatles made the best record of the 20th Century, for example (see: Rolling Stone's 2003 list of the best albums of all time).

it made me miss my missing of the last emp pop music studies conference all the more.

i was going to write a bunch of things after reading it, but either the noodle vague person said them very eloquently already, or i got so embroiled in reading the thread i forgot what i was gonna say.

i for one have very spotty, primarily self-taught understandings of folks like derrida. i never finished my undergrad degree. but it does seem rather obvious that a lot of this sort of critical rethink regarding the "normative" nature of pop/rock is happening NOW: after 50 years of rock music, a hundred and twenty years of recorded popular music, and roughly forty years of pop/rock criticism. most art forms went through a similar thing critically in the '60s, (notably of course conceptual/ pop artists and postmodern authors), which in its own way made even the concept of pop/rock ("low" culture) criticism possible. the influence of academia on pop/rock crit. is greater today than it was in the '80s when you mostly couldn't write for the "voice" unless you limply quoted baudrillard -- and this is a good thing, but i'll get to that in a second.

i've always thought that what's held back the pop/rock discourse has been more than anything how popular/ "populist" it is. i refer not to the seymour glass approach to music writing (this power-noise-jazz trio is good at least partly because they're unpopular) versus the chuck eddy method (this hair metal band is good at least partly because they're not unpopular), but how commodity-centered and release date/ad-money-driven pop/rock writing is -- the simple/ obvious fact that music writing is an extension of the entertainment industry's need to continually sell more product.

and while i initially balked at the idea of contemporary music studies entering academia, it appears that much of what's being done there is at least a bit fueled by the sort of focused, intense, and marketplace-free FANDOM one used to only find in 'zines, which tended to be written --not so well-- by malcontents living in their mothers' basements. (i don't feel the need to enumerate what's good about 'zines since i've done them, slowly and irregularly, for 22 years myself. and yeah, we all know blogs have replaced 'zines, for the most part.)

i can't wait to read tim ellison's thesis on psychedelic rock or whatever the hell it's on. he's always been one of my favorite writers and it's awesome/ only right and natural that he can get a degree based on this work.

Bernie Gendron's book, From Montmarte to the Mudd Club, is pretty good on this count and really gets at the history of these kinds of debates as they've played out in relation to the avant-garde and popular music over the course of the twentieth century.

hah. lo siento.

hah. lo siento.

Lethal, this is why those Deleuzian comments seem out of place. This is about taste and gatekeeping, about hierarchies of value, so the obvious go-to man is Bourdieu. If you're going to throw theory around, that is.

Bernie Gendron's book, From Montmarte to the Mudd Club, is pretty good on this count and really gets at the history of these kinds of debates as they've played out in relation to the avant-garde and popular music over the course of the twentieth century.

I don't mean to "throw theory around," I just picked that quote up from the debate on dissensus! and I think those deleuze quotes definitely relete to this discussion in a very real way.

...in a very real way. I will definitely check out that book though.

ill admit that when i first heard the phrase, i filed it in my mental dictionary as a synonym for "elitist".

(or for that matter, the "wrong" politics)

fyi, i've just started a publishing venture with steve from puncture -- the first two titles are gonna be a thick-ass book/ cd "chemical imbalance" best-of and a collection of essays/ writings by luc sante, so i'm very psyched about that! [working title for the c.i. book: "In Love With Those Times: The Best of C.I." -- izzat too flying nun-centric/ stolen, or what?]

i don't remember ever reading a brodsky book all the way through either but i do find him a much better "difficulut" writer than any of the mcsweeneys clan and remain curious re: his lack of renown. game theory = acquired taste, to be sure.

[[has heart attack, dies]]

I'd like to be really annoying and quote myself in order to expand this a bit (in a basic way) and explain why it's a problem.

The "source of true meaning" is problematic because it denies cultural mediation. Most people adhere to a Cartesian worldview "naturally" because it is "apparent" (i.e. *I* attach meaning to things myself and I have agency and authority over my life and my artistic output). Psychoanalysis (among other things) finally taught us to challenge this whole and rational ideal of the self and to recognize the subject's definition from without. The end result of this challenge should be a lessening of the importance of the individual author of a work and a recognition that the work does not spring forth fully formed from the pure unmediated mind of the artist. However, rockism clings to this heroic view of a soulful and pure authorial intent, thereby priviliging singer-songwriting, virtuosity, the live (present) experience, and the timeless nature of true music; and at the same time decries the studio, the producer, recorded music, technology (although the specific technology changes over time), and ephemeral music.

And Spencer, you're just reiterating what I suggested about discourse, and what Douglas was saying about normativity: they each set up regimes of meaning, value and understanding which many people take for granted, or as simple common sense.

More to your point, what precisely is "complex"?

I wanted to explicitly expand upon my logocentrism definition because I've found it's better to overexplain on ILM because people are coming from so many different places.

I wish Drew Daniel was here.

On the other hand, I could say that I like "Go All the Way" by the Raspberries more than I like "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" by the Rubinoos because I think there's a little more to it.

-- Haikunym (zinogu...), May 6th, 2005 4:44 PM. (later)

I'm late to the party, but I'd like to throw my hat in with Haikunym and everyone else who pushed for a non-rockcentric definition of rockism -- for example, techno fans can be rockist about techno just as rock fans can be rockist about rock.

Also, if this is the least insane rockism thread we've ever had then it's because we've already had 918324 rockism debates* and are tired of yelling at each other, moreso than the genius of DW's article (which is very well written, though).

*I specifically didn't say "we've already had the *same* debate 918324 times" because this one is clearly covering fresher ground, so three cheers for that.

Also, Tim, again "rockism" does not necessarily relate directly to the qualities of "rock" music (although it often does).

Also, saying the rockism debate is over is pure rockism! (I keed!!)

It could be that, it could also be the opposite.

I'd like to know--having read Christgau but not having paid much attention to the British music scene in the '80s, actually--what people think is the musical event that really triggered the anti-rockist thing? Was it disco? To my way of thinking, disco is such a good example of how rockism deforms one's perception of what music does, since the subject matter is usually so frankly concerned with hedonism, and "nothing happens" in the music like it does in rock (usually no guitar solos, lotsa lotsa repetition, "gay" themes, "divas" singing, and so forth.

It does seem to me, too, that the last few years have seen a real and noble attempt to get past that whole perspective of seeing everything pre-rock as a leadup to it--I'm thinking of the renewed interest in stuff from the very early years of the century that weren't exactly blues, or jazz, or ragtime...and for me, once I started thinking about what Bert Williams was all about, for example, things began to get a lot clearer. But I never bought the rockist line, since I was always way more into frankly "unreal" pop music and r&b/soul/funk/disco leading into whatever you want to call Autechre or, to take an example of something I love lately, the Soft PInk Truth...groove-based music being the basic vocabulary of that music, I'd say. In other words, it *always* seemed to me that James Brown was a really fruitful tree and the Beatles were a nice sorta dead end, not that I really want to put it that baldly, just attempting to make some kind of distinction and place my own taste in this discussion/historical continuum.

Anyway, yeah, I know this has been done to death but it seems like we need to keep goin'...

At a particular point in time, though, I might just be interested in asserting my preference of one song over the other, and not interested in going into a full musicological analysis of the Raspberries song. Can it not be a given in this instance that:

1) Saying that the Raspberries song is better "because there's more to it" does not necessarily reflect a bias on my part toward complex things in general, and ...

2) That I am actually implying in my statement that the more simplistic majesty of the Rubinoos song (which I like, and which I do think has a simplistic majesty) isn't as great as the more complex majesty of the Raspberries song?

But when you state it as you did above, it implies just the opposite! If you said "the intricate passage in song a) is more effective than the way song b) employs a more minimal effect" its fine. But if you say "its better because it is more complex" that implies that you mean "complexity" (if such a thing can be defined) is inherently better than "simplicity" (ditto) and the idea of this "inherent" heirarchy is what rockism is about.

A personal point I've suddenly realized which...*might* apply here, a bit. I have not for a long while, and possibly never (but I could easily be wrong), seen music as biographical expression from its creator(s). The 'soul' of said individuals -- whether SAW or Dave Pearce of FSA sitting in his room somewhere -- does not convey itself per se through the music; alternately what meaning I might glean or read into the songs is generally insular or seen through my own specific lens. (I don't hear a death wish in Ian Curtis's lyrics, instead I sense a yearning for connection -- life, if anything; likewise what I hear in Timbaland's work at its best is a staggered shock that turns into motion -- his innermost being, I don't know about and wouldn't expect to.)

Douglas, as Spencer and others have elaborated, is right to focus in on the language used to describe the event. I find it interesting that to me there is no debate in my brain about the 'honesty' of a particular approach, I assume I am far from alone here (and I assume I am not necessarily operating with a uniform philosophy either). At the same time I am less concerned about an artistic expression of honesty in a truth/lie context, I am deeply concerned with celebrated artistic *connections* of...I don't know, head-rush, scramble, shock, being moved and moving. Perhaps it *is* honesty, but honesty separated from the moral requirement or describing factor, more internalized in a 'great, that works!'/'yugh, how boring' fashion...

Hmm...rambling here, I'm losing my point a bit. I think what I am trying to say is that there is a way that the internalized language of rockcrit -- what Tom is noting, in a way, with his question about an anti-rockist critical language -- can function away from the rockist normative, that it can at least mean something on a personal level even if (or because of its nature) as a crutch. That *maybe*...maybe...the reexpression/revision of terminology, as it crackles under expected pressure from a host of continuing new influences and conceptions in life in general, will yet become, not necessarily anti-rockist as such, but...different. Differing. And that to plan it is too much but to watch it happening and to ride the possibilities could be freeing.

Hm, still a ramble. Hopefully there's a point in there.

who still sez this and is taken seriously by anybody anywhere pleeze?

"Writing in The Chicago Sun-Times this summer, Jim DeRogatis grudgingly praised Ms. Lavigne as "a teen-pop phenom that discerning adult rock fans can actually admire without feeling (too) guilty," partly because Ms. Lavigne "plays a passable rhythm guitar" and "has a hand in writing" her songs." -- K. Sanneh

I imagine some writers (sometimes even myself) have trouble reconciling or expressing love for career longevity with the innately temporal and almost by definition trendy nature of pop. Will people be listening to Britney is 20 years? Does it matter if they do or don'? I suppose it's equally interested whether she's completely forgotten or revered in 2025.

Hold on here Josh, this is circular logic. You're essentially claiming Dylan is important because he is important, which is somewhat glib. Also, comparing Patton's far more obscure work in terms of how it was recorded, released, and received with the far more immediate and easy access to Dylan -- major label contracts, high profile media appearances, etc. near the start of his recording career and after, in otherwards the fact that 'millions' could actually *hear* and encounter his work as opposed to Patton -- is an utter apples/oranges situation.

Well, xpost a bit, but still.

However, I think there's something important about rockism that isn't discussed explicitly here, and that's the idea that there are opposite (if not equal, at least in terms of the number of times I've read articles about it) ideas in every other intellectual/social group. I remember once at ILM, mark s once described rockism as "moralist", as opposed to materialist. I agree with him: rockism is an example of using one set of morals as a baseline that we can judge all other ideologies. Wolk does talk about baselines in this article, and even brings up racism, which is a good parallel - but doesn't really note that the exact same thing can happen for pop or any other kind of music. I'd assume just see the word rockism vanish, and replace it with moralism.

i wrote about this (badly) elsewhere, but the people tagged with the new dylan tag were never signifiers of massive cultural import. they were all "pale" imitations of dylan. steve forbert? prince was never called the new dylan. neither were public enemy. they both had just as much right to be if you are basing the (admittedly stupid) designation on *POW* impact. thus, rockism. i guess. i'm not a rockism expert.

The tricky thing is that one can have a "whig" perspective, but still produce really good history, in terms of actual narrative of events and research, assuming that the "whig" elements are read out of some of the broader claims. So the norms of what constitutes valid argument, inference, and proof, allow historians to have discourse despite perhaps even having *competing* whig perspectivees.

Whig history is bad for the past coz it doesn't let you recover what was really going on (i.e. seeing the early who through the lens of "finding their way" to the "mature" sound of "who's next") and is bad for the present coz it attaches a fixity and permanence to the "hero" of yr. story, often rooted in some transcendental being-ness of some aspect of it as "demonstrated" thru yr. narrative itself.

This is where a rich constructionist theoretical toolkit comes in, and why i'm starting to heart pickering and other practice theorists in the history of science/sociology of knowledge. but the beauty of the discussions in history is that the shift to "objectivity" came with ranke and the development of history as a "science" in the first place, so there's an established basis of grounded "what really happened" or "who rides whom and how" to appeal to in the course of particular debates, rather than as great a tangle over notions of constructionism themselves. so partially, if someone sez you're a bit "presentist" or there's a "whig" element in yr. outlook, it can be debated in the concrete rather than hackles immediately going up. meanwhile, unfortunately, rock-crit discourse is so grounded in the primacy of individual experience that these discussions can degenerate far more quickly. which is not to dispute great first-person based crit, but rather to point out the (and "logocentrism" works great here) assumption of unmediated expression on the part of the *writer* if not the artist.

When I try to think of "anti-rockist criticism" I end up coming up with theories that basically justify either how I write about music or where I'd like to go with my writing, which is probably a covertly rockist move insofar as rockism is partly about pretending that what feels right/good, be it how and what I decide to write or the transitory effect of a piece of music, is the productive of a universally applicable truth. Nonetheless I'll try to talk about it anyway below.

Such instances of my ongoing rockism involve a delegation of responsibility for my opinions and actions insofar as they posit a disembodied third party as adjudicator and arbiter of these disputes, even if that arbiter is simply the "truth" itself, or rather just "what this music means even when I am not in the room". This is why statements like "no one will listen to this in twenty years time" remain the ultimate rockist move I think - the value of a given piece of music is decided not by the speaker, not by the listener, not by anyone either person knows, but by a hypothetical population who have yet to come into existence. As if the further removed the moment and forum of justice is from one's personal experience of music the more legislative weight it's given.

One of the great things about ILM obv is that the nature of its instant responsiveness tends to work against this: my opinions are not tested for their objective truth value by some future population of music fans, but will instead be weighed and assessed by the next poster on the thread according to their own tastes and experiences. The inability of ILM to ever agree on a group or artist we all unequivocally like or dislike doesn't negate the possibility of truth, but it undermines a certain way of thinking about truth in relation to music.

There's a certain performative contradiction in anti-rockism, which is that pretty much all music criticism implies a certain truth value, a conviction that what is being said needs to be said for the sake of others, and that's a big part of its effectiveness - I'm not about to start attaching subjectivist caveats to every proclamation I make. But I think what we're really doing is not trying to open up people's eyes to the "truth" of the situation (ie. objectively Britney Spears' "Born To Make You Happy" is the best song ever and I'm the only one thus far to realise it) so much as communicate a private experience to others in the hope that it recreates itself for them - truth as infectious rather than universal. What is it work is perhaps some sort of quasi-moral conviction that our enjoyment is worth sharing, that if we can maximise someone else's enjoyment by infecting them with a bit of our own, we should.

Rockism, working on a basis of some universal truth that exists within the music, seeks to repress the accidents, deviations and idiosyncracies of individual experience, in favour of identifying some irreducible core of meaning that should remain stable for all listeners. In truth this "irreducible core" is more hegemonic than objective/universal, the sum total of endlessly reiterated received wisdom in relation to a piece of music (or music generally) and thus usually just about the least interesting thing that anyone can say or read (this is where Deleuze's gripes about people lazily attaching affects to concepts and assuming the link between them is self-evident and eternal become relevant).

Anti-rockism should therefore conversely maintain a level of fidelity to the at times totally contingent specificity of experience, because it is the very contingency of the experience which is also the truth of the experience as such, and it is what makes it valuable: a certain music writer (critic, fan, whatever) comes to a certain piece of music at a certain moment in a certain context and with a certain amount of prior experience and/or set of expectations: their engagement with the music and insight into it thus has the potential to be unique, but once it happens this experience and insight is something which they can (if they write well enough) pass on to others.

Ironic that arch-rockists Manic Street Preachers sum it up in one of their album titles, "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours"...

...Sterling's post makes an interesting x-post! And it's not surprising that we come back to "is individual experience the ultimate or only ground" which was the same issue that the dissensus pop thread hinged on for ages and still does to some extent. The history comparison is a good and compelling one I think (though I know v. little about the debates you mention Sterling) but what I always get stumped by is how you go about saying "what really happened" in relation to music unless object you're asking it in relation to is your own experience. What really happened for whom?

What rockists don
t get is that rock IS artiface--it glowies and reaches its finest registers when plying the finest in thought-out fakery. Historically, artiface is one of the things that remove it from the blues, very old R&B and other sources.

The few cases of 'authentic' rockist greatness are usally the resuly of simply not having enough money to produce some grade-A artiface, something like Raw Power.

To me, it's just another dregs-of-the-60s idea.

On the other hand, there's artiface and there's artiface. When reviewers start treating B Spears with the seriousness they might better spend on Bjork or Aqua, how do they differ from trying to legitimize dull corporate fancy?

So I guess my dividing line re: artiface is--Is this the product of a zany person or a craven combine--and how should that effect my relationship with it?

Anyway, for me, "Go All the Way" trumps everything by Radiohead in terms of self-honesty and integrity-in-intent.

I'd rather hear Cher than Chan.

What most people utterly don't get about first wave punk was that it was defined by artiface, hence the tolerance of Bowie.

And so on.

Yes Chuck, but you have to first explain to some people that any music can be judged in terms other than rock before you can then get them to accept that it might be possible to judge rock in terms of disco.

One of the things that makes the current country/rap crossover interesting is the fact that presumably the two styles relate to eachother (when they do relate to eachother) in ways that largely bypass rock's terms of reference. Whereas a lot of the time rock journalism tends to assess musical developments in non-rock genres according to how much they reflect or deviate from rock tropes.

parallel with rockism here seems obv.

p.s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history

p.p.s. w/r/t "what really happened" i think if we look at how history is practiced we see there isn't the one history of say, the seven years war, anymore, but rather a recognition that certain aspects are being discussed, certain analytic units brought into focus and others left aside, etc. "all writing is an act of exclusion." so there isn't any *one* "what really happened" story, but there are methods to distinguish something that really happened from something that evidently *didn't*. TS: a "usable past" vs. "using the past."

xp

my worries about music criticism sort of transcend this rockism problem, i think. i think there are lots of ways music criticism can and do surmount rockism (whatever it means) that still don't address what i see to be some problems with (or, to put it more ecumenically, things lacking in) criticism.

Yeah there's definitely not one set of rock terms! And generally rockism's rock terms are pretty dubious in terms of judging rock too, or at least most types of it. And you're right to note that the bad stuff about rockism doesn't originally stem from rock.

All these things are part of the point Mark S made really well and succintly when (and I hope i don't get him wrong in paraphrasing) he said that rockism is anti-rock insofar as rock was originally less rockist than most of the other music being made at the time; "rockist" values were adopted by rock discourse out of insecurity vis a vis those other styles of music (interestingly this is an example of how rockism and anti-rockism have twin opposing flight-from-Eden narratives: rockism tends to tell the story of styles starting off authentic and then losing their way in artifice, whereas anti-rockism tends to tell the story of styles becoming bogged down by the weight of demands for authenticity being placed upon them).

I see this as being quite connected also to Frank Kogan's position: Frank once said (can't remember if it was to me or here generally) that his entire approach to music generally and rock specifically was very much shaped by his experience of rock when he was growing up when (and now I'm actually putting words into his mouth as I have to retrospectively reconstruct the point he was making) it was diametrically opposed to the er PBSized rock of rock discourse. And I wonder if there isn't a lot of common ground between Frank on rock and Mark on punk.

(Both are of course free to come on here and explain how I've misunderstood them)

Anyway, I like songwriting a lot, but I think as I get older I admire the audacity or even wrong-headedness of someone who says fuck songs and all that, I want to *play a certain way*. Which maybe relates to what Chuck says about thinking about rock in disco terms--why not? For me, it can only be healthy to discount the, I guess, prime rockist tenet that "good songwriting" and so forth is the most important thing. There's so much stuff I like just because I like the way it's done, not because I think the songs are great or anything like that. I think it's gotta be healthy to think this way, and for me, it's a way out of "rockist" strictures. I'm a big fan of Charles Keil's "Music Grooves," which talks about all this far better than I. I am sure I am stating the obvious, but it does seem to me that part of "rockism" has to do with the primacy of the record-as-object, and a consequent devaluing of live performance.

I do have a problem with "normative" when you're talking about music of the '60s, too. When I hear the Beatles or the Stones or the Left Banke, just to pick three names, I hear " '60s," but I hear it just as much in Elis Regina, Gilberto Gil, or some African music from the decade I've been listening to lately. Or in Howard Tate or James Brown or Eddie Floyd. So what '60s are we talking about?

"why would hip-hop critics who demand that the music be "real" and serious and not plastic and frivolous not be at least as rockist as rock guys who enjoy music because "it rocks"

As far as the semantics of the term go, I have problems with these statements. Does most of the muddle surrounding the term originate from the fact that "rockism" is being used to refer to things other than a bias in favor of rock music? With the hip-hop critics mentioned in the quote above, can we not just say that we feel that they may be biased about music needing to have strong meaning? "Rockism" needs to be far more firmly established in the lexicon as a universal if it's going to be used to refer to particular types of bias in general.

"judging metal or country or blues on *disco* terms"--I'd love to see more of this, actually--in some sense it's the same category of "mistake," but it's at least a fresh one, you know? Except I'm not even sure what disco terms would be: I don't know of a body of writing/thinking about disco that's as engaging as the rock equivalent (and if someone can point me at something that proves me wrong, please do, pref. contemporary with early disco and not in academic-ese).

I think there's a particular flavor of authenticity-so-called that gets invoked for rock considerably more than for other stuff; there has to be a better name for it. Hip-hop critics demanding that hip-hop be "real" and serious is a problem of its own, but it's not rockism.

Otherwise I'm gonna have to think about a lot of the points you've raised.

A couple of points I should've probably made clearer in the original piece:

*"Rockism," if it's going to be useful at all, has to be SPECIFIC and LIMITED in its meaning. I tried to come up with the narrowest meaning I could (and the way it's being used in this discussion it's still sliding all over the place).

*Rock is not rockist (so e.g. "Raw Power" isn't rockist). Loving rock is not rockist. Rockism emerges in the way people address stuff other than rock.

*Rockism is not responsible for everything that's wrong with popular music or popular music criticism.

x-post

Yes.

>i'd be pretty bored unless you went into some detail about how those things (i mean, music) actually functioned and what it meant for them to "rock."<

As well you should be. And I have--many, many, many, many times.

x-post

This has probably been said before on ILM, but it almost seems a foregone conclusion that popular music criticism should not be rock-centric, given the dominance of non-rock musics on the chart, the graying of the rock audience, etc. I'm not convinced this development represents any advancement in how we think about music, just a change that reflects changing musical values in society at-large.

Because all this change happens so quickly, you still have rock critics who judge things on classical values, rock critics who judge everything on rock values, and even a few critics, I imagine, who still don't see any good in most pop music.

This has probably been said before on ILM, but it almost seems a foregone conclusion that popular music criticism should not be rock-centric, given the dominance of non-rock musics on the chart, the graying of the rock audience, etc

The twist here is, at least since punk, rock criticism has not defended the music of the charts, it has been much more likely to criticize the music of the charts.

Douglas, I liked your piece and I find your additional remarks upthread helpful- but when you say "loving rock is not rockist" I assume that you are saying "loving rock is not *necessarily* rockist"; and your statement "rockism emerges when people address stuff other than rock"- I think I follow you if you mean "rockism shows up when people use certain kinds of rhetoric to repudiate non-rock genres"- but it does also seem to me that there can also be "rockism" in the way that one celebrates what one loves about rock music. Agree? Disagree?

also, what about actual songs whose content is itself "rockist"- i.e. to me Turbonegro's "Rock Against Ass" and Bob Seger's "I like that old fashioned Rock and Roll" tune are not just rock songs, they *are* "rockist songs" (and I know it's corny to say that but still . . .)

to Geir- thank you for your comments- everytime I start to think that "rockism is a straw man, nobody really holds such snobby views about other genres" you helpfully remind me that it's not a straw man after all.

-- Drew Daniel (mces...), May 7th, 2005.

A strawman, hardly. But a dying breed.

Geir: calling criticism of popular music "rock criticism" is _exactly_ an example of rockism!

Proponents of a nonrockist criticism have to face the fact that rockism is enormously powerful as a way of defining oneself and ones taste, of separating oneself ideologically and morally from other people who don't like music so much*. Other fandoms - comics, film, TV, videogames, sci-fi, beanie babies, scrapbooking, etc - almost certainly have "rockism"s of their own, though whether these are successful or not within the fandoms surely varies.** I wonder actually whether the acceptability of a fandom within society is proportionate to how successfully it manages to create and sustain an equivalent of "rockism"!

*(This is the crux of a lot of things. I buy a lot of music. My neighbour buys little. He seems entertained and satisfied by what he buys, though. So there must be something more that I get out of music which explains - to me, to him - why I buy so much more of it, otherwise I'm nothing but a glutton. And that something more must be located in the music that I buy and that people like him don't, otherwise I'm nothing but a sucker. So maybe the definition of "rockism" I'm looking for is something like religious apologies.)

**(I actually think Douglas' super-reader piece has MORE to do with how I understand "rockism" than his r-word piece!)

i suppose i can see chuck's point that the latter position *can* also be rockist - eg, a kind of separate-but-equal treatment; but i can't necessarily how you would carry out his exercise of judging a metal song by disco terms convincingly, without being rockist (albeit from a position of disco hegemony). or just unsufferably clever.

but i'm missing something, too, because ultimately i would hope that anti-rockism (a term i hate, but popism isn't quite right) would amount to more than a simple "it's all good" liberal relativism.

i think the example i'm looking for, actually, is chuck's piece from around election time 2004 where he talked about some right-wing country (?) act, praising its artistry at the same time he admitted his discomfort with its ideology. can someone post a link to that piece? sorry for my crap memory.

Douglas, it seems to me that is a problem with the way rockism is being discussed, rather than a problem with a comprehensive definition. What do you think of my definition as stated above (and slightly edited): rockism is an argument regarding music that is based on fallacies that subordinate the experience of actually hearing the music to expecations that music fit into some specific mold.

I should add to this - every rockist is a new orthodoxy, because rockism can be entirely different from person to person; there is no "defining" rockism.

Anyway, the so-called "rockists" are the only ones who are able to argue against fans of jazz or classical music when they say that rock music is "just commerse and entertainment".

Or rather, the so-called rockists are the only ones who could find something there worth arguing over. Definition of "entertainment" needs to be unpacked, etc etc, as does assumption that aesthetic gratification can exist at all outside of a system of exchange.

What needs to be unpacked above all is what it is that makes us (as a modern audience, generally) so devoutly wish to ascribe that sort of purity to our pleasures. Any ideas, foax?

hurting, i have to disagree there. i'm guessing the proportions between types A and B in your example are about the same as, say, hood-wearing klan members and casual racists, or on the other side, committed activists and casual progressives. in other words (lest a perhaps over-provocative image obscure my point), people of both inclinations toward commitment can develop vastly different kinds of musical values, which will determine their assumptions about what music should do.

haha ignorance is bliss eh?

Hooray! (I mean, this is the crux of my own radical subjectivism re: music, which argues for its own particular moral stance -- inasmuch as there is one -- by basically saying "What you listen to does not define how good or bad a person you are" -- and thus tries to fight against the rockism/racism equations drawn in some (not all) cases. That said, I'm NOT saying simply 'it's all good,' rather 'I think this is REALLY FREAKING GOOD/BAD/whatever and that you disagree is fine and all, but I'm not changing my mind because of it.')

Then you don't need the "rockist" term, as this kind of cultural "snobbery" is existant in all kinds of "higher culture".

Well taking this back to the whole question of logocentrism, arguably there's something in the way we actively think/talk about/write about music that forms with knowledge of language and everything attendant. I didn't recall pondering all that went into Free to Be You and Me when I was wearing down the vinyl when I was six (or the Popeye album I had when I was four or whatever), I just...liked it. Coolness, honesty, etc. didn't apply because I don't think I had *any* conception of how that *could* apply to what I listened to/enjoyed/etc.

Of course it is, Geir. I believe that the term "rockist" exists as it does because it implies a certain kind of cultural snobbery that emerged from within popular music. (Analogue: photography critics — that is, defenders of an art form that was once maligned from outside as being artificial, mechanical, and not art at all — who went on to attack the snapshot aesthetic of Cartier-Bresson, then Robert Frank, etc., for the same reasons, while defending modernist vanguardists, pictorial landscapes, etc.)

"i can't necessarily how you would carry out his exercise of judging a metal song by disco terms convincingly, without being rockist (albeit from a position of disco hegemony)"

For me, this is the kind of liberal use of the term "rockist" where the meaning of the term feels very muddled. Even if the person was, in fact, arguing from a position of "disco hegemony," I don't understand what this has to do with "rockism." "Rockism" is now any perspective involving elements of any kind of stylistic hegemony at all? That feels to me like a dilution of the term.

Also, why assume that the disco loving critic writing about metal is, in fact, arguing from a position of disco hegemony? The critic may merely be making a point (as Chuck has done, obviously) that metal has sometimes functioned as dance music. If a particular band is lacking this element, the critic is surely entitled to wonder why the band chose to ignore this aspect of metal and even lament its loss.

But it's been argued again and again that rockism rears its head in any genre; what, then, are the hallmarks of that, without diluting the specificity of the term?

1. Someone continually saying that they hate everything that doesn't rock out can be rockist. Biased against everything that doesn't rock out.

2. Someone saying that the Jackson Five are horrible manufactured crap that has nothing to do the great depth of someone like Bruce Springsteen. Biased against stuff that doesn't have the same type of "meaning" as Rock Gods.

Then there are the Sanneh points as summarized by Douglas

1. "idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star." Same as my # 2.

2. "lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco." Well, someone might do this for a number of reasons. Could imply bias against music irrationally perceived to be "manufactured." Could imply something similar to my # 1, i.e., disco doesn't rock out like the Ramones do.

3. "loving the live show and hating the music video." Could imply bias about artists irrationally felt to be too caught up in the trappings of music as commerce. Could imply nostalgia for the good old days before TV.

As for Douglas' argument about the term "rockism" being used to refer to anyone treating any genre of music as normative: Not sure that this bias is such a salient feature of rock criticsm (as opposed to other types of criticism throughout history) that any instances of treating any genre as normative in the future should be labeled as "rockism."

I mean, if someone was indeed arguing that "rockism" was an argument involving any kind of bias asserting the stylistic hegemony of any genre of music or any genre in any other art medium, that feels silly to me. Do we go back and in history and assert that Adorno was a rockist because he was probably biased about popular music in general?

(Tim: my argument's not the one I think you're ascribing to me! Treating any genre of popular music as normative is not the same as rockism; rockism, I'd argue, is the one kind of pop-normativity that is actually a problem, because of a) its hegemony and b) its played-out-ness.)

(As a flawed but not entirely inaccurate analogy: the Baseball Hall of Fame doesn't have display areas devoted to football, chess and cricket, does it?)

But there are a couple of flaws here:

First of all: They are usually met with criticism that they are "derivative" and that there is no innovation. But this entire way of thinking sort of requires sort of a "history line" where you have all these historic innovators, changing history, and thus becoming "part of history". And isn't this really a very "rockist" way of thinking? Particularly when arguments about hip-hop being, indeed, quite stagnant with not much of a historic development or obvious stylistic innovation within the genre, are indeed met with the "rockist" term?

Another thing: Coldplay and Keane are very much part of today's music scene, they are music that people love today, and a lot of people consider them great entertainment. Doesn't this mean they should be defended from criticism in the same way that 70s disco and boy/girl bands are also defended from the criticism they met with? I mean, if you reject the idea of anything but today's music, Coldplay and Keane are today's music. They may not be the same genre as R&B and hip-hop, neither the same genre as the metal stuff the kids love today. But they still represent a very popular direction in today's popular music, loved by a lot of people. They represent today as much as they represent yesterday.

Well, if the typical "rockist" is the typical music nerd, then, I guess that, other than the occasional Googler, everybody on ILM is a rockist :-)

Any genre of music should be defended against bias. I think people believe that you tend to assume that there is bias against these particular artists, however.

Geir, get one Sophie's World.

I have never seen those speaking positively of any act within the same style, at least not a recent one.

Is it not possible that some people might think that the handful of bands that you identify as being a part of this genre are all mediocre, though?

i think i'm with wolk on the "hear the music on its own terms" thing with all that implies, but that doesn't mean i'm not with chuck on hear "rock" as "disco" too. coz if you can hear the disco in the rock, that's because the disco is there. on the other hand, if i tried to hear the disco in, say, the harry partch, it probably wouldn't work very well. i can hear the hip-hop in the talking blues, but i can hear a different hip-hop in, say, the bee-gees.

the terms of the music are more than the terms of the producer, is what i guess i'm saying.

on schama i haven't read too much but he strikes me as a bit irritating in what he does.

i guess we might say rockism is also attaching "inappropriate" value-judgements to certain sonic signifiers?

This is great.

This is not very helpful on Adorno's position since it blurs two arguments. Adorno's criteria by which to judge art music is something like innovation (originality, novelty: in this he is a modernist, but he claims his criticism is immanent, i.e. he is judging art by the terms in which art asks itself to be judged). But Adorno clearly doesn't expect this of popular music (which doesn't claim to be artistic, because not claiming to be innovative, original, novel). This doesn't mean that popular music is 'pointless' although it does mean it can't be art. Since the possibility of art working (i.e of what claims to be art or wants to be art turning out to be art) is highly attenuated (not a priori impossible), this means art fails much more often than pop fails. The next stage of the argument is to investigate the link between 'art' and 'freedom': if art is a rarity this means freedom must also be a rarity, according to the tradition which links aesthetics to politics (i.e. for Adorno, basically a post-Kantian line, although we could argue about the links to Rousseau and other precurors). On my reading of his work (i.e. including the stuff explicitly about freedom, not just the stuff about music (i.e. I'm only going to take comebacks on this from people who've read the lectures on moral philosophy and the Kant section of Negative Dialectics, and possibly the final section of ND / last lectures on Metaphysics also) Adorno poses but doesn't answer this question: i.e. can we / do we accept this way of linking art to freedom? He certainly doesn't claim to replace it, since all the other alternatives are less rigorous (i.e. 'true') than the tradition he is questioning, but does leave space for the possibility that this entire tradition (culture) has reached an end. This is why he likes American culture so much, contrary to popular belief.

And actually there is a lesson for a discussion of 'rockism' in Adorno's work: what he really hates in culture is the middle ground, i.e. standardised music which gives itself artistic or political airs and graces. A lot of the criticism of rockism seems to be similar: i.e. no-one would attack a classical composer for rockism, but they will attack popular music for claiming to deliver (or being praised for delivering) some kind of 'authenticity' or 'immediacy' which cannot be justified. I think if we were to actually untangle the genealogy of rockism, i.e. also the genealogy of rock and pop criticism, we would have to go back to the 60s and ask questions like do we think a counter culture was / is possible? This would be tied up with questions like 'what is the difference between Adorno's position and Marcuse's?'

If 'rockism' is invented in the post-punk era, the question we need to be asking there is basically is this music to be assessed as art (i.e. implying a link to freedom) or as standardised music. If post-punk is basically 'experimental' rock all along, then the claim that something specifically different or liberating was happening there (i.e. a post-punk fan was more free than a disco fan) must be spurious, or at least badly formed. If post-punk is 'art' music, the question is valid. The pop reaction to post-punk looks like a way of saying the former is the case rather than the latter. (But this is belongs to a different discussion I think)

Yeah this is it, but let's tease it out a bit more. When we talk about "hegemony" here I think what we're talking about is a sense of a spoken or unspoken contract between the speaker and the listener that certain values or concepts are self-evident. Judging metal from a disco perspective is, whatever its worth in a specific context, a contrarian move insofar as it is almost certainly not the sort of critical application that a reader expects (unless the reader has grown up on Chuck Eddy and precious little else), so even when it is executed confidently by the critic there is a level of uncertainty there - "can this be done?" It's the sort of critical manoeuvre that of necessity foregrounds itself ("did you see what I did there?"), presents itself as a variance of the contract, and to the extent that it deviates from expectations it creates a space for new insight.

Conversely, judging music on rock's terms is so common place, so much part of the every day that it ceases to be noteworthy, it is backgrounded. And to this extent, because it forms so much of the useless dietary roughage that cushions lazy music criticism, it elides over the criticism's capacity for differential insight and, potentially, the listener's potential for differential perceptiveness (I totally sympathise with Lethal Dizzle when he says that thinking in a less rockist way allows him to appreciate so much more music and so much more about music than he did previously).

I kinda said this over in the "hating good stuff vs liking bad stuff" thread, but surely it's the task of anyone who writes about music to avoid allowing their critical approaches to ossify into rigid, prejudicial formulas which can only limit the volume of their thinking. The point is not that avoiding this will make one's insights more correct, but rather that it will make them more interesting and useful.

x-post Alex did you read the recent k-punk post on post-punk? What did you think of it? I'm hesitant to take a definitive stance on whether post-punk is genuinely liberating because (obv) I wasn't there...

(the prob w.his crit of popular music is that he just didn't know very much about the machinery of its making and made a bunch of broad assumptions abt said machinery based on the pop industry's own claims for itself as regards pure marketing effectiveness) (but his analysis of composed music, ancient and modern, is exemplary anti-rockist thinking)

(actually i don't much like the stuff on stravinsky in PHIL OF MOD MUSIC which is as a result by far his weakest book, written in the shadow of WW2 in exile and despair: implicitly, godwin's law applies, i think)

Depends. Criticising Schönberg, or even Wagner or Mahler, from a "standarised" entertainment music point of view would be rather pointless indeed. The same way, it would be just as pointless criticising Britney Spears or Celine Dion from an "artistic" point of view.

But there's a lot of stuff in-between those, both in classical music and in popular music. And the latter is where most of the popular music "canon" is found.

Please read more carefully before repeating the same unsupported argument over and over again.

ps) james hunter seems to judge lots of the music he writes about on *architecture* terms. i don't always get it, but i'm usually fascinated regardless.

i will say that i still don't understand what is gained with *limiting* rockism's definition

I still wonder this as well.

I especially can't stand the use of "rockism" to describe pre-rock attitudes (i.e. the Adorno example above).

Couldn't this broad use of the term actually be a kind of inverted rockism itself, i.e. it still places rock at the center of the musical universe.

This is exactly what happens when singer/songwriter/producer/arranger/instrumentalists such as Todd Rundgren or Stevie Wonder make music.

I just don't believe this!! I'm pretty sure that assuming most of the population of the planet is somehow closed-minded and dumb is a) closed-minded and dumb, b) not true and c) as close to 'rockism' in my definition as anything I've seen on this thread. I often think it's a good thing that "most of the population" doesn't write about music (they criticise it in much more productive ways, like living to it) since writing about music turns people into dicks really fucking fast.

is there such a thing as a rockist as opposed to rockist arguments?

This is a great question too, because I think it relates to Douglas' concern about people getting defensive as soon as they hear the term.

"(they criticise it in much more productive ways, like living to it)"

i don't even know what this means. they live to it? who doesn't?

I do kind of like Rush, Queensryche, Dream Theater and The Mars Volta. That is, there are things about their music that I love and there are things about their music that I strongly dislike. The latter consists of 1. screaming vocals 2. slightly too blues oriented melodies 3. too many loud guitars 4. not enough keyboards and not enough mellow parts.

Considering these four things are the "metal" elements of the styles of these four bands, I have a reason to be sceptical towards prog that has obvious metal elements.

Well, if you don't accept anything that you can't dance too, then you don't accept 90 per cent of all Western music.'

If I am in doubt, there is always Soulseek.

Regarding Opeth and similar, I am not even in doubt. I know a lot of today's metal has prog elements, which is nice. I also know most of today's metal has extremely loud guitars, annoying grinding or screaming vocals, and basically not a lot of good tunes. Which is not quite as nice.

I find this a little irksome actually, Scott. Are people supposed to just do this arbitrarily? If not, then how should they go about it?

If someone sends me something in the mail, I'll listen to it at least a little bit. I also make some attempts to keep up with things I might not be optimistic about so that I don't miss out on things that interest me. Mainly, though, through the years, I have followed the trajectory of my own interests. I don't feel that this is a narrow "comfort zone." And it takes enough of my time that I don't really have the additional time to IMMERSE MYSELF in a bunch of other stuff "in order to learn more about music or even learn more about why I do like what I like." Maybe it's because I studied music in school and had a decent amount of discipline outside of my areas of interest there. But I also feel that I have learned lots about music by following the trajectory of my own interests.

But I still think the comfort-zone argument sucks, A) because I just don't think it's true, who are these people? and B) because it takes an art-music argument about proper aesthetic-critical experiences and generalises it to everyday life (itself part of the trajectory of the aesthetic-critical argument, so perhaps reasonable in its terms, but terms i"m not totally happy with) but also to music that simply doesn't demand or expect that kind of response. (In fact, to a large extent doesn't demand a 'proper' response at all: pop music simply says live with me, take me into your life on your own terms, or don't. This is why it can't be 'damaged' by mechanical reproduction whereas the argument that a symphony designed to be heard in a concert hall is not being 'heard' properly over the radio does have some value). It looks to me like a way of hanging on to the pretensions of the art-tradition (i.e. pretending to have something other than an instrumental / consumerist relationship to music) without asking whether this idea of art was ever / is still possible / as desirable as it claimed to be. That is pretty much my definition of rockism, as I may have mentioned :-)

sure, why not? whenever you feel like it.

As someone who's background is Funk/Disco/Hip-Hop, followed by Jazz/Race Records/non-Dylan:Stones Oldies, I've spent my life defending agsinst rockists, and then having them embrace me and my music on their terms only.

Hearing a panel of critics come around to embracing Public Enemy, but then tell me about how avant-garde it is or how similar to musique concrete it is just tells me that they're still waaaaay off base. It's mostly fucking James Brown loops. The only siren on PE's break through was used in the opening intro record live at a concert that predated production on It Tkaes a Nation of Millions. Yet, the "sirens" always get pointed to. Context is overlooked, and instead, they apply their history to something that already has its own history.

I have spent too long with my constant knee-jerk response of "get over your rock-as-art perspective on ALL music." I'd like to think that eventually my perspective on my own music becomes validated by the people who control the platform.

Thanks Doug!

oh and like half of ITaNoM is built on "The Grunt"?

(likely source of move: attali's NOISE and pe's BRING THE NOISE hit the english-speakin world abt 18 months apart)

(rock and rap are strong rival co-opters of their various pre-histories though: they have both structured their histories via serial ruptures, and have both used the device of looking back towards unspoiled mythical pasts as means to drive off into new terrain)

As I said upthread, the imperative to be open-minded about music is not a moral imperative, but a pragmatic imperative in the service of good, interesting criticism - I don't care what people think about music unless and until they start talking to me about it or fill up space on an online messageboard or newspaper or whatever which I happen to read.

And as you point out Tim we have to be careful not to equate being open-minded with simply listening to lots of different types of music (although I think that can be helpful insofar as it tends to place stress on the more obviously inflexible listening prejudices) - one can listen to a single style of music (or, hell, even a single piece of music) and hear something new and interesting in it each time.

One possible way to think about rockism is that it operates by dint of the "structural exclusion of thought": a discourse wherein certain ways of thinking, certain realisations, are simply not possible, because the entire critical approach to music is structured in such a way that these thoughts are necessarily excluded. And depending on the strength and subtlety and hegemony of the discourse, simply attempting to disprove its tenants by showing evidence to the contrary (ie. exposing the discourse's exponents to music from other styles so they can see how it actually functions and is effective) will not necessarily overcome that, because this evidence is still "read" by a structure of thought and feeling.

A good example of this is the debate re pop stars writing their own lyrics, insofar as rockism has an answer for any real life factual permutation of the issue:
a) if popstar doesn't write his or her own lyrics, he/she is a manufactured robot
b) if popstar does write his or her own lyrics and the lyrics suck, he/she demonstrates that manufactured robots can't be trusted to make art on their own
c) if popstar does write his or her own lyrics and they don't suck, he/she is no longer a manufactured robot, but like Pinnochio has transcended that category and is now a real boy, er, sorry, artist.

Where the strawman rockist falls down here is not so much in their dismissal of pop music - indeed, as long as they apply the rules above there is an entire canon of non-manufactured chart pop the rockist can construct. Rather, it is the insistence that any piece of music will fall into one of the three categories above, this subordination of the music's potential for affectivity to a rather simple set of schematics whose conclusions are at once foregone and banal, which seems to undermine the rockist's claim to being a critic as such.

Rockist pan-genre eclecticism is of course a widespread phenomenon - there is always the "correct" hip hop, dance music, metal, reggae, chart pop etc etc to which the discourse can grant legislative approval.

My favourite model for explaining this is a solar system (and I apologise to anyone who is now thoroughly bored of my use of this metaphor): the sun is "rock", not real actual rock but an imaginary of rock, a set of values which rock should espouse. Around this sun orbit other genres (not real actual other genres but the imaginary of etc. you surely get the picture by now). For the purpose of rockist discourse, these other genres are valuable/visible to the extent that their face is turned to the sun, to receive and reflect back the values which it shoots out into space. These planets rotate on their axes very slowly, such that there are whole sections whose faces are turned away from the imaginary of rock for long stretches, and are thus effectively invisible and/or lifeless (usually not permanently though: see the creeping rockist acceptance of early dancehall).

The added bonus of the solar system model is it also reflects rockism's capacity to establish a heirarchy of genres: each planet receives the sun's light, but some are closer to the sun than others.

The challenge for critics trying to escape rockism is not necessarily to visit each planet, but rather to conceptualise the dark hemisphere, to shed light upon that which the prevailing discourse (in this case rockism) passes by untouched. Chuck's tactic of judging [x] genre in the terms of [y] genre is one way to do this, because it offers perspectives of proximity and visibility quite different from rockist heliocentrism. You can even practice anti-rockism from the perspective of rock's terms of references itself: the "truth" beneath this solar model is that outside of this hegemonising discourse the imaginary of rock is itself merely another planet, with its own dark hemisphere to be investigated. Of course this is what rockism seeks to deny or ignore most vehemently.

Tim: nice way of putting it.

I am SO loving this thread.

Actually, we have it pretty good out here in readership land. We don't need all of you to be generalists; when want to learn about metal, we can read the metal guys, and see through their eyes. Same with any other genre. (Though admittedly it is interesting to get a metal guy's take on something that's not metal, etc.)

Be careful though, young dudes, when you criticize old-school writers for dismissing genres you like. The tendency is for you to return the favor and dismiss out-of-hand the music *they* like (as too genteel, too lyric-oriented, not, well, rockin' enough, too reflective of some perceived canon). You're missing lots of good stuff, just as they are.

Let me add to that. (Part of my reason for not really getting into the meat of this more is my shying away from theoretical language, not because I think it isn't applicable -- it's INCREDIBLY applicable -- but it gives me ghost-of-grad-school hives to use, so I'd rather read it. :-) )

Actually I think there's a distinction between the writing and thinking to possibly be made, but then there's that whole logocentrism question again to be sure.

*thinks how to word this*

I suspect -- I have a *hunch,* let me phrase this carefully -- that there is a potential assumption that much older writing (rockist if you want to use the term) can be seen as dealing in tropes that from a distance come across as too macho, too biased, etc. for Our Lovely Modern World. In otherwards, that it has to be...screened, filtered even. I'm probably grasping at straws here and/or this has been discussed much more clearly above.

But I really like MBV! *hides*

Ha! But I don't miss a trick. And I dig deeper! Ah, but I'm not that young anymore. You'll find out when I finally get off my butt and send you that tape that I promised. But wait, I'm thinking of older stuff.I'm not a big fan of Aimee Mann or Wilco, but my mind can be changed. I haven't shut my door to them. Yet. (those are the only two people i could think of that old-school rockist critics like. i could be wrong though. I'm not always so sure who the rockists are. i think of rolling stone when i see the word.)

"That Kanye West album has no COUNTERPOINT! It's not even music!"

There are two many notes in music with counterpoint. You have these guys, Bach and Handel, who are extremely derivative and insist on recycling the past, but everybody else knows that the future of music lies in the considerably simpler approach that Bach's sons, and people like Salieri, represent.

But to take one thing, the statement:

So, for instance, it's a rockist opinion that pre-stereo-era blues and country are interesting less in their own right than because they anticipated rock

is interesting, because it is the reverse of the truth. "Rockist" critics don't write that Eric Clapton validates Robert Johnson, they write that Robert Johnson validates Eric Clapton. Of course one suspects many, if not most, of them actually listened to Eric Clapton more frequently and with more enjoyment than they listened to Robert Johnson, but that isn't what they wrote. By missing the essential point, that "rockist" critics were imposing values derived from earlier art forms onto rock (and *not* imposing values derived from rock onto earlier art forms) Wolk shows that he misunderstands what he is writing about too completely to have anything very perceptive to say about it.

This also explains my musique-concrete note from above.

And I probably shouldn't address Gier's note as it seemed dissmisive, but my point is, I don't feel the need to "judge" rock music. I am a black music fan that found rock later in life, and at times, I struggle to understand it.

There's plenty of rock I enjoy, and when a rockist tells me it's crap, I just concede that I'm enjoying some crap.

"This Strokes album is fun; good melodies."

"The Strokes are fake."

[still listens to Strokes, alongside The Fall, etc.]

But when a rockist tells me my Disco (et al) is crap, I know they're wrong...but they are in the majority.

This is why I applaud Douglas's attempt.

(I went to the first meeting of a class about recordings & cultural ghosts a couple of years ago; its syllabus talked about Johnson being "one of the earliest Delta bluesmen." Um, no; he'd be more useful for myth-making purposes if he were, but no.)

From Dylan Hicks, as quoted here: http://www.citypages.com/databank/26/1265/article13016.asp?page=3

Of course the great black artists have a somewhat easier time getting played on the Current, if by "great" you mean the dead ones. They play Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Sam Cooke, Billie Holiday, Howlin' Wolf, Leadbelly, Aretha Franklin (technically living)--all brilliant, and all exemplars of the worst kind of tokenism on a station that routinely ignores contemporary African American artists. Often the black ancients will set up a tune by a later white artist who was profoundly influenced by black styles--so Louis Armstrong might lead into Tom Waits, or Howlin' Wolf might give way to Nick Cave. All of this jibes with two tenets held dear, if rarely spoken, by hip white people: One, black music died at some point in the mid-'70s, but the old stuff sure is fun to dance or make out to. Two, black music's main contribution is to generate ideas that more "cerebral" and arty white performers can then pilfer.

The discussion re: rockism could head in this direction; identifying strains of rockist thought that cause the canon to be formed the way it is (beatles on top, london calling is the best album of the late 70s, etc.)

Then: from http://cantstopwontstop.blogspot.com/2004/12/robert-johnson-rockism-and-hip-hop.html
Where Jeff C. quotes Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music...Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most-rural sounding styles, and set a pattern for any future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial...

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. (Ed. note: Like Rick James, bitch!) To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. (Ed. note: Like Freestyle Fellowship or Bun B, bitch!) By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues-stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

I firmly believe that in the same way record collectors affected the way we think of "the blues," critics affect the way we think about music history. And this is why I think anti-rockism is so neccessary.

I agree with this except that it's not quite the same thing as I'm saying. Which is that the critical values generally assumed in a discussion of Clapton in the 60s/70s did not come into being with rock music. They were a pretty seamless continuation of a long tradition of how, for want of a better term, "folk-art" had been discussed since the nineteenth century. You can include pretty much anything with any of the characteristics of folk-art, from Robert Frost to Woody Guthrie to Charles Mingus, in that category.

To understand this you can't lose sight of what these critics, consciously or otherwise, were struggling against: the establishment view that pop/rock was meaningless froth and to treat is as if it were serious art was risible. It was a fight for critical respectability and they used the tools that would do the job. No point in pretending that The Rolling Stones could compete with Prokofiev in terms of formal complexity or musical sophistication. So you focus on authenticity of feeling, (alleged) lack of artifice, a tradition fed by the folk-art of the alienated and dispossessed, the need for an art that ariculated of the feelings of the politically disaffected and so on. Of course I agree that the particular folk-artists chosen for sanctification as part of the tradition were selected because they were a good sonic fit with rock; yes, people who listened Muddy Waters because they'd heard he was an influence on The Rolling Stones heard proto-rock music; but that isn't the same thing as saying critical values derived in the 60's and 70's were being used to judge art from the past. At the level of "what we like" it was a two-way street between the present and the past. At the level of "how we justify what we like" it was pretty much one-way.

Which is a bad thing because pop deserves to be treated as just as much serious art as classical music is.
-- Geir Hongro (geirhon...), May 10th, 2005.

Um, 'unpick' doesn't mean 'abolish', and nor does 'undermine the (existing or previous) alliance between pop and serious art/critical respectability' mean 'never treat pop seriously as art'. The recent thread about pop music on Dissensus also seemed to make this assumption about anti-rockism/popism - that it's about being anti-critical, and in the end always resorts to "who cares, it's fun, it gives me pleasure" as a way of bailing out of arguments. This strikes me as demonstrably untrue, there's a huge body of writing that indicates that what popism if often about is thinking ever more critically about pop - in the process, taking to pieces some very entrenched assumptions about the criteria which is used to assess it.

And I think at this late date "folk art" is a really vexed concept, in this day and age after the efforts of someone like my pal Steve Calt, who wrote strenuously to take apart the assumptions of a guy like David Evans, who was looking always for some illusory "tradition" of blues in the delta. If it were truly a "tradition," then why was it that by the '60s there weren't any black musicians down there who even remembered that Patton played blues? Surely that whole attitude has a lot to do with rockism, since the only way to make that old music supposedly "palatable" to modern ears was to connect it to what was happening then?

xpost Geir, I listen to lots and lots of music that isn't "danceable," I listen to tons of late-19th century composers, Ravel, Debussy...and to Bartok, Stravinsky...and Webern, Berg, both of whom I'm into these days. It's great to be an American and be able to do both, you know, and it makes me proud just like Lee Greenwood to realize that someone like Miles Davis could so fruitfully combine "danceable" with the innovations of serious European composers...

In this same lineage of thought, there's a new generation out there that treats old-school Hip-Hop as that which fed modern day electronic dance music, rather than it's own artform.

I lost interest in Clapton when I was about 16, but Robert Johnson, Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Charley Patton, Skip James, etc. remain fresh to my ears.

I think this idea of a "point of entry" is an important one that shouldn't be dismissed -- it's almost always been the tool by which I've overcome my musical boundaries.

For example, I liked James Brown. Someone told me once that Fela Kuti is "The African James Brown." So I listen to it to hear some funky grooves. But I gradually realize that it's something different, that he's not "The African James Brown," but that characterization has forced me to give it enough of a listen to realize what's unique and different about Fela.

Reading this thread, my own grasp of what is or is not rockism keeps coming in and going out of focus. Regardless, some underlying themes keep flashing me back to undergrad debates over authorial intent.

actually, he came at the end, encapsulating the form. also, if it werent for folk and rock, the blues would be the dead genre it was until unburied by trolling college students and 78 collectors.

shouldn't this be "yea"?

/pedant

Rather than abandon this, I've been able to expand my horizons by expanding my definition of "musicianship" -- just writing a catchy melody takes musicianship, singing in an "unmusical" way and making it convincing takes musicianship, scratching on turntables, beat-matching, tricking the rhythm while rapping (but also rapping in a straightforward, simple, forceful way), programming interesting beats in a laptop, even making noise sound unique and interesting, etc. But I still hear things somewhat in this context -- I listen partly for the human skill in everything, whether it's the producer's skill, the turntablist's skill, the guitarist's or whatever. And I don't equate "skill" or "musicianship" with "technique," either -- a technically great guitarist can exhibit a lack of "musicianship" by just not hitting those right, sweet notes, by overplaying, etc.

Are you as dumb as you seem, or are you just pretending?

All the menuets of the 1700s are danceable, I would say.... Nothing wrong about adding a beat to an artistic piece of music, but the beat still remains far from the most important thing.

To use the elephant-in-the-room sexism analogy, patriarchy doesn't treat males as normative so much as treat Male as normative ie. man as the embodiment of a certain type of masculinity, reasoning etc. etc.

This is an important distinction because it means that not only does rockist practice end up with a fairly restrictive view of other genres, or even the rock the listener dislikes; it's also quite restictive in regards to the rock the listener likes, by insisting that the value of the music is synomyous with the value of Rock, ie. the myth of Rock.

(Under the sexism analogy, disco is a woman, bad rock is a homosexual and good rock is a solid upstanding member of the fraternity who only gets commended for his skill at golf, while his beautiful poetry is passed over with silent tolerance)

not in blues it doesn't. See the great book "Origins of the Popular Style" for more on this.

A lot of the rock "canon" isn't that much influenced by the blues though.

Robert Johnson and especially Charley Patton had a good beat, in fact that stuff is ferocious. Howlin' Wolf in 1950. It's a mode like any other mode, and you can take out improvisation from blues and it really doesn't even matter. The beat is what is important and what is the organizing principle, not some vague notion of "feeling" which we, as good post-rockists, have discarded, I should think, long long ago. I have to politely but firmly disagree with you here, man--would suggest you go back and grit your teeth and *listen* to some blues music.

This is about rhythm, but not about beat.

So, I was in a record store today and I hear a little of this guy at the counter talking to the guy who works there and they're talking about Blackfoot and April Wine and the Allman Brothers. By the time I get up to the counter, they're talking about disco and the guy is saying that Donna Summer had an okay voice, but he didn't think much of her musical direction. Then, he starts in on this thing about how the '80s were a black hole in music, but he guesses that maybe U2 and the Police and maybe a couple of others were okay and ohmigod!

Between rhythm and beat?

The beat is in the bass and drums. The stuff in the background that you can dance to. The rhythm is everywhere. All music has rhythm, while a lot of music has no beat.

this thread has taken a turn toward rockism-as-love-of-Rock, but its previously discussed twin, rockism-as-hate-of-pop, is a better hook to hang my ideas on here. Tim F's dissection (waaay) upthread of the rockist's take on the various ways a popstar comes by her lyrics is sorta telling, cos it's abt the textual element, the part of the music that's the most easily described in specific terms: these are the words that were sung.

and I think that if we're talking about critical bad habits, and rockism is then the hegemonic collection of a bunch of bad critical habits that seem to form a "natural, obvious" shape to its adherents, it all hinges on an inability to write about music as such.

i think the MORAL terms that rockism uses for its dismissal of stuff it doesn't like are masks or screens for AESTHETIC judgements it doesn't know it has made and doesn't know how to speak about. A song is cheesy or pompous or cheap or bankrupt, but the investigation of this keyb sound or that swelling arrangement or the other beat pattern or whatever goes undone, or better said, happens automatically. And this goes for the stuff it likes as well! and this is what we see the various sounds that are coded as "good," MORALLY good, automatically produce good music when they are repeated.

and this is what we see time and again: any old boring shitty band that uses anything from the sound palette and songwriting mechanics from late 60s production is hailed, etc. you know the story.

interestingly: the good/bad categorization has to be constangtly updated as history goes its merry way. timbaland is an auteur and therefore good, and so his readymade triton sounds can't be totally bad, right? and some stuff is hailed as obviously great even if their sound is disapproved of or needs to be "heard thru" ie has anyone ever tried to sound like Husker Du ever again? (ok squirrel bait, i know)

HOWEVER, i won't go as far as someone like Amateurist, even tho I am asking for music writing to spend a little more braintime on the sonics. i'm not a strict formalist "music qua music, plz" kind of guy, cos thing is the politics are contained in the sonics. the embarrassment at a glassy digital synth preset or the honest joy of an overdriven tube amp: these are the immediate reactions of a rockist, the sound-in-ear first response, and all the social political stuff of what's right and what's wrong, who's in and who's out, is happening immediately. but in bringing that response into language, only the moral/political shortcut associations come through, and the aesthetic triggers are assumed.

"i think the MORAL terms that rockism uses for its dismissal of stuff it doesn't like are masks or screens for AESTHETIC judgements it doesn't know it has made and doesn't know how to speak about."

Yes this is a big part of it. I think it was Hurting who in another thread wanted to know whether anyone who disliked Britney was automatically rockist. And the answer of course is that one is not a rockist for simply disliking Britney, but that rockism almost inevitably creeps into the language that is used to dismiss her. eg. "manufactured" as a term collapses and conflates aesthetic and moral/political criteria as if they were identical.

A commitment to teasing these threads out inevitably leads to the conundrum of strict formalism (I'd say "amateurist formalism" but I'm not certain that this is precisely the position he argues from) and whether it is "enough". Is there a political component to sound?

On dissensus Mark K-Punk claimed that certain sonics have an inherent political/transformative potential (he defined it negatively: Snow Patrol's guitar sound comprehensively lacks this potential). I am partly sympathetic to this but I think the error is to locate this potential in the sound itself as some sort of inherent universal component rather than as one side of a potential relationship. Which is to say that the transformative potential of sonics is grounded in the musical, social and psychological contexts it is inserted into and forms a relationship with.

Sound never appears outside of a relationship of mediation through these forces, so for me a better formulation than "what are these sounds doing?" or even "what are these sounds doing to me?" is "what are these sounds doing to me and what am I and my world doing to them?" But a certain level of formalism - a commitment to identifying as near as possible how the music is actually working - is definitely a large part of this.

The danger of a more rigidly musicological formalism - a desire to establish some "set terms" for identifying what's going on, say - is that it misrepresents the fluidity of these relationships, ossifies them into timeless formulas.

incidentally, the ossification of classical music's sounds was its own political contest; i'm thinking of Pope whoever who banned instrumental music and even polyphony in the 14th cent., at least from church. it makes rockism seem so paltry!

and i don't want to demonize "classical" too much... even archconservatives from that world know the political or economic reasons why romantic music sounds so different from baroque, etc (tho maybe this is a more recent development, probably the 60s along with everything else...)

(plus the bear baiting pun was hard for me resist - or is "Geir" actually pronounced differently?)

Ten years now. You don't want to know, people. You DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

The Britney point is a good one: to illustrate -- my judgment of her is that she and her collaborators -- but she is always first -- mostly fail at what she's supposed to be good at, ie creating memorable tunes that I find enjoyable and that I would want to listen to again. Manufacturing or whatever doesn't enter into it. That there can be surprise over this is understandable -- I remember one time Nicole almost had a fit when I said "...Baby One More Time" was terribly unmemorable but if something just doesn't stick with me what am I supposed to say? 'Sorry.'? -- but if someone ever said (and nobody has) that I was somehow not understanding a deep truth about music through that song or numerous others because I didn't like it, well, get bent. Thankfully there is no Wennerized script pounding that into the collective unconscious and I hope to fuck there never is. ("Oops! I Did It Again," though, that's another matter. :-) )

Sorry to bring this back in, but this author just seems off the mark in his description. This word "syncopated" gets tossed about to mean anything not "white" sounding. If the rhythm of the song itself is syncopated, then of course it will sound weird if you de-syncopate it -- you'd be changing the song. Does he mean that the rhythm is "swung" maybe? That it is sometimes phrased behind the beat? I also don't understand what he means by a "background" of rhythm -- the rhythm section? Is he only talking about blues played by a full band?

There's a thread in this: Has Nicole Ever Been Wrong?

I do find it hard to let go of some of the impulses I have to use certain Rockist sounding terms to describe Britney and other pop I don't like though. It's not about "not playing an instrument" or "not writing her own songs" -- I couldn't care less about that. It's not that I don't think she's talented, she certainly is. I really do find her melodies and lyrics dull and her production seems sort of gimmicky and pyrotechnical without really moving me. But it's also, admittedly, that I can't help but hear deep cynicism in the music -- let's do this because this is what sells.

The danger, I recognize, is that some degree of cynicism must necessarily exist in all commercial music, and the tendency is to avoid identifying it in the music we like because that music seems so "real" "true" etc. Neil Young doesn't do things for commercial reasons man, he's an artist. Right. And this seems like the rockist thing to do -- wow, Wilco is so fucking independent because they moved to another division of the same record label. So maybe in Britney I more just intuitively recognize that it's someone elses values and tastes that are being cynically pandered to, not mine.

And then someone like Jay-Z, one of my absolute favorite artists, is so openly cynical, and yet I forgive him for it -- maybe because of that.

Re: memorible tunes vs. rockism - Baby Baby by Amy Grant is one of my favorite pop tunes post 1984.

All I ever demand is syncopation or a memorable meldoy. Anything else is icing, which is greatly appreciated.

What is clear here to me is this: you *HAVE* heard Britney, you don't like what you hear much and you have a particular response to that. I too have heard, don't like much of what I've heard from her etc. We have different responses and explanations as to why but the key thing is this: we've heard her. We've made a decision based on experience. Again, it's not "because* it's in the charts that we like or dislike something, or so I hope -- and if anyone wanted to advance that argument (and as much as I mostly see complaints of "It's just chart music," elsewhere I've seen the reverse mindset advanced as horrific reverse snobbism in the form of things like 'top 40 is the only democratic medium for things musical' -- PLEASE don't make me laugh), they're nuts. That's advancing the case for something unheard, rather than accepting the fact that someone can say, "Yeah, you know, I *have* heard this track that a lot of people like/dislike because it's so widely known -- and I disagree with the majority."

So in other words, you prefer it when the drummer sort of keeps a steady beat, as opposed to kind of interplaying with what the other instruments are doing? Or the other way around?

But I'm not saying that it has to be either...but yeah, typically, I have to put little effort into it when a synocated rhythm drives the song. Otherwise, it better have a damned good melody/weel placed chord changes for me to get it. But I don't get a lot...

Yeah this is a big point wrt the debate that proceeded the ILM rockism/anti-rockism debate - the rather similar indie/anti-indie debate. I think a lot of what fuelled ILM's early kneejerk anti-indie position (and thus, to some extent its pro-pop position) was a delayed realisation that indie music could be read as being quite cynical, that a lot of indie music was just as susceptible to the charge of being "manufactured" insofar as it appeared to conform too eagerly to certain very narrow sonic/cultural norms.

Which doesn't differentiate it from pop really except insofar as it's always very tempting to rubbish music when it seems to contradict its own stated or implied aesthetic goals so thoroughly (being anti-indie in this context is a bit like rubbishing Ashlee Simpson for falling short of the criteria by which she differentiates herself from Britney)

It's good that the board has been able to move beyond this mostly, although there are echoed eruptions everytime someone arrives who reasserts this moral distinction (commodity/artistry) in relation to pop/non-pop. One of the main reasons for moving beyond it is that, whichever way you play it, the anti-cynicism game posits the speaker as someone who escapes this process, as someone who music cannot "deceive". Whereas I would argue that all musical enjoyment is predicated on a certain logic of deception, a relationship between the music and the listener that is strictly speaking irrational and excessive.

(this isn't to say that certain pieces of music aren't necessarily cynical, or that all music is equally cynical; rather, that cynicism strikes me as being a mostly useless concept to explain or organise what you like or dislike)

OTM. But perhaps the idea of "cynicism" comes into play when we feel the deception is unsuccessful? As in we feel that our intelligence is insulted when something that seems predictable, obvious, cliched, contrived, etc. is put before us in the way that a 14-year-old might feel insulted when the magician at his kid-brother's birthday party pulls a coin from behind his ear and expects him to be wowed. I often feel this way at movies lately, not only at blockbuster movies but ESPECIALLY at "indie" or "arthouse" movies which often seem equally contrived but have the pretense of greater sophistication. And I suppose there's a parallel there with indie music.

Not sure why you're making this assertion.

With music that we love, feel an attachment to, we are unlikely to see it for "what it is" - simply a piece of music with certain melodic/rhythmic/lyrical/sonic etc. principles. A strictly neutral classification of formal characteristics is not commensurate with our overall feelings toward the song anymore than the same approach could explain completely the experience of having a crush on someone. Our fascination is stimulated by the sense in which the music appears to transcend such a neutral classification (Lacan might say that we desire what it "in the music more than the music").

This is why I'm hesitant to endorse accounts of musical enjoyment that hinge on a distinction of false/real consciousness - unless the account rejects enjoyment of music in its entirety what it is really doing is trying to set up distinctions of good/bad false-consciousness (ie. it is okay to be deceived if it is in the following manner, for the following purposes, and with the following results...)

This is why Hurting's magician analogy is a good one - our disappointment with the magician is not so much that his magic is false (unless we are very young perhaps), but rather that we haven't been deceived, our disbelief has not been suspended.

If there's a flaw with the magician analogy, it's that in some ways magic tricks and music work in a precisely opposite manner. With music, it's often the case that the more familiar we are with a certain "trick" the more likely we are to overlook the ropes and pulleys and other "giveaways", the more likely we are to be suitably satisfied. A magic show draws attention to the implausibility of its magic, to the process of the magic's production, whereas music is closer to religion or myth, where belief is valued over marvel and result over process (if the immaculate conception was part of a magic show, the key moment would be the moment of conception whereas Jesus himself would simply be a rabbit-equivalent).

I wanted to underline this because I think it's essential, and I agree with Tim (!! as ever). If k-punk is correct, I'd be very impressed and it would provide the basis for some kind of materialist / transformative musical politics. Since it would need quite a lot of brain science and musical logic to be joined up I assume it would fit the k-punk software quite well. I just don't believe it is correct, and I think the political effect takes us down the using low frequencies to make people shit themselves route rather rapidly i.e. nothing changes. Underwear sales go up. Shares rise in radical posturing.

I prefer the emphasis on context: in Adorno's terms what makes art art (if it works) is some kind of shock or disruption vis-a-vis its context. This is always fatally compromised (i.e. art is never simply possible) by the fact that art can only ever draw its materials from its context. (This context is other art works, traditions, everyday cultural stuff, and the capitalist world etc. i.e. to be understood quite widely). This could become a fairly ILX aesthetic, i.e. looking for 'innovation' or 'novelty' *wherever* (pop / rock / disco / art music) it appears *except* that the capitalist processes of production and distribution ALSO need innovation and novelty to keep selling people the-same-but-different products (and pop / rock / disco / art music are all caught up in this). So the task of criticism becomes negating the claim of the work to be art i.e. to have broken free, by showing this to have failed. What we call art is the existence of this paradox. But art music / disco / pop / rock have different relations to this idea anyway, because not all of them claim to be 'artistic', so not all can fail as badly.

-- Q (mcgra...), May 10th, 2005 5:26 PM. (later) (link)

What do you think? Jackass.

Commercial pop would work more within the way artistery was defined in ancient Greece, where there was no line between art and craft the way it is now, and where craft might have artistic elements while there was also a certain element of craft within art. This applies both whenever a hit producer does something slightly innovating and unexpected, and when a more traditionally oriented songwriter is showing his ability to master a particular already existing style, through a pastiche, or simply through creating another excellent song withing the same already existing style.

Geir, I'm not sure that there really is a "line" the way you're describing it, unless you're just being unabashedly rockist. Commercial pop doesn't have to be innovative.

I think this is a great point. And I think it ties into another recurring debate on ILM which is perhaps tangentially related to the rockism debate, which is "Do the artists' intentions matter?" This comes up in various forms. For instance, when someone says "I don't like Britney because she's just trying to make something that will sell." The response is often "What does it matter what she's trying to do? Just listen to the music as music." Now admittedly trying to infer an artist's intention and judge a piece of music based on that intention is often a tricky business. How often do any of us ever fully understand our own intentions, let alone the intentions of people we've never met and only know through their music? But at the same time, I do think it's somewhat self-defeating to ask people to completely forget about the artist's intentions. (Perhaps this ties into the whole deconstructionist "death of the author" movement in literature.) Because I think very few of us listen to music as "pure sound" - and I question whether anyone who has a functioning brain can really listen to anything as "pure sound" - unless they are in some sort of fleeting drug- or meditation-induced state of consciousness. In any case, I would guess that it makes up a very small percentage of the time we actually spend listening to music. And I don't think there's anything wrong with this. Why should we want to separate the human element out of music? Perhaps it is the human element that makes it worth listening to. Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, or how exactly it relates to the rockism debate. Food for thought, I guess.

Sorry to bring this back in, but this author just seems off the mark in his description. This word "syncopated" gets tossed about to mean anything not "white" sounding. If the rhythm of the song itself is syncopated, then of course it will sound weird if you de-syncopate it -- you'd be changing the song. Does he mean that the rhythm is "swung" maybe? That it is sometimes phrased behind the beat? I also don't understand what he means by a "background" of rhythm -- the rhythm section? Is he only talking about blues played by a full band?

Well, Hurting, my take on this statement is kinda what you say here--that, yeah, you're *changing the song*. In other words, it ain't a blues any more. Van Der Merwe goes on to talk about the relationship of the underlying syncopation and the harmonic structure of a blues song, the I-IV-V. So, to my mind, he's talking not about the superficial aspect of "how the song is being accompanied" by a band or by a lone guitar, but the mechanics of the form itself. And it seems like a really valid point to me. I mentioned this upthread not because I wanted to bait the bear, Geir, but because I found his statement about "blues didn't get a beat until Stax" or whatever really interesting--he seemed to have been talking about, again, superficial aspects of blues and not blues form. Again, Patton is a good example because the whole performance of a Patton song is based on "the beat," right? It's not something that crept in because the Mar-Keys came up with it in 1961.

And since my whole aesthetic is based far more on what Stax or soul music or blues did than it is on what the Beatles did (and there are similarities for sure), I found it interesting to think about this as it relates to the bigger question of rockism here, since I think rockism is in many ways fear of new rhythms or more basically a misunderstanding about how, say, disco rhythms derived from, among other things, Stax and Hi and Don Davis Detroit productions and Muscle Shoals, filtered thru some real interesting mis-readings of various American rhythms by Europeans. I don't mean "mis-readings" as pejorative either, since, again, rockism would call them *bad* misreadings and I just think, how interesting a development. Like Autechre, whom I like so much--they've said in interviews that they were really influenced by rap and disco, for example, and as someone who has plenty of down-home, "common-sensical" perceptions about music, I just find it fascinating to trace the development of all this from some record done at Malaco or Alabama thru to today, and I don't see why one should get exercised about some supposedly "normative" take on what music does when you can just relax and have fun with readings/mis-readings, go with it or even dance around to it. Isn't that rock aesthetics are all about anyway (being deliberately simplistic...)

What would characterize a literary rockist?

That doesn't sound exactly right to me. The syncopated rhythm of a *melody* has nothing to do with the *beat.* In rock or soul, the *beat*, as I assume Geir means it here, is the *underlying* rhythm, a more-or-less steady rhythmic pattern usually held by the drums (and I suppose you could say the bass as well, and maybe also the guitar in some cases). But this is pretty much standard usage of the word *beat* in pop music. It's not the rhythm that the singer sings.

By extension, I do think you could say that older blues (with just a singer and guitar) has a "beat" in that it has a pulse. Sometimes you can hear this in the artist stamping their foot, or in the sort of "CHUNK, CHUNK" on the guitar. But this *beat* is very often NOT syncopated -- it's just downbeats. The guitar part and the melody are often syncopated, but the underlying pulse or "beat" is not.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure blues was done with rhythm sections before the advent of Stax.

Well, that was that one, now largely forgotten, band with Kurt Cobain in it. (Frank Kogan on Nirvana, in 1991: "an intriguing synthesis of Husker Du type music with Bob Mould type vocals.")

Rather than say that one is "deceived" by a piece of music, we could say (like Baudrillard) that one is SEDUCED by a piece of music. And I would argue that seduction is part of the natural order of things (the mating instinct, etc.).

Not if you're using it to persuade people with whom you disagree.

Well Tim I'm not trying to say that it's bad to be deceived/seduced/interpellated by music anymore than I would claim it's bad to have a crush on someone. I think you're inferring a value judgment that isn't there.

Nor am I trying to say that we should only consider music as a collection of sounds: the point, rather, is to acknowledge that beyond that nothing about music is self-evident (indeed, even the sounds themselves are somewhat slippery: sounds sound different to different people and in different situations).

The choice of "deception" specifically here was merely in service of a rhetorical point, which is that the mechanism by which listeners are "deceived" by Britney (the rockist argument) is true of all musical enjoyment. If rockists only talked in terms of "seduction" this wouldn't be an issue, but instead they try to set up a limited definition of "deception" which they hold themselves out as having escaped or transcended.

Likewise I'm not trying to say that neutrality = truth. The whole point here is that truth in music cannot exist outside of a given relationship to it, and such relationships are always, for want of a better word, partisan.

Of course that doesn't mean that I necessarily with o. nate when he says:

"Why should we want to separate the human element out of music? Perhaps it is the human element that makes it worth listening to. Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this, or how exactly it relates to the rockism debate. Food for thought, I guess."

Or, rather, I agree with him, but not if he uses "human element" to refer to the creator of the music. The "human element" in music is a fantasy we construct in response to certain sounds and codes within the music - it is us! And this is the "irrational" component to musical enjoyment.

Hypothetical: I find an empty bottle on the beach. I begin to wonder if it had once contained a message put in it by someone lost on a desert island in the middle of the ocean. I imagine a forty-year old woman who has been living on this island for three years after she went on a cruise trip in a fit of pique at her unfaithful husband, and one night she had too much to drink at the bar, toddled out onto the deck, tried to stand on the railing and promptly fell in with no-one seeing. The next morning she found herself washed up on a strange beach and has been there ever since.

Now even if (flying in the face of all probability) my imagined back-story for this bottle is actually 100% correct, that doesn't change the fact that this story is a fantasy of mine, which says more about me than it does about the bottle or the woman on the island. It is "irrational" to assume it is correct even if it is correct.

A slight innovation, such as inventing a new bassline, a catchy synth theme or some weird idea that nobody (or at least not most people) have heard before may often lead to commercial success.

This may often be derived from something truly innovative, but commercially unsuccesful, though.

Sometimes I think that when a critic reviews a record, they're not so much reviewing the record itself as they are reviewing what goes on inside their heads when they listen to the record. Critics tend to prefer records that have the clarity and limpidity of an abstract idea. The records that regularly top the best-of-all-time polls are the records that seem to stand for something in our minds. Once an album gets associated with an idea - ie., an "important innovation" in music that it represents - then its critical esteem is assured. For example, for many critics, the Beatles "Sgt Peppers" represents the innovation of the "concept album". For others, the music of James Brown represents the revolution in pop music of "rhythm replacing melody". It's easier for us to think about music when we can associate it with something concretely historical or social. Our minds are evolved to think primarily in social terms, and abstract forms such as music are easier for us to think about when we can render them in social terms.

In order for a school of criticism to succeed, it needs to develop a consistent narrative or frame of reference. This allows critics within that school to associate the same musical cues with the same social references. "Rockism" is one such frame which has succeeded. It has become a dominant school of thought in pop criticism for the past couple of decades. "Anti-rockism" is not an effort to eliminate these sorts of social associations for musical cues, rather it is an attempt to create a new frame of associations that will lead to a new set of conclusions about which kinds of music are important or "good".

haha Green Day's "Welcome to Paradise" to thread

I don't think I agree with this, but maybe you should expound first?

Well I don't think that the alternative has become established enough at this point to define it very well. There are still many competing frames vying for supremacy, if you will. As the top dog, rockism attracts challengers from all directions. So "anti-rockism" is perhaps more a temporary coalition of disenfranchised challengers, rather than a coherent frame in itself, if you will.

Rockism is here to stay:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/atrak/deadmau5-press-play_b_1694719.html

and here i was worried...

I think alext's posts in this thread were the original seed of my decision to write my masters thesis on adorno several years later.

It's funny... I'm reading Joe Carducci's legendary Rock and the Pop Narcotic at the moment, which is generally held up as a sort of Rockist ur-text as far as I can tell. The thing is, what a lot of people far upthread (and long ago) seem to be describing as Rockism is precisely what Carducci is arguing *against*... For instance, this:

Anti-Rockist criticism might be expressed as a kind of Formalism which seeks to describe a musical event as music. Or critics might then go beyond "mere" Formalism to analyse the assumptions that are made about the presence of value or meaning in the music. From "what does it sound like" to "how does how the way it sounds and is performed attempt to create a meaning, and how is that meaning undermined by the way it's performed and the way it sounds?"
Or write as subjectively and temporally as possible about the experience of listening/seeing as it happened.

― TV's Mr Noodle Vague (noodle vague), Friday, May 6, 2005 5:48 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Carducci is striving to describe what makes rock music work in music terms, in terms of the interaction of the players, the way they navigate musical space together. The extraneous stuff is, to him, bullshit, and he actually vociferously lambasts critics for focusing on the "worthiness" of a Springsteen or a Stipe.

How many of you guys who regularly participate in discussions using the terms "Rockist" and "Rockism" have actually read that book? What did you think of it? Is it a good example of Rockism or is it its own singular thing?

I've also sort of always been uncomfortable with one of the underlying semi-consensuses of ILM thought: the idea that talking about "feel" is bad and not helpful. I guess I don't hate the idea that this concept is hard to define/discuss--I mean, it's really freaking hard to do that--but some folks I think have taken it a step further and stretched this observation to mean "feel" doesn't actually exist, that people who talk about "feel" are just bullshitting. In other words, they've made a discursive observation (that it doesn't help to talk about "feel") into an observation about what's actually there (or not there) in the music. I'll try to find some examples of this, but hopefully you know what I mean.

I do think "feel" is an important notion, but I also acknowledge that it's hard to discuss. I don't think that matters very much, however, unless you care about criticism more than the music itself. I don't mean to expand/distort the discussion here too much, it's just something that's been on my mind a lot as I've been working through Carducci.

i've read it, and carducci's other music book - enter naomi: sst and all that. they are favorites of mine...(minus the reagan worship in r&pn)...but yeah carducci's not going to easily fit into any neat category IMO...his blog, the new vulgate publishes some great stuff....

i'm a rockist in some important ways. but i try to be open minded to things and not let it overwhelm me hearing things that are pop that are good.

This is how I'd describe myself, too, I think. Rock and the Pop Narcotic is such a deeply flawed book (he ends up railing against a constantly shifting hydra of a strawman so much of the timme), but I find it amazingly compelling.

I think I'm also feeling the influence of my drift, as of the past year or so, pretty heavily into metal. I'm realizing how much sheer joy I get out of hearing guitars, basses, and drums played together in ways that excite me, and discovering all this stuff, old and new, where that's the basic framework has really underlined that for me. I do also love techno, but I think my tastes in techno are pretty Rockist in some ways as well.

I'm also extremely, vehemently rockist about wine (my line of work), and I think I'm uncomfortable with the notion of entirely abandoning that way of thinking when it comes to music. I think good wines, meaningful wines, come from relatively small farmers who grow the grapes themselves, practice a great deal of difficult manual labor in the vineyards (limiting the use of machines), and do as little in the cellar as possible with regard to technology (i.e., they don't "sculpt" the wines). The parallels with rockism are pretty apparent.

Clarke the main problem with the wine analogy is that thinking about music as being like food/drink is one of the most reliably misleading groups of analogies for how music "works" that remain widely used.

Firstly, the production of wine is necessarily technical in a formalist, circumscribed way that doesn't apply to music per se - there aren't any particular processes and ingredients that need to be involved for music to be music.

So immediately a key distinction between wine and music is that you're trying to conflate appreciation of something which needs to conform to particular rules in order to be recognisable as that thing with appreciation of something that doesn't. This immediately changes the legitimacy and operation of rule-based appreciation. Whereas wine appreciation is much more comparable to appreciation of a particular sport (music genre appreciation is also comparable to sports fandom - however both wine appreciation and music genre appreciation are much more like sports fandom than they are like each other).

The more general problem with food/drink analogies is that the relationships between substance/process and taste are much more predictable in the case of food/drink than in music - with much less variations in how the product is experienced - while preferences obviously differ the actual experience of taste of food substances doesn't differ to nearly the same extent as it does with music.

Imagine your wine appreciation being transposed to much more appropriate (though still problematic) analogies for music - writing and art:

"I think good art, meaningful art, come from relatively modest artists who mix the paint themselves, practice a great deal of difficult manual labor in their studio (limiting the use of mechanical aids), and do as little as possible with post-production technology."

"I think good books, meaningful books, come from relatively unknown writers who type up the manuscript on a typewriter without the continual self-editing efficiencies of a word processor, and whose works are not edited following the completion of the first draft manuscript."

Obviously these would be fairly meaningless and bizarre standards of judgement!

The more general problem with food/drink analogies is that the relationships between substance/process and taste are much more predictable in the case of food/drink than in music - with much less variations in how the product is experienced - while preferences obviously differ the actual experience of taste of food substances doesn't differ to nearly the same extent as it does with music.

I think we're getting into somewhat murky waters here... One critic can taste a really technique-driven, ornately composed, "creative" dish (this is the chef-as-auteur tradition) and be stunned by the complexity of flavors and textures involved, and full of praise for the chef's vision or what have you. Whereas another critic can taste the same dish and be put off by the stench of striving-to-impress, the fussiness and overcrowdedness of it. This critic may well prize a simple, straightforward, ingredient-driven approach to cooking that downplays the chef's role and highlights the quality of what's involved and the elegance of a relatively unadorned presentation.

I guess I don't know exactly what you mean by "the actual experiences of taste of food substances"... If you're talking about our biological ability to discern flavors, etc, then sure--but then with music as the analogue that's about as useful as saying that we all have eardrums and brains that process music, thus we all "hear" basically the same thing when we listen to a piece of music. It all comes down to what particular standards of judgment we bring to the table when the food passes our lips or the music buzzes our eardrums, right?

I like what mrjosh way upthread was getting at, and I think I agree:

TV sorta continued: In poststructuralist critical circles there was a great term that popped up: "out-left," as in "I have been out-lefted" or "I can out-left you!" And this referred to the degree to which a hegemonic ideological commitment could be unearthed by a skilled deconstructor in almost any position or statement.
Right now, the rockists have been out-lefted by everyone. Now, all the anti-rockists are starting to out-left each other. This will continue until everyone is exhausted and recognizes that their own positions are all beholden to certain underlying aesthetic / political / ideological positions. At that point things will settle down and everyone will feel free to appreciate the music they like, etc.

Douglas / Tom: Sure, rockism is ingrained in language just like misogyny is arguably ingrained in language, I agree. But I *don't* think people are willing to admit that their anti-rockism positions are just as normative, capitalist, or what have you as rockist positions, which is what they are. Example: the "white guys with guitars" thread.

― mrjosh (mrjosh), Friday, May 6, 2005 6:17 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hope that douglas wolk introduces himself these days by saying: "Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on Rockism."
I'm re-reading that Carducci book too, and yeah, in a lot of ways he *is* an anti rockist in that he really doesn't care about the kinda primal, (non-musical) myths of rock music that became firmly entrenched thanks to rolling stone and its writers in the 70s. he really cares about rock MUSIC as opposed to the rock EXPERIENCE. if that makes sense.

It all comes down to what particular standards of judgment we bring to the table when the food passes our lips or the music buzzes our eardrums, right?

Yes I would grant that. Hence my caveat about preferences re food, which I should have fleshed out. Obviously all experience is mediated and subject to individual aesthetic judgement.

The difference (which is relative rather than categorical) is that the technique to product to "flavour" relationships are much more predictable* with food - the amount you heat a piece of meat will affect whether it tastes raw or well-done, and this distinction is at least partly meaningful without knowing anything about social trends in cooking.

Obviously we then apply preferences and standards of judgement on top of that (from the simple "I prefer my steaks medium rare" to the more involved "this particular style of meat historically has been served blue and I think to get the authentic experience of this dish it shouldn't be cooked any more than that").

* That is not to say they're objective or universal, just predictable. If you asked two random people to describe what a dish of food tastes like, they're much more likely to offer similar descriptions than if you ask them what a particular song sounds like. At root is the fact that whether something tastes good or not - while not predetermined or universal - is related to biological imperatives that simply doesn't apply to music. While we're all biologically capable of hearing particular qualities in music, the experience of those qualities serves no particular biological purpose.

If you think of paintings, there are paintings that look "wrong" to a large amount of people. This is in part a physical experience: the experience of absorbing the art through vision. But the idea of rightness of wrongness is, in that case, an entirely social construction.

Also:

Right now, the rockists have been out-lefted by everyone. Now, all the anti-rockists are starting to out-left each other. This will continue until everyone is exhausted and recognizes that their own positions are all beholden to certain underlying aesthetic / political / ideological positions. At that point things will settle down and everyone will feel free to appreciate the music they like, etc.

Douglas / Tom: Sure, rockism is ingrained in language just like misogyny is arguably ingrained in language, I agree. But I *don't* think people are willing to admit that their anti-rockism positions are just as normative, capitalist, or what have you as rockist positions, which is what they are. Example: the "white guys with guitars" thread.

― mrjosh (mrjosh), Friday, May 6, 2005 6:17 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This misses the point somewhat: "anti-rockism" is/was about trying to get to the point where "everyone is exhausted and recognizes that their own positions are all beholden to certain underlying aesthetic / political / ideological positions." Its usefulness as a critical intervention is inversely proportionate to the extent to which such positions are recognised as such.

It also doesn't claim that being rockist is more capitalist than not being rockist - only more hegemonic, within certain social contexts. And of course it flies in the face of common sense to say that all positions are equally hegemonic in any given social context. However, what is or is not hegemonic in any particular context is of course a historical fact which is subject to change.

Incidentally, in similar vein, the phenomenon of out-lefting was not actually about claiming an absence of ideological commitment, but mostly about claiming that the ideological commitment of the out-lefted was more hegemonic (and, for real rhetorical force, oppressive) than that of the out-lefter.

My niece who just turned 1 has this toy keyboard that has a round yellow button that plays about five songs. She always hones in on that yellow button to the exclusion of the keys and the instrument buttons. I was there when the toy was introduced to her and I don't think I've seen anyone show her how the toy is supposed to be used or encourage the preference for the yellow button. This is just anecdotal - it's not evidence - but do you think her preference for music over the tones she makes with the other buttons, which themselves could be construed as musical, is coincidental or something inherent to her biology? That is, just because music doesn't serve any biological imperative, does that mean that taste FOR music, if not taste IN music, has no biological foundation?

Yes, I disagree with the argument that there is no biological element to aesthetic preference, even if it not considered an "imperative" in the same sense as food.

If you asked two random people to describe what a dish of food tastes like, they're much more likely to offer similar descriptions than if you ask them what a particular song sounds like.

Part of the problem with the comparison is that people have a different range of things they might be considering in either case. Asking people if they hear higher or lower pitches or dissonant or consonant intervals would be comparable with asking them whether they experience something sweet or savory with food.

I guess maybe I shouldn't have said I am rockist

I barely understand this thread...It's just I like Neil Young so much I figure I must be.

This misses the point somewhat: "anti-rockism" is/was about trying to get to the point where "everyone is exhausted and recognizes that their own positions are all beholden to certain underlying aesthetic / political / ideological positions." Its usefulness as a critical intervention is inversely proportionate to the extent to which such positions are recognised as such.

This makes a lot of sense, Tim... It feels much like what Wittgenstein was trying to accomplish in his later writings, which have been described as "therapeutic" (your use of the word "intervention" is great)--offering a freedom from the at-the-time hegemonic notion of meaning in language (which, ironically, his influential early stuff helped establish!) not through "solving" existing problems but through shedding light on the underlying assumptions of the dominant framework from which those problems were approached, thereby, well, "dissolving" rather than solving them. I really like thinking about "anti-rockism" not as position in itself but as a therapy that allows one to get rid of hang-ups. (That feels a bit like stating the obvious, but I do think it's important to try and avoid anti-rockism hardening into just another dogma, when its purpose should really be to liberate us as individuals into a more direct, intuitive, and non-ethically-mediated relationship with music.)

Yes, I disagree with the argument that there is no biological element to aesthetic preference, even if it not considered an "imperative" in the same sense as food.

the non-imperative nature of it is where I think the differences stem from, though: it results in an experience where the degree of variability introduced by social construction is substantially increased.

Part of the problem with the comparison is that people have a different range of things they might be considering in either case. Asking people if they hear higher or lower pitches or dissonant or consonant intervals would be comparable with asking them whether they experience something sweet or savory with food.

yes, and these aren't the kinds of distinction of taste that we generally mean when we refer to people's taste in music.

Our relationship to food typically is grounded in much more basic properties than is the case with music.

So it's not that taste in food is fundamentally different, but that the discourse around taste in food is structured very differently.

Well there's only one logical thing I can post at this point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM_8vOG-3CY