Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

semioticians would say that any ideology happens because it happens to serve the interests of a group of people. they use their influence to put norms and limits on what signs can mean to maintain their influence

It isn't only semioticians who talk this way, it's pervasive throughout vast corridors of academia. Talk of hegemony has a lot in common with conspiracy theory, and I mean that in the mean way.

I'd be startled if many people didn't accept the concept of hegemony these days - even the center right tacitly accept it in the characterisation of the liberal media.

like clarke b, i wonder if anything can be salvaged from "artistic merit"...

when i was a kid, i was a hardline atheist/materialist, but as i've gotten older, i've softened considerably (ahem). i'm no longer inclined to aggressively deny the existence of things simply because they can't be proven, and even if i could be purely rational about everything, i doubt that i'd want to. i guess i try to leave a little room for the ineffable.

similarly, and though i can't satisfactorily define it even on a personal level, i'm loathe to entirely discard the notion of artistic merit. to do so would feel too much like surrender to the cruelest and most lifeless aspects of rational materialism, where all things become inert objects, and nothing has any value or meaning other than that which we arbitrarily assign. of course, that position is eminently defensible, unassailable even - but it seems so pinched and defensive. so, you're right. so what?

rather than insist on the tedious equivalency of all things, it seems much more interesting to me to risk foolishness in pursuit of what is valuable, as one sees it. that could be the worship of superhuman technical expertise, or an identification with the margins and extremes of culture, or even a moral vision of art's higher purpose. i respect the sort of devotion that outstrips any rational justification, at least where art is concerned.

"artistic merit" is one of those meaningless terms like "nutritional value"

― the late great, Friday, July 27, 2012 8:32 PM (1 hour ago)

ironically, i was thinking of your point about leaving "wiggle room for magic"* while composing that last post. if we're inclined to leave room for spirituality and magic in our conception of the physical universe, why should artistic merit be so difficult to accept?

* see ILX fear of death thread

i think the critical framework of 'rockism' vs 'pop(ul)ism' is not a good one.

― one dis leads to another (ian), Friday, July 27, 2012 9:04 PM (1 hour ago)

agree. it's frankly lousy.

ironically, i was thinking of your point about leaving "wiggle room for magic"* while composing that last post. if we're inclined to leave room for spirituality and magic in our conception of the physical universe, why should artistic merit be so difficult to accept?

As with spirituality and the universe, it's not the leaving of wiggle room that is the problem, but the fact that very few people are prepared to accept that they might be wrong about what it is.

is artistic merit the same as cultural uplift? i have to agree that lip syncing lends itself to cultural debasement because of the built-in cynicism. autotune is cool, though.

gah, make that "i'm loath to entirely discard the notion" a few posts back. loath/loathe thing always gets me...

And oddly, the main story on CNN.com today:
http://us.cnn.com/2012/07/27/showbiz/art-pop-music-image/index.html

There's a veritable army of straw men in the comments.

like clarke b, i wonder if anything can be salvaged from "artistic merit"...

when i was a kid, i was a hardline atheist/materialist, but as i've gotten older, i've softened considerably (ahem). i'm no longer inclined to aggressively deny the existence of things simply because they can't be proven, and even if i could be purely rational about everything, i doubt that i'd want to. i guess i try to leave a little room for the ineffable.

similarly, and though i can't satisfactorily define it even on a personal level, i'm loathe to entirely discard the notion of artistic merit. to do so would feel too much like surrender to the cruelest and most lifeless aspects of rational materialism, where all things become inert objects, and nothing has any value or meaning other than that which we arbitrarily assign. of course, that position is eminently defensible, unassailable even - but it seems so pinched and defensive. so, you're right. so what?

rather than insist on the tedious equivalency of all things, it seems much more interesting to me to risk foolishness in pursuit of what is valuable, as one sees it. that could be the worship of superhuman technical expertise, or an identification with the margins and extremes of culture, or even a moral vision of art's higher purpose. i respect the sort of devotion that outstrips any rational justification, at least where art is concerned.

― contenderizer, Saturday, July 28, 2012 1:21 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I like this post a lot, contenderizer. I would never decry the notion of artistic merit; I was only trying to explore the situations in which the phrase tends to pop up, because I think it's always telling to examine usage when dealing with such nebulous things.

I furthermore think "risking foolishness in the pursuit of what's valuable" is something we naturally do. To point at something like that meme photo of Jeff Mills and the "Three DJs With One Laptop" and think that the three DJs are the lame ones is not, I would argue, a reflex honed by some sort of rockist brainwashing, but rather a fairly natural thing to think. There's something impressive, life-affirming, and inspiring about the way Jeff Mills pursues his craft, and that's something people naturally connect to--something they find value in. It feels dry, smarmy, and condescending to insist that those who believe in the aesthetic superiority of Jeff Mills in the above scenario are exercising bad thinking. (Side thought: maybe they're not thinking; maybe they're responding on a gut level to a perceived sham-ness and bullshit in the other act. If that's the case, why is this bad?)

the tedious equivalency of all things

This phrase really gets at it for me. It may well be an impressive achievement to be able to respond to everything you encounter as "just music" (although I've never really understood what this would feel like, or how you would prove that that's what you were doing), but even if I could, I don't think I'd want to. The model of a listener as some sort of totally unbiased ingester of aural information who never enters the messy fray of extra-musical ethics, questions of authenticity, etc, seems to me to be no fun at all. It's a way to feel broad-minded without having to get your hands dirty.

ARGGGGHHHH why do you all keep jumping to the conclusion that the choice is between rockism and "the tedious equivalency of all things".

Maybe I just think the awesomeness of Jeff Mills is something to be decided and discussed and advocated for rather than already decided by god/the universe.

Tim F. My inadequate response to your First line: yes I see how the rockism discussion goes back and forth, finally read a bunch of it this morning, but it does depend on how far people want to take it and I don't see consensus.

Tim F. My possibly misplaced response to your Second line: it is obvious, right, that when I say "this is good," that it is - I hate to resort to this cliche - "always already" my opinion? Do I have to add, "IMHO", all the time, so that nobody gets intimidated? I know people who actually believe this matters. It doesn't.

Again, this may not be a fair response to how you feel, so I will throw out an opinion//fact decided by god: Being paranoid about the effects of critical hegemony is misguided; being actively anti-hegemonic is inherently flawed because it is being hegemonic.

I want to say, again not necessarily to Tim F., but to everyone, everywhere, (cue guitar opening of The Youngbloods "Get Together" here) just do your work, be some other thing. Being "anti-hegemonic" is no escape from hegemony, no more than being atheist is an escape from religion. Be agnostic about hegemony. Here, I think I will make this into a beautiful internet meme.

ARGGGGHHHH why do you all keep jumping to the conclusion that the choice is between rockism and "the tedious equivalency of all things".

Maybe I just think the awesomeness of Jeff Mills is something to be decided and discussed and advocated for rather than already decided by god/the universe.

― Tim F, Saturday, July 28, 2012 6:07 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry to frustrate you, Tim! I don't think taste always works that way, though... We often respond to things on a gut aesthetic level and then rationalize (then advocate for) why it is that they're good/bad. The discussion is more a working through the details of that response than some sort of forum after which we make our decision as to how we feel. A lot of people don't feel the need to offer more than a "rules" or a "sucks"--which makes for boring discourse, obviously. But I don't think people have any obligation whatsoever to be able to articulate their tastes.

Rockism is, of course, a sort of stunted attempt to create an aesthetic framework for one's tastes. Which, to bring it back to wine, is often more harmful to aesthetic happiness than having no framework whatsoever. We say in the wine business sometimes that "a little knowledge is dangerous"--people think they know stuff about wine, and their prejudices (often a melange of iffy received wisdom, extremely limited exposure to certain wine regions or grape varieties, and identity politics) prevent them from engaging with entire huge swaths of the world of wine.

Thinking over it the past few days, I wonder if rockism's fatal flaw might be the ol' correlation/causation conflation. In trying to work out why he likes certain things, a rockism-inclined individual may notice that, hey, he tends to like dudes sweating it out on guitars/bass/drums, he likes real-time performance, he likes albums recorded with a dry, "documentarian approach" (great Carducci phrase to describe lots of '70s hard rock production), etc. The discursive leap is to say that the reason the stuff is good is BECAUSE it has those characteristics. And then, further, that stuff that doesn't have those characteristics is bad BECAUSE it lacks them. This is the line of thinking that has led to thousands of shitty bands (Burzum made all his stuff on a four-track with purposefully poor microphones; that's WHY it rules, and I can do it, too!). Non-rock is of course subject to this sort of thing, too; Jeff Mills isn't awesome BECAUSE he uses three decks and can mix really fast and spins only vinyl. I would argue that Jeff Mills wouldn't be Jeff Mills and wouldn't quite have the rep/respect that he does if he didn't do things this way, but that's only because I do belive certain mediums are better, more sensitive revealers of artistic talent than others.

Which brings me to the idea of the auteur. I've never really found that notion controversial, though, and I don't understand why it catches so much flak. Talented individuals who have the ability to connect with audiences and create art that stands apart from that of their peers are who we all gravitate toward as we navigate our way through the piles and piles and piles of music/film/art/wine/food, right? I guess what I'm saying is that I can easily sidestep the pitfalls of rockism, but I'm not exactly sure how to do it without at least gently appealing to the notion of the auteur.

Here are what I consider to be the key tenets of anti-rockism, laid bare for you. If you think any of them are wrong, please explain:

1. There is no necessary hierarchy of musical qualities.

2. Further, musical qualities are not consistent and easily isolated forces for good or bad: the perception of their goodness or badness depends on their articulation with and through other qualities (Frank Kogan's Boney Joan Rule).

3. Genres are not in and of themselves a spiritual force, and there is no 'essence' of genres. What "rock" means... depends.

4. The greatness of music is not the direct expression of the greatness of its creator. Similarly, the creator cannot control what their music means (although for obvious reasons their POV is usually worth taking seriously).

5. The perception of greatness in music is derived through the experience of listening to the music (and potentially absorbing other phenomena - photos, interviews etc.). Hence the listener's notion of the greatness of the performer is always necessarily an imaginative reconstruction (although potentially a very accurate one).

------

Each of the above tenets is not intended to shut down discussion - e.g. what did X songwriter mean for X song to be about - but to avoid conversations being shut down, lines of inquiry not being pursued.

The vast majority of careful, insightful music criticism already adopts each of the above 5 tenets whether openly or implicitly, and whether the writer considers herself a rockist or an anti-rockist or whatever.

Tim F. My possibly misplaced response to your Second line: it is obvious, right, that when I say "this is good," that it is - I hate to resort to this cliche - "always already" my opinion? Do I have to add, "IMHO", all the time, so that nobody gets intimidated? I know people who actually believe this matters. It doesn't.

Yes, of course it doesn't matter. I am more than prepared to argue forcefully for my opinion, knowing it's only mine. The fact that it's mine and not the universe's makes me more passionate about wanting to win the argument - I have more at stake!

Again, this may not be a fair response to how you feel, so I will throw out an opinion//fact decided by god: Being paranoid about the effects of critical hegemony is misguided; being actively anti-hegemonic is inherently flawed because it is being hegemonic.

Agreed. Hegemony per se is not something that particularly worries me per se even though I think it exists (individual instances might). Agreed that there's really no such critical or academic practice as "anti-hegemonic" - maybe "counter-hegemonic".

But also a lot of stuff that sets itself up as "counter-hegemonic" is really no such thing either. It is definitely useful for the left to see the right stealing some of its more petulant rhetorical devices.

What is the reason for the argument that a genre has no spiritual essence?

I understand when you say "what 'rock' means...depends," but that doesn't seem (to me) to contradict the postulation that a genre has some sort of essence.

jumping in with a deleuzian thought: neither rockism or anti-rockism is "right" but they form a disjunctive synthesis that reflects an oedipal double-bind at its worst, or a ... larger cultural topography? relationships between desire and production? ... at its best.

essentialist talk is always ideological, but there's something about being "anti-rockist" that's somehow equally bothersome to me.

that being said, i think no music has to mean anything in particular, that this link is culturally and biologically (biological always cultural) finessed into a million shades of meaning -- very important to remember when music begins to mean a million different things to us, because we can ask why much more insightfully -- AND make music mean for us in more honest ways (which is more fun and more serious at the same time).

^thoughts i don't know how to make coherent rn

i mean, i think rockism (or some kind of musical essentialism) vs. anti-rockism (meaning is slippery oh no!) is a debate where the fact that this very debate exists means that it's enabling "us" to perform/hold up this late capitalist fetish of authenticity along with its flipside of permissiveness/"fun"/"shopping" or w/e. i mean, everything is already authentic and everything is already permissible, but that doesn't mean that certain outcomes aren't more desirable/sustainable than others?

I like all your 5 tenets, Tim. In practice they are as likely to turn out anti-anti-rockist as they are anti-rockist, but that's a nitpick.

I absolutely agree with you that the subjectivity of aesthetic argument is exactly what is exciting about engaging in it, especially combined with barely-defensible feelings for my positions.

My suspicion of hegemony-talk stems straight from my five-years-and-counting grad school experience, especially the forced exposure to cultural studies (which I did not knowingly or willingly sign up for - a very colonizing field, cultural studies).

What is the reason for the argument that a genre has no spiritual essence?

― timellison, Saturday, July 28, 2012 11:07 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Rock is a word to describe a collection of music tied together by loose sonic and social affiliations and those affiliations change over time.

The "idea" of rock does not proceed from essence to particular manifestation, but the other way round: our notion of what rock means is derived from the manifestations in order to reverse-engineer a working definition.

In essence, new instances of rock work by a process of analogy with other instances, rather than all instances being in communication (to a greater or lesser degree of directness or success) with a platonic ideal.

Also this:

The greatness of music is not the direct expression of the greatness of its creator.

In what sense is this intended? If I believe that Chopin's second sonata is a great piece of music, is there some argument here that it doesn't reflect on Chopin as a person in a way that some might suggest?

Genres don't have a spiritual essence but are a set of expectations. However, "rock" could be a spiritual state as well as a genre. I'm going to turn into Bruce on Kids in the Hall if I take this any further.

I agree with those statements but still don't agree with the premise that a genre has no essence - at least if you look at essence at something that can be viewed in retrospect rather than as a set of rules followed meticulously in the first place.

x-post to Tim F

My suspicion of hegemony-talk stems straight from my five-years-and-counting grad school experience, especially the forced exposure to cultural studies (which I did not knowingly or willingly sign up for - a very colonizing field, cultural studies).

― Vic Perry, Saturday, July 28, 2012 11:23 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally fair call. It's a shame that most of the people who like to pretend they're Raymond Williams don't share his capacity to sound like a particuarly smart ILX poster (Nitsuh maybe).

I agree with those statements but still don't agree with the premise that a genre has no essence - at least if you look at essence at something that can be viewed in retrospect rather than as a set of rules followed meticulously in the first place.

― timellison, Saturday, July 28, 2012 11:30 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This probably depends on the uh hardness of the use of "essence" - do we simply mean definitional property/ies (in which case, sure), or an inherent, unchanging, causal and really existing spiritual essence?

Because if something only exists in retrospect then it cannot be the latter.

I'm not sure what you mean by "really existing" - as opposed to what?

Also this:

The greatness of music is not the direct expression of the greatness of its creator.

In what sense is this intended? If I believe that Chopin's second sonata is a great piece of music, is there some argument here that it doesn't reflect on Chopin as a person in a way that some might suggest?

― timellison, Saturday, July 28, 2012 11:27 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No it may reflect on Chopin, but it's not a direct reflection, meaning that what a particular piece of music means cannot be reduced to the creator (and the creator cannot be reduced to their music, for that matter).

This particular tenet obviously becomes more pressing as the responsibility for stylistic content becomes more disseminated - if a dance producer creates a piece of music in a particular style that existed before them, and it's a great tune, is it great because it expresses the creator's greatness, or because it expresses the style's greatness (and hence, arguably, the greatness of some prior creator(s))? It is, of course, highly unlikely to be either of these things solely.

I'm not sure what you mean by "really existing" - as opposed to what?

― timellison, Saturday, July 28, 2012 11:42 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as opposed to something existing for the purpose of definitional consistency - i.e. we choose to describe a group of records of "rock", and we try to agree (not always successfully) about what we mean when we say "rock".

I don't see what it has to do with directness or a lack of directness. The piece was written by Chopin; what does saying that it's "not a direct reflection" of him mean? That there is more to him than the piece? That there is more to the piece than him (because of historical factors that play a part in the piece, etc.)? These statements strike me as being self-evident, but maybe there is some other meaning to "not a direct reflection of him" that I am missing.

Why is anti-essentialism a tenet of anti-rockism, though? It seems like a different issue. I had thought that rockism was the overprivileging of authenticity, seriousness, and enduring importance. It's insidious because, even if one does love trashy pop music, one often attempts to legitimate that love by calling it a guilty pleasure (it's an exception, so the hierarchy of values still holds), or by comparing it to some serious music in order to show that it actually has those values already. Pushing back against that attitude doesn't, as far as I can tell, require any stance on whether genres have essences.

Why is anti-essentialism a tenet of anti-rockism, though? It seems like a different issue. I had thought that rockism was the overprivileging of authenticity, seriousness, and enduring importance. It's insidious because, even if one does love trashy pop music, one often attempts to legitimate that love by calling it a guilty pleasure (it's an exception, so the hierarchy of values still holds), or by comparing it to some serious music in order to show that it actually has those values already. Pushing back against that attitude doesn't, as far as I can tell, require any stance on whether genres have essences.

― jim, Saturday, July 28, 2012 11:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Essentialism is the assumed underwriter of authenticity and enduring importance, though: only if a genre has a necessary essence can it be necessarily more authentic and enduringly important than another.

I don't see what it has to do with directness or a lack of directness. The piece was written by Chopin; what does saying that it's "not a direct reflection" of him mean? That there is more to him than the piece? That there is more to the piece than him (because of historical factors that play a part in the piece, etc.)? These statements strike me as being self-evident, but maybe there is some other meaning to "not a direct reflection of him" that I am missing.

― timellison, Saturday, July 28, 2012 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes. It's self-evident. The reason it remains a tenet is that a lot of people writing about music have resisted the idea that thinking about music can be structured around things other than artists and their greatness. But I would hope that the limitations of that insistence would be obvious to 99% of readers here.

I'm glad we're still debating these points. CNN ran his today:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/27/showbiz/art-pop-music-image/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Yeah, Tim, that's fine.

The original statement does sound strident to me, though. I don't think "the greatness of music is not the direct expression of the greatness of its creator" can be completely reduced to "thinking about music can be structured around things other than artists and their greatness."

I'm going to go back to Matt P's argument that "essentialist talk is always ideological" also. It's not ideological if I'm writing a positive review of the Bangles' album from last year and praising their (non-ideological) essentialism for the way that it honors a particular genre.

That sounds like you're honoring the "performance of essentialism". Anti-essentialism basically means "essentialism is performed".

Re the artist <=> music issue, the other point in the line is that when we're appreciating a piece of music we're not in absolute communion with the experience of its creation without bringing ourselves and the world to the table (the music crit version of schroedinger's cat I guess).

Anti-essentialism basically means "essentialism is performed".

I apologize, but I'm not getting your point on that one.

Genre essentialism : gender essentialism :: performance of genre : performance of gender.

Actually those are in the wrong order but hopefully you get my point.

But you say anti-essentialism "means 'essentialism is performed'" - does the performance have something to do with the reason for the critique of essentialism?

I'm not sure how it relates to my Bangles example.

Well, maybe we should start with you telling me what you literally mean when you say that the bangles' essentialism honors a genre.

That their adherence to genre is done in honor of the genre. This isn't praiseworthy in itself, but in my opinion is praiseworthy in the Bangles' case because of the sincerity of the gesture and the depth with which it is executed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol4MaEPayv0

The essentialist would say it's praiseworthy in itself: that the highest purpose is to capture the essence of X. Your position doesn't assume this, but assumes that the performance