anti-rockism has a lot to say about what shouldn't be critical criteria...

Is privileging inauthenticity the new rockism?

Does Rockism Exist?

Rockism! - The Soundtrack: What Would This CD Comprise Of?

Anyone who mentions 'Rockism' is UNCOOL

The Schism? Random Crazed Thoughts on Rockism/Popism and what music is really FOR....

Indie pop and Rockism

The Scourge of Rockism

What Is Rockism ?

Is privileging inauthenticity the new rockism?

Rockism

The effects of rockism on compilations

New York Times on Rockism

Scourge of Rockism Part II: The Mojo 1000

ILM in New York Times article on Rockism

Rockist Meat and potatoes: s & d

the so-called "producer's medium" and where it falls on the pop/rockist divide

Rockist Bubblegum: Find me some!

Rush Limbaugh, Rockist

Careless Talk Costs Lives is too Rockist Discuss

Most Rockist Moment of Your Life

etc. . . .

*I know this isn't what you said; it's just an example I decided to use

It annoys me how a lack of official consensus opinion is automatically equated with some sort of babble of irrational "I don't like this so fuck off" (or "I like this so fuck off") from everyone. Consensus opinion isn't objectivism, its hegemonic subjectivism, created and enforced only by historical contingency.

I will allow for a critique of music which incorporates certain and very limited kind of objectivity, being: how does this music objectively function for me. Strictly speaking, it's deceptive to say "this is my opinion and that's the end of the story" - one can always potentially break down a subject's experience of music into component elements whose affect functions upon the listener in a manner that has nothing to do with "opinion". But a functional account of music cannot be universalist or hegemonic precisely because every piece of music, every listener and every listening situation is different.

We wouldn't expect a chemical to behave in the exact same way if we varied its mass, its volume, its temperature or the other chemicals it was exposed to. And, indeed, even the supposed stability and uniformity of the chemical at a particular temperature, context etc. is only a result of us being unable to perceive all of the activity going on at a molecular level. However, this variation in behaviour is utterly objective, there is nothing subjective about it.

Music is similar really: I think it's impossible to ever fully explain the effect of a piece of music on us, there will always be some material differences which our conceptual explanation will not adequately capture. But this is not because of some radical subjectivism. "Leavis" has got it all wrong: the subjectivity is on the side of the concepts and criteria we use, the objectivity is on the side of a particular experience of a particular piece of music.

What I meant, rather, is that dialogue and common enjoyment are good and very much part of the process of appreciating music. Some subjective consensus is therefore probably necessary. Not an overarching one, but maybe just small pockets of consensus here and there. But for even that to happen, you need to have a language for your exchange, ie commonly held ideas about what you're appreciating in common.

Isn't there something in the very concept of commonly held ideas that a certain strain of anti-rockism doesn't like?

Certainly when the 'commonly held ideas' held up as examples by rockists are in fact anything but.

Fair enough, I meant the "pure" strain, that thinks you can come to a song without any baggage, and that anti-rockism is about the banishment of ideology (see: many posts along those lines in various threads here). A more revisionist strain might see that as a laudable yet utopian goal and tends more to your hundred ideologies blooming and the ultimately inevitability of rockisms succeeding rockisms.

if I'm reading this right, and I think I am, you're saying something along the lines of "Rolling Stone magazine picking 'Like a Rolling Stone' by Bob Dylan as the greatest song of all time is an accurate reflection of how everyone thinks." which is wrong, but is also not what I think Leavis is trying to say--it's that a lot of people (in and out of RS' staff--and hey, I contribute to the magazine sometimes, so count me guilty if you want) take it as a given that "LARS" is a great song. that seems reasonable to me.

or, in shorthand, "common" /= "unanimous"

Yeah, but there's also a lot of prima facie rejection of arguments based on the idea that they're the "wrong type of argument", rather than actual engagement with the argument.

I need to go do some work. Thanks for the great discussion, guys.

I have been wondering if what is bothersome about rockism doesn't also plague some of the proposed anti-rockist positions (which tends to refer to a more pop and hip-hop friendly position, though it need not): namely, a tacit switcheroo between two separate things:

1) demographic facts about the popularity of a given song/artist
2) aesthetic judgements about the quality of a given song/artist

Let's take some straw-man rockist claims: "Bob Dylan is the greatest songwriter of his generation" or "Nirvana changed everything about rock music".

Clearly, enough people think that both these statements are true that one can refer to these statements *in an opinion poll sense* as reflections of a significant set of music lovers' views/opinions within this country. Which never quite manages to be the same thing as some objective fact about "quality" or "greatness", unless you are resorting to some kind of utilitarian calculus in which the sheer number of people who are made happy/pumped/excited by product X just DOES equal "product X is Great Art". Now let's switch these straw man rockist statements up into their anti-rockist mutations: "Britney Spears is the pre-eminent pop star of her generation" or "The Neptunes changed everything about hip hop". The names have changed, the genres under review have changed, but the same blurry feeling prevails, because people are routing demographic reports about popularity through aesthetic claims about quality. The "punkist" credo that the masses are sheep and that whatever they like necessarily sucks finds its funhouse mirror inversion in the (again, straw man) anti-rockist credo that "The people have spoken" and that Soundscan numbers = the ultimate objective validation of the worthiness of an aesthetic object. I don't think that anybody actually holds the cartoonish, reductio ad absurdum versions of these two opposed positions. But what is being undertheorized here is, as F. R. Leavis points out, the criteria for aesthetic assertions which would NOT be just sociological reportage about popular opinion disguised as critical evaluation of the object itself.

sincerely,

I. A. Richards (not really)

It seems to me the argument isn't really about replacing rockism with something else, it's about exposing the basic fallacies of the underlying assumptions (about authenticity, authorship, originality, and all the other things rockism holds dear) -- defeating "rockism" by demonstrating that it doesn't -- can't -- really exist, because it's built on false assumptions about art and the world.

And, of course, the very idea of "the aesthetic object itself" cut off from its manifestation in a scene, from a particular location, within a historically and culturally contingent environment is simply the ideological dream of New Criticism, so take THAT, F. R. Leavis and I. A. Richards! You are acting as if interpellated subjects who have races, and are members of classes, and have been trained to reiterate and reinforce gender norms, could just suspend all of that and hover in the void with "the object itself", and that is THE ideological move par excellence.

sincerely,

Terry Eagleton (not really)

sincerely,

I. A. Richards (not really)

sincerely,

Terry Eagleton (not really)

Well, I think some of the aethetic criteria stay the same: imagination, execution, artistic engagement, etc., all those standard aesthetic values. But what's being removed is a scrim of artifical, a priori (and basically lazy) prejudices that consign music to different taste ghettos based on assumptions about what constitutes "real" or "important" music. And what's being acknowledged more explicitly is that entertaiment value -- how much fun something is, how pleasurable it is -- is actually an aesthetic value too. Part of this whole thing is a reaction against the assumption that anything that gives readily available pleasure is too pleasurable to really be significant somehow. Hence Kelefa Sanneh's disdain for the phrase "guilty pleasure" -- this is partly about liberating pleasure from guilt.

There are strands of rockism, though, where the seven/ten/eleven year cycle of music revolution fits very comfortably, where each vanguard of annihilating revolution, like punk or Nirvana, no matter what its stated aims (J Rotten: "I hate ALL music, blah blah blah"), always ends up getting rock music back to its 'roots'.

Though only to a point, right? Does the anti-rockist necessarily have a stance about removing the guilt of enjoying morally offensive things like, say, unambiguously homophobic lyrics?

Wilder dismissed the authenticity thing by claiming that Kelefa's perspective was based on opposing, in a 'creaky cultural studies' opposition, straight white rockist rock to 'periwigged artifice and the Other'. But having set the argument up in Queer Studies terms, he proceeded to throw the baby out with the bathwater. He didn't get to the point of admitting that rockists make big claims when they say that some music is more 'real' than other music, and that the onus is really on them to defend this claim, rather than on the anti-rockists to defend the much more modest claim of liking... well, just whatever they like, really.

As I've muttered on here, I'm Mr. Radical Subjectivist as such -- and far from saying that stopping with "it's great and that's that" is a bad thing because it is 'irrational,' I actually think it's absolutely core to a lot of what we think! In that we do not as a matter of course always and constantly review *why* we like what we like -- a truism but I think an important one to consider, the explanation of one's reactions, positive or negative, are not required unless asked for or prompted, including self-prompting. Thus the difference between, perhaps, a 'rational' and an 'irrational' response -- the pleasure of criticism can be its own reward in debate on these areas but to be utterly honest, while I like talking a lot about what I do enjoy and don't, I don't always feel the need to go deeper than initial reactions, and neither, I suspect, do a lot of us.

Tim's elucidation of what can function as a personal subjectivity and objectivity therefore greatly interests me. I don't think it's deceptive to stop at a certain level, rather it would be deceptive to say one should stop at a certain level. Again, this may seem patently obvious, but discourse, as generalized, would appear to demand more (otherwise why the frustrations of the 'anti-rockists' at what would be appear to be a closed loop of mainstream discussion?). Pre-discourse, however -- unless we talk about that discussion in our heads (and after all, why not?) -- we could 'stop' as much as we wanted to, we could have reached the end of the story. The need for rigorous analysis and self-reflection is not as immediate or as intrinsic as might otherwise be assumed -- whether because there are 'more important things,' whatever they might be, to worry about, or simply because it's judged as unneeded.

And I agree, I hate term 'guilty pleasure' and don't recognize it as valid for my experience -- at the same time, sometimes I think that people who adore something which 'gives readily available pleasure' often assume the worst when someone who doesn't adore it says as much. Not always, of course -- indeed, the whole point here is the recognition of alternate approaches. But there is a subtle irony at play if we are assuming that something which 'gives readily available pleasure' ALWAYS does that, universally. I don't think that's gypsy's intent...but it intrigues me.

And applied to art, pleasure becomes even more subjective and contextual. Stuff that literally does sound like "noise" to some people -- that is actually painful in some way to listen to -- makes other people ecstatic. There's a lot of conditioning that goes into this, obviously. But I think there is a tendency among people with refined or conditioned or educated tastes (whatever the basis for their refinement and conditioning, whether they've become attuned to free jazz or the nuances of hip-hop) to distrust art that seems too readily available, that too many people "get" too easily.

There's some ironic aspects to it, though. It can cut both ways. Consider OutKast: Embraced by the alleged rockist community for some of the things rockists care about -- they play instruments! that one song sounds like the Beatles! -- they were therefore subject to a lot of carping and bitching on this very board (the famous thread calling out everyone whose only P&J hip-hop pick was OutKast). Those opposing points of view both excluded the possibility that someone might actually hear a lot of hip-hop and still think OutKast was great, for the standard range of aesthetic reasons (imaginative, skilled, entertaining, etc.).

Anyway, I don't think invoking "pleasure" is a convincing critical argument in itself in either direction. It's not enough to just say you like something -- if you want to engage in criticism, you have to be willing to examine the basis of that, find out what gives you pleasure. But more to point contra rockism, it's certainly not valid to be skeptical of something for the mere reason that lots of people find it enjoyable.

Therein the trick. I think, that the frustration over rockism as outlined/assumed here isn't with people liking what they like -- it's with how people talk about what they like.

i've always been split down the middle myself, because my induction into being a fan of music was always guided by a purely aesthetic pecking order -- which, in some ways, gets the worst of both worlds, rockist and anti-rockist (you've got "good" and "bad" without claims to social relevance and "beautiful" and "ugly" without the populist authority of instinctual enjoyment.) all this because i was raised in a religious family and needed something to replace religion? probably.

my main beef with a certain kind of anti-rockism is its reinvention of itself as a science tracing a "function" (as outlined by tim), not because i think this replaces "faith" in any way (as many cultural conservatives do), but because it tries to render itself functionless through its supposed neutrality and openness, thereby giving itself up to a different kind of ideology (more Eagleton stuff, I'm sure) that has no bark or bite, while TruthBeautyImportance folks are all bark no bite in the sense that their doctrine of cultural hegemony is a masking device.

I'd rather see criticism and a canon more oriented towards sparks of "profane illumination" within the current cultural marketplace (as opposed to a "neutral" engagement with said marketplace or a masking of it through Great Artist arguments) -- because if I were a thirteen-year-old fan of Britney, I wouldn't change if you traced a phenomenon or headed off into dickface land like Wilder. I might change (or see how I might change, or have the temptation to see) if you were more like Benjamin. Ha! The cat's out of the bag...

ned otm - i can't think of a single supposed anti-rockist who doesn't actually like rock

(my emphasis)

The Black Commentator (who end their 'About Us' page with 'We at The Black Commentator are who we say we are and plan on keeping it real.')

Cave says of the now-departed Blixa Bargeld:

"He was such a significant presence in my adult life," Cave told me. "That he's not around, there's just a big hole there. At the same time, we were moving towards something that was less ironic in nature, and he was very much about playing the guitar in a non-guitar way. You know, that I have this sort of foreign instrument in my hands, and I'll make the best of it that I can. Whereas, if, in a way, Warren has replaced Blixa to a degree, and filled that hole, Warren doesn't play music in that way. He plays it in the opposite way, without any irony, and with a real love of rock 'n' roll and noise." For any longtime fan of Cave's work, Bargeld's departure was a shock and a tragedy. But perhaps it was necessary for the continued evolution of the band.'

'Rock 'n' roll, which so prides itself on being anti-establishment, and Christianity, the ultimate establishment, make uncomfortable bedfellows -- is there genre of music more reliably atrocious than Christian rock? Dylan went electric and his fans revolted. Dylan went born again and they were so stunned and horrified that they went into denial and pretended he didn't exist -- at least until he distanced himself from Christianity a decade later. But with Dylan, there's always the niggling, in this case welcome, suspicion that he doesn't really mean it, that he's just toying with the world, having some fun, being cryptically ironic. With Cave, that interpretation does not work. He is a deeply, unsettlingly sincere artist.'

God, I wish I was better at uploading files because I think we need a Venn diagram now to track the overlapping zones and differences between several terms in play here now:

1. Authenticity Discourse
2. Rockists
3. Marketplace Apologists
4. Anti-Rockists

Authenticity Discourse is absolutely pervasive, Momus, you are OTM about that. While I agree that many Rockists are drawing upon and perpetuating Authenticity Discourse (A.D. for short). I don't think rockism can simply be reduced to a local, music-specific form of the broader and more extensive A.D> Your hip hop example doesn't reveal rockism, it just shows that A.D. is alive and well in non-rock genres. Also, there are forms of Rockism that reject A.D. along the lines of "who cares if Fu Manchu are fake and retro, their songs ROCK!"
Furthermore, as I.A. Richards pointed out through me upthread, both Rockist and Anti-Rockist positions can partake of Marketplace Apologetics, a strain of thinking which tends, when discussions get into politics and economics, to move in the opposite direction of A.D. "Punkism" at its most cartoonish is the most virulent assertion of Authenticity Discourse and rejection of Marketplace Apologetics. Britney is the most cartoonish example of the Marketplace mandate, and has absolutely zero so-called "Authenticity", but if you like "Toxic" because "it ROCKS!", then hey presto, you're a Rockist Britney fan. So all four of these notions need to be kept logically separated, especially SO THAT we can trace the extent to which they mutually inflect and inter-penetrate one another in the world of consumption and discourse around us.

Ok, so maybe the Venn diagram wouldn't have any rockism that wasn't an example of authenticity discourse, but surely there are forms of authenticity discourse (such as "keeping it real" in hip hop) that shouldn't be reduced to "rockism". i.e. "is rockist" would be a sufficient condition for the claim "partakes of authenticity discourse", but it wouldn't be a necessary condition.

Furthermore, I think Marketplace Apologists still need to step forward and theorize pleasure; announcing "pleasure" shouldn't be the end of a discussion, it should be the start of one. I mean, Freud cottoned on to the existence of "neurotic pleasure" over 75 years ago, surely music criticism could do the same. Pleasure isn't simple, and it can be defensive and suspect too, and NOT for simply Puritanical reasons.

There has to be an effect for this so you don't have to be Blixa to pull it off. Antares should put out the Autoironer. Then instead of buying a Phase 90 thinking they're gonna be Eddie, maybe we'd get kids picking up an Autoironer thinking they'd be able to pull of some crazy rocking ironic licks without actually practicing.

Okay, that was totally off topic.

I think I'm pretty rockist in spite of the fact that most of my favorite artists are absurdly self-aware and only sincere in a kind of sideways way that comes from being actually dedicated to what they do. Which is to say I tend to like things that rock but are on at least some level patently unreal.

My gut reaction says that the patently unreal serves to remind you that it's just a damn song even if it rocks, but that makes it too tempting to whip out comparisons to something intentionally removed from the audience like Brecht, and I'm not going there because then I'll have to figure out which music is Stanislavski and which is Artaud, etc.

I'm gonna take the Ned Clause though and not think about it enough to explain it. Matos is pretty familiar with what kind of music I'm interested in if he wants to take a stab at it. He's also better at critical thinking on this topic than I am...

Heheh -- not meant to be taken as an opting out per se, but merely an acknowledgement that the critical response finds many different outlets, or perhaps none at all. Also that one can find someone else's response to a song that's almost a cliched classic to be a cliche in turn, and it could annoy us and make us go "USE OTHER WORDS PLEASE" -- but! what we see as cliche others feel is a perfectly accurate description of how they feel. Again, I think the annoyance mainly not from that but from an assumption of certain parameters of discussion as framed in music discourse...which brings us back to the Sanneh piece in the first place.

By my definition that makes you a non-rockist, Martin!

So maybe the structure is like this?

1. Authenticity Discourse Believers
2. Rockists
3. Marketplace Apologists
4. Anti-Rockists
5. Pleasure Pleaders

Axioms:

All 2s are 1s.
Only some 2s are 3s.
Only some 4s are 3s.
Most 4s are 3s.
Most 5s are 3s.
No 5s are 1s.

Questions:
Are most 4s 5s?
Are most 3s 5s?

When a lot of people say "its real" they merely mean "it resonates with me" I think. back in the day i remember people saying "oh thats real" the same way they'd say "oh that's dope."

And Momus - perhaps in some circles hip-hop is the new rockism, and obviously hiphop mags trade in a parallel version of rockism, but to suggest that it has replaced rock and roll-based rockism is sort of ridiculous - rolling stone, which is like the definitive "MAINSTREAM" music publication, still does not acknowledge anything like a hip-hop canon.

Whooops, that structure up there has some BIG errors:

"Only some 4s are 3s" and "Most 4s are 3s" can't BOTH be axioms at the same time, now can they? That's just inconsistent.

Maybe it's time to put names to certain positions, ie.

"Wilder says that ALL 4s are 3s"

and

"Momus says that ALL 2s are 1s"

and "djdee says that not all 1s are 2s"

Oh fret not, I didn't see it as that! (Random [unrelated?] thought: I can tell where my own comfort zone in language is because I'd never say 'dis' in a sentence casually like that in print or speaking, it would feel weird to me.)

they can seem to have the same impact, i.e. some snooty critic is spoiling pleasure for you, or making you feel like in experiencing pleasure you are being just another Ideological Dupe

Or perhaps both simply try to say "You are in a comfort zone" -- which, I think we're agreed, is something ever more removed from whatever you're listening to in favor of how you listen. Taking that first example here, what if the Kaia Saariaho string quartets satisfied a base instinct and Cameo punishing your mind? Or perhaps more accurately -- if what one enjoys and falls back on the most is the comfort zone no matter WHAT it is, then I think many people are described to a T.

I agree, Momus, and that's why it's perplexing. Because there is still some part of me that thinks They Might Be Giants is somehow "more real" because their public persona is that of two "quirky"* guys rather than some kind of artistically "tortured" souls. This in spite of the fact that I'm certain the quirky persona is just as affected on some level.

I find myself explaining a lot of my interests by saying that such and such an artist I like is "aware they are funny but also being serious." And on some level I still have an adamantly rockist view that artists without that level of self-awareness or use of humor even in dark situations are necessarily less interesting.

On the other hand, if you put on Van Halen's Fair Warning I will be the first person to ignore the misogyny/idiocy in half the lyrics because Eddie's lixx are so fuckin' hot.

* "Quirky" is a word I despise in music reviews almost as much as "eclectic"

In the Salon piece on Nick Cave 'real' was all about Nick being a Christian and believing in a non-ironic way in a supernatural deity. I think the writer hinted at the ever-shifting, ever-illusory nature of the 'real' in showbiz when he said 'But with Dylan, there's always the niggling, in this case welcome, suspicion that he doesn't really mean it, that he's just toying with the world, having some fun, being cryptically ironic.' But he seemed to go on to say that this didn't apply with Nick Cave. However, I think the fact that he raised the doubt, with his Dylan comment, actually implies the possibility, at least, that the designation of 'realness' in showbiz is prone to suffer from some sort of infinite regress, and that no-one is exempt.

Do any of you think originality, authenticity, and ownership might possibly be qualities many fans inherently seek from artists? I'm not just talking about music here either. I think the relationships we form with these artists can be pretty complex stuff, not too unlike real human relationships. I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just saying it's part of the formula of how many people naturally respond to music - not in every case obviously. I guess I'm thinking about "who's your favorite band" scenarios.

I'll shut up now, before I dig myself in a hole.

x-post

Fucking hell. I think I am Momus. Or Momus is me. Or he's the real Momus and I'm the fake Momus, or something.

Oh, totally. I think everyone seeks this on some level, certainly in their musical adolescence (hence popularity of confessional artists with a certain kind of teenager). It's all about the whole.. I dunno, finding your own voice thing. So you identify with people whom you perceive as having a distinct voice of their own. But at some point you become aware that none of these things can really be determined in the music, that none of them are really necessary to your enjoyment of any given song, I guess it's all about growing up really. That didn't mean to sound as patronising as it does.

I think this the reason I'm so enamored of black comedy or other juxtapositions like it.

See I knew if I took the Ned Clause and refused to think about it, somebody would figure it out and put it succinctly. And verily, it was Momus.

I don't think "originality, authenticity, and ownership" are that important to adolescents though (auto-biography and a certain element of fantasy aka they are like me or what I want to be like are much more prevalent.)

Q: In showbiz, which is more real, real or fake?
A: In showbiz, fake is more real.
Q: In showbiz, which is more fake, real or fake?
A: In showbiz, fake is more real, I just told you that.

Because we're not redefining 'fake' here as 'real' in any cosmological, universalist way, it no longer leads to the infinite regress.

I think you could exempt rockist use of 'real' if you situate it in a similar way:

Q: In your head, rock fan, which is more real, real or fake?
A: In my head, real is more real.
Q: In your head, rock fan, which is more fake, real or fake?
A: In my head, fake is more fake, I just told you that.

The system defining showbiz is complete and inconsistent, so it's totally possible to say "I am lying" and have it be a valid statement.

The system defining the internal rockist ideal is incomplete because it has to be consistent, so it's impossible for the phrase "I am lying" to even exist without an implosion. There is only "[The other] is lying" and "I am telling the truth."

That's interesting, I don't know much about Godel's incompleteness theorem, but it seems to map quite well to Derrida's idea that language refers endlessly for its 'content' to other language, which in turn justifies its 'content' with reference to other content, so that it's like a banking system in which loans are secured by other loans.

Godel's theorem is normally phrased more to say that any logical system at least as complex as algebra (which is most of them) is either incomplete or inconsistent, but it can't be both... You can't find the area under a curve in algebra. You can do it with calculus, but you end up using this weird fake quantified "number" called "infinity" all over the place.

But yeah, I almost put the Derrida thing in my response to your example of the rockist and showbiz conversations, but then I figured Godel was less mentally taxing, and I'm trying to follow this thread cause it's interesting as all get out, but I'm also at my day job...

SCHROEDINGER: "That is unknowable, Einstein."

(They do not move.)

I think for me it's not about setting up music criticism as a science in whole, but rather honing in on exactly what can be allowed to be considered scientific within criticism. From my vantage point, most rockism has pretensions to being a science insofar as it claims that authenticity, artistry etc. are real properties which need to be observed within music, rather than rather vague concepts which the listener inflicts upon music in order to account for his or her experience of it.

The proposed functional model delimits the extent to which any critique of music can be considered scientific by emphasising that the science as such resides within the individual's experience of the music, rather than in some property inherent to the music which can be divined by all listeners if they'd only "listen right". This dissolution of individual experience in favour of shared cultural meanings is thoroughly ideological, but also inescapable, insofar as we cannot conceive of ourselves as existing in relation to others (and thus be able to communicate with them) except in ideological terms. As such, my objective would be not to do away with ideology, but rather to at all times recognise and resist its annexation of the individual and objective qualities of my engagement with music.

How do I plan to go about doing this? Generally, I think a "close reading of the text" is enough. I will not be able to escape incorporating ideology into any opinion I can sensibly communicate about music; however I can limit its operation by attempting to trace as nearly as possible how the music works for me. This is not just a formal musical analysis either, it also incorporates the personal baggage which I bring to the music and that which it leaves with me. But it's important for me to think about how that baggage is provoked by the music at hand, and how it then affects my sensory perception of the music.

The statement "I don't like Britney because she is soulless manufactured plastic pop" is ideology par excellence and not just because it might entail a political concern about music industry practices or a bias against music allegedly enjoyed by twelve yr old girls. More fundamentally, it is ideological because under its auspices any individual engagement with the music is entirely annexed; this statement tells us nothing about the peculiarity or individuality of the speaker's experience of the music.

It is a function of hegemonic values (such as the one outlined above) that they tend to annex individual experience more energetically, for the precise reason that their ubiquity gives them the appearance of a scientific law. Interpretations which seem to have consensus will always be more effective in misrepresenting the complexity of individual engagement because they're so easy to draw on - thus on ILM the celebration of Daft Punk's Discovery as sincere can stand in for individual understanding and appreciation of the music just as much as condemnation of the album as ironic tends to in the external rock music press.

Which means that, yes, we should be wary about uncritically adhering to ILM-friendly anti-rockist interpretations to the detriment of individual engagement. However, what I've always liked about most of the posters on ILM is that they tend to do this as a matter of course. When people complain that ILM celebrates Daft Punk or Basement Jaxx or Britney uncritically, they ignore not only the numerous voices of dissent, but also the sheer range, depth, complexity and individuality of the interpretations of how the music in question works. I'm always impressed by the extent to which people here seek to capture the individuality of their own engagement with music. Reading these attempts provides me with a deep sense of pleasure, perhaps because it continues to bring me face to face with the underlying, inexhaustible sensuousness of music.

-- Momus (nic...), November 18th, 2004.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why that is sounding rather like the Lacanian version of "The Real"

In which case: We only get to experience the trauma of its absence, and by definition we can never experience the Real itself, only "Reality" which is actually a linguistically constructed stand-in for the impossible Real, and that Real is proleptically projected backwards to a time before we were symbolically castrated by our entrance into language.
Huzzah!

Trouble is, it's rather like the diminished figure of the Christian Creator God, too. (pre-lapsarian, causally responsible yet absent)

But yeah... I almost want to argue that "the real" in this context is the [theoretical] kernal, infinitely far back in the regression, from which context arises.

Cause Derrida's thing is that it's infinite... language taking it's content/meaning from language taking it's content/meaning from etc., but Godel's thing basically says "Well, only sort of. Because if you build a meta-language that includes the inconsisten infinite regression as well as the original language relationship, then it can be quantified. At least until you notice that the meta-language itself is inconsistent and you have to go up another level to explain it."

hmmm...this was a fatty of an xpost

SCHROEDINGER: That is unknowable, officer.

EINSTEIN: By which he means to say that we were aware of our spin, orientation and location, so we cannot have been aware of our speed... Officer.

The OFFICER pulls the two men from the car and beats them with his nightstick

Why that is sounding rather like the Lacanian version of "The Real" In which case: We only get to experience the trauma of its absence

But if we accept, with Adorno, that soul itself is nothing more than 'the longing of the soulless for redemption', we just need the reference to something outside language to generate meaning. Desire is both a lack of something and a creation of something. The bank loans depending on other bank loans don't need gold, they just need the desire for it represented by more and more loans...

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

Cause Dennett et al. are gonna argue that what represents an object is actually a set of affordances it has. (i.e. A box in the container sense always has put-things-into-it-ableness but may or may not have lift-able-by-a-human-ness.) This is different than the old Ideal Object from which all other objects of this kind are derived.

Okay, I've got to finish what I'm doing here at work so I can get out of here at a reasonable hour.

P = if P then Q

where Q is "Thread is over just as if someone had mentioned Hitler"

But can it withstand the crushing force of ILM's own version of Godwin's Law?

I have to go back to my dissertation now.

Oh well maybe we disagree on that.

How about the majority of Rockist critics?

I'm typical in my atypicality, Alex.

Daavid, I really don't think there is a 'best song ever written', because taste is not timeless and music is not timeless. If I like something today there's no guarantee I'll like it tomorrow. What's more, tomorrow it will be a different song. A new context will have changed its meaning.

ii) Judging by, say, people from my martial arts classes or old call centre jobs or any environment not dominated by musicians, Madonna, Janet (and Michael) Jackson, Elton John, and U2 (to name a few) are all much more popular than Dylan. Of course, this is not anything resembling an accurate statistic but I'm just stating my own experience. Especially in environments not dominated by white people, Dylan doesn't seem that big at all in my experience.

daavid: Yes I know it's big with rock critics but that was my exact point - that they represent a minority taste.

I don't know, one song simply can't sustain the scrutiny and unbearable pomposity of being declared 'the best song of all time'. It's an absurd demand, like trying to isolate the most meaningful word in the dictionary, when words need other words to mean anything.

I knew you would answer that, but I was hoping for an authoritative reply.

Hm. I fall into that category and I only half remember it. The Sebastian Cabot version, that I remember.

The only useful statistic I could imagine would be those best-selling albums lists, on which Dylan didn't do nearly as well as Michael Jackson or The Eagles or Elton John AFAICR, right?

Anyway, I don't even totally remember why we're arguing about this. Most of what I have to say about rockism is on the "Does rockism exist?" thread. I think it's a strawman for the most part.

But yeah, feeling obliged to acknowledge Dylan's "genius" when you don't actually think he's a genius is just that whole received wisdom thing, and it's bullshit. Like, I do actually more or less think he's a genius, but I'm not going to mandate that that be stipulated as a ground rule or something. I like arguing with people who don't think he's a genius. Or sometimes not even arguing with them, just listening, if they have enough interesting things to say. One of the things I dislike most about the "rockist" stance is that it claims for its own a lot of things I actually love and hangs them on some hallowed gallery wall, when I think they fare much better left to their own defenses.

There are some analogies in this article about the new MoMA:

on the whole, the galleries look beautiful, elegant. But also correct and genteel, sparkless. I walked through with a sense of affection at seeing old friends, but with disappointment at how mild-mannered they felt. "The Bather," "The Moroccans," "Desmoiselles d'Avignon" and Mr. Rauschenberg's "Bed," which suddenly looks inconsequential and wan, are all just part of a well-worn master-narrative flow.

Rockism is, as much as anything, the impulse to enshrine and canonize, to put things in the Hall of Fame (and to build a Hall of Fame to put them it), to set them apart both from the world that created them and the world they helped create, to render them untouchable and safe.

It all reminds me a little of the Judge in Blood Meridian who collects things (animals, plants) and documents them faithfully in his notebook -- because, he says, anything that exists without his knowledge exists without his permission -- and then kills them.

-- Momus (nic...), November 19th, 2004.

OTM

This is one of the most OTM things I've ever read here. It's like Rolling Stone is under the delusion that people don't take Dylan or the Beatles seriously enough and if they stop hustling and falling over themselves to classicize these acts, then some fool might come along and start slagging them off in favor of [insert any band formed after 1980 here].

I'd pay good bucks for a Bennett version of "Positively 4th Street"

Is it rockist or anti-rockist to like Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl"? I say it's rockist, but my friend says it's anti-rockist. Please help!

Sincerely,
Mystified in Minneapolis

Love,
ILM

Thanks for the advice...I like your no-nonsense, tough but fair approach. You're like Dr. Phil in that respect.

Thanks,
Mystified in Minneapolis

Thanks,
ILM

Concerned,
ILM

Stop making what? Out with Ned? I'd never stop doing that! I can type one-handed!

Don't worry,
Mystified in Minneapolis

Relieved,
ILM

Waddup with this:

http://www.blackpitchpress.com/lostledgers/images/drphil-beforeafter.jpg

Buy my book,
Dr. Phil

RE: Oprah

Hey did you ever "hit that"?

Mystified in Minneapolis

It's hardly over, we were just taking a break. I'll say more later in the morning or something.

Somebody said 'Why did Ashlee Simpson burst into tears when it was revealed on TV that she couldn't sing? Does this make her a rockist?'

Somebody said 'If I weren't a rockist, would I have to like records by The Backstreet Boys and paintings by Thomas Kinkade?'

To which I replied 'I'm sure Ashlee Simpson, The Backstreet Boys and Thomas Kinkade are all rockists, just as robots are sure to be rockists when they come along. The less authentic something is, the more important insistence on authenticity becomes.'

It seems to me that the anti-rockist is someone confident enough in his own taste that he doesn't need to resort to the ideology of authenticity to back it up. The anti-rockist reaches right over the middle-class doxa represented by people like Rolling Stone and tries to shake hands with the populace, who seem unabashedly plastic. But this is a bit like Marxists trying to reach out, with their materialist philosophy, to the proletariat over the heads of their fellow bourgeois. The proletariat turns out to be deeply religious, to subscribe to 'the opiate of the people'. They are more likely to share a more vehement version of the ideology of the class directly above them than the anti-authenticist arguments of the intellectuals.

So if anti-rockists like Kelefa tell Ashlee that it's okay not to be able to sing, it's very unlikely that Ashlee will agree. It's almost certain that Ashlee would prefer to win a rockist award from Rolling Stone than an anti-rockist award from The New York Times. Similarly, although an ironist like Jeff Koons might well love Thomas Kinkade's paintings, and use Kinkade's popularity as a stick with which to beat his mandarin conceptual art peers, it's likely that Kinkade would hate Koons' work and invoke rockist arguments about why his work is 'real painting' whereas Koons' is some kind of a joke.

Authenticity arguments at this point become just another weapon in a Bourdieu-like struggle for social differentiation. One uses them to attack the class just below and to try to hoist oneself into the class just above. The anti-rockist is saying 'Darling, it's so petit bourgeois to claim that you're real! Why can't we all be as plastic as that Ashlee Simpson?' At which point Ashlee, overhearing, bursts into tears and leaves the room.

'When those on the rock fringe do reach out now, it's to people like themselves, who just happen to live in other countries. Nouveau cabaret acts like Momus in London, Kahimi Karie in Tokyo and the French-singing April March in Los Angeles use their sophistication to make common cause across national boundaries... Such alliances supersede the need for a local scene and offer an alternative, albeit a deliberately small one, to the planetwide media presence of a Celine Dion or Puff Daddy. Yet the worldliness these performers manifest inevitably promotes an ideal of affluent cosmopolitanism.'

As a counterbalance to this invasion of 'cosmopolitan sophisticates' Weisbard cites the Eminem and Kid Rock, who he sees as sort of Elvis Presley figures, bringing back some kind of unity. I wonder what Weisbard made of Kelefa's article?

xpost
Footnote: The clever American girl known as April March may have gotten her stage name from a Borges "imaginary book' but google tells me the band deny it. In fact it's more appropriate if it was an unintentional coincidence.

I have to say I haven't followed the fine twists and turns of this thread but in general I agree with you, Nick, because you are the artist and I am the fan, and as an incorrigible rockist, I must believe what you say. Seriously, didn't Duke Ellington say something like: "if it sounds good it is good!" Does that make him an anti-rockist? Probably. If so, I'm sticking with the Duke.

1) I realized that many singer/songwriters can neither sing nor write songs.

2) I saw the film "Black Narcissus," which obviously takes place in a completely fake environment, but it is precisely its artificiality
that makes it hothouse flower beautiful.

:xpost
1a) Any singer-songwriters on ILM excepted of course.

3) After pondering the question for endless hours of my youth, I realized that rock lyrics usually don't quite make literal sense. I decided that if they sound good and perhaps give off some general sense or mood, that's OK with me. This is preferable to the alternative: too literal, slice of life songwriting, with novelistic details about the songwriter's grandmother's breakfast cereal of choice, for example (I think I heard this example at the CBGB's gallery), which come off like so much high school looseleaf scribbling set to music. For one thing, reality is more boring than art. In the real world I have come to terms with this fact and in some perverse way, enjoy it. But I don't listen to music to be bored, and someone else's boring reality is a kind of torture, quite unlike my own comfortable boring reality.

Now if you listen to pre-rock music, lo and behold the lyrics do in fact make sense. Is this because of some laughable pre-sixties naivete, the same naivete responsible for all those prurient fifties buxom blonde sex-tease movies? Well, if we are smart enough and can handle black-and-white, we can go back at least one more decade to the films of the forties, when things actually appeared kind of sophisticated. We realize that there was in fact an artistry in those movies and those songs. Ira Gershwin was not a love struck fool, but a very clever man. My point? The rockist trope would be that the incoherence of rock lyrics is due to the fact that they are grasping at the expressions of some authentic feeling and emotion. But the acid test of authenticity is not good enough, some other aesthetic is needed.

Or to ideology at all. That seems like one of the underlying things here, the struggle to move beyond an ideologically-framed understanding of the world. I nibbled around at this idea in a not very articulate way on an ILE thread the other day, this frustration at trying to understand history or politics or, here, art without being blinkered by established narratives and vocabularies ("real" vs. "fake," "capitalism" vs. "socialism," "left" vs. "right"). So in the rockist debate, there are actually two debates: the argument over the specific weaknesses in the rockist ideology, but then more importantly the argument over what you do when you dispense with rockism. The easy answer (the one by which all revolutions are betrayed) is to supplant it with another ideology -- one that begins much broader and more ecumenical and welcoming, but that eventually and inevitably tends toward a narrowing of acceptable knowledge and perspective. The harder option is to insist on no new temples and no new gods -- or, more to the point, to welcome new temples and new gods into a sort of endlessly expandable and adaptable multi-perspectival system of knowledge and experience. Does this become its own ideology? I guess. I mean, it may not actually be possible to live without ideology and theory -- but I think it is certainly possible to live comfortably in an environment of endlessly mutating and recombining ideologies and theories.

This doesn't mean anything as squishy as accepting all ideologies (fundamentalism) or theories (creationism) equally. If the argument is framed as broad/non-ideological vs. narrow/ideological, then the very narrowness and ideological puritanism of, say, Islamism, or Christian evangelism, or rockism, becomes the basis for challenging it. Systems of belief and meaning that narrow and constrict knowledge, those are the danger.

I'm personally very much into 'making sense' lyrics, although the question then becomes 'Do I subscribe to the values of the world these lyrics draw me so firmly into?' Because vagueness can pass for universality, but specificity always leads us to situatedness. Georges Brassens' lyrics take us into a specifically french postwar world. Country and Western ballads take us into that American South world. They both 'make sense', but they take us into very different worlds.

I think people continue to claim artists like Dylan and the Rolling Stones as 'the best artists of all time' not because they transcend history, and not even because there's anything intrinsically great about their work, but because they come out of a decade -- the 1960s -- that is eternally youthful and charismatic. They connect us to that optimistic energy. They're not 'authentic' (Mick Jagger's fake southern accent! Bob Dylan, the unlikely middle class Jewish folkie hobo!). But they plug baby boomers into a cultural era which feels like a summation of their hopes, their collective identity.

The rockist ideals are mainly those albums that came out from '66 to about '74 anyway, bookended by "Revolver" and "Here Come the Warm Jets" or "Radio City." After that, the rockist thing dissolved--the rise of funk as mass phenomenon, disco, early rap, rediscovery of the Brazilian pop artists of the '60s as counterpoint to the Beatles, etc. In the olden days you bought some crap like "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" and thought, this is an album I have to listen to all the way through, I must appreciate this, and yes, it is an advance on the one before, just like people did with the Beatles. So I think we ought to talk more about what people listened to and what they liked and how the best artists always push the limits of the popular. Except some of the best artists didn't do that. As the idea of the very prominence, fame and heartless ambition became intertwined with the musical product itself, the appreciation of the second by the '80s became a requirement to enjoy the first. Which I have nothing against and actually it's more a matter of degree--Madonna was famous, you wanted to know what she did next, how was she handling fame; the Stones were famous, you wanted to know how they could top their last stuff, how were they handling drugs and Mick's entry into high society--but to use a word J.G. Ballard uses a lot, it's a bit "overlit" for me.

It's a matter of accepting a lot of different subjects one could write songs about, being open to what a "song" is, the various convolutions of taste/frame of reference. Anti-rockism is just as good a thing as rockism, but neither one gets a privileged place in my thinking.

Momus this is good:
>it seems to map quite well to Derrida's idea that language refers endlessly for its 'content' to other language, which in turn justifies its 'content' with reference to other content, so that it's like a banking system in which loans are secured by other loans.

Musical vocab as language, and of course it's always been self-referential. We got more to reference now. And it's part of a system where there's no divide between commerce and art, which is in my opinion the thing to keep remembering. Rockists are bemoaning that lack of a divide and it's a silly thing to worry about since it's always been there in one form or another.

Really? Even when they're written by Bernie Taupin?

"Land of 1000 Dances" makes sense, ... Chuck Berry makes sense, Dylan songs make sense, even "Trout Mask Replica" songs make sense.

Well, yeah, but most of the examples you pick are rock and roll, not rock. If there is such a thing as rock-and-roll-ism, then I prefer that to rockism. I think the late Robert Quine was a rock-and-roll-ist.

In the olden days you bought some crap like "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" and thought, this is an album I have to listen to all the way through ...

Yup, in fact one sign is mindless rockism is to keep loyally buying album after album from your favorite Boring Old Fart, long after he has "jumped the shark."

"Here Come the Warm Jets"
Yeah, I was just thinking of Eno as an artist who a rockist would not understand. But could a rockist ever have written that Windows 95 theme music?

sure. what is not to understand? even "tiny dancer" makes sense--it's about a slim, even tiny, "l.a. lady" in bluejeans he's takin' a drive with. arthur lee is "rock" and again, what's not to understand there? dylan? lou reed? what's funny is how a lot of '70s artists tried to hide what they were really saying behind a lot of verbiage, like taupin being entranced by the wild west and kids' books and referencing all that. just because something is impressionistic doesn't mean it doesn't make sense, that's my take.

eno is on the line between rockist and not, i think. an album artist. i mean i don't really even know any people who worry about rockist-vs.anti, or at least they never bring it up because it is boring, but i know plenty of people who like "rock and roll" who like eno fine. many of them, unfortunately, continue to believe that john fogerty is an Artist but funkadelic are Not, but that's racism or something, those people just don't want a good beat.

i don't really even know any people who worry about rockist-vs.anti, or at least they never bring it up because it is boring

It is boring! I only came over to this thread when I ran out of things to do on the other threads. I've listened plenty to the big classic rock acts, and thought my thoughts about them, while other people have listened to them and thought their thoughts about them. To the point where they've been consumed and iconified, and are the equivalent of the pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart on the pizza parlor wall (I think Robbie Robertson wrote a song about this, or wrote a song about Marilyn Monroe and James Dean at least, a love letter from one classic to some others). What's left to say or think about them? Time to listen to something else and think some other thoughts.

But the classic rock dinosaurs endure. To paraphrase Momus, they live on in "baby boomer nostalgia" or, as the French might say "nostalgie de la boom."

Don’t step on greta garbo as you walk down the boulevard,
She looks so weak and fragile that’s why she tried to be so hard
But they turned her into a princess
And they sat her on a throne,
But she turned her back on stardom,
Because she wanted to be alone.

You can see all the stars as you walk down hollywood boulevard,
Some that you recognise, some that you’ve hardly even heard of,
People who worked and suffered and struggled for fame,
Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain.
Rudolph valentino, looks very much alive,
And he looks up ladies’ dresses as they sadly pass him by.
Avoid stepping on bela lugosi
’cos he’s liable to turn and bite,
But stand close by bette davis
Because hers was such a lonely life.
If you covered him with garbage,
George sanders would still have style,
And if you stamped on mickey rooney
He would still turn round and smile,
But please don’t tread on dearest marilyn
’cos she’s not very tough,
She should have been made of iron or steel,
But she was only made of flesh and blood.

You can see all the stars as you walk down hollywood boulevard,
Some that you recognise, some that you’ve hardly even heard of.
People who worked and suffered and struggled for fame,
Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain.

Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everybody’s in show biz, it doesn’t matter who you are.

And those who are successful,
Be always on your guard,
Success walks hand in hand with failure
Along hollywood boulevard.

I wish my life was a non-stop hollywood movie show,
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes,
Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain
And celluloid heroes never really die.

You can see all the stars as you walk along hollywood boulevard,
Some that you recognise, some that you’ve hardly even heard of,
People who worked and suffered and struggled for fame,
Some who succeeded and some who suffered in vain.

Oh celluloid heroes never feel any pain
Oh celluloid heroes never really die.

I wish my life was a non-stop hollywood movie show,
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes,
Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain
And celluloid heroes never really die.

Fun fact: on 52nd Street in NYC they put little doodads in the sidewalk to honor a few of the jazz greats, but they didn't use a hard enough stone, so they have all worn down to the point were they are almost illegible.