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

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)

what defines "cult" as a genre then?

tho could make argument that disco was something not initially a genre (was it harmed by becoming formalized as to what 'it' was?)

what defines "cult" as a genre then?

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Saturday,

those books on the shelf you just mentioned!

genre in itself is fine, especially if its a formal definition. problem with cult is that the act of giving it a formal definition seems to drain the possibilities from it

xp

no dice, that definition won't fly :D

if it's a genre, you shd be able to give a description of its properties rather than just listing its members

one of the many critical impasses reached in an undergrad class on popular fiction i took at a university in the midlands was when we discussed what separated the poppy z. brite novel we'd read as an example of 'cult' fiction from exemplars of 'horror' fiction

re: randomness: the new temporary expansion of the bodleian library has tens of thousands of books from the last few decades sorted by size and acquisition date, which i enjoy

(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.)

alternative: between the founding of 'rebel inc.' & it being bought by canongate

i like the notion of strip-mall bookstore giants being a thing here. & scott's conclusion.

i think there's some interesting differences between how j0hn's and 0wen's projects do & have done this sort of thing, & how, say, the hold steady and titus andronicus do so, and how the cure or the fall did

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.

Yeah this is something that bears repeating. Sure, I kinda miss the small burst of joy when you finally find something you've been searching for a long time, but nothing beats the even bigger burst of joy when you realise you have 50 years of music to enjoy at your fucken fingertips, man, whenever you want it. I'm willing to sacrifice that small bit of cultural cache for the ease and speed of hearing stuff I really love instantly.

xp

Do not know about them, but there's def a gap between syllabus artists who seem to use their reading-list refs more explicitly, talking about it in interviews etc, and a more oblique & evasive approach where you've got to dig to find the pointers. Like even when Mark E Smith is explicitly shouting 'C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark there', it's hard to make it out.

(and yes, feel the same as others - the age of abundance is amazing, and I'm ok to have lost the pleasures of the hunt in exchange for it)

I'm trying to get a sense of what you guys mean by "Cult" as a literary genre - is it that whole thing of 20th century post-beatnik white dudes who write about their drug experiences? Do you mean that thing?

that does seem to be a big part of it.

my argument is that it shdn't be a thing, that cult isn't a particular set of interests or styles, but used to mean stuff that sat outside of the canons or had small devoted fanbases, usually coming from their own agenda. like the way john waters has written about gay audiences creating a cult around "bad" movies thru camp. but now Cult as a product and a label is a bunch of stuff nailed into a box that's much how you describe it.

so what are some things which are cult but not Cult? Are you saying there are no things that have small fanbases that are somewhere other than the Cult shelf?

Oneohtrix Point Never seems to have a syllabus, but maybe not a literary one. Lots of young artists seem to be including the Internet as part of their syllabus.

"so what are some things which are cult but not Cult?"

noise tapes. ebm night at the goth club. cockfights. dog racing.

Mills and Boon novels i'm thinking

UFC, in the UK at least

jai alai. contradancing.

is it that whole thing of 20th century post-beatnik white dudes who write about their drug experiences?

yes, as I remember it, that's the heart of it, but you can have violence or low life or transgressive sex or alcoholism instead of/on top of drugs, & I don't think it's just white dudes, though they'd predominate. I'm not really sure any more though - I haven't seen one in a first-hand bookshop in ages (bye borders), and 2nd-hand 'cult' sections are often a bit odder.

"so what are some things which are cult but not Cult?"

The novels of Elizabeth Taylor.

I feel so out of touch because when you all started saying "Cult" I was thinking the section of the bookshop that has, like, all 3 volumes of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger and the complete works of Aleister Crowley?

too fey

wilson certainly counts to what i'd think of w/r/t 'cult', god help us/him/it

"The novels of Elizabeth Taylor."

i am a member of this cult! still searching for ones i don't have. so, that's like the old days, i guess. if i lived in the u.k. i'm guessing i could complete my collection in a day.

ha, I'm not yet, but a copy of Angel that I ordered on a whim the other day arrived this morning, so she's on my mind.

"ordered on a whim" = couldn't do this in the old days.

but when everything cult becomes just another shelf in the shop then i feel like it commodifies and tames the books

well from the last few posts it looks like this doesn't actually happen

Yeah so we started with Let England Shake and ended with Liz Taylor, I feel like my work is done here... ;-)

What exactly is rockism?

have you ever read elizabeth taylor? one of my favorite fiction writers. not well known in the states. though there was a movie version of one of her books not long ago that might have helped to sell a few copies of her books here.

x-post

x-post I don't think this is a rockism thing, pop bands can have Syllabi - in fact, holy shit, the first band I encountered with a full-on Syllabus was Duran Duran.

No, I was being facetious about the actor of the same name, I wasn't being serious at all.

I hate to bring up the dreaded C word on ILM but here's an interview that kind of dances around some of the ideas we've discussed her.

Melvyn Bragg insisting that there is not such thing as Class any more, there's only Culture (but since when has capital-T Taste been anything *but* an expression of one's Class and Culture?)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/feb/12/melvyn-bragg-interview-class-system-culture

(And kind of pwning himself by trying to say that class is dead because Prince William wears jeans in a nightclub, despite the fact that all his former schoolmates are now investment bankers and lawyers but KMT, realy.)

But this idea of one's Taste as a badge of belonging to a certain in-group (whether that ingroup is a Fandom or a Class) is certainly the kind of thing I think we've been talking about. (God I should never have read Weblen, it destroyed me.)

'Weblen'?

Is that like reading Veblen online?

So I can't always spell, I guess that invalidates every other question I've asked on this thread. Silly me.

No mention of the Mekons, who regularly included reading lists in their liner notes?

Wait, what the fuck is this thread about?

It can be about the Mekons on their reading lists, that sounds really interesting, please tell me some more about it?

The thread is mostly about talking about bands that used to do that kind of thing, and wondering why it seems to no longer be such a *thing* or if we're all just too LOL old and bitter to be in contact with artists that still do it.

Don't mind me re the Veblen -

Only Mekons list I remember was the oneon Honky-Tonkin' -Adorno, Wittgenstein, Leaving the 20th century...... Laid out as footnotes after the lyrics on the inner sleeve IIRC

And kind of pwning himself by trying to say that class is dead because Prince William wears jeans in a nightclub, despite the fact that all his former schoolmates are now investment bankers and lawyers but KMT, realy.

also jeans are diverse enough to be able to signify yr group through brand & detail I believe. Guessing Prince W's weren't from top man.

& further to Duran Duran - Scritti Politti & Frankie/ZTT would also offer non-rock syllabuses. Are KLF a syllabus band? Is there much theorised pop now?

xp: so that would be the primary influence for Too Much Joy's lists:

If I Was A Mekon

If I was a Mekon
I’d drink pints of beer
If I was a Mekon
And talk about Adorno
If I was a Mekon
I’d have a lot of friends
If I was a Mekon
Everything would be ok
I’d have a lot to say
No one would look at me that way

And a Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing to be

Let me be a Mekon
If I was a Mekon
I would be from Leeds
If I was a Mekon
Maybe I could sleep with Sally
If I was a Mekon
Or Tommy one night in Chicago
If I was a Mekon
We’d smile a lot the next day
We’d never talk about it again
But we’d be that much closer friends

And a Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing to be

Permettez moi d’etre un Mekon

Sadly, I never took their cue to listen to Mekons records or read Adorno.

Want to say books have made numerous appearances in Mekons sleeves. But I guess it's been a while since I read them. The sleeves, that is.

The KLF were in some ways the apotheosis of Syllabus Band. And not just bcuz of their references, but bcuz they themselves (thru The Manual etc.) became part of a Syllabus for later bands.

IIRC wasn't Bill Drummond driving much of the Syllabus type stuff in Echo/Teardrop when he was managing them? Or have I misremembered all that urban legend?

Thinking about the Mekons thing a little more...

The difference between then -early/ mid '80s - and now, in a British and Irish context is not just the internet etc, but also the huge growth in 3rd level education: then, I think it was around 10% of the 18-21 age cohort went to college in both, now it's upwards of 50%.

Bands like the Mekons and Go4 were widely known as 'student' bands, precisely because it was still a weighted distinction - the vast majority of musicians/ people in bands here would leave school at 16/18 and that would be it. There would have been almost no prospect of further ed for the likes of Mark E. Smith and Joy Div. and even an obvious 'intellectual' like Green was an early school leaver.

Taken together, I think there were two effects of this: one; whereas now, a large number of young people think they know something because a lecturer mentioned Foucault to them once, and thus, conversely, don't feel excluded from some precious knowledge, so they don't think they need clues from bands to educate them, and two, there isn't the same need to educate yourself felt by intelligent musicians.

I did go to college in the late '70s, but in a very staid and tweedy English dept. so I was dead impressed and a little intimidated by the fancy names that I was only hearing about at the time from the likes of Scritti and the Mekons and in the NME. Even a little later (early 80s), reading about the Monitor lot in Oxford, and hearing about stuff in other Universities, that gap had probably shrunk.