Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

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.