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>>> Unlike novelists and visual artists, who study the history of their discipline as a matter of course, popular musicians themselves are not seen as intellectuals participating in an unique discourse. (e.g., Beck is not reviewing Bjork in the NY Review of Books.)
That's a good point, but they do TALK about each other all the time. So, I suppose, do footballers. I guess different levels of discursive elaborateness are involved.
>>> 2. There is a relative absence of legitimizing institutions (like the gallery complex) or gatekeepers (respected novelist-critics) to isolate significant works for study. (This is partly why writing about the Wonder Stuff, in the Pinefox's example, seems trivial: among all the music ever recorded, that band seems arbitrary to spotlight.)
But who legitimates a legitimating institution? The distinction between galleries and rock venues, or art magazines and pop ones, itself seems 'arbitrary' to me. (But we may be able to agree that 'The fact that the divide is a construct doesn't make it less real'.)
I'm not sure why it would be esp. 'arbitrary' to write about the Wonder Stuff. If you take pop 'seriously' (a dubious, un-Morleyesque word), then you might be interested in the Wonder Stuff - or violently uninterested.
>>> 3. While the lines between popular and high-culture art and literature are quite blurry (cf. the Jonathan Franzen debacle), thus giving more leeway for popular works to sneak into syllabi, they are much more stark with respect to music (composition or bust) -- and thus easier to justify pop music's exclusion.
I think that's true. But I would have thought that the last couple of generations of pop institutionalization - Sir McCartney, Dylan And The Poets, etc - have changed that. Or more generally, the post-Q / CD idea of the Back Catalogue. (Perhaps this is standard Rockism.)
>>> 4. Compared to literary and artistic "themes," the focus of much academic inquiry, it is not always obvious what popular music is "about" (it is often more functional).
Really? I think it's usually much clearer what pop music is about than what abstract painting is about.
I suppose that novels - White Noise, Lolita, The Trial - are about things. But they are usually about more things than pop songs (watering cans, sprinklers, queues): so it is less clear what they are 'finally', or 'ultimately', about.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 4 June 2003 12:05 (twenty-one years ago) link
three years pass...