Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

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.