Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

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?

Well I don't think that the alternative has become established enough at this point to define it very well. There are still many competing frames vying for supremacy, if you will. As the top dog, rockism attracts challengers from all directions. So "anti-rockism" is perhaps more a temporary coalition of disenfranchised challengers, rather than a coherent frame in itself, if you will.

Rockism is here to stay:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/atrak/deadmau5-press-play_b_1694719.html

and here i was worried...

I think alext's posts in this thread were the original seed of my decision to write my masters thesis on adorno several years later.

It's funny... I'm reading Joe Carducci's legendary Rock and the Pop Narcotic at the moment, which is generally held up as a sort of Rockist ur-text as far as I can tell. The thing is, what a lot of people far upthread (and long ago) seem to be describing as Rockism is precisely what Carducci is arguing *against*... For instance, this:

Anti-Rockist criticism might be expressed as a kind of Formalism which seeks to describe a musical event as music. Or critics might then go beyond "mere" Formalism to analyse the assumptions that are made about the presence of value or meaning in the music. From "what does it sound like" to "how does how the way it sounds and is performed attempt to create a meaning, and how is that meaning undermined by the way it's performed and the way it sounds?"
Or write as subjectively and temporally as possible about the experience of listening/seeing as it happened.

― TV's Mr Noodle Vague (noodle vague), Friday, May 6, 2005 5:48 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Carducci is striving to describe what makes rock music work in music terms, in terms of the interaction of the players, the way they navigate musical space together. The extraneous stuff is, to him, bullshit, and he actually vociferously lambasts critics for focusing on the "worthiness" of a Springsteen or a Stipe.

How many of you guys who regularly participate in discussions using the terms "Rockist" and "Rockism" have actually read that book? What did you think of it? Is it a good example of Rockism or is it its own singular thing?

I've also sort of always been uncomfortable with one of the underlying semi-consensuses of ILM thought: the idea that talking about "feel" is bad and not helpful. I guess I don't hate the idea that this concept is hard to define/discuss--I mean, it's really freaking hard to do that--but some folks I think have taken it a step further and stretched this observation to mean "feel" doesn't actually exist, that people who talk about "feel" are just bullshitting. In other words, they've made a discursive observation (that it doesn't help to talk about "feel") into an observation about what's actually there (or not there) in the music. I'll try to find some examples of this, but hopefully you know what I mean.

I do think "feel" is an important notion, but I also acknowledge that it's hard to discuss. I don't think that matters very much, however, unless you care about criticism more than the music itself. I don't mean to expand/distort the discussion here too much, it's just something that's been on my mind a lot as I've been working through Carducci.

i've read it, and carducci's other music book - enter naomi: sst and all that. they are favorites of mine...(minus the reagan worship in r&pn)...but yeah carducci's not going to easily fit into any neat category IMO...his blog, the new vulgate publishes some great stuff....

i'm a rockist in some important ways. but i try to be open minded to things and not let it overwhelm me hearing things that are pop that are good.

This is how I'd describe myself, too, I think. Rock and the Pop Narcotic is such a deeply flawed book (he ends up railing against a constantly shifting hydra of a strawman so much of the timme), but I find it amazingly compelling.

I think I'm also feeling the influence of my drift, as of the past year or so, pretty heavily into metal. I'm realizing how much sheer joy I get out of hearing guitars, basses, and drums played together in ways that excite me, and discovering all this stuff, old and new, where that's the basic framework has really underlined that for me. I do also love techno, but I think my tastes in techno are pretty Rockist in some ways as well.

I'm also extremely, vehemently rockist about wine (my line of work), and I think I'm uncomfortable with the notion of entirely abandoning that way of thinking when it comes to music. I think good wines, meaningful wines, come from relatively small farmers who grow the grapes themselves, practice a great deal of difficult manual labor in the vineyards (limiting the use of machines), and do as little in the cellar as possible with regard to technology (i.e., they don't "sculpt" the wines). The parallels with rockism are pretty apparent.

Clarke the main problem with the wine analogy is that thinking about music as being like food/drink is one of the most reliably misleading groups of analogies for how music "works" that remain widely used.

Firstly, the production of wine is necessarily technical in a formalist, circumscribed way that doesn't apply to music per se - there aren't any particular processes and ingredients that need to be involved for music to be music.

So immediately a key distinction between wine and music is that you're trying to conflate appreciation of something which needs to conform to particular rules in order to be recognisable as that thing with appreciation of something that doesn't. This immediately changes the legitimacy and operation of rule-based appreciation. Whereas wine appreciation is much more comparable to appreciation of a particular sport (music genre appreciation is also comparable to sports fandom - however both wine appreciation and music genre appreciation are much more like sports fandom than they are like each other).

The more general problem with food/drink analogies is that the relationships between substance/process and taste are much more predictable in the case of food/drink than in music - with much less variations in how the product is experienced - while preferences obviously differ the actual experience of taste of food substances doesn't differ to nearly the same extent as it does with music.

Imagine your wine appreciation being transposed to much more appropriate (though still problematic) analogies for music - writing and art:

"I think good art, meaningful art, come from relatively modest artists who mix the paint themselves, practice a great deal of difficult manual labor in their studio (limiting the use of mechanical aids), and do as little as possible with post-production technology."

"I think good books, meaningful books, come from relatively unknown writers who type up the manuscript on a typewriter without the continual self-editing efficiencies of a word processor, and whose works are not edited following the completion of the first draft manuscript."

Obviously these would be fairly meaningless and bizarre standards of judgement!

The more general problem with food/drink analogies is that the relationships between substance/process and taste are much more predictable in the case of food/drink than in music - with much less variations in how the product is experienced - while preferences obviously differ the actual experience of taste of food substances doesn't differ to nearly the same extent as it does with music.

I think we're getting into somewhat murky waters here... One critic can taste a really technique-driven, ornately composed, "creative" dish (this is the chef-as-auteur tradition) and be stunned by the complexity of flavors and textures involved, and full of praise for the chef's vision or what have you. Whereas another critic can taste the same dish and be put off by the stench of striving-to-impress, the fussiness and overcrowdedness of it. This critic may well prize a simple, straightforward, ingredient-driven approach to cooking that downplays the chef's role and highlights the quality of what's involved and the elegance of a relatively unadorned presentation.

I guess I don't know exactly what you mean by "the actual experiences of taste of food substances"... If you're talking about our biological ability to discern flavors, etc, then sure--but then with music as the analogue that's about as useful as saying that we all have eardrums and brains that process music, thus we all "hear" basically the same thing when we listen to a piece of music. It all comes down to what particular standards of judgment we bring to the table when the food passes our lips or the music buzzes our eardrums, right?

I like what mrjosh way upthread was getting at, and I think I agree:

TV sorta continued: In poststructuralist critical circles there was a great term that popped up: "out-left," as in "I have been out-lefted" or "I can out-left you!" And this referred to the degree to which a hegemonic ideological commitment could be unearthed by a skilled deconstructor in almost any position or statement.
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.

― mrjosh (mrjosh), Friday, May 6, 2005 6:17 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i hope that douglas wolk introduces himself these days by saying: "Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on Rockism."
I'm re-reading that Carducci book too, and yeah, in a lot of ways he *is* an anti rockist in that he really doesn't care about the kinda primal, (non-musical) myths of rock music that became firmly entrenched thanks to rolling stone and its writers in the 70s. he really cares about rock MUSIC as opposed to the rock EXPERIENCE. if that makes sense.

It all comes down to what particular standards of judgment we bring to the table when the food passes our lips or the music buzzes our eardrums, right?

Yes I would grant that. Hence my caveat about preferences re food, which I should have fleshed out. Obviously all experience is mediated and subject to individual aesthetic judgement.

The difference (which is relative rather than categorical) is that the technique to product to "flavour" relationships are much more predictable* with food - the amount you heat a piece of meat will affect whether it tastes raw or well-done, and this distinction is at least partly meaningful without knowing anything about social trends in cooking.

Obviously we then apply preferences and standards of judgement on top of that (from the simple "I prefer my steaks medium rare" to the more involved "this particular style of meat historically has been served blue and I think to get the authentic experience of this dish it shouldn't be cooked any more than that").

* That is not to say they're objective or universal, just predictable. If you asked two random people to describe what a dish of food tastes like, they're much more likely to offer similar descriptions than if you ask them what a particular song sounds like. At root is the fact that whether something tastes good or not - while not predetermined or universal - is related to biological imperatives that simply doesn't apply to music. While we're all biologically capable of hearing particular qualities in music, the experience of those qualities serves no particular biological purpose.

If you think of paintings, there are paintings that look "wrong" to a large amount of people. This is in part a physical experience: the experience of absorbing the art through vision. But the idea of rightness of wrongness is, in that case, an entirely social construction.

Also:

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.

― mrjosh (mrjosh), Friday, May 6, 2005 6:17 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This misses the point somewhat: "anti-rockism" is/was about trying to get to the point where "everyone is exhausted and recognizes that their own positions are all beholden to certain underlying aesthetic / political / ideological positions." Its usefulness as a critical intervention is inversely proportionate to the extent to which such positions are recognised as such.

It also doesn't claim that being rockist is more capitalist than not being rockist - only more hegemonic, within certain social contexts. And of course it flies in the face of common sense to say that all positions are equally hegemonic in any given social context. However, what is or is not hegemonic in any particular context is of course a historical fact which is subject to change.

Incidentally, in similar vein, the phenomenon of out-lefting was not actually about claiming an absence of ideological commitment, but mostly about claiming that the ideological commitment of the out-lefted was more hegemonic (and, for real rhetorical force, oppressive) than that of the out-lefter.

My niece who just turned 1 has this toy keyboard that has a round yellow button that plays about five songs. She always hones in on that yellow button to the exclusion of the keys and the instrument buttons. I was there when the toy was introduced to her and I don't think I've seen anyone show her how the toy is supposed to be used or encourage the preference for the yellow button. This is just anecdotal - it's not evidence - but do you think her preference for music over the tones she makes with the other buttons, which themselves could be construed as musical, is coincidental or something inherent to her biology? That is, just because music doesn't serve any biological imperative, does that mean that taste FOR music, if not taste IN music, has no biological foundation?

Yes, I disagree with the argument that there is no biological element to aesthetic preference, even if it not considered an "imperative" in the same sense as food.

If you asked two random people to describe what a dish of food tastes like, they're much more likely to offer similar descriptions than if you ask them what a particular song sounds like.

Part of the problem with the comparison is that people have a different range of things they might be considering in either case. Asking people if they hear higher or lower pitches or dissonant or consonant intervals would be comparable with asking them whether they experience something sweet or savory with food.

I guess maybe I shouldn't have said I am rockist

I barely understand this thread...It's just I like Neil Young so much I figure I must be.

This misses the point somewhat: "anti-rockism" is/was about trying to get to the point where "everyone is exhausted and recognizes that their own positions are all beholden to certain underlying aesthetic / political / ideological positions." Its usefulness as a critical intervention is inversely proportionate to the extent to which such positions are recognised as such.

This makes a lot of sense, Tim... It feels much like what Wittgenstein was trying to accomplish in his later writings, which have been described as "therapeutic" (your use of the word "intervention" is great)--offering a freedom from the at-the-time hegemonic notion of meaning in language (which, ironically, his influential early stuff helped establish!) not through "solving" existing problems but through shedding light on the underlying assumptions of the dominant framework from which those problems were approached, thereby, well, "dissolving" rather than solving them. I really like thinking about "anti-rockism" not as position in itself but as a therapy that allows one to get rid of hang-ups. (That feels a bit like stating the obvious, but I do think it's important to try and avoid anti-rockism hardening into just another dogma, when its purpose should really be to liberate us as individuals into a more direct, intuitive, and non-ethically-mediated relationship with music.)