How many ILM discussions (rockism vs. electronic music, Momus vs his detractors) are covert versions of "culture wars" debates, ie. some approximate version of humanism versus some approximate form o

critique of lip-synch = she's not being honest, direct, a "real" musician

defense of lip-synch = get over it, all pop is fake anyway, lipsynching is a post-modern anti-authenticity strategy blah blah blah

Klone = spectre of technology, reproduction / copying, anti-humanism of the endless series, sinister post-modernist relay

See, you can lazily map anything onto this stupid binary!

so: is it customary ILM practice to take a sentence out of context from someone else's post and make a thread out of it?

As with all message boards.

You know you're actually a straw man caricature of your own views, don't you?

At least one.

I have NO idea what the word "humanism" refers to.

I have NO idea what the word "post-modernity" refers to.

my cover is totally blown!

You had me pegged all along . . . .

to express my non-sexuality.

defense of lip-synch = get over it, all pop is fake anyway, lipsynching is a post-modern anti-authenticity strategy blah blah blah

and if you think that BOTH of the above arguments are at least partly full of shit? then what are you?

defense: pop is fake, sure. but even so, yer props should work!

look at all the trouble it got me into!

suddenly I'm being crammed into a ghastly mixed metaphor about being BOTH a strawman AND a caricature, etc.

Eisbar, if both of the diametrically opposed positions seem fishy to you, then congrats: you are a Hegelian. Or a bisexual. Or a tricycle.

Don't worry about it, man. There's an epidemic of this sort of thing around here lately.

though i was kinda serious about the arguments both being full of it. which may have been the point, i know, but it still had to be said!

Eisbar, are you named after the Grauzone song?

yup ... i'm a simulacron of a neue deutsche welle.

but otherwise i'm not sure what the question in this thread title means exactly.

what's with this recent spate of determinedly "lowbrow" or anti-intellectual posts following any post that uses a big word? i find it kind of annoying.

(i think this post is ready-made for the noise board's "excelsior" thread.)

maybe a mandatory haiku policy is in order . . .

By the way, talking of time, I think an SF-Berlin timezone Momus-Matmos pro-celeb wrestling-debating tag-team could see us kicking butt. And speaking of butt, loved your Butt interview, Drew. I think I'm probably the only person on ILM who reads Butt. Certainly the only one who reads Butt while playing the electronic sackbut.

Yeah, but I've been getting bored of haiku recently.
Perhaps all posts should be concrete poetry; the text should be formatted into an image which is an overarching comment on the post itself...

'Whether the songs are pained, twisted, whimsical, or even sometimes weirdly silly, aside from being fantastically musical and expertly played, they are also utterly sincere, and devoid of a single drop of post modern irony. In short, he's the real thing.'

'2 years ago I first heard the crude home made recordings of Devendra Banhart... His voice - a quivering high-tension wire, sounded like it could have been recorded 70 years ago - these songs could have been sitting in someone's attic, left there since the 1930's... When it came time to record new music we were of course faced with the quandary of how to go about it - does he continue making hiss-saturated home recordings, or do we go into a "professional" studio? We mutually decided that it was best to move on - why should he be ghetto-ized as a possible low-fi crank/eccentric? Besides, his songwriting and his guitar playing (in my opinion) have taken such leaps and bounds forward, that we were compelled to record them in a way that made it possible to really hear the performances clearly... we recorded 32 songs (culled from something like 57 Devendra had initially submitted!) in his living room, using the best possible vintage gear. Ideal... Deciding on the final arrangements was ridiculously easy - the songs were so good in their raw state that there was no need to bolster them with sonic fluff or cheap impact.'

You know, there are enough weird assumptions in that text to run this thread through to April 2008.

I also have major problems with 'expertly played' and 'recording in a way that made it possible to really hear the performances clearly', and I find it completely odd that the best way to do this was to 'use the best possible vintage gear'. And 'the songs were so good in their raw state that there was no need to bolster them with sonic fluff...'

What Gira describes seems either naive or willfully perverse. It's Platonic and entirely yoked to 'the metaphysics of presence'. There is a 'real' and 'clear' sound of 'well-played' music which 'production' can only tarnish. The hiss on Devendra's early recordings is merely an impairment, to be banished when the budget allows. To retain it would make him a 'low-fi eccentric'.

The best way to get a 'real' and 'clear' sound is to use vintage gear, says Gira. Ah, you mean tape hiss, wow and flutter? But not quite as much of it as Devendra used to use? But that's not considered 'production', somehow, just as it wasn't 'production' when Devendra made those early hissy recordings that evoked the 1930s so pleasurably for Gira. None of this is 'production' because production is bad. Production is something calculating, something that takes us away from authenticity and 'the natural'.

To me, reproducing, deliberately and self-consciously, the sound of the past is an absolutely key part of post-modern music-making, and yet Gira denies there's anything post-modern about Banhart's records. It's ironic!

thnx.

Bulbs, I guess the trouble is that once this binary gets invoked, the two terms are so fluid that you can torque and tweek any position into rough alignment with one of them. This is the point at which "theory" becomes as supple and bogus as astrology, enneagrams, yin/yang, Type A vs. Type B, sundry self help and pop psychology terms. etc.

Which is not to say that the terms are just empty, but that they're maybe too easy to use in certain ways.

To really answer your question, maybe the kind of critical stance that isn't humanist or post-modernist would be a rigorously formalist criticism. You wouldn't be evaluating or rewarding supposed sincerity, but you also wouldn't be celebrating its inversion either. You'd be openly advocating a strict adherence to a clearly defined standard. Like the judges at dog shows evaluating the obedience of animals.

momus is right about gira, but i'm not sure why he's chosen to focus on that angle w/r/t to mr banhart. seems one of the least interesting ways to approach him. although it does offer an opportunity to gently castigate (or simply "call out") a certain form of rockism that obviously bothers him quite a bit. why? what are its uses or anti-uses to momus? --sincere question that maybe gets to the heart of whatever this thread is about. i.e. why not write about banhart's music? the music often complicates and sometimes transcends momu's happy dichotomies in ways that would be challenging/exciting to him. he does get into this a bit when he uses banhart's music to punch holes in gira's ideas. however the proportion is something like 80% meta-criticism, 20% musical observation. momus is pretty good at the former--although usually when he can assimilate someone's ideas into one half of one of his premolded dichotomies--but frankly i'm tired of that kind of thing and would like to see more of the latter--WHICH i think momus would be really good at! if he tried!

so: i don't think a "rigorously formalist criticism" would be absent a kind of implicit or explicit worldview. i think the formal analysis would inevitably be a part of a larger program. although it would change the proportion of analysis just the same, as i just suggested--it could uncover and highlight purely formal elements/patterns that simply do not play a role in rock criticism now. also i am *certain* that it wouldn't be a matter of judging music against a defined standard. or at least, not unless you simply mean standard as a well-defined musical system i.e. pitch or scale etc. (i mean, norms as methodological tools not best-practice guides.) otherwise uh-uh.

Still, you know, I've never given a fuck about "rockism." This is just a term made up by people who want to like rock and roll music but have perhaps become too self-conscious to just groove to something simple without worrying about it. I mean I never really bought into the Great Albums theory of rock, just as the Great Men of History/Will Durant approach to history is, uh, stupid. Obviously media-savvy '80s performers made their own mega-popularity and manipulation of the media part of their act; just as obviously, afterwards folks began to see all that supposedly "pomo" bullshit as just more folk music. I really don't care--I've read Fred Jameson, I get it. I'm interested in "theory" as it applies to music or literature or film but it's not as interesting as the thing itself. I could actually do with a little less self-conscious "fragmentation" these days just 'cuz I think it's, uh, quite easy to do--my friend here makes all these cut-up recordings, hundreds of them, and not one is actually listenable, who gives a shit? Matmos generally does it well--however, as much as I like Soft Pink Truth doing Vanity 6, their version of "Make Up" still isn't as good or weird as the original.

I'm just saying that this is all boring, and somewhat pseudo these days. I like Chuck Berry, I like Four Tet, I like Xenakis, I like Justin Timberlake. "Rockism" just gets in my way. One should be aware of theories like this, but taking them really seriously is quite another thing, in my opinion. I'm all for formal analysis--which means learning how to play the song, don't it--and bemoan the lack of same in pop music. I'm not calling for noble-savage shit either. I think art ought to be sophisticated. As anyone who's taken something apart knows, it helps you to really see into what before had been a blur, and I think "post-modern" stuff can be taken apart the same way that stuff from the supposed earlier era can, and it should be. You got to be practical about art to be mystical about it, maaan...

*e.g., oh postmodern reality is "fragmented"; matmos makes music from "fragments." hence, matmos is postmodern HELLO GRAND THEORY.

The problem with the binary is that it can only be a description used by the pomo side. The humanist side probably can't comprehend the pomo side as an equal and/or opposing force, and sees it as a frivolous nuisance in the 'grand scheme'. Similarly, the pomo side tends to simplify the humanists into macho fascists (or at least that's what I do, haha!).

Maybe obvious point, but: Seems like fragmentation at the formal level isn't necessarily genre specific. Starfuckers (great Italian band) are one of the most fragmented entities on this planet and they are a rock band. Lots of free improv is vastly more fragmented than music made in computer-sequencing environments. Maybe structure/un-structure could be the comparative axis of a formalist criticism, rather than the sincerity/anti-sincerity axis.

on the criticism/theory end of things . . .

I'm trying to think now of recent-ish applications of "theory" (shorthand here for continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the usual academic suspects) to music criticism that worked and were interesting. Most of what comes to mind are really more historically aligned elaborations of the theoretical implications of major technological innovations- ie. Douglas Kahn on the early days of phonography in his Noise Water Meat book, or that Allen Weiss book on the relationship between sound recording and 19th/20th c. transformations in the mode of "lyrical nostalgia". But who is the Lester Bangs ( ie. impassioned, ranty, longwinded and fun) of recent techno-theorizing? I don't think the answer "there isn't one" (if that is the answer) is because it can't be done. Kodwo Eshun's book comes to mind here, but there's got to be more, right? I can recall sporadic things from that Radical Philosophy journal that touched on noise in relation to Deleuze, but nothing really comes to mind as all that portable, or satisfying as music criticism. But it's got to be out there, I just figure I haven't stumbled onto it yet.

"always already": just caught myself typing that one in actual academic prose, ouch . . .

I don't get it. How does that answer the original question? Is it like a term from theory?

Here's a made up example:

"Rockist celebrations of sincerity are always already compromised by the founding absence of a criteria with which to adjudicate debates about intentionality"

yes, I'd agree with that, heartily. you've had "fragmentation" in jazz since pretty much its inception. the elevation of "soloing" over the ensemble aspect of early New Orleans/Memphis jazz music caused this, I think. it's interesting to me to think of the snooty Creoles bemoaning the swerve from "musical verities" back when the "primitives" took over. so I think this is really nothing new. sincerity--what does that mean anyway? i'm all for smoothness, groove, and for fragmentation or whatever you wan to call it, and obviously many artists are trying to do both and do it well.

i think too that the big mistake postmodernists and "humanists" make is to act like the "opposing" side doesn't understand the respective aims of both. seems to me that's something one ought to get past, at least at this late date. and again, I think something like Matmos' "Civil War" does this quite well (I've been listening to this a lot lately).

One sound that might be useful in this discussion was the auto-tuned vocal warble on Cher's "Believe". I remember making bold claims at the time about the end of the naturalistic "voice" as authorial in the popular imagination. I mean vocoders always signified an actual robot, and there's a general understanding that vocals have been produced and manipulated in order to sound 'better', but here was a case where a 'natural' human voice morphed into something alien (and not necessarily robotic or technological, there was definitely something organic about it), thereby announcing it's artifice (and during the most important part of the chorus medley). Numerous releases have employed this over-auto-tuning since and it's of course become a cliche to a degree, but I still believe that in some way, this broke down the popular conception of what the voice in pop music "should" be, if only on an unconscious level.

Unfortunately, I'm guessing that the "other side" in a discussion of the influence of this sound will simply assert that the song sucks.

how would you test such a claim?

you'd also need a theoretical framework by which the introduction of a new device can constitute in certain cases, a breaking down of popular conceptions. as i worte, that's a bold phrase-- and yet i'm not certain what you mean by it. do you simply mean, people have learned to expect something different from vocals? that the "meaning" carried by effects-on-vocals has shifted, or the possible meanings have expanded? etc.

But I see people's attempts to 'transcend' or 'deny' this as a form of bad faith. And I think postmodernism will not be superceded by denials and reactions against its core values, but by a complete embracing of them. That's why I like Cher's 'Believe'. By embracing postmodern production, by showing that there's no contradiction between technology and emotion, or contrivance and sincerity, or confection and belief, or the engineer and the humanist, 'Believe' brings the end of postmodernism closer because it brings closer the day in which to be postmodern will be as natural as breathing. Postmodernism will disappear by becoming so accepted that it's invisible and omnipresent. Whereas all reactions against postmodernism (Stuckism, rockism, fundamentalism) only serve to make postmodernism more visible, more important, something distinct from us, ahead of us, rather than written all through us.

Another way of saying this is to say: 'Japan will be the country which first embraces whatever comes after postmodernism, because Japan is the society currently most at ease with postmodernism.'

To accuse artists of "acting in bad faith' is to make a value judgement isn't it?

(*)The Parker/Picasso analogy is a red herring - Parker is about the egotistical sublime, not revolutionary forms.

Raises interesting questions:

- why the long delay? (possible answers: how do you defend less sophisticated genres v more academic ones without reference to romantic views - authenticity of feeling, anti-elitism, the music of simpler but more emotionally intense folks etc. no coincidence that pioneer anti-rockists contained more than their fair share of artists who flirted with extreme right wing politics (Bowie, Morrissey etc)

- do many anti-rockists have a grasp of what babies are being thrown out with this bathwater? how do you justify the crudities of Robert Johnson or even Louis Armstrong (vis a vis The Academy) without it? Generally, how do you critique twentieth century music underpinned by 19 century romantic values if you have no grasp of that tradition, even for comparative purposes? Not trying to invalidate the anti-rockist position but I feel there's often a poor understanding of the implications of it.

Retro-romanticism in rockist rock (or folk) music is part of what makes it completely at home in postmodernism. Devendra Banhart doesn't sound like a 1930s artist so much as he sounds like a 21st century artist sounding like a 1930s artist. He is -- as we all are -- inside history. So in the light of that, I think your last question about how we critique pop music that contains pomo retro-romantic values can easily be answered: we critique it from inside, as pomo retro-romantics ourselves. We're all livin' in the same box.

Starfuckers (great Italian band)

Did they ever have more than the one album?

"Spitting on" is of course the classic Bourdieu distinction argument rehashed; an argument of flawless logic though it fails completely to handle aesthetic distictions between works that operate on the same cultural plane (not madonna or dylan; but which madonna remix for example).

But I'm more interested in your notion of the 'unenlightened postmodern masses' - suggests you see a way if reading cultural history as a socio-economic condition? Sounds almost bible belt to me but maybe I'm misreading.

hi, ned!!!

He made a choice as a "producer". He thought analog equipment and a simple set-up would complement Devendra's playing and singing in a fruitful way. And he was right! Gira is hardly retro or anti-production. He's one of the most sonically superduper makers of sound around. And one of the most underrated producers as well. Has been for years. Nearly everything he's put out is designed for MAXIMUM high fidelity. Check out a Body Lovers Disc or an AOL disc or an Ulan Bator disc or a Windsor For The Derby disc or a .....i could go on for ever. Most other people really do sound like they are stuck in the 30's by comparison.

Check out World Of Skin's cover of Nick Drake's "Black-Eyed Dog" that came out a zillion years ago. Great dog sample in that one. Great post-modern electronic folk all around.

Be clear, I didn't say that rockist music is "living in the 19 century". My point is that the critical apparatus that has traditionally been used to discuss, say, Coltrane, or BB King or The Rolling Stones, would have seemed entirely familiar to Coleridge. The primacy of self-expression, authenticity of feeling, politics of rebellion, art as a substitute for spirituality yada, yada. I don't know anything about Banhart and I'm not clear whether you are using him to exemplify rockism or the opposite: but rockist artists don't see themselves as discontinuously appropriating an earlier mode of expression but as continuing and subtly modifying an ongoing tradition.

I didn't suggest that Bowie or Morrisey were "fascists". I said that they had "flirted with extreme right wing politics", a very different thing. If you think it more precise to say they did no more than flirt with the iconography, then I suspect that's something of an oversimplification, but am happy to let it go - the difference doesn't affect my argument. Which is that their flirting with such iconography represents a departure from mainstream popular music tradition, one of a number of elements which may have had the "shock of the new" to pop music fans in 1980, but which in poetry or painting would have been old hat long before, the equivalent disjunction having taken place around 1922. Yes, many of their borrowings from earlier periods were self-conscious and late twentieth century, and you can apply all sorts of "post" or "neo" type prefixes to describe the way in which they relate to earlier periods of art, but you can still usefully see this disjunction in simple terms as modernism becoming part of mainstream pop music culture many decades after it revolutionised other art forms.

Obviously I accept that there some very broad generalisations here and that their are a host of maverick artists from Robert Bridges to Merle Haggard that won't fit.

Dylan or Keith Richards may have played occasionally with iconography of earlier eras, but in essence they regarded themselves as continuing the tradition of their immediate forebears like Woody Guthrie, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and back through folk-music and blues, all more or less able to be evaluated within a consistent critical tradition that could have stretched back to Wordsworth. A tradition that prized the authenticity of the feelings of the common man, above the numbed sensitivities of the over-civilised; and regarded the artist as a kind of shaman whose function was to journey deeply (and possibly dangerously) into the self report and report as truthfully as possible what (s)he discovered, on the basis that deep truths about the self have a universal relevance. These are the bases for "authenticity" and "sincerity" of feeling as the ultimate aesthetic value, as they still are for rockist criticism.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that artists or critics should limit themselves to this anachronistic tradition (although it seems to me that most jazz musicians still do). But I do think that jettisoning these values absolutely has wider implications than a poke in the eye for people who prefer Eric Clapton to Depeche Mode. How do you understand Robert Johnson without reference to authenticity of feeling? What damage is done to left-wing politics if you ditch the theoretical basis for privileging the experience of the unsophisticated artist over the academician? Certainly it seems to me there is a huge strand of intellectual elitism in the pomo approach to music criticism, a contempt for the ordinary and a yearning to be taken seriously as high art at the same time as its professed relativism is ostensibly denying the the existence of any such thing.

Sure, I think the Cher track is quite important. As is Kraftwerk, the processed vocals of Lennon, etc. Dunno about "contempt for the ordinary," I see your point, but once something like that Cher track becomes the ordinary, then who has the contempt? Obviously, it's stupid to have contempt for the "elite" and to have contempt for the ordinary. Is not part of the lesson of postmodernism the fact that the ordinary ain't so ordinary...you have media to contend with. The thing is, I just don't think the aims of art have changed at all; it's the ways we elevate the "ordinary" that have changed.

When I'm hired to make a Euro-Trance song, I'm usually not working with the most gifted singer in the world, so I'm obliged to reach into my bag of tricks to get the best possible vocal track. I'm poring through each take, looking not just for words and phrases but individual syllables. Then I'm compiling those bits into an idealized performance, adding Auto-Tune, reverb, and delay to suit taste. I have accepted these practices as completely normal, since dance music is about serving the track and not the artist. Furthermore, I like the fact that this music tends to revel in its own artifice. It has absolutely no basis in traditional musical performance, and it's not afraid to flaunt that.

Conversely, when I'm listening to a rock album, my first question is "Can they really sing and play, or has everything been massaged in Pro Tools?", and I'm usually disappointed to find out when a hot band-du-jour can't cut it on stage.

Compared to what, though? Bix Beiderbeck? Edward Elgar? What would have been the orthodoxy of their day, and where did the vocabulary come from to challenge it and allow people like Armstrong and Johnson to be treated as serious artists (I presume you're not going to tell me that you are a postmodernist and think these attributes are instrinsic to the work!).

I'm not abandoning the notion of authenticity of feeling. I just think it's more complex than it's given credit for being. It's often to be found where it's least expected. It's also constructed by the very means which seem merely to 'express' it.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine committed suicide. I didn't cry until the moment, when, having made a web page announcing it, I saw it online. My emotion was all tied up with the way I expressed it.

I don't believe there's emotion, and then there's expression, and one precedes the other, just as I don't believe you can really separate the medium and the message or form and content, or a speech act and context. This is why I criticized your ahistoricism. We're so tied up with the 'now' and the 'how': 'now' has a lot to do with 'how' -- how we speak, how we think, how we see. There is no timeless way of speaking. And the way we speak and think can determine what we believe and feel. But just because emotion is often constructed by a communications medium (Robert Johnson played the blues, but the blues also played him) doesn't make it any less authentic.

This year's irony is next year's sincerity. A word I used last year with invisible quote marks around it, I may use this year without quote marks. A feeling I claimed to feel last year in a theatrical, posturing and ironic way might become, this year, a real feeling that can make me cry real tears. Rather than being a sterile binary, the vector between irony and sincerity can be an unpredictable walk into ambiguity. The places in between irony and sincerity are rich in artistic opportunity. They're places of fuzzy logic, of role playing, of mixed feelings and changing beliefs. Irony has been given a bad press. People think it's a joke shop. In fact it's more like a mysterious forest or a masked ball.

What damage is done to left-wing politics if you ditch the theoretical basis for privileging the experience of the unsophisticated artist over the academician?

The traditions of my left wing politics have always allowed respect for the intelligentsia as well as the workers! I think privileging the unsophisticated is more a mark of dictatorship (Mao and Hitler) than of socialism.

Certainly it seems to me there is a huge strand of intellectual elitism in the pomo approach to music criticism, a contempt for the ordinary and a yearning to be taken seriously as high art at the same time as its professed relativism is ostensibly denying the the existence of any such thing.

Someone else answered this, and I agree: pomo is now widely appreciated by all sorts of people. Cher and Devendra Banhart are both pomo artists. Cher is more plastic, more produced, and has bigger mass appeal. Devendra Banhart is sort of organic, has big claims to authenticity being made for him, and has elite appeal. I don't think we can say either is more authentic or more postmodern than the other, really.

Does this not simply become a new orthodoxy?

When was Venturi's "Learning from Las Vegas" written? Late '60s?

In pop music, pomo dates from roughly the time of the oil embargo. '74. That's era of first Eno records; Big Star's "Radio City" (pomo Beatles); Parsons' "Grievous Angel" (in which country music is reimagined as received wisdom/gloss on earlier efforts, last gasp of "romanticism"). Roxy Music. Etc. Whereas the Beatles, James Brown, soul music, Beach Boys are all high modernist/high '60s works, and even there the subject is starting to crumble.

Drew Daniels' post is great; I don't want to retreat from pomo; we're living in the era and why deny it? Theoretically, the possibilities are endless and that's what pomo is at least partly about, isn't it?

Yeah, it can become a new orthodoxy. But haven't artists always been on the one hand incredibly passionate and on the other hand really detached? Isn't that what art is to begin with?

Isn't that kind of the point of postmodernism? It's a bit like intellectual zen: Nothing is real, it's all about the brainwave state.

This is quite arbitrary, but I like to think of 1956 as the 'Big Bang' year for postmodernism. Elvis Presley's first single, and the 'This Is Tomorrow' show at the Whitechapel Gallery, which more or less invented Pop Art. Richard Hamilton was in that show, and you can draw a direct line from him to Roxy Music because he taught Bryan Ferry, who named 'Virgina Plain' after one of his paintings. Reyner Banham was in that show, and he's on the sleeve of my new album! In fact, if Elvis started mainstream pop music as we know it, the Pop Art of the Independent Group has been much more important to what I think of as 'indie' music (yes, stretching 'indie' to include Roxy Music...)

Here's a blurb from an MIT Press book about The Independent Group:

'The Independent Group, or the IG, as it was called, is best known for having launched Pop Art. But the young artists, architects, and critics who met informally at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in the early 1950s were actually embarked on a far more subversive and constructive mission than the founding of an art movement. Street-smart, anti-academic, and iconoclastic, they embraced Hollywood and Madison Avenue and rejected the traditional dichotomies between high and low culture, British and American values. They used their meetings and exhibitions to challenge the official modernist assumptions of British aesthetics and to advocate instead a media-based, consumer-based aesthetics of change and inclusiveness - an aesthetics of plenty. In doing so they drew upon Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist strategies to invigorate their alternative version of modernism - a version that today can be said to have insinuated the terms of postmodernism.'

I should probably say 'art rock' instead.

A recording made now that sounds like a 1930s recording is an example of post-modern irony, whether that's deliberate or accidental.

This is true and obvious, but it's funny how much mythic pull old sounds have. We (or some of us...or Michael Gira at least...) say something sounds like it could have come from the 1930s by way of establishing this whole authenticity thing, as if the 1930s (or 1830s, or whenever) was any more real and less self-consciously constructed than our own time. The rockist world view at its most cartoonish partly boils down to old = real and new = fake. This doesn't only infect music criticism, obviously -- it's also a cartoon definition of conservatism, which is obviously what the whole "rockism" thing is getting at. (And in music, it doesn't only infect rock. The most obvious example is the continued persistence of scratchy needle noises on hip-hop tracks.) Anyway, I've just always found it amusing that people listen to, say, the Carter Family, and hear it as old-timey or authentic or something, when at the time it was contemporary pop music recorded on state of the art equipment. (As, for that matter, were Sousa marches recorded on wax cylinders.)

On the other hand, I think the more fervent of the anti-rockists sometimes buy into the same bullshit -- rejecting canonical works, say, just because they're canonical. Denying Springsteen or Dylan or the Beatles the right to exist outside those musty halls, punishing the music for the offenses of its most ardent defenders. Matters of personal taste aside, I don't understand people who can get the joy in "Toxic" but miss it in "Badlands."

(stopping this post now before continuing on to post-modernism...)

Momus, that is astonishing. I know nothing about The Independent Group. I look forward to reading that book. That blurb though still leads me to argue (for the sake of this thread and begging your indulgence) for the dehistoricization of postmodernism, inasmuch as the precursors listed--Dada, Futurism, Surrealism--themselves fall short of epochal designation unlike Drew's Atomic Age which clearly achieves it. Rather these movements may be regarded (for the sake of argument) updated metonymies for our proclivity to send-up and pastiche authority and official culture which probably accompanied our first stories around the camp fires in the waybackwhen and will continue to result in cultural color commentary until the end times. Yesterday's Dada is today's Postmodern, and so forth before and beyond ad nauseaum. The same cannot be said for the revolution wrought by the threat of the atomic bomb. That situation and its concomittant paradigms--basically the real threat of world annihilation--are unique in human history. (If I'm being bitchy I hope you consider me an engaged if smartass student as opposed to a mere agitator.)

That said, it also seems to kind of be over, doesn't it? Part of the conceit of postmodernism was that everything had been done -- Modernism pushed things as far into abstraction as you could go, and so you either had to retreat into some more traditional means of representation or step outside the whole chronology and treat it as your plaything.

But of course, everything hadn't been done. Nobody had blown up the World Trade Center, for example. But September 11 is just a symbolic turning point, if it's even that. The real point is that postmodernism still was within the Western Enlightenment tradition, and that entire tradition has reached a point (because of gloablizing economies, cultures, technologies) of needing to adapt to new circumstances in ways that are going to require new ideas and new connections and new means of representation and communication. Rhetorically, both the left and right in the West seem flummoxed at how to cope, applying rancid 19th century overlays (capitalism vs. socialism, imperialism/colonialism) or 20th century analogies (War on Terror as substitute for WWI/II/Vietnam/Cold War, take your pick) in ways that don't really fit. Likewise, postmodernism seems ill-equipped for the present moment, which calls for synthesis much more than deconstruction. Digital media itself, at first glance a postmodernist dream (it can take everything apart and turn it all into equal-sized bits, and then rebuild it anyway you want), is producing all manner of mutant forms of communication that are more fundamentally forward-looking than anything with "post" as a prefix can really account for.

Or so it seems to me.

Well, we're talking about cultural history here, so the events are bound to seem a bit less incandescent than atomic bombs. But I don't see why you would want to 'dehistoricize' postmodernism.

Continuing my case for 1956 of Pomo's Big Bang year, over in Paris Barthes is writing 'Mythologies', his book of essays on such things as the way the new Citroen looks like a medieval cathedral and the way Charlton Heston's hairstyle looks suspiciously modern in a Hollywood gladiator movie. 'Mythologies' is still the template for cultural journalism today. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard, a journalist at Cahiers du Cinema, is raving about populist British / American directors like Hitchcock and John Ford, as you can see from the Top 10 lists he starts publishing that year. The Top 10 List becomes an important part of pomo ephemera / trivia culture, still big on this very board!

It's already clear what will replace postmodernism. Posthumanism. The era of gentech, the blending of manbrain and machinebrain, of the posthuman and of 'digital flesh' (copyright Arthur and Marilouise Kroker) is the next thing. Never mind humanist, postmodernism may well be the last cultural movement that's 100% human.

This is a bit like Benjamin's "aura" applied retrospectively isn't it. I was thinking about this in relation to kitsch collectables the other day: the rapid turnover of capital results in commodities transforming in our imagination from being standard manufacturing belt replica commodities (devoid of aura) at the time of manufacture and sale to taking on the aura of being one-of-a-kind works of artistry/craftmanship by dint of their scarcity. Such reevaluation/re-valuation appears kitsch when we are still aware of the humble beginnings of the art, but over time as even that historical awareness disappears the sense of kitschness drops away too, such that the appreciation loses all awareness of its own irony, becomes "genuine".

(on a slightly related note: I think Tom E has this idea that pop music styles reach their lowest ebb of fashionability about seven or eight years after their popular peak, and then after that they can slowly move towards a resurgence of interest, archival compiling and ultimately revival. Perhaps that seven year period is the period within which said pop artefacts have a decreasing level of cultural value, but their presence (whether in terms of cultural ubiquity, radio dominance or sheer number of CDs in the rack) is still in surplus. A resurgence in the artefacts' value can begin when its cultural presence (and availability) slumps beneath the level of interest in it, creating a deficit relative that interest.)

This is probably all pretty obvious, but they were new thoughts for me!

Which leads me to make this point--I'm overstating my case for dehistoricization to provoke discussion about the attitudes that shape postmodernism having always already existed. Aren't there always Barthesean and Godardian (sp?) figures in every era prepared to make it new by refocussing attention on the superficial (and the playful? the unserious? the childish?) to undermine stale othodoxy? And doesn't this occur on the level of High Culture as a synechdoche for "authenticity," the everyday sarcasm of the non-educated non-privileged? Coleridge's and Wordsworth's celebration of "common speech" in the face of stale Augustan diction springs to mind as a precursor to Godard's insurrection against the Tradition of Quality in French film.

Yeah, I think 9/11 is a totally pomo event. It's not a good place to mark 'the end of pomo'. Bin Laden is a completely pomo phenomenon, in the sense that his Islamic fundamentalism is in a simple dialectic with the west's 'aesthetics of plenty'. In fact, you could argue that Bin Laden is a pomo rockist in just the same way that Gira sets Banhart up to be. Bin Laden and Banhart both exist in the present and use postmodern technology and the media to further their goals, but condemn the contemporary and harken back to a notionally more 'pure' time when people were 'less corrupted'. This apparent denial of postmodernism is actually an integral part of its dialectics. Bin Laden probably gave pomo an extra 20 years of life when he arranged 9/11. It was looking, in the 90s, to be morphing into 'the posthuman'. But Bin Laden brought things back to the old pomo binaries: sincere / ironic, real / fake, past / present, anorexia / bulemia...

Yes, that's exactly what I mean about 'last year's irony is this year's sincerity'. That's why you can't write off irony. Irony is a site of shifting attitudes, a place where we explore ambiguities we feel. The Independent Group were leftists who were fascinated by the capitalist imagery of America, for example. They used irony to explore the contradictions in this stance. 'Richard Hamilton practises an ‘ironism of affirmation’ toward Pop culture (he borrows the phrase from his mentor Duchamp) or, in his own words, a ‘peculiar mixture of reverence and cynicism’.

You may laugh at this prediction now, but you won't laugh in 2012: the point at which postmodernism turns into posthumanism is the moment when Arnold Schwartzenegger becomes president of the US. That's the point at which the pomo fight between the authentic and the fake morphs into the posthuman fight between flesh and digital flesh.

I personally think a lot of the most interesting ideas of the last few decades have come from the scientific rather than philosophical realms (to the extent that they're different). I'm thinking especially of chaos theory, and even more of complexity theory, which provide whole new prisms for seeing all of this stuff through, and point toward some ways of joining science and religion, tradition and innovation, in a sort of unified cultural theory. The basic concept of emergence gives new depth and flexibility to the old dialectic models.

Obviously I'm mostly talking out my ass, since I'm not a scientist or a philosopher. But complexity theory seems especially well suited to wrestling with emerging global culture and crises, as well as with the mindfuck explosion of digital technology.

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), October 30th, 2004.

ha

If the authenticity of the Mayan calendar holds up, this will be the moment the Earth comes into harmony with the rest of the universe.

Have you seen the latest video from him (and i realize by saying that it almost seems like I'm talking about a pop star more than a terrorist)? As an American constantly bombarded with the national political state of mind (confusion, apathy, anger, whathaveyou) tt feels so incredibly surreal to hear Bin Laden saying that Bush misled us.

Perhaps w a different president it would make me upset or whatever, but enough American people have been fed up with Bush for so long that we are at a point where we can hear this horrible man and actually agree with him.

Before we hunt down and kill him of course.

1. He looks good, like the clothes.
2. That's the man who took those buildings away, the ones I used to like seeing towering over East Broadway. And killed thousands of people.
3. I wonder if Bush has killed more people? I suppose it depends how you calculate it.
4. It really does seem like Bin Laden has seen Michael Moore's 'F9/11', or at least had it described to him. Because of the 'My Little Goat' thing and because of the way he brackets Bush with the Saudi rulers. Then again, these things are established facts. They're not the property of Moore, and they don't become less true just because Bin Laden says them.
5. He actually makes a reference to voting scams in Florida.
6. Protection racket-style menace -- 'I'm just trying to find the best way for you not to get hurt.'
7. I wonder if we could get Bin Laden blogging? I mean, he could 'update' daily with a video, an audio message, or just a letter, and be on a Friends list with lots of other Evil People.
8. He seems to be mellowing with age.
9. This doesn't really threaten new attacks.
10. What did the bits Al-Jazeera held back say? US diplomats negotiated with the network before the tape was shown. We can only assume that the bits shown are a compromise reached by the two sides. Perhaps in other parts of the tape Bin Laden said something that would tip the election clearly one way or the other. As it is, it's unclear who it helps.

well, if you believe the latest reports that calculate civilian deaths in Iraq to be above 100,000, then yeah, I would say he has. And if you add Afghanistan to the equation...

It still seems unclear whether we are talking about Postmodernity as a historical phase or whether we are doing a character sketch of the figure of the Postmodern-ist and trying to come up with candidates for who is or is not an "agent" of Postmodernity. This is (and apologies if this all sounds way pretentious) a bit similar to Derrida's move in relation to Deconstruction: Derrida said that the texts he wrote about were already "in deconstruction", that is, he did not feel that what he staged were interventions that did a something to them, that applied a theory called by others "deconstruction", complete with doctrine and dogma, rather, he felt that he was revealing the fissures, slippages, aporias that were already present within the philosophical systems and texts under analysis. The texts and systems themselves were themselves "always already" (hi Spencer) IN DECONSTRUCTION, with no need for a "deconstruction-ist" agent at all. This move struck some as highly disingenuous (as if Derrida was saying "little old me? why I haven't touched a thing") and always rang as a highly performed display of modesty, if not sleight of hand. I think the same can be said about Postmodernism as a historical state of being, versus the conception in which there are people who going around *making* Dolly Parton appear to us as postmodern by flagging or pointing out her combination of silicone prosthetics and geewhiz Tennessee mountain home shtick.

I am also reminded, and this gets closer to Momus' Bin Laden example, of a recent talk Slavoj Zizek gave about the people in Brazillian slums being the foremost postmodern/posthuman subjects. It is not about cultivating an empowered, sleek mastery of technological trinkets or flaunting/revelling in consumerist alienation or surfing the ceaseless flow of value-neutral info-surfaces etc etc. Rather, it is the people who fall outside the cracks of any support system, the people in refugee camps who aren't covered by the birthright/citizenship model of human rights who thus occasion a crisis/collapse in how we think through what a nation is/does, the people in "failed states" and lawless "no go" areas in Brazil's favelas where the police will not enter, who are the most exemplary subjects of Post-modernity. They don't just entertain doubts about historical master-narratives, they are the ones whose lives are lived in a kind of disavowed/abjected "failed state" inside the state apparatus itself. It was a talk that pissed a lot of people off and raised many doubts, but it was interesting as an extension and re-location of Post-modernity from a kind of doctrine about ideological freefall back to a kind of political/materialist mapping of where we can see the greatest collapses in political/economic structure. Dunno if this just amounts to going up to the next homeless person you see and saying "congrats! you're now the bleeding edge of post-modernity!"

Isn't there a song on Devendra's Rejoicing in the Hands where he sings "it's like an old folk song / that you've never heard before / still you know every word" seems like a pretty canny location of himself as precisely a new songwriter who is NOT a throwback but who is self-conscious and aware of his relationship to tradition and is teasing us and himself about that fact.

-- Momus (nic...), October 30th, 2004.

does this mean anything? do you intend it to mean anything? or is it just more wordplay?

Either way, I'm not sold on "post-humanism" as much more than a handle for grad students to hang dissertations on.

i'll still read his web site occassionally, there are some real gems there. (ironically he seems to "write for an audience" better on his web site essays than he does here!!)

does this mean anything? do you intend it to mean anything? or is it just more wordplay?

Perhaps I shouldn't have used 'terminate' in both terms there. What I meant was that Schwazenegger will be elected for his reputation as a tough guy but will actually be more significant as a symbol of the age of man-machine combination. Since I've identified Schwarzenegger as the turning point between the postmodern and the posthuman, what I'm saying is that he will be elected on a security platform that relates to a postmodern dialectic between the 'bulemia' of the west and the 'anorexia' of islamist terrorism, but that his presidency will usher in a new paradigm, a new dialectic between the human and robotic. These two elements are already apparent in his persona. The American public will think they're electing a 'tough guy' -- in fact they'll be electing a 'robot'.

argument proceeds not by logic but by puns, wordplay...semantic likenesses and oppositions. in which something sounding clever is the surest measure of its truth. i like momus is very good at this.

I think speculatively and playfully, erecting structures, games and metaphors quickly and dismantling them quickly too. It's not a style of argument that advances implacably towards a single, central, immobile 'truth' because that isn't my view of the universe. What it does do is put small lights down in various parts of the terrain which throw enough shadows to give some idea of the topography. I don't think it's a monologue at all -- in fact dialogue is one of my favourite forms (and the one thing I really admire Plato for) and I do my best thinking dialectically, bouncing off other people's points like I'm bouncing off yours right now. It seems to me that this thread has many voices, and that we all basically understand one another and are getting along fine. Sometimes I get a little tired of being treated as if I invented semantic oppositions, or as if the unstable and metaphorical nature of language is somehow my fault. Anyway, the lucky thing is that, on some level, language works and we communicate, even if people occasionally say things like 'I like Momus is very good at this'. (For which, thanks.)

Now, I wonder if cultural attitudes cluster and bunch up the same way political attitudes are supposed to (but don't always do)? In politics -- and this may be one of the great fictions of politics -- you're supposed to have linked, clustered views. Even when the views linked are contradictory. For instance, a Republican is supposed to believe 'Thou shalt not kill', and to apply that to unborn babies, but not to foreigners killed in the wars or prisoners on death row. My suspicion is that these attitude clusters are not logical but magnetic. In other words, someone has a self-identity as a Republican, shares a couple of the necessary presuppositions, and sort of gravitates towards a whole cluster of attitudes as if drawn by a magnetic force. Consistency of identity is more important than consistency of reason.

So does that work here too? Amateurist and I agree on the genius of Jacques Tati, but not on other things. My views on 'rockism' seem to be shared by a lot of people here, but my views on 'hipsters' aren't. I think even the 'and he dresses stupid' remark is a shot in the culture wars, because obviously I dress to express my values. If I dress in a silly way, it's because I think it's important to be silly!

with regard to political beliefs, at least, i think this is true and borne out by recent studies on voting habits.

with regard to political beliefs, at least, i think this is true and borne out by recent studies on voting habits.

...in the context of contemporary america. i don't know whether this holds for all places at all times.

Drew Daniel (because it's his line, cut and pasted by someone else)

I did happen to start the thread, though I'm not sure I poached Drew Daniel's line or some -no-name's-

Foucault
Derrida
Barthes
Lacan
Zizek

I really don't understand this thing about 'postmodernism has always existed'! Is it like that Bjork song where she said cars and TV sets are part of nature, and have been kept inside a mountain down the ages, ready to emerge when the time was right? Is this the intellectual equivalent of Creationism, this need to assert that everything was created at the same time, and no evolutions have happened since.

(BTW, yes it was Drew's line. He even queried whether this happens a lot on ILM. I think he was surprised to see a thread started with his own thought, like woman being plucked from man's rib in the Old Testament!)

(BTW2 if you feed Matmos into Musicplasma it tells you they're close to two Icelandic bands, Manitoba and Boards of Canada, so I suppose they're in a cold part of the planetary system! Whereas Momus is -- bizarrely enough -- rather close to Madonna, which I guess is a hot place, though not necessarily where I want to be!)

If you like the death penalty, you'll love pre-emptive war! Customers who bought abortion also bought gay marriage.

By the way I'm not trying to pick a fight; I'm just tweaking your nipples--you have after all qualified your entire corpus with the name of the Graeco-Roman god of criticism!