Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

"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?