Artists With A Syllabus - is this or is it no longer A Thing?

I dunno, Manics attitudes towards "Socialism" seemed to go a bit deeper than wanting your own personal toilet at Glasto because, let's face it, the toilets at festivals are revolting. I can understand that urge.

Like, the idea of Nicky Manic still living and paying local taxes in an end of row terrace house in the neighbourhood where he grew up vs Billy Bragg and his "I'll use the communal toilet in Glasto, but move to a rock star beach house in Dorset" (or wherever he lives now, rather than staying true to the Essex roots or whatever he talks about? But mainly I just think Billy Bragg shout STFU for many reasons)

the most recent uk version i can come up with is the libertines. but they're also the most recent band to be successful enough in the white-boy-with-guitar phylum (public school genus) to be culturally unavoidable enough that people would notice. american examples seem without number.

I had to google it, but my question is: did they want everybody else to know what a mansard roof was or did they just want to say "mansard roof"? Betting on the latter.

when artists tell you about the art they absorb themselves, there's a bunch of ways of doing it. a name-dropped list can look very shallow, but at some points in your life - especially adolescence i guess - it doesn't matter if it's shallow because you're just looking for reference points on the map of the world that you can go and explore for yourself.

i prefer artists who show you what makes up their experience-world, thru cover art or references or oblique conversations. as an adult i don't need reference points so much, but i'm interested in the ways that artists influence other artists - i want to see the trails.

when we talk to other people about our interests we're always exposing ourselves, especially to the hateful glare of "taste". i've said before how negative a trait i think good taste is. it makes people wary of discussing things they like in case their peers can sneer at their gaucheness or whatever. which isn't to say i'm above the odd sneer myself - i doubt any of us is. but i'd like to think that mostly what i sneer at is a kind of unreflectingness, an assumption that certain ideas or modes or things are inherently cool or correct or above analysis. i hate that shit.

some artists now i'm sure are still signposting and discussing art they love. maybe it happens less than it used to do because there's a deeper obsession with "good taste" in some genres? a lot of music fandom outside of the popular mainstream can degenerate into a game of cooler-than-thou that makes savvy practitioners keep their cards closer to their chests. and there's a streak of deliberate boorishness (occasionally funny and necessary but often just easy) thruout the history of music crit/fandom. but also maybe increasingly music practitioners take most of their experience-world from other music in a way that reduces their points of reference?

ramble ramble

i suspect this is actually a very small part of the larger story about how there are still smart and earnest kids at american universities, whereas every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

In the "flippin' lousy" TV interview (from around the time of 'Sell Out'), Townshend does mention that the band are "a relatively simple form of pop art", but he doesn't go into it much more than that. And during the rest of the interview he seems to be actively deflecting any questions that hint at the possibility of intellectulism in their music. Even around the release of 'Tommy', there's a German TV interview where the interviewer is asking all kinds of complications about the metaphysical themes etc. of the album, and PT is giving more or less monosyllabic 'yes/no' answers.

every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

this seems harsh and yet

in response to your earlier post i wanted to say something dismissive about how music fans as a group were the least well read people in the universe but i'm not sure if i agree with myself

I think how it basically breaks down is that something can be intellectual while seeming totally dunderheaded (Stooges), and also something can be labelled 'intellectual' while actually being just a bunch of random quotes cribbed from somewhere.
Alarm bells go off for me when a band makes a big show of their influences. It reminds me of Will Self's rant about 'you don't somehow know all about Italian cuisine because you've eaten a chiabatta'.

i want to say that the young people today are the least well read people in the universe but i'm trying to ease my curmudgeonly middle-aged man persona in gently

x-posts, wow, fast moving thread for a Saturday!

Well, I was thinking about Radiohead because, well, that's where my thoughtworm obsession is at, at the moment. And how they went from being the kind of literate band that would namedrop Coupland or Chomsky in interviews when asked what their influences were (I always found that endearing rather than pretentious, tho I know many disagree.) To being the kind of band that had a whole blog dedicated to what they were reading, not even in a namedroppy this is what we're influenced kind of way, but in more a OMG THIS BOOK IS AMAZING YOU SHOULD ALL READ IT TOO!!! kind of way. But then again, RH seem like the kind of band that if they weren't rock stars, they would be either college professors or the kind of marketing creatives who spend their lives telling other people what they should be consuming (or some odd mixture thereof.)

I dunno, though, Noodle, because sometimes I find the way that you sneer at "good taste" to be almost as hateful as the whole cult of "good taste." I kinda get what you're on at, in that "worrying about how other people will perceive your taste" is gross and worrying about being sneered at for the stuff you love is just so awful. But at the same time, that whole thing of refusing to contemplate or examine or engage with the stuff you put in your brain - that's even grosser (and that was when I really started shouting at the RH fans.) Maybe that's what you're saying, and I'm misreading you?

snoball i feel like you're having an entirely parallel discussion with yourself

nv i think the boat sailed on that one

wcc are you familiar with tom fleming and his band 'the wild beats'

xp

oh i think you shd grapple with yr own aesthetic, no doubt. it's unreflectiveness that i hate, but i feel like "taste" as a public quality is very much about unreflectiveness, like it's an acquired set of rules that save people from having to think when confronted with something that doesn't engage them.

every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

lol u old

sneering is generally unattractive, obviously. it's a reflex reaction like sneezing or like fighting back when you feel attacked.

i suspect this is actually a very small part of the larger story about how there are still smart and earnest kids at american universities, whereas every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

I disagree with this SO HARD, mostly because the people I most often encounter this reflexive anti-intellectualism from are Americans?

And also because, I dunno. I remember (OK this is 4 or 5 years ago now) meeting a bunch of teenage LOTP fans and thinking, oh god, these ppl are gonna be terrible NME-reading, mindless cool-eating people who listen to Horrors albums, ugh - and then I met them and they so WEREN'T - they were far more engaged and curious and interested in following up cultural references and exploring concepts. Like, a generation of kids who had grown up with videogames, but were prepared to dissect videogames as art and reference them to Japanese literature and the explosion in 19th century photography technology and just WAU, like, these kids, these fans, are so much smarter and more articulate than the bands they're consuming or the press who are talking down to them, like, what gives?

I guess there's a difference between "I'm namedropping this influence because I think it will look cool" (even though bands like Bauhaus could make that work, somehow?) and "OMG, everyone should read this book because it's amazing, it inspired me so much, you might like it, too!"

But it's hard from the outside to sometimes tell the difference? Especially, yeah, when wikipedia makes every experts in 30 seconds, but sometimes digesting something and getting it wrong will have interesting results? (wasn't that one of the origins of the Bunnymen/Cope beef?)

lotp?

Late of the pier?

also i figured the way i formulated that was recognisably deliberately over the top, but oh well - i do think the ways in which 'smart' indie has survived in the states are more or less directly correlated to the different cultural/economic status of the universities there, and to city cultures more amenable to spending your early 20s doing something unproductive with your life

e. you're at u of sussex right? i submit that that university is an anomaly

Yup. They kinda seemed like they might have had a syllabus, or developed that kind of phenomenon had they gone and, but I think they might just have been a bunch of weirdos. heh.

Yup meaning LOTP = Late Of The Pier, sorry, x-post

I suppose the corollary question is really, when did naked enthusiasm become viewed as *so* ~uncool~? (Though I suppose the word "cool" itself implies a lack of heat or visible enthusiasm.) It seems deeply tied up with the whole hipster (cringe, I know) aesthetic, that one must never be seen to be *bothered* or concerned about anything.

And being a fan - sad fan or otherwise - is very tied up in notions of being a fanatic, of being enthusiastic to an almost unhealthy ideal, that being a hipster and being a fan are mutually impossible positions, which makes engaging with pop culture rather a dilemma?

(a side note that amuses me.)

a lot of Swift's earlier writing, and that of his like-minded peers, is fiercely dismissive of "Indexes" and "Keys" and the like - early encyclopaedias, basically - because they were convinced it allowed a shallow acquisition of learning that shd only legitimately have been acquired thru years of reading latin and greek etc.

so whilst it's true that tools have transformative social consquences, wiki is still just a tool and it doesn't in itself destroy the possibility of "deep" understanding. i'd argue a counter-possibility that it allows for much more rapid connection forming or mapping. i'm wary of shallow/deep dialectics of thought and feeling, and i'd argue they're both important surfaces for experience.

and yet i also feel like the "general culture" is moving towards more shallowness, and simple lists are a real manifestation of that?

i'm eternally gratefully to the sixth form english teacher who, on the first day of A-level class, dictated us a list of stuff we might like to read that wd be interesting or mind-expanding tho completely unrelated to the syllabus. and the list started with Blood and Guts in High School and in 1985 that was revelatory. but lists can be dangerously close to shopping lists and serve as a guide to consumption of culture. and one of culture's uses has always been as a commodity, to signify taste and therefore class and therefore bad things that culture is also always trying to absorb and melt.

and to wind back to the point of the thread - that's also a thing that syllabus artists wind up doing: "here are the products you should consume if you want to be One of Us". the positive, liberating, bridge-building urge is always lying right up against the negative, exclusionary ownership urge.

in 1985 that was revelatory

i was just thinking (before i saw yr two posts) that one difference over the past decade or two is the extent to which the publishing industry, the academic industry, and the general movie industry have attempted to capitalise on older ideas of 'cult' work. like it used to be a lot easier to present a set of Things Outside The Mainstream that had influenced you -- because they weren't as easy to find in the first place, admittedly -- like, try running through every author mark e smith ever made use of and thinking about whether they were in print at the time or whether there'd been a movie version of them the same decade

ha, this is an expost with your more recent post

xpost, rather. also, i was born in 1985, i'd like to just mention that here.

try running through every author mark e smith ever made use of

yeah i remember finding The Dice Man in a bookshop and getting v. excited

and the death of secondhand bookshops is maybe another issue here

see, i first saw that in a branch of hammick's in the luton town centre in a publisher's display of 'cult books!'

i guess i noticed the de-cultification of "cult" when the BBC started showing old Simpsons eps or something on a "cult" strand on BBC2? you're quite right, a word that at one time signified stuff that was hard to get hold of and difficult for an audience to form a relationship with has now become A.N. Other genre

actively resist engaging with the band's non-musical reference points as being something with the whiff of "sad fanboyism" bordering on what reads to me as anti-intellectualism.

I see where you're coming from but I have the opposite feeling about this (tho I've no idea what non-musical reference points any artists I know of even have). Anything book/film/non-musical I have an interest in occupies a completely different place in my head from music. Definitely don't consider myself anti-intellectual, just music and non-music don't occupy much shared space for me

actually just realized you in the original post it says 'band' - i don't really like any bands, which does make something of a difference I think?

do you like mainly music with words in it or music that mainly doesn't have words in it

without

and the switch from "cult" to "Cult" might account for a perceived absence of syllabus artists: the market's become saturated with syllabi, every magazine is chocka with lists of things YOU need to experience, every W.H. Smith's is chocka with books telling you what to see, listen to, experience. artists going down this road now run the risk of being just another reshuffled deck of the canon

When Richard & Judy are pushing a syllabus via their book club, having a syllabus can seem like a fake thing to do.

When i read something it definitely throws up other things to read - and music leads to other music, but like if i buy a damon lamar 12" off ebay can't imagine that connecting to any book I might read

But then i dunno I guess listenign to like jean ritchie then connected into reading more about west virginia, mining, politics etc so maybe i guess it depends on the type of music

On my iPhone so this has to be short but I meant artist, as in thread title, not necessarily band. Like, Dopplereffekt and Drexciya - techno artists I'd think of as coming w a "syllabus."

Also I dunno, in world creating, doesn't an interest in Detroit techno and Ruin Porn / industrial desolation photography often go hand in hand? That stuff counts.

Also I dunno, in world creating, doesn't an interest in Detroit techno and Ruin Porn / industrial desolation photography often go hand in hand? That stuff counts.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Saturday

Its a good question, thats an interesting example. I think a lot of the legwork in joining the dots between those things has been done by journalists (often british) to the point those two things are often linked but I don't really get why

i think certain detroit artists definitely knew how to play british journalists looking for an angle!

this year i've been tenuously writing lyrics, something i haven't done in a long time. and partly because of constraints i want to set myself or things i want to avoid, i've been using a lot of visual motifs to guide my work. visual art used to be important to me in the past but now i feel like my interest in the written word is largely down to relationships with the visual. but to be fair i'm a lot less interested in music as visual metaphor or vice versa. for me music has been tied down to that relationship in ways that writing hasn't been enough

Because I am a posh kid that went to a fee-paying school, we had teachers every year who would give us a reading list over the summer of a couple hundred non-syllabus books and you were expected to have read at least 5 by the time you came back to school in the autumn. So I dunno, I like reading lists in that sense, in a "you might like this, go and explore yourself!" way even while I really reject those shopping-list Canons of "1000 albums you should have heard" which really make me want to throw albums I know and love into the bin when they turn up on them.

It's a hard line to tread. Though I don't have any problem with Richard&Judy or Oprah book clubs - I'm an anti-snob when it comes to that. yeah, I know book clubs are totally fucking middlebrow but I'm *such* a bibliophile that I don't really care how people come to books, so long as they get there.

The "death of the second hand bookshop" thing might be getting at something. Though, like record shops, I don't think this is about the death of the thing itself, so much as the idea of "curated collection with knowledgeable staff." That Amazon, no matter how it refines its algorithms, is still really shit at making recommendations. (though it depends on the baseline with all of those matching programs - that if it tells me "I see you've been looking at Radiohead records, would you like to buy something by Muse?" I want to go FUCK OFF but when, say, Spodify says "I see you've been listening to Laurel Halo, would you like to listen to something by Stellar Om Source or Julianna Barwick?" I say hmm, yes, actually, you're right, I would!" That it's not the algorithm, it's what you put into it.)

I would have thought that either Mark E Smith or Thom E Yorke would be a lot better as a reading guide than an Amazon shopping algorithm (though neither is as good as the bloke with a quiff at my favourite charity bookshop in Streatham.)

But it's almost like the stuff that used to just be cult has now become a new Canon, which goes back to that thing of what I was saying of, what, really, is there left to intellectually namedrop, which hasn't already been claimed, by someone better than you, 20 years ago?

a lot of Swift's earlier writing, and that of his like-minded peers, is fiercely dismissive of "Indexes" and "Keys" and the like - early encyclopaedias, basically - because they were convinced it allowed a shallow acquisition of learning that shd only legitimately have been acquired thru years of reading latin and greek

they're also hard defenders of taste vs book-learning - like when they mock eg Richard Bentley they're backing the taste values – lived knowledge, cultivated judgement, a kind of sprezzatura - against deep & well-reasoned scholarship. it's one of the enduring zones of cultural tension - aesthete's 'natural taste' (=coming from large amount of cultural capital - Distinction by Bourdieu very good on this iirc) vs worked-at acquisition of culture.

Maybe syllabus bands can offer focus and direction for the latter, & can transform it into a something that can go on the offensive against received culture, ie 'taste' is a weapon if allied to genuinely creative energy (which is what the best of the eighteenth century types were doing anyway - Swift & Pope liminals-to-outsiders, despite classical educations). 'Good taste's' unpleasant elite-forming tendencies can be useful as a support & map in youth.

The age of information abundance does make a big diff tho': opaque Mark E Smith references (Chorazina n. - said to be negative jerusalem)so much easier to track down now, but these are just the old arguments about the relationship between how hard things are to find and how much you value them.

(The emergence of 'cult' as bookshop category - I must have first seen it mid-90s, maybe - sometime between Trainspotting the novel and Trainspotting the film.)

Though, like record shops, I don't think this is about the death of the thing itself, so much as the idea of "curated collection with knowledgeable staff."

can also be a physical environment that opens up things in youth - other customers, people like you, potential crushes, sense of possible lives.

i remember cult becoming normal with the opening of borders in philly and also barnes & noble. every bukowski book and kathy acker book and jim thompson book, etc, available all the time. this happened in even crappy video stores too. the cult and midnight movie sections got bigger and bigger. probably inevitable. and now with the internet...man, it's endless now. i don't think its bad or anything. i don't feel the need to glorify how long it took me to find things when i was a kid. the case is often made that it made it more special when you found something weird or off the beaten track. i suppose that's possible. i still feel that way about records to this very day.

but maybe now people don't look to artists themselves for tips/guides to living/culture. they get tips everywhere they look.

one thing Amazon and online stores in general can't do very well is the pure randomness of browsing along shelves - algorithms are okay if you know the area you want to look thru but the sheer randomness of a none-too-carefully stocked secondhand bookshop is its own pool of new signposts and unthought of interests and connections

yeah scott i don't think hard to find-ness was a good thing in itself. but when everything cult becomes just another shelf in the shop then i feel like it commodifies and tames the books - puts them in their own neat box when really cult shd be an anti-genre. once something becomes a genre with rules then you'll get more people just clomping thru the rules and transgression becomes harder somehow? everything becomes recouped by Capital etc

I've never thought of 'cult' as anything other than genre (I also don't see the problem with the idea of genre, or of 'cult' being one)

Sonic Youth were really big on this kind of references both in their music and surrounding artwork.

But perhaps more in the sense of, if an author I really liked said they listened to one piece of music on repeat while writing mh favourite novel, I would totally seek that music out?

Largehearted Boy - Book Notes

to clarify from yday i don't 'object' to things like the panda bear list - and to, say, a 13 year old fan in Winston-Salem that would be amazing! The only thing I find weird about the list is its sort of totality, and Panda Bears seeming desire to present this to the world like a badge (surely their records do this!). Their desire to tell the world about The Beatles and Bob Marley is sort of endearing (no sarcasm intended if it seems that way), but the longer a list is, the more of a manifesto it can seem, which is great if you like that kind of thing

do i think its bad that artists do these lists? no, of course not! turning people on to other music, books, ideas, politics, of course this isn't a bad thing! But do I wish more people did it? No, because I personally don't engage with music in this way (and its not how 'obvious' or 'obscure' any given list is, its that its a list) - and the orig question seemed to be asking more "do you personally like this",

HAS THAT KITTEN BEEN THERE ALL THIS TIME???

Ahem, anyway...

I dunno, back when the Echoes and bun were a thing, it was easier to count the bands that had no 'literary' references than the ones that did. Having said that, I usually got singularly put off by overly overt 'references' to books in songs. To the point where I would suspect that they were vaguely cheating at songwriting and say "Make up your own scenarios! Stop Copying!!"

I got a copy of "Anarchists in Love" possibly because I saw someone from a NWONW band reading a copy while on the bog (faked pic, usual way, you know..), and I thought it looked intersting (approved spelling there), and it was.

I still think "On the road" is boring tosh, and if you 'really really' like the lifestyle, go for it, no problem. Just don't do it vicariously, yawn...

I'm gonna have to turn pictures off on ILX because I've already shot through my data allowance for the month and it's actually costing me dialup money to continue this discussion, boo hoo hoo.

Hey, if anyone feels like expanding on the Wu Tang syllabus, go right ahead! I am not being prescriptive or rockist on this thread - it's just because my own personal knowledge is slightly better in pop and dance music than in hip-hop or rap (hence why I brought up Duran or Dopplereffekt (god I cannot spell that correctly ever) having syllabi)

I've been thinking about this more, what I like, what I don't like, and why. Sometimes it boils down to the culture as shopping list idea. Culture as something you can consume just by owning the right records or reading the right books. When I think culture is something kinda deeper than that, it's not just reading the right book, it's engaging with the ideas in that book. It's not just listening to that record, it's entering into and engaging with the worldview portrayed in that record.

(This is kind of going to tie in with something I'm about to say on the feminism thread, that it's not enough to just learn the lingo, it's about actually understanding what it means and the ideas *why* behind them. That it's not enough to learn a few words in a foreign language and think you speak it, you have to learn how to *think* in that language.)

So now I get into the entirely subjective bit, because I prefer when an artist doesn't spell it all out for you, when they make a bit of a *puzzle* for you, because I like puzzles, I like filling in the blanks myself and doing the research and finding it out for myself.

For example, compare and contrast two songs. Antonin Artaud by Bauhaus - that song is not a reading list. That song makes no fucking sense at all until you start to read about Artaud's life and his work and his death and once you've done all that research the song makes sense, but you've also learned a lot about surrealism and the theatre of cruelty and all these other ideas along the way. It was set up as a puzzle, that you can choose to untangle - or you can just go "hunh hunh, he said wank."

Then you compare that with Le Tigre singing "What's your take on Cassavetes, what's your take on Cassavetes - genius? Misogynist?" and it's like - all the work's been done for you, the conclusions drawn, the options presented. There's no puzzle, it's a straight Classic or Dud, taking sides. And that's so frustrating to me, because, obviously I think that the ideas that Le Tigre are trying to get across are amazingly good, and the world needs to be exposed to them, but treating feminism like it's a bunch of slogans that can be got across in a cheerleading chant makes me uncomfortable, and I'd rather it was presented as a puzzle to be unpicked.

Which is a shame, because I'm generally in favour of Le Tigre's politics, and recognise that Bauhaus were often incredibly clumsy and dire.

But that is me, and my prejudices as someone who is a child of the intelligentsia class (my lack of spelling ability is a rejection of my family values! - I'm someone who talked about Veblen at the dinner table as a teenager, but doesn't have a clue how to spell him) and I know for a fact that there were many, many 15 year old girls who did not have my Privilege, for whom Le Tigre's cheerleading WAS life-changing, even if I sneer at it as a shopping list. Toe-MAY-to, toe-MAH-to.

I think the difference between, say, the Panda Bear one and more traditional list is there's not much of a sense of personal curation. Seems to be mostly canon stuff, which reads to me as boring. That is to say: it is wide, but not very deep.

yeah but as crut says - whether its deep* or not depends on your perspective, many many people wouldn't know most of those artists (there's def more than a few on there I've never heard)

*actually whether its wide or not also depends on your perspective

Wait, what is Gormenghast and how is it referenced by The Cure?

it's a big fat-faced clown, and it's a big fat-faced clown

Gormenghast is a novel (well part of a surreal? fantasy? experimental? trilogy) by Mervyn Peake (sp?)

Robert Smith pretty much lifted whole paragraphs from it for definitely The Drowning Man on Faith but my housemate found another one on Pornography I think?

(Charlotte Sometimes was also based on a novel but it's more obvious and admitted, I remember the Gormenghast thing taking one of my friends by surprise when she first encountered it and making us all read it)

whether its deep* or not depends on your perspective

"deep" meaning "people with a passing familiarity of the genre may not have heard of the artist, let alone head them." With a handful of exceptions (The Free Design being a decent one), the list is all either contemporaries, artists that have been in the top 40 in the last 15ish years, or canon picks. The only real exploration venue is the house/techno interest, but some of those artists have been commissioned to remix Panda Bear!

Thanks, WCC. I love The Drowning Man, but I'd never heard about the novel(s).

Ha! On authors referencing music, Elizabeth Wurtzel just deliberately described something as "gigantic, a big, big love" in this terrible book and I did as much of a lol in my mouth as when I read the lyrics Robert Smith would lift for Drowning Man in Gormenghast so I guess influence-dropping can go both ways.

Frank Zappa's syllabus in Freak Out! was so off-putting that it gave me a dim view of artists' syllabi in general. In retrospect, I think the notes on the songs were more smug and obnoxious than the list of names.

forgot i started this thread. a little obscure, but a decent list:

what are your five favorite things/people listed on the back of the sufi choir album from 1973?

I suppose Sgt Pepper cover has a place here too.

yeah that's the big one. did all four of them actually pick all that stuff, though? i don't remember.

Not sure Ringo picked any.

Holy effing shit I've just thought of a recent one - and an artist I've listened to - and discussed on ILX loads recently as well!

Grimes writing a whole album around the universe of Dune. Maybe that's a concept album more than a syllabus but she certainly seems like she weaves references and allusions through her work in that non reading list way that I like.

But I guess she's more in the same vein as Owen P than the Bunnymen the way she does it, but still. Recent, relevant example that it may still be A Thing in some corners.

i had more of a sense of pop, arts and literary culture overlapping and intermixing in the 80s and 90s than i do today. at the time, i was reading art periodicals, the village voice, various mags and fanzines large and small, and listening to a TON of "underground" (lol) rock music. it seemed to me that there was a shared conversation going on between these things. greil marcus would talk about sonic youth in artforum, and sonic youth would put artforum-y artists on the covers of their albums. scenes were defined not just by musicians, but by filmmakers and photographers. everyone seemed to be obsessed with "sampling" (lol), and this allowed people to connect the dots between public enemy, basquiat, kathy acker and considerations of things like techno-dystopianism and the fragmentation of perspective in urban environments, or w/e. names like "harry crews" and "j.g. ballard" kept cropping up in different places. in forced exposure, byron coley not only drew a big circle around a bunch of punk, noise and artmusic bands, he made constant reference to his free jazz heroes and to writers like phil dick. the bands coley liked often namechecked the same folks (i.e., sonic youth, again).

as i saw it, certain artists and writers were instrumental in creating this intermixed arts culture: the RE/search crew, coley, kim & thurston, greil marcus, the folks at the voice and film threat, among others. there seemed to be something similar going on in providence, RI over the last decade, with a lot of cross-pollination between musicians and graphic artists, but that seemed more insular, less connected to an overarching narrative that took in other subcultures, art forms, and historical precedents.

Well, this is what we have in our pop stars today: "Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph ... I am a proud non-reader of books." --Kanye

Pic of Ital mentioned on the hipster house thread.

http://pitchfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/content/ital3.jpg

my syllabus these days pretty much the same as always. abel ferrara, christina stead, bruce willis. the usual.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JqTiKAqxR9c/Ty0wIwc9jiI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/XhTrKeatakA/s1600/skotrekerds%2B006.JPG

I've always loved this approach and definitely indulge in it myself

The Rawkus/Def Jux/backpack genre alternated between multiculturalist and sci-fi canons. Perfect for a late-90s early-00s humanities major.

Phillip K. Dick, Toni Morrison, Hawking, Cornel West come to mind first.

^ yeah, that's a v good point. was gonna mention DJ spooky as a late 90s/early 00s musician who definitely came w a syllabus, but forgot.

http://991.com/newGallery/Harry-Crews-Naked-In-Garden-H-519036.jpg

lol, yeah, for example

i'm pretty sure sonic youth got me into harry crews. before the kim/lydia album. from an interview or something. i lied to kim once when that album came out and told her i liked it. i was drunk. just trying to make small talk.

yeah, HC was definitely a "thing" in hipster rock circles before the formation of that band

Thinking about this now, with hindsight I didn't have 2 years ago, I do actually think (and it was the mention of Grimes upthread that put it in my head) that the rise of Tumblr may have had an effect on Syllabus bands, if used to its advantage?

Mark S just casually dropped a reference for something I had completely forgotten, but here it is, Ground Zero for Syllabus Rock: Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer:

http://www.listal.com/list/portrait-artist-consumer