OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

i thought the original popists or w/e they were called were like early 80s NME type dudes who like MJ and scitti politti and stuff, like ex post punkers who embraced 80s pop

i think ewing hearkened back to a lot of them?

but he started out in a climate where, like, post-nirvana punk/rock authenticity was re-entrenched (and quickly squandered w/ commercial debasement via yarling etc.), w/ new artsy 'quality' aspirational dimensions in britpop, 'no depression' style authenticity was valorized, indie rock's establishment was pretty firm and it was making overtures toward 'pop' posturing ('if only it could get on the radio') and genre dabbling, even the indie and rock types had started coming back around to the early 90s uk dance scene, u.s. rap was reaching the height of its combined commercial/critical ascendancy…

good context for a lot of those issues to come up in new ways

"So I guess I feel like Whiney's right the whole popism vs rockism thing is pretty much irrelevant anymore because there's not really mass scale pop or mass scale rock anymore"

pop is more private now. there are people who sell millions of albums and get millions of youtube hits and the public ,by and large, has no idea who they are. their fans are online and listening to them with headphones on.

j otm. One of the things abt those 90s times was that even if you were open to listening to pop, a lot of what you'd then hear was affirming values you were kinda trying to question (lots of Britpop stuff, Sebadoh/Pavement stuff, etc). P much noone could take pop as even worthy of listening to, unless they were yr 10 yrold sister

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_for_Peter_Hughes

Check out track 4

^^From 1995

People were always (maybe) listening to this stuff, just maybe not writing about it so much and with such volume. I blame the internet culture

Uh don't you mean credit? I liked Britney, just couldn't admit it to my bandmates

xp dude, you ARE the internet culture

your bandmates otm

scott, i think that's very important, i'm just not sure it's limited to pop. most music now is private. maybe to an unprecedented degree.

i think the older coordinates for a rockism/poptimism debate had to do with a different map of what was public and private, relative to what—which maybe comes out in the way that the stuff i mentioned being in tom ewing's context had starker contrasts between mainstream/underground/respectable/not attributed to it.

maybe one reason that the debate can seem so muddled and wishy-washy a la powers/wilson is that in combination with the privatization of the listener/fan experience, the major site for anything prospectively 'public' about music has undergone a huge leveling of those old complex distinctions in status/respectability/purpose/whatever. like, what codes as 'pop' now is loosely inclusive of dance-pop, edm, country, rap, rock, 'folk', indie, etc., depending on the level of media-machine exposure you want to count. and relative to that extreme level of media visibility the choices have more to do with vulgarity-gentility/urbanity than with any of the old distinctions.

pop has always been that way though

Feel like pop just historically kind of faces an uphill battle in the rock-based music criticism lexicon, the split between the two happening at rock's birth (The Day The Music Died), and then continuing on from there. 60's pop was more or less immediately embraced by rockers (which was basically English bands doing R&B/pop covers) and certainly in the 60s rock was considered pop. Maybe the shift from singles to LPs (singles popularity peaking in the mid-60s) is to blame. At an rate it feels like every year the wool is pulled back, and nostalgia/re-contextualization/the leveling qualities of the internet/listener fragmentation puts a "this pop is OK" stamp on acts previously derided by rockists through kitsch or irony or genuine reappraisal. So once you had rock bands playing Monkees songs and now you have rock bands playing Fleetwood Mac songs, and in the future, I don't know, that's where my train of thought leaves the station. By the late 90s rock and pop were so intertwined (Avril Lavigne, pop-punk, nu-metal like Linkin Park) that it complicates things too much for me.

avril lavigne was not the late '90s, neither was linkin park

which sounds nitpicky but it's not -- I wasn't reading criticism back then but the general sense among laypeople was that linkin park and avril et al got their pop traction as a backlash to the huge teenpop boom that had essentially become synonymous with "pop" starting around 1999 or so.

Fleetwood Mac and the Monkees apparently not "rock bands" now.

Nor were they appreciated as such during the peaks of their own careers.

Well be honest there

When was Fleetwood Mac NOT a "rock band" and when were they "derided by rockists?"

Rot

When Stevie and Lindsey joined and they had massively huge hits. Yeah they rocked, bt did rock fans like them? Aside from that noone didn't. You were pointing out their lack of appreciation at careerheight

http://books.google.com/books?id=jEeovH2wN9kC&lpg=PA86&ots=Ibiem3njLY&dq=%22Stevie%20Nicks%3A%20Lilith%20or%20Bimbo%3F&pg=PA86#v=onepage&q=%22Stevie%20Nicks:%20Lilith%20or%20Bimbo?&f=false

wow that's fucking horrible

waterface, that's probably true that 'pop has always worked like that', but the context has changed because the current configuration/understanding of public/private distinctions has changed

i was struck by this bit from tiqqun's 'intro to civil war' this morning

https://24.media.tumblr.com/69183df6450cd55a81335de6e2c86b4a/tumblr_n422nhapvE1qcq6s5o1_500.jpg

in the sherry turkle book that ann powers refers to (re young people and their shame about what they should be liking vs not admitting to liking) a point she repeatedly makes is that people with networked lives, but especially the younger ones, are uneasy but fatalistic about the possibility of facts about their lives / private lives which are digitally accessible (usually because they themselves have volunteered them, in order to take advantages of the personal/social functions network technologies can serve) will be used against them in the future, end up being publicized, come back to bite them in the ass, etc. so there's a real confusion about where the boundaries of self are, what to make of the various pre-existing cultural understandings of self and society.

i don't know how accurate this is, but my perception is that some of the notable vanguard trends in musical taste/fashion of the past decade+, like noise, or field recording, or wandelweiser-style 'quiet' minimalism, or minimal techno, or extreme metal, are attractive partly because they look as if they could thwart the wrong kind of uptake into the public/pop/capitalist empire realm. (which makes pitchfork's uptick in metal coverage, or the phenomenon of black metal release features on npr, seem symptomatic.)

I didn't think Fleetwood Mac was ever considered less 'rock' than Steely Dan or the Eagles?

wow that's fucking horrible

Included mostly for the quote "Never met anyone who didn't like Rumors"

xxp No, I was being sarcastic about the idea that Fleetwood Mac were some unappreciated nugget until rockists re-appraised them.

I was responding to albvivertine. I got your sarcasm.

Well you incl the Monkees, which confused things

(forgot to say, the leveling of various genres/styles that goes on in pop seems especially significant, once it reaches kind of an equilibrium and shows that it's able to accommodate them all, because music is a sort of window onto social experience / society, and for the pop-media-system to suggest that it more or less doesn't matter what your experience is—because everyone's got their preference and every preference has its representative—that it's just one more bit of information about your taste-profile and consumption habits, is basically to suggest that the non-pop counterparts that you might also happen to have a preference for are null as vehicles for / windows onto social experience / society.)

I think the falling out of favor of "bimbo" in the discourse is at least a small step forward

And now sund4r you've reminded me of rock becoming same as pop for a while and that confuses things as well, corporate rock raises its head at some point

yeah i feel like nothing is really inescapable today!

What do you think has changed? Not saying you're necessarily wrong but it's not obvious to me. To me, it feels like pop music is inescapable to more or less the same extent that it always has been in my lifetime: you hear it in grocery stores, in malls, at the gym, at the office, at fast food places; songs turn up in movies and TV shows; pop stars are on the covers of magazines at the checkout stand; friends and co-workers talk about it. It's not like anyone was forcing you to listen to pop at home before the Internet. I'm quite sure my Mum had no idea who Cyndi Lauper or Paula Abdul were. (She does know who Lady Gaga is because of social media, on the other hand.)

in 2014 if you're 'overexposed' to any kind of media it's a result of yr own choices, everything is very very avoidable, ed sullivan died a long time ago
--balls

truth nuke

Dude if you don't work at home/wear earbuds outside the home, not true

xxp No, I was being sarcastic about the idea that Fleetwood Mac were some unappreciated nugget until rockists re-appraised them.

I don't know, I was born in 1981, the first time I was aware of FM was "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" as early 90s Democrat boomer campaign pop.

Unless you somehow go out of yr way to studiously avoid singers you've never heard of xpost

You can hear Lady Gaga on the radio in the supermarket and not go "Oh, is this Lady Gaga?"

I don't know, I was born in 1981, the first time I was aware of FM was "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" as early 90s Democrat boomer campaign pop.

Come on, I was born in 1979 and I've been hearing Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks on classic rock and AOR radio my whole life. "Rooms on Fire" was #1 on the US Mainstream Rock chart in 1989.

Otherwise I can't imagine any scenario where you're FORCED to reckon with pop music in 2014

xxxxxpost

all the grocery stores i go to dont play top 40, neither does the gym i used to go to

for one, so many ppl i know just plug their iphone right into the aux jack of their car stereo and avoid radio altogether...i don't think MTV proper really plays many videos anymore (of course ppl always said that but i think it's true now?)....radio listenership and rating in FM are downward trending...more people that aren't listening to their

phone in the car are listening to sports talk, talk radio in general is the moneymaker now....

i think that in general listening to top 40 radio was more prevalent that it was now....also simply the factors of what pre-recorded music is available to buy. i lived in a town where all i could buy was the tapes and CDs at Wal-Mart (i was enough of a dork to drive an hour to musicland but most weren't), so generally that was more top 40 stuff...now the same kid could go on Spotify and have literally limitless choices

i don't know how accurate this is, but my perception is that some of the notable vanguard trends in musical taste/fashion of the past decade+, like noise, or field recording, or wandelweiser-style 'quiet' minimalism, or minimal techno, or extreme metal, are attractive partly because they look as if they could thwart the wrong kind of uptake into the public/pop/capitalist empire realm. (which makes pitchfork's uptick in metal coverage, or the phenomenon of black metal release features on npr, seem symptomatic.)

― j., Wednesday, April 16, 2014 11:48 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

again this may be somewhat true but there's also the factor of it's easy to find things now, whereas in the late 80s or early 90s learning about black metal would have taken some serious tape trading or mail ordering....now if a kid is curious about noise or black metal or minimal techno, he can just listen to it, so it stands to reason that once obscure subgenres would grow in popularity

there is that. i was thinking that these are ones that would have a hard time ever becoming pop. (minimal techno sure, but what would it mean? the music leaves it a blank.) and part of the attraction to a kind of music can have something to do with social life. unless you think that the only reason genres become popular at all is their intrinsic soundyness.

guys... the beatles

just... the beatles

I somehow went a year without ever having heard Gotye and then heard it immediately upon stepping foot in a Subway

Wasn't there a long time where Sgt. Pepper was seen as too soft, to pop to take seriously?

20 years ago today iirc

you know if you leave the gotye cheese off your Subway, that's saves like 30 decibels

(also yeah lol The Monkees but the Sex Pistols were covering them less than a decade after they were A Thing, and not particularly ironically like with e.g. "My Way.")

(and no I don't want to go into the Pistols being as manufactured as the Monkees were)

I somehow went a year without ever having heard Gotye and then heard it immediately upon stepping foot in a Subway

― flamboyant goon tie included,

haha yes