Simon Reynolds - C or D

How about having no "arguments" and just listening to and enjoying music, whatever your poison, or is that too pat a "conclusion"?

just listening to and enjoying music

What kind of listening can avoid value judgments being made? It's not so much pat as it is impossible.

I'm talking about arguments about the relative worth of cultural products - if the argument is worth having it's first and foremost because the argument will actually tell us something rather than because of something intrinsic to the products... however, the likelihood of the argument telling us something may stem from the nature of the products themselves.

The real life thing I'm thinking of here is the old bugbear re "grad students writing theses deconstructing buffy". Like crabby old conservatives I actually find it difficult to take these particularly seriously, but my issue is not so much with buffy per se, but my skepticism that the thesis will end up saying anything illuminating - its the practice of critique which is flawed rather than the object of critique.

Marcello, you of all people surely understand the value of arguments!

yeah i agree with that re. buffy -- but partly coz the university system is more ummm politically important than the internets. everything comes down to funding -- i mean sure if people want to self-fund the typical 'angel as read through x-continental philospher' then that's great for them, but they may as well just come to ilx and do it for free for all the use it'll be.

"enjoying music" of course being a "value judgment"

you mean there has to be a "use"?

criticising continental philosophy =/ conservative per-se. i'm not sure anyone's saying that it does explicitly but y know it kinda needs to be noted.

aren't kpunk and reynold's crit-theory to the max thou? they read their fave music through certain philosophies right?

"enjoying music" of course being a "value judgment"

I guess I just mean that once you try to analyze that enjoyment (or lack thereof) you're making an argument. (And with Paris, I'm not really interested in whether or not people do enjoy it, but whether or not they feel they should enjoy it.)

All the culture of resentment arguments are ripped from Nietzsche. I think the 'resentiment' spelling comes from the fact that Nietzsche used the French word untranslated in his writing. N argues that egalitarianism implies a levelling of distinction (from Christianity i.e. we are all equal in the eyes of God) whereas hierarchies are essential for life (a truth we have forgotten). Someone like k-punk sees being pro-pop as refusing to accept that there are distinctions of value. This is why he and Simon can never hear the fact that pop-ists aren't against distinction (i.e. no-one ever argues 'everything is good' or 'everything popular is good'). Whereas I think it's fairer to say that the argument N. is really against is the one that says 'it doesn't matter what I like, it's only an opinion and everyone's opinions are equal'.

I find this interesting because in some ways the pro-pop arguments are like the admirable sides of the Christian / egalitarian tendency. If distinctions and hierarchies are essential to life, refusing them or questioning them (asking: is Paris Hilton's record art or not?)threatens life. Culture in the Western tradition defines itself as superseding that which is necessary for the survival of life, so the pop-ist position is at least exploring the possibility of culture, whereas simply being in favour of hierarchies (Paris Hilton's record obviously isn't art) is bowing to necessity.

If pop-ism and culture / egalitarianism are linked, we also have to factor in commodoties. In the Genealogy of Morality, morality is seen as arising out of economy and exchange: everyone is equal as a possible buyer or seller (I'm remembering this from a few years ago so I may be getting this wrong!). This need not undermine our idea of morality, just lead us to see it as itself a natural process (and therefore not as 'cultured' as it claims to be in e.g. Kant, basically N is here playing a sociological account vs. an idealist one). But on this account pro-pop would mean accepting that everything is already a commodity, so the interesting questions is no longer commodity art vs. non-commodity art. As someone says upthread, SR still believes in the aesthetic account of art as redemption from the fallen commercial world.

this is a bit ill thought out. k-punk quotes N. against pop-ist arguments, and I am currently re-reading Beyond Good and Evil to try and think this one through.

schooled.

reynolds read critical theory as a boy; but it's where k-punk eats.

marcello -- yeah there does a bit when it's publicly funded, coz you're talking about funding useful stuff vs funding useless stuff. obviously there's a whole 'but aaaaaaaaah, who's to say what's "useful"?' argument to be had but unless they do it by lottery *some* criteria of *some* kind are being applied, some value system is coming into play; it's just a question of whose.

it's just a question of whose

Yeah it strikes me that the one anti-'popism' argument I *do* think has some weight is the chastisement of 'popists' seeming lack of interest in the mechanics of what music gets selected, marketed, promoted, and by who. (Obviously people who are critical of "commodity music" only explore this element very very selectively themselves).

i dont know, that argument (the mechanics one) is the only one i ever really hear. and its a good argument. i dont think its quite as straightforward as that, other than that its a push/pull process. people who make decisions are a lot better at listening and watching than they used to be..

why do you think the anti-commodity music is only explored selectively (are you suggesting its the old 'the masses cant see but i can' argument - inability to apply to own situation?)

I think they only explore it selectively because they aren't interested in the mechanics of promotion/marketing/distribution in the music they like, only the music they disapprove of. It's not an inability to apply it to their own situation, it's just they think the mechanics are more relevant when applied to music they see as 'pure' commodity.

Tom, it's not just the selection and promotion of the music, but the popstars themselves as well surely*? The dismissal of the 'would Artetha Franklin get signed now?' argument has always bothered me somewhat.

*Unless you're implying that already

one anti-'popism' argument I *do* think has some weight is the chastisement of 'popists' seeming lack of interest in the mechanics of what music gets selected, marketed, promoted, and by who.

These are major issues for me, but I'm also interested in (1) how non-existent systems are put in place to make arguments easier for dismissal of "popist" music when, to grapple with the systems as they exist, you have to deal with plenty of music that, e.g. SR does champion, (2) the artist emphasis and institutional emphasis are often unrelated (loving Britney's music and hating the corporate environment in which her career was made possible is absolutely possible), and often institutions work to screw over artists stuck within them (e.g. Skye Sweetnam, Fefe Dobson, Lillix...countless others and that's just the teenpop thread), who are then held personally culpable for their failure, just as they're held personally culpable for how they're marketed and received, (3) The popist/poptimists I know are always looking anywhere they can for exciting music -- sometimes it gets promoted via radio monopolies etc., sometimes it comes from MySpace. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

Yeah it strikes me that the one anti-'popism' argument I *do* think has some weight is the chastisement of 'popists' seeming lack of interest in the mechanics of what music gets selected, marketed, promoted, and by who.

When I self-identify as pop-ist (which I do sometimes) I want to chastise other people who self-identify as pro-pop for this, because it's largely what I complain about anti-pop people doing as well. i.e. everyone wants to be blind to the mechanisms of selection and sorting because it means confessing to what structures (NB: NOT determines) their own choices. But both sides are also quite resistant to talking about what structures their ways of talking about music too.

Dom upstairs somewheres identifies pop-ism with professing to liking pop: for me it means a way of thinking about whatever you like, rather than a particular thing you like, and I tend to get irritated by people who self-identify as 'liking pop'. As I ranted about last week elsewhere, the idea that 'I can like this and that and it doesn't matter what it's called' seems to me being in denial about the social dimensions of the music, which aren't added in later but are there as an intrinsic part of whatever it is we're listening to. i.e. I am not imposing something on to a piece of music when I hear it as positioning itself socially, but responding to something their way of listening blocks out. Obviously I don't do this ALL THE TIME. That way madness lies.

The "culpable for their failure" bit was actually more in reference to an artist like Paris or Lindsay Lohan than someone like Skye or Lillix or Fefe, who never really got much of a chance. Paris's album was marketed horribly, aside from everyone hating her in the first place. But she is the one who seems to have failed.

Actually thinking about it, people do explore the mechanics of other musics quite a lot - the recordmaking and distribution of reggae records in Jamaica, for example, forms a big part of the way that story is told. But that kind of viciously competitive entrepreneurialism is glamorised, it's part of the excitement of the story, in a way that viciously competitive business activity by major labels isn't (not that I'm saying it should be).

xpost Matt sorry wasn't meaning to exclude the Aretha argument - that's totally part of it.

"how non-existent systems are put in place to make arguments easier for dismissal of "popist" music when, to grapple with the systems as they exist, you have to deal with plenty of music that, e.g. SR does champion"

we must vanquish these non-existent systems post-haste!

Actually thinking about it, people do explore the mechanics of other musics quite a lot - the recordmaking and distribution of reggae records in Jamaica, for example, forms a big part of the way that story is told. But that kind of viciously competitive entrepreneurialism is glamorised, it's part of the excitement of the story, in a way that viciously competitive business activity by major labels isn't (not that I'm saying it should be).

yeah this is a vg point: the model for dubplate/white label culture is quite 'devil take the hindmost' 80s capitalist.

but the major labels are great lumbering monopolist dinosaurs, they take a lot of hits! they are more vicious now, but it's still a failing model.

Reynolds is wrong though, because the poppist approach to music criticism is manifestly *not* about pure appreciation of music. In fact, I can't think of any other critical approach that places less emphasis on how much the listener is actually enjoying the music they listen to. Popism revolves around a weird outdated sense of being challenging, it's more concerned with *not* liking the music it *doesn't* like, rather than enjoying the music it does

This is a failure of popism, then. I do sense this streak of wanting to be subversive in many of the Lex's defenses of pop starlets, and I recognize it, because I've been known to deliberately gush about Justin Timberlake in front of people who I know sniff their noses at anything on commercial radio. But as a critical approach, popism (or at least anti-rockism) has also allowed me to ignore questions of social cred or whatever and just focus on a song's sonic elements and the degree to which said elements produce pleasure.

I agree with Reynolds that this approach is also limiting, but it's not because it ignores "what's really important" -- it's mostly because writing from that perspective isn't always very interesting and runs the risk of getting bogged down in either arcane music theory or solipsism.

Yes but this is the odd thing: the big labels are presented as wicked controllers of the music system who offer our kids only pabulum AND as rank failing incompetents. You can be both I guess but it's a bit of a tightrope.

I can think of two long-term marketing triumphs for the record industry. The former possibly accidental (but probably not), the latter definitely on purpose. First is the promotion of the album as a format and the repackaging of popular music as non-disposable. Second (linked to the first) is the promotion and success of the CD format as a way to buy old music as well as new.

the chastisement of 'popists' seeming lack of interest in the mechanics of what music gets selected, marketed, promoted, and by who. (Obviously people who are critical of "commodity music" only explore this element very very selectively themselves).

Yes this nails it really, but the selectivity (hypccracy even) of the people making the critisisms doesn't excuse the exasperation about the lack of interest. Perhaps it is because in pop the mechanics are more hidden and thus more interesting.

Tom was it in discussion with you on an ILM thread long ago that I speculated about the people behind some early Will Young (or Gareth Gates?) songs and various Scandanivian pop factories? I'm sure there are lots of interesting (to me) stuff to be said about this phenomenon, even if it is rockist to consider their influences, motivations etc.

What is the selectivity you consider people critical of commodity music exhibit? (and I guess I am often critical of it myself)

you have a similar-ish thing in movies: non-hollywood product isn't half as scrutinized as studio filmmaking -- though even then the real juicy details (cf the recent 'sahara' revelations) are kept secret. but you know, "how much does juliette binoche get paid?" never comes up, while it does for jim carrey or whoever.

we must vanquish these non-existent systems post-haste!

Uh, not sure if it was clear that I mean that people are just guessing at what systems they think produces the music they're discounting, and creating stupid myths instead of making a cogent argument (best example of this is probably Before the Music Dies, the argument of which seems to be that Ashlee Simpson's fans are all stupid). I actually think a poptimist type is more likely to seek actual information about how the music is produced than non- (knowing the producers, the labels, the marketing systems)...it's what they then do with this knowledge, or what importance they put in it, that makes the difference. But if there are people who celebrate the corporate/institutional model rather than grudgingly accept it, I haven't met them.

ignore questions of social cred or whatever and just focus on a song's sonic elements

But you can do both! And (again) that's what's so great about Paris, she's the pop star that puts the person focusing solely on sonic elements in the position of unavoidably thinking about questions of social judgment etc. even when they don't want to...this sort of general feeling that just enjoying the song isn't enough.

what she seems to have done is provoked people who don't care a fig about questions of "social judgment" -- to whit, she is a smelly rich racist -- to say LALALA WHO CARES WHEN SHE HAS THESE AWESOME TUNES?!?! just to get a rise out of us sane folk. my god, if it were possible to enjoy the song then she'd slip through the net the same way other hard-to-like performing artistes do. if that makes her great then kudos!

people who don't care a fig about questions of "social judgment" -- to whit, she is a smelly rich racist -- to say LALALA WHO CARES WHEN SHE HAS THESE AWESOME TUNES?!?!

Names, plz.

you can celebrate elements of the corporate model (ie sometimes - SOMETIMES - i would trust the record company above the artist in selecting singles, songs for the album, finished mixes and so on) while disapproving of other elements of it (which i rarely do out loud because every other fucker goes on about these bits all the time innit)

"Names, plz.

-- dabug, Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:19 PM (5 minutes ago)"

um the lex?

oh for god's sake nrq this has been explained countless times, if you only decided you could like art by morally unimpeachable characters you would find yourself unable to like 99% of it - admittedly this is how you do come across but as ciara said to me "i choose to enjoy life"

she's smelly?

"And (again) that's what's so great about Paris, she's the pop star that puts the person focusing solely on sonic elements in the position of unavoidably thinking about questions of social judgment etc. even when they don't want to...this sort of general feeling that just enjoying the song isn't enough.

-- dabug, Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:14 PM (10 minutes ago)"

names plz of these people who are so up their arses they 'focus solely on somic elements'? what is this, bloomsbury circa 1912?

1% of all art is a ton, lex. but i said that if the music was good then people would let her slip through the way they do with other dickhead musicians. your thing wasn't to attempt that but to say she was actively lovely and good, and that's just mad.

my thing was to praise both the music and the personality conveyed in the music, both of which are lovely. if real life paris isn't, the fact that she manages to convince as lovely in her songs surely makes her a better artist.

HM, I wouldn't say that I "focus solely on sonic elements" but I do privilege them.

names plz of these people who are so up their arses they 'focus solely on sonic elements'?

*waves hello*

my thing was to praise both the music and the personality conveyed in the music, both of which are lovely.

since when was narcissism 'lovely' rather than nauseating?

since 'Rapper's Delight'

sorry. must have missed that meeting.

since "Bo Diddley"

"if real life paris isn't, the fact that she manages to convince as lovely in her songs surely makes her a better artist.

-- lex pretend, Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:30 PM (3 minutes ago)"

that's interesting. obv i disagree -- up to a point i think honesty and self-revelation aren't bad things in pop. that doesn't mean i only like leonard cohen and fiona apple or anything.

i think honesty and self-revelation can be great in pop (i like leonard cohen AND fiona apple), i think the theatrical/performative side (intentional or not) can also be great. oddly i think both cohen and apple can fall more into the latter category.

the thing with perceived honesty and self-revelation is that...ultimately how do you know? how do you know that some random cat power song is FROM HER HEART or something she made up while feeling bored one day or something she wants to pretend she is or something she wishes she was? does it matter as long as she convinces (or if she makes it obvious she's acting, but in an appealing way) (or if she tries to convince but fails in an appealing way)?

and doesn't it depend on so many other factors? do you expect an artist to spill their emotional guts on stage every day of a tour? some nights they might be a bit too happy to be really honest singing a sad song - but if they're a good enough actor they'll still convince their audience.

well no shit lex, performers perform, news at 11

the thing is, EVERYTHING counts, every intra- AND extra-musical little bit of data is out there, hitting you, me, everyone, and it all interacts or gets sorted as people want it to, or even how they don't want it to.

it's not about puritanically not listening to people who don't fit some moral/political angelic model. it's that sometimes, certain bits of problem data loom larger or aren't excused by whatever positive bits there are. i'm sure there are other rich racists i've given my money to but in Paris' case the record (which didn't grab me with anywhere near the urgency has half a billion other things) came AFTER a huge cache of blisteringly negative information was already inescapable. So, sorry!

inconsistency is good

"When I self-identify as pop-ist (which I do sometimes) I want to chastise other people who self-identify as pro-pop for this, because it's largely what I complain about anti-pop people doing as well. i.e. everyone wants to be blind to the mechanisms of selection and sorting because it means confessing to what structures (NB: NOT determines) their own choices. But both sides are also quite resistant to talking about what structures their ways of talking about music too. "

I always liked the neatness of k-punk's line about rockism vs popism being about "a romantics of production vs a romantics of reception".

I don't think he carries it through though: a "romantics of production" is really about reception, or more specifically the reception of production. So when a popist/anti-rockist insists that reception has to be the starting point, it might be due to a "romantics of reception" or it might be a more broader point that is epistemological rather than ontological: when we're talking about music, our understanding is always affected (infected) by our enjoyment. So to even hope of getting to the kind of structural, scientific diagnostic critical position in the Althusserian sense that k-punk seems to advocate, you sort of have to traverse your own enjoyment, work out as near as possible what it is that is structuring your own enjoyment, in terms of both production and reception (what is the music's baggage, what is my baggage), rather than assume (per Althusser) that you alone have uncovered the scientific formulation for divining the difference between 'mere' enjoyment and something more real. Of course, the awful truth is that you never get to that point, it's a point of infinite regress. This is why every critic is a popist, they just don't necessarily know it yet.

I'm getting to the point where I never want to read the word 'Popism' ever again. None of the definitions here actually make sense - with the possible exception of Tim F I can't think of a single person on this thread who has never held an irrational prejudice against an artist or dismissed them out of hand. Whether it's Paris Hilton or the Arctic Monkeys or whoever.

Everyone has music they don't want to like before they even hear it. Harmless irrational prejudices are fun, admit it.

wow, that matt dc point ^^^^^ seriously OTM

Tim, I doubt that Simon has any idea that I like the Paris album (or that I'm one of those generalists who listens to country). I also think it's so obvious that when he talks about "popists" he's going after straw men that we really don't need to discuss it. If he's an interesting enough figure for such a long thread, it seems a waste to focus on his lazy and stupid statements. Of course, when someone intelligent resorts to laziness and stupidity, there's probably something going on inside him, but unless he's willing to explore what's really at issue for him (and what the "popist" bugbear is standing in for in his mind), I just don't see that we have anywhere to go with it. But I do have Simon's email address. It seems to me that if those of you most concerned with Simon's jabs at "popism" - Tom, Alex, Lex, Dave - do want to take it further - if it's still bugging you - then you should write him and tell him that he's going after a straw men and ask him if he's willing to engage with you on your actual ideas. Or do you think he's so far off the deep end on this issue that there's no reeling him in?

Tim, Paris's third single, "Nothing In This World," is the best Dr. Luke track since "4ever"; also, it's the only one that avoids what's becoming a really annoying trend in Dr. Luke, his tendency to pump up the sound so much that it's grotesquely musclebound: giant FUN hooks, BIG drums, HARD-ROCKING guitars. Whereas "Nothing In The World" goes for a gorgeous glide. Maybe Paris forced him to take down the sound, or maybe, given that she's not a belt-it-out diva, he really had no choice.

are you willing to explore what's really at issue with you, paedo?

I've e-mailed Simon on this topic before Frank (although I know I've lost his e-mail address because I wanted to e-mail him about Studio, I think he would really like them).

And it's a function of such communication that everyone's position seems (and ultimately becomes) much more reasonable - really Simon and Mark and Matt Woebot are 99% perfectly reasonable about such issues, and only get a bit dodgy when caught in a feedback loop with each other.

But it's not really the popism strawmen that concern me, it's more me trying to work out exactly where I stand in relation to what he calls "nu-rockism" i.e. his theory for his own taste. Of course because nu-rockism is explicitly defined against "popism" the two issues collapse into one another very quickly.

Simon has said before that "nu-rockism" is kind of a critical mapping of his taste, an attempt to devise a formula for what is good and bad in music based on what empirically he is into or not into (when set against the allegedly over-experiential popism this becomes something of a contradiction, but I'll leave that aside for now). I'm dubious about the notion of having a set formula for what works and what doesn't in music (both whether it's even possible and whether it's a good idea) but that doesn't mean that I don't spend a lot of time consciously or unconsciously trying to devise one, or relying on some half-articulated one that is most likely a combination of my own tastes and received wisdom. So I can't help but ask myself "if I had such a formula, what would it look like?" I think this is what makes this whole topic interesting to me: some sort of secret Oedipal process by which at the end of this thread (or all the others on this topic and related ones) I will have discovered the formula.

Ultimately i think a big part of one's position on these issues is how you perceive the current development of your tastes. I'm still at an age where it feels like I'm changing more than the music around me is - by which I mean, that my sense of music being good or bad has much more to do with how I'm developing interests in some styles/areas/artists/approaches and losing interest in others, and less to do with how music as a whole (or in specific areas) is changing from year to year. Such a position tendentially leads to a "popist" position I think, because I feel my reactions to be less reliable (because subject to change) but also more interesting (because subject to change).

Whereas clearly in the discourse of Mark and Simon, there's a really clear sense of them believing that it's less their tastes changing now than it is the world of music "out there" (outside their heads) changing. Especially when this particular change is negative, i.e. you're finding less music exciting each year, it would seem equally irresistible to drift towards a position where you want to impose some level of fixity or determination ("standards") upon questions of goodness/badness etc. based on your own tastes, because to recover that excitement you want the world of music to change in a different direction (often to "return" to a point [x]) to come into alignment with your reliable tastes. Simultaneously to your tastes becoming more reliable (because less subject to change), they also become less interesting as a site of enquiry (because less subject to change) - hence a further critical transposition away from asking "what is it about my experience of this music that makes me experience it this way" and to focus more exclusively on asking "what is it about the production (in the general, not sonic sense) of this music that makes me experience it this way".