Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

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.