Frank Kogan's forthcoming "Real Punks Don't Wear Black"

Trying to read Frank Kogan's new book, but keep putting down my advance copy because I WAS FRANK KOGAN, except I was born about eight years later and three time zones westerlier. But it's all there: the relationship to music, the poetry of young revolutionaryism, the funky despair that leads to brilliant insight (well, Frank really IS kinda brilliant as a kid, I was just our town's functional equivalent). It's painful but it's awesome like an opossum and my teeth, I don't floss 'em.

The Afterlife Of Pop

Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black is a devastatingly good book. The first evening I read it I found that it shook me up a lot - I recognised the ideals and ideas Frank was chasing, even if I couldn't have articulated them, and I was ashamed of my own inability to follow then. Not that Frank is appealing for 'followers'. Not that I want to 'follow' him. But the first chapters made me feel tentative and timid. After that initial cold splash, the rest of the book has been exhilarating: I've been reading it in a more positive mood, feeling stimulated and inspired. I'm not sure I'm ready to respond yet to the ideas in the book - either intellectually or by example (though the rest of this post has turned into a partial response).

Partway through the book, in the chapter discussing "Superwords", I get quoted, a quote from this odd piece, which I've not dared read since I wrote it. My reluctance was based around my never finishing it - I never wrote the subsequent parts, and after a couple of weeks I'd forgotten what was meant to be in them. I was also afraid I'd read it again and think it was wrong - which I now do, but it's not wrong in any terrible or humiliating way so I don't know why I was so fussed.

The 'death of pop' piece sits as one of my most grievous examples of that Kogan bugbear, not following through ideas. I'm never sure how seriously I take this - I think a lot of ideas are un-follow-through-able, or rather than if you try to follow them through you get ground down and tired, so it's better to just spray them out and see if anyone else can do anything with them. This was always a guiding notion behind ILM, which I actually started half-based on a description I'd read of a Frank Kogan zine (its other parent was the "Question of the Month" box on 80s Marvel editorial pages). But maybe when I say "better" I simply mean "more fun" or "lazier".

This actually ties in a bit with what I was talking about in the Death of Pop piece. The bit I like most in the piece now is the section near the end about stage magic and pop existing in the same precarious showbiz state. In stage magic, pretending that it's all for real (i.e. that you actually possess supernatural powers) is seen as vulgar or a cheat; showing the wires is also frowned upon. A magic performance, in other words, is an idea that refuses - or cannot survive - a follow-through. Somewhere in the tangle of the article I'm suggesting a similar thing about manufactured pop.

Except stage magic is - or used to be, I don't know enough about how it works these days - a stable form where this refusal is built-in and understood by performers and to an extent by audience. Pop is unstable, judging by the continual movement of its performers towards perceived autonomy and credibility (which very rarely translates to achieved cred). The 'death of pop' I was getting worked up about four years ago is always with us, a constant career trajectory. So the question is: why? And also - to paraphrase a question Frank Kogan asks a great deal - what do the performers gain by that? What does the industry gain? What do we listeners gain?

(I think Tom meant to type "follow them" rather than "follow then," and "old piece" for "odd piece"; and I think the description he'd read of WMS had been in The Wire, a pseudonymous review by someone called Hopey Glass.)

I just read an advance of a bock by Village Voice rock critic Frank Kogan. He's a friend of Chuck Eddy, and has a writing style reminiscent of Richard Meltzer's. He's got some interesting ideas: about "Superwords", "The WHAT THING", legitimacy and non legitimacy, the "PBSing of rock"...he's very smart, compassionate in a way, but it ends up making me sort of ill...its solipistic, self obsessed, and lacks an understanding of what musicians are doing.

The best part is when he talks about how "non legitamacy" is the essential element of "legitimacy" in rock...for example, the thing that confers" legitimacy" on Jerry Lee Lewis, in a lot of peoples minds, is his illigitimate act of shooting his bass player. He gets a lot of cred from that...Kogan talks about how, for musicians, dying is the utmost in legitimacy creation, cause yr surely not kissing anyone's ass then! There is wacked out truth in this, this is a true picture of us...it gives me a headache as he starts to say, then, that once you have legitimacy in the eyes of the rock fan, you are in fact on yr way to becoming the opposite thing. For example, hard rock is seen at one point as being the most rocking form, and ballads are out...this confers "legitimacy" on ballads in the next round.

Hmmmm...think I'll just stick with what I was doing, get that book away from me!

The point is the hunger in our culture for justification...everyone feels ignored, tiny, a loser, invalididated by the machine, etc...its the way that it is! There is an image of truth in Kogans idea here.

Oh well I just wanna play! Cant wait til I get over to Amsterdam, I havent played there since 89, or was it 92?

Ex-leader of the Plimsouls.

Also, I have a great understanding of what musicians are doing: E.g., band in rehearsal, song peters out, the keyboardist says to the guitarist, very tentatively, "Was what I was playing all right?" and the guitarist says, "Oh, yeah, I guess so," while thinking to himself "How the fuck should I know? I was so busy struggling with my part that I wasn't paying the least attention to what you were doing." Meanwhile, the bass player tells the drummer, "You need to play with more concentration," and the drummer snaps back, "What are you talking about? You come here and play with 'concentration,' asshole," and throws a stick in his direction. The singer, meanwhile, hums to herself and goes and fiddles with something on one of the amps.

I'm sure his plim is very soulful.

Real Punks Don't Wear Black offers an adventure by pairing a university mind with a high school dropout phenomenon. Frank Kogan to me is a writer who would write fascinating treatises even if he were comparing new brands of carpeting. While the rest of us in our writer's group encourage Frank to write about other things, the man is clearly set on a life's path of writing about something he can't let go of, and his obsessive compulsion is to our benefit.
—Denver Daily News, January 20, 2006

Freddy drastically misinterprets the letter that gives the book its title. Among other things, the letter is an obvious work of fiction, written by me. (Obvious? Well, I didn't imagine that someone could take it for real.)

And one of the things the book does is to challenge the claim of the pierced and tattooed to speak for all of punk.

I think "solipsist" gets over-used to mean anyone who's self-involved or writes mainly about their own thoughts and internal mental states and perceptions. Clearly any critic who gets deeply into constructing a personal system of aesthetic values is going to be accused of building castles in the air that no one else can see. There is a very real debate here which has been held many times on ILM about whether critical judgments can ever be anything other than subjective. Perhaps "solipsist" is a short-hand way of denoting someone who takes the position that critical judgments are inherently subjective and it's pointless to deny that they are.

Never even rented one. (Nor read Vollmann, though he and Woody Allen are now on my to-read list.)

uga library still ain't got the kogan book.

Well, I don't think the for-reals version (rather than the reviewer's promos) are even printed yet.

Except what I keep trying to hammer home in the book is that critical judgments are inherently social, and I keep emphatically rejecting the idea that you can talk about yourself or about the world but that you can't do both at once. I wish the word "subjective" (and "objective," its partner in infamy) would vanish from the language. People don't know what they mean when they say it.

hurrah!

Well, in my sentence where I used the word "subjective" to refer to a view of the nature of claims of truth in aesthetic criticism, I simply meant that one who held that aesthetic judgments are "subjective" would hold that such judgments are only true for the person who makes such judgments and are not true in a universal sense. Perhaps an example would make this more clear. If I say "The Rolling Stones are the best rock band of all time" and if it's true that such judgments are subjective, then there is an implied "to me" that should be added to the end of that sentence (and any sentence which makes claims in this manner).

And I'm saying that those aren't the only two choices, which is why I think "subjective" and "objective" need to be shitcanned.

"The Rolling Stones are the best rock band of all time" is obviously not only true for the person who makes the judgment, since more than one person has made that judgment, and someone's stating it as a judgment rather than a matter of taste is in itself a claim that the judgment has a validity that goes beyond oneself; i.e., more than one person should make that judgment.

Let me take another example. Suppose there are several people in a room. One person says "It's cold in here". Some others agree. Another person says, "Actually it's warm in here." Some others agree with him. So is "It's cold in here" a subjective statement or not? Clearly more than one person agrees with the statement, and the people making that statement are implying that the others should agree with them. However, not everyone does agree, and there doesn't seem to be any objective way of measuring whether or not the room is in fact cold - simply because there is no objective definition of the word "cold" that will resolve every grey area. Say they had a thermometer in the room - would that settle the issue? No, because regardless of what the temperature reading was, to some people the room would still be cold and to others hot.

unless it's like 10 below then everyone would be fuckin' freezing.

Yeah, I think that's the point I'm trying to make, that "subjective" and "objective" leave most of the map untouched. My feeling is that you and I aren't seriously at odds here, but my other guess is that if you dropped the word "subjective" from your vocabulary, your thinking wouldn't be inhibited thereby. E.g., if in some instances by "subjective" we mean "we can get away with disagreeing without being called insane," that's what we should say: not that we're being subjective, but that can get away with disagreeing. This is because the word "subjective" implies a deeper principle than "what we can get away with saying," and furthermore implies that there are only two choices: you're either speaking for yourself alone or your speaking for everybody.

In your example, everyone in the room could agree, "It's too cold for some of us but not for all of us." But as soon as someone says, "No, it's too cold, period," the situation has changed. Either the guy is dismissed out of hand - is in essence dismissed from the conversation - or at least some of the other participants have to acknowledge that one person's judgement of coldness may be better than another's (in which case it's no longer just up to the individual). OK, that'd be a strange argument, to argue over whether someone feels cold or not. But to bring up an example that I use in my book, what about the person who claims that Jay-Z is too pop to be real hip-hop? Or what about the person who claims that there are witches? Or the person who believes in Intelligent Design? You can call all of these judgments and their corresponding counterjudgments (Jay-Z is real hip-hop, there are no witches, Intelligent Design is vacuous bullshit) "subjective," but how does that help you? What does it tell us about these judgments that we wouldn't otherwise know, if there were no such term as "subjective"? Once something jumps social roles from "matter of taste" to "matter of judgment" (which often then links up with "matter of definition"), then not everyone is agreeing to disagree, since some people's ideas can be better or worse than the others', some people can be right and others wrong, and we have no process that everyone will adhere to that determines who is right or wrong.

If you want to, you can call matters of taste and matters of judgment "subjective," but I don't see what you've gained by lumping the two together. "I don't like spinach" and "witches are real" seem at a pretty far remove.

But all this is also at a pretty far remove from why people call me solipsistic. In Real Punks, where I tell my story I'm not doing so just for its own sake but because there are resemblances between my story and some other people's, so by analyzing and probing my own predicament I'm analyzing and probing a lot more, too. I make this clear right on the first page of the preface, where I say that my sentences don't just come from my pen, they're a social product; and I ask, therefore, not just what do I gain by producing such sentences, but what does a society gain by producing people like me who write such sentences. So I'm saying that my story is relevant even for people whose experience doesn't match up with mine, since I'm still playing a role in the society of which they're a part. Of course, one can dispute this claim, but whether I'm being "subjective" or not doesn't touch the claim one way or another. Rather, what's at issue is whether or not my experience resembles other people's; and whether the principles I'm illustrating in telling my story can be applied to other people; and whether my social roles relate to the social roles of poeple whose story doesn't resemble mine.

You think you know me?

And if that surprises you, then either you don't know me as well as you think, or you don't know her.

You think you know me?

You think you know me
Word on the street is that you do
You want my history
What others tell you won't be true

I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep
Nobody's really seen my million subtleties

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

I hear you talking
Well, it's my turn now
I'm talking back
Look in my eyes
So you can see just where I'm at

I walked a thousand miles to find one river of peace
I walked a million more to find out what this shit means

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

I'm a bad ass girl in this messed up world
I'm the sexy girl in this crazy world
I'm a simple girl in a complex world
A nasty girl, you wanna get with me?
You wanna mess with me?

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
I laugh more than I cry
You piss me off, good-bye
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

well, i think this relates back to my issues above with readers claiming to not understand writer's metaphors, and feeling like instead of not understanding them they are just rejecting them b/c they cannot see how anyone's peculiar experience is of use, b/c it has to be individual to them and therefore must be different from everyone elses. there's no understanding how getting into someone else's understanding might help with making your own map. anyway...

Except the lyrics on the page don't convey how sexy it is when she says. It's a come on. The song is like the world's most brilliant personal ad.

And I never in my life wrote a line as great as "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep." I don't know if Jay-Z or Eminem ever did either. Or Dylan. It's like she's saying, "Here I am, stealth genius, and you didn't know." Of course, she's making promises in that song that she probably won't be able to keep, just as Dylan and Jagger and Iggy and Lennon and Johnny and Johansen never lived up to their promise.

When I go out I'm a go out shooting
I don't mean when I die
I mean when I go out to the club, stupid

That's actually a pretty good definition of "subjective". And since the difference between "subjective" and "objective" is a continuum and not a black-and-white divide, then I think perhaps you're right that the word obscures more than it reveals. It's basically a lazy way of saying, "I don't think you're right and I don't think you can convince me." And in any case, I don't think the word is absolutely necessary to an understanding of criticism. Because criticism (or at least good criticism) is a social process, good critics quickly move beyond the "AC/DC rules! Losers drool!" school of thought and they start to ask "Why do they rule?" and "What other bands rule in similar ways?" and so on, and pretty soon they find that there are things they can hold a conversation about, even with people who might not agree that AC/DC rules.

It's actually "And I'll walk a million more to find out what this shit means."

See what I mean about her making promises? I admire her for making them.

Or it could be a way of saying "I think you are right but there's no sure-fire way that we can convince even the people we respect." But my major problem with the words "subjective" and "objective" is that they divide up the universe between what's in the psyche and what's in objects; that way of mapping the universe pretty much leaves out most of the universe. Leaves out society, and culture, and people's lives, and the fact that people use objects in their lives.

(Not that people who use the words "objective" and "subjective" actually map out the universe in this way. Another thing I imply but don't really get into in the book is that the problem isn't that people's views are distorted by their belief in a mind-matter split - normally people don't think about that split at all, and it really doesn't play a big role in social discourse - but that they run to such splits when they don't want to deal with social conflict.)

Frank I really really like this point - I think I've verged on thinking it dozens of times without ever actually finally articulating it. e.g. I used to be broadly in favour of Ned's "Radical Subjectivity" position but now I'm somewhat uncomfortable with it, not because I believe in objectivity but because it feels like a conflict-avoidance-mechanism.

hahahahaha. you have brass balls, and i love you for saying this. youve just sold another copy of your book, which might have been your intention.

When I first listened to Bob Dylan's mid-'60s stuff I thought it was especially honest. It was honest to me because the vocals weren't pretty and didn't sound like singers were supposed to sound, and mistakes were left in. The lyrics to "Visions of Johanna," "Memphis Blues Again," etc. were honest because they were self-destructive. The earlier protest stuff, attacking power, prestige, and everyday commonplaces, fit into a genre of "folk" music; the electric stuff seemed more individual and true. Dylan got to be "honest" not by attacking power, prestige, and everyday commonplaces, but by attacking Dylan.

I thought if you were going to get to see Ashlee's come-on, you should see mine as well, so that's the first paragraph. Ashlee's has a better lilt. I should work on my flirting technique.

I wrote the piece 22 years ago, and it's not about any actual Dylan autobio. "The true autobiography of Bob Dylan isn't an account of his life, or how he got to be that way; but of how it got to be that way, how we got to be that way." In other words, I'm saying we get to complete Dylan's "autobiography" in our own lives and our own stories.

Harold Bloom to thread.

Yes, this thread's all about selling copies of my book.