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

"Kogan has been writing about music for some 35 years—for his own blogs; for his zine, Why Music Sucks; as well as for Spin, Radio On and the Village Voice."

So, Frank, you have...blogs?

*checks*

No record yet. I could theoretically pretend it's a Reserves order but I'm not THAT flaky. I'll make a request and see if there's some traction.

The Publisher's Weekly reviewer probably just assumed that "Internet" meant "blog." But recently I've started listing my "blog" like so:

/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?thread.php?msgid=6585005

I've twice asked the Voice to pay me to post online on their site, first time back in 2002 in a long after-midnight email to Doug Simmons (excerpts from it became chapter 18 of Real Punks; can be summarized pithily as "So if you're listening, there's so much more to me you haven't seen"), then again a couple of months ago, on the heels of my pay cut, in a long email to Nick Catucci, wherein I asked for a weekly column. Catucci ended up quitting as online Voice boss shortly after that, so I don't know what he thought of the idea. I think they're insane not to take me up on it, since they can get me for about a third what they'd have to pay for equivalent-length pieces in the regular section, and one online link a week is hardly clogging up their Webspace, if it turns out I only get a specialty audience. I'd probably re-work the proposal a bit, since I feel that I'm clicking with pop music now in a way that I wasn't last October and I'd probably therefore bring it into the proposal.

I wouldn't want to be on Breihan's and Sylvester's beat - for one thing, they're amazing, churning out all that copy, and I think the Voice is exploiting them terribly, but also I couldn't do as well either at Breihan's straight-up reporting and real-time journo-musical analysis or at Sylvester's running wise-brat vaudeville act. There are some things that the young and hip do better than I. But I wish someone would pay me to do what I do better than anyone else in the world, which is to probe and to question and to ask the sociomusical "why," relentlessly but also as accessibly as I can. And dammit, I'll tell you why a lyric such as "So if you're listening, there's so much more to me you haven't seen" matters, better than anyone else'll tell you.

In Kogan's terms, being a rock critic is about broadening the idea of what counts as criticism. Not everything counts, but because everything potentially can, you need to risk being ridiculous and rigorous to figure out what is worth saying. Music – and all the other stuff it includes – is, most essentially 'an activity in which people participate': a social activity and therefore an intellectual activity. Which means: Kogan is a rock critic because he's interested in thinking, specifically in those forms of thinking called 'rock' and 'criticism'. So he treats the New York Dolls as his favourite philosophers and Ludwig Wittgenstein as his favourite band. (You just know he has 'meaning is use' written on his loose-leaf notebook in purple magic marker.) He writes as if he’s dancing, fighting, killing time and trying to change the world.
—Steven Stern

A friend of mine here in Denver tells me:

"my daughter who lives in Athens says your book is 'hot' amongst the in group"

(ps i will be buying a copy of the book ultimately i'm sure).

I first saw "meaning to read this history of Poptimism."

Is "banana-herald" a cross between The International Edition of the New York Herald Tribune and Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl"?

bridges burnt in this town o brother

The one humorous line on Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway is "It's not a light at the end of the tunnel tonight/Just a bridge that I gotta burn" (line courtesy of DioGuardi or Shanks).

(It's a great album though, even if it's lacking in yuk-yuks.)

I've been spending a lot of time lately with Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black, probably the best non-Lester Bangs collected-music-writing book I've ever read, even if he does include all these long-ass unreadable screeds he wrote when he was like twelve. Probably my favorite idea within the book is the Superword, which Kogan describes a lot better than I could:

"A Superword is a word like 'punk,' which is, among other things, a battleground, a weapon, a red cape, a prize, a flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag. To put this in the abstract, a Superword is a word or phrase that not only is used in flights but that is itself fought over. The fight is over who gets to wear the word proudly, who gets the word affixed to himself against his will, etc. So the use is fought over, and this - the fight over usage - is a big part of the word's use."

That's about the simplest Kogan ever puts it, and he devotes pages and pages to this thing. His favorite example is "punk," but virtually every genre of music becomes a Superword at some point or another; people start fighting over what exactly it is and what can and can't claim that status. My favorite Superword is a term I try to never use: hip-hop.

[Then a whole bunch of stuff about Christina Aguilera and Premier and the fight over "real hip-hop."]

So, anyway, what do you guys think of the concept Superword? We talked about it a whole lot on the Key to deconstructing C Eddy / S Reynolds thread, if you want to know more. I pulled whole hunks of stuff bodily from that thread and put them in my Superwords chapter, including long quotes from Sterling, Tom E., and Tracer. Here's how I elaborated on that concept in the thread:

A Superword is a controversy word, but not all controversy words are Superwords; for what makes a Superword really super is that some people use the word so that it will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment. Like, no one and nothing is good enough to bear the word "punk," and I wouldn't join a band that would have someone like me as a member anyway. (Supposedly, in the late '80s I once claimed that Michael Jackson and Axl Rose were the only two punks going at the time.) "Rock," "pop," "punk," and many other genre names sometimes act as Superwords. So "punk" (for instance) can be an ideal, and every single song that aspires to be punk can fall short in someone's ears. But for the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so that the music is always inadequate to the ideal, even if the music would have been adequate to yesterday's version of the ideal. And the music then chases after this ever-changing ideal. Words bounce on ahead, and the music comes tumbling after.

I once pitched the idea of an article entitled "Antirockism Is for Teacher's Pets." The title of course would be to get the attention of the antirockists and to dent their self-image, and I think the designation "teacher's pet" is psychologically and socially acute as well; but underlying the piece would be my assumption that the pets - who are people I sympathize with, basically - are trying to tell their own truth and that they probably have an interesting truth to tell, if they can find their way to it and not settle for comforting half-truths. The dynamic in antirockism is that the antirockist has put defeating people ahead of trying to understand them, so the antirockist projects his own ideas onto supposed "rockists" but in really stupid form, so he gains an easy victory over an imaginary foe.

A friend of mine, old enough to know better, once explained his dislike of the Backstreet Boys by complaining that the Backstree Boys don't even write their own songs. The thing is, my friend doesn't know why he dislikes the Backstreet Boys. "They don't write their own songs" is a placeholder, an "explanation" that gives him the excuse not to probe himself for the real reasons. Now, if we call this guy a "rockist," this means we aren't interested in why he dislikes the Backstreet Boys either.

But if my piece says no more than this, it hasn't accomplished much. The goal is to bring the antirockist back to the impulses, experiences, battles, and nascent ideas that were bubbling in and around him before he stepped sideways into the fake discussion about "rockism." In other words, I want the antirockist to reflect on who he is, what social groups he belongs to, what his gang affiliations are, and what the relationship is between his opinions and his social commitments. And even more, I want to ask what the world is that produces this guy - it's usually a guy - and that produces these opinions, this whole discussion.

If I had to I could come up with a pretty accurate description of something called "rockism": basically, a bunch of loosely related - and really irritating - habits and justifications for saying why what you like is more real than what someone else likes. But the reason I can't put myself at odds with the supposed "rockist" is that I don't think there's anything wrong in principle with saying something's more real than something else - I'm willing to call myself a real thinker, and say that person X is not a real thinker - and when you come down to it, I have exactly the same impulses the supposed "rockist" does in regard to "authenticity," even if I take my impulses to more interesting places. To explain it briefly: the "authenticity" issue is about one's relationship to authority and to social pressure. The Hero Story it draws on has the Performer in defiance of Authority. It isn't about who writes the song but about who seems to be groveling in front of whom and where one's own fandom puts one in relation to authority. The reason there's so much obfuscation in the discussion of "rockism" is that there's no way not to buy into the Hero Story, but there's no way to tell the story honestly without connecting yourself to the groveling. (Well, that's vague enough. I don't think I can explain my argument briefly. But my book explains it well enough and without resorting to the buzz word "rockism.")

The supposed problem with the Backstreet Boys isn't that they're not singing their own song but that they're singing the record company's and the audience's song. But then we have to pretend that the person singing to us isn't singing our song. But how is it possible not to sing the audience's song?

As much as I have discussed rockism/anti-rockism as much as anyone over the last six years or so, the debate is an irritating one because it always ends up returning to the same banal dead ends. Most of the really interesting brain gruntwork done on this topic has been that which perhaps inadvertently moves beyond the opposition, which struggles to go back and tenuously redefine itself as working in service of the cause of one side or the other... and perhaps therefore should just stop worrying and try to attach itself to - or better, create from scratch - a different kind of critical language.

I think Mitch once said that my relationship to Britney as a performer (specifically vis a vis "Born To Make You Happy") was post-rockist, and I wonder if (though he will likely disagree with me on this) Frank's critical appraisal of Ashlee Simpson is not similar. Which is to say that the relationship values a notion of authenticity which is not about external empirical validation but personal identification (Hero Story stuff, in Frank language). The issue is not whether we believe in and value a notion of "realness", but how honest we are about our differing notions of realness.

I still think it's worth thinking about the way that music fandom - and especially music criticism - functions by way of analogical imposition (in so far as we talk about different artists and different types of music and different impulses and logics within music by way of comparison to others) and how this serves to both define and limit the possibilities of what we can think about music. But the rockist/anti-rockist dichotomy can usually only approach this in an overly dramatised [x] or [y] manner.

Relevant here perhaps is the tension b/w the injunction to "value artists/styles on their own terms" (immanent judgment) versus intermingling these terms and using different artist/genre criteria to throw a different light on the music in question (as chuck might say, why shouldn't I ask whether this rock song is good or bad disco?).

I was thinking yesterday that it's a bit like those superhero universe-crossovers - Batman vs Superman, or Aliens vs Predator. "Would Batman best Superman in a fight?" Should we complain that it's unfair to pit Batman against Superman because Batman isn't actually superhuman and the whole point of the Batman universe is that of an ordinary man using skill, strategy and technology to punch above his weight? Or does this only serve to close down our thinking about what the "whole point" of Batman might be?

Actually (because I've mentioned her here before) Christgau is interesting on Ani DiFranco w/r/t this - here he's talking about a discussion he had with some teenage girls who like Ani:

"This is linguistic craft as a means to character--DiFranco's character. Pointing out that "When Doves Cry" (a formerly ritual show-closer that kicked out the jams at Roseland) is DiFranco's only cover, my otherwise sophisticated panel insisted on autobiographical verisimilitude: all right, maybe "Letter to a John" wasn't true, they didn't think she'd ever lap-danced, but if it came out that, for example, Ani-the-person wasn't really bisexual, it would be like Milli Vanilli or something. And they're right to care. Aesthetes are free to believe she's merely constructed this headstrong, mercurial, sensual, edgy, alert, pissed off, affectionate, waggish, empowered, needy, indomitable, fierce, leftwing, hyperemotional, supercompetent persona. But self-expression goes into it too, and you have to wonder whether she can keep it up."

Sorry that's probably all irrelevant, but I find this whole general topic totally fascinating.

I don't think that's necessarily so. I agree with the general premise - it's nice when people genuinely seek answers, don't merely make accusations and rely on buzzwords, etc. But your post seems to be telling me, "Don't use this word. It's a Stupor Word for teacher's pets."

If there is indeed a rockist perspective, then yes, you can talk about it and analyze the reasons behind it, but you still need a word to identify it. Not sure what's wrong with using the word "rockism" for this purpose (unless it's just too vague or something).

>"Rockism" is a stupor word for sure. The reason is that no one aspires to rockism, hence no one's trying to up the ante and make rockism better than anyone can be. <

Not sure I follow this. Do you mean this in the sense of saying that no one aspires to sexism or racism either? (And if so what does that have to do with the value of the word?)