Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism

One can dream. They'll probably do it on dissensus, but I'm not feeling that board completely yet.

xpost

Gotcha, good point then.

(I hope that didn't sound too pretentious, I hardly claim to be some sort of philosophy expert or something, i'm just trying to explain my thoughts in the best way i know how.)

I've been biting this paragraph from the "pop thread" on dissensus and showing it to people for like a week now, but I think it's a very good explanation. I hope I'm not changing the intended meaning by removing it from context, and I've been all quoting Tim on ILM lately which probably makes me a weirdo, but Tim F. said:

Deleuze writes, “What is an essence as revealed in the work of art? It is a difference, the absolute and ultimate Difference. Difference is what constitutes being, what makes us conceive being.” The function of sensuous signs in art is to bring us face to face with the mass of differentiated intensities, whose aggregation and conglomeration allow us to conceive of stable concepts and meanings. When I say art brings us "face to face" with this stuff, I mean that it forces us to recognise the inescapably differential nature of these affects, rather than proceed straight to the concepts which we have lazily attached to them, and which we imagine to be standing behind them in a signifying relationship. For Deleuze it would be a mistake to assume that art exists to be "interpreted", its signs read in order to discover some message or meaning they contain. This reduces art to a reflection of conceptual generalities - insert "auteurism" or "dilettantism" here. Instead, the function of art is to intensify our experience of difference – or, to put it another way, our awareness of the endless potential for differentiated experience.

"There is a definite value judgement there--that it's okay to be gay, women aren't for debasement and violence is 'bad.' these are common, modern american values. and i agree with all of them. but i am not Everyman."

Why does someone voicing an opinion have to speak for Everyman?

* "gimme someone like mia who sez something."

"It's not saying "I like MIA" it's saying "What you listen to is bad because it is NOT like MIA." It implies that music that does contain homophobia/sexism/violent imagery DOES NOT say something, which is quite false. It does say a lot of things. You just don't like them."

That's kind of semantic hairsplitting. It's fairly clear what the person means by "saying something." The person is saying that there's more value in the words. (Yes, more value for himself or herself personally.)

"and no one has the right to tell anyone else what to like."

Expressing an opinion /= telling other people what to like

this whole discussion is awful. go back to graduate school.

I know, I was just saying that was the part of the article that stood out for me the most and trying not to get bogged down in the current morass of discussion.

And, uh, no offense but your definition doesn't exactly make it more clear.

If the point is that the person saying this is generalizing too much about hip hop/grime/dancehall then, yeah, it's bullshit.

I'm talking about the "value" that the music itself holds for the person making this statement. MIA has use value for the person -- they buy the CD and they play it. The music they don't like has no value for them -- if someone gave them the CD, they wouldn't play it.

If you ever read a reggae reviewer talking about the music in terms of "good" or "bad" or overall quality, then they are probably missing the entire point, severely. It's not that kind of genre and it doesn't abide by those kinds of rules, so following them won't get you anywhere.

I think the useful questions are ones like: What shouldn't work but does? How does this artist or producer do so much with so little (or so little with so much)? What does a crowd of moving bodies in front of a massive soundsystem understand about this tune that a person sitting alone in from of their home stereo might never, ever get? Why are these electro-Caribbean gangster entertainers so puritanical on certain issues and famously libertarian on others---and might it be possible to pin this on a heat-warped vestige of British colonialism? Are all or just most of the leading studio producers semi-closeted gays? Will US stars ever follow Elephant Man's bold lead and develop a new dance move with each new single? And so forth...

Although he's talking about reggae specifically, I think it works beyond that. There is so much to talk about with music; I guess my least-favorite music would be music that doesn't leave me with much to say, not in the sense that it leaves me speechless (which is more like an overload of things to say that i can't readily put into words) but that which does not provoke me in one way or another.

So the reason they like the album is because they like the album?

According to Derrida, "logocentrism" is the attitude that logos (the Greek term for speech, thought, law, or reason) is the central principle of language and philosophy.1 Logocentrism is the view that speech, and not writing, is central to language. Thus, "grammatology" (a term which Derrida uses to refer to the science of writing) can liberate our ideas of writing from being subordinated to our ideas of speech. Grammatology is a method of investigating the origin of language which enables our concepts of writing to become as comprehensive as our concepts of speech.

According to logocentrist theory, says Derrida, speech is the original signifier of meaning, and the written word is derived from the spoken word. The written word is thus a representation of the spoken word. Logocentrism maintains that language originates as a process of thought which produces speech, and that speech then produces writing.

So when applied to music, it is logocentrist to expect/value "meaning" in music?

Sorry, I don't quite understand the correlation between logocentrism and rockism.

If I wrote a review about two power pop albums and talked about one accomplishing something that the other does not, am I doing the same thing?

If I wrote a review about two power pop albums and talked about one accomplishing something that the other does not, am I doing the same thing?

This is way too vague of an example, but what I'm trying to say there is that the accomplishment made = effect on me as a listener, expressed through my writing. Some music has a stronger pull for me, and I can say so; but saying that 'it is my opinion that mia's politics are the 'correct' politics, ergo her music is better' does not fulfill the kind of expectation i have from music writing, i guess. I want someone to explain the music to me, not turn music into a simple represenation of "good" and "bad" politics/belief systems/structures.

is what i'm trying to say, i think.

(I know that these qns are what everyone is sort of asking but I felt framing them explicitly might provide a focus. Also I keep on asking this in conversation and email myself.)