Simon Reynolds - C or D

There are people on Dissensus whom I do enjoy reading and who do post interesting stuff, e.g. K-P, Stelfox, Derek W, Tim F (when he's on there), but otherwise it's a bit like the local Rotary Club with some pomo added.

there was a smudge on my computer monitor that made "some pomo added" look like "some porno added", thus quite drastically altering the meaning. anyway, carry on.

*smokes plastic kid's toy bubble pipe*

there are ways of doing things, of course: maybe the popists are reacting to the misplaced puritanism of political correctness. i think most ilm types are involved in some kind of complex negotiation when listening to homophobic/sexist lyrics though, and i think it's a lie (or just worrying!) to say 'oh i can just ignore all that'.

there's also obviously the possibility, esp with rap, dancehall etc, of listening primarily in terms of beats, production etc rather than the lyrics. this is how i naturally listen to much of aforementioned music, rather than because i'm privileging anything on ideological grounds.

equally, tho, it is posssible to some extent to ignore the cultural baggage surrounding a piece of music by not immediately discounting it in terms of the demographic that likes it. i'm sure i wouldn't much like the majority of girls aloud or 50 cent fans, but that's not going to stop me listening to the music with an open mind. this debate's been reduced by people insisting on absolutes, particularly in terms of the popist position.

i think marcello is otm, but haha yes very good 'blount move', 'life isn't like that etc etc', i'm not tuomas though, i know this stuff, but what can i say? oh, i know, i said COMPEX NEGOTIATION which i'm involved in too. you won't find any black eyed peas in my cd collection, but you will find ludacris and, yes, schoolly d.

i think i probably would like girls aloud's fans (not 50 cent's though).

i listen to music mostly for production and don't always trouble to figure out lyrics, but i still think this position, which spencer took, is a bit disingenuous.

the effect of this sly, self-legitimating move, in ilm terms, is to say that 'i can fully identify with ordinary working folk who like pop music for the simple reason that it sounds good but i dislike those who listen to rap music about the streets on a non-authentic basis'. it's back-door rockism masquerading as popism!

I didn't mean it in that way at all (the misreading is my fault not yours nrq I fear)! I meant that a large part of the nu-rockist critique of popists is the argument that for popists nothing is sacred (meaning, importance, consistency, authenticity, resonance etc. etc.) except some sort of shallow consumerist enjoyment. Hence the importance of the (empirically dubious) idea that M.I.A. fans celebrate M.I.A.'s political context and then, when questioned on this, the same M.I.A. fans say that this political context is irrelevant. i.e. the popist position is to have no position, to stand for nothing so as to fall for everything.

ie the popists have no position because authenticity is part and parcel of the whole MIA package.

there are very few people who boosted MIA for realness, iirc!

"there are very few people who boosted MIA for realness, iirc!"

You clearly never opened a newspaper or magazine ever!!!

only if you choose to take lyrics about rubicon and mangos with a straight ear, so to speak.

-- Tim Finney (tfinne...), October 7th, 2005.

this i have to concede!

(The only time I've really been baffled by anything SR has said recently was about 6 months back, either on Dissensus or his blog, I can't remember, when he said in essence, well yes I systematise things, by the time you're 30 you should know what you like, and I thought, god, I'm 30 and I know less about what I like or why I like it than EVER!)

(i.e. yes Ich Bin Ein Flake)

" i don't understand how it's really possible to listen in that contextless popist way, i don't even know if i want to! i think here reynolds at el were saying, 'how can you ignore all these issues when MIA herself foregrounds them'. "

I don't think anyone really does listen to music in that gross-simplification-of-popism way. But music always has a multiplicity of contexts, whose importance vis a vis one another will be reshuffled according to how they intersect. e.g. it's easier to ignore M.I.A.'s political side on the dancefloor than it is when looking at her artwork or reading an interview with her. I think one of the first steps towards a reasonable critical discussion is to acknowledge that we are likely to use (and therefor conceive of) the same piece of music in different ways.

Against the point you raise above, one could just as easily say, "i don't know how you can ignore M.I.A.'s great hooks and awesome grooves when she herself foregrounds them." But such statements only get us so far if we don't acknowledge that we'll all rank these things differently.

this is not a rhetorical question.

.

context changes a piece of music, but only up to a point, and you know if you've seen an interview with MIA and then hear her on the dancefloor, you've still read the interview...

The fact that neither abolishes the other is precisely the point. Actually the idea that the dancefloor abolishes everything else is something of a nu-rockist touchstone NRQ! Read that pop thread on dissensus!

"their ears are always good enough to detect the tinge of authenticity (even when they have no direct experience of the authenticating tableaux) and vice versa."

See yeah this is a big issue I have. If authenticity is basically referenced back to what your ears told you, isn't it, like, an inaccurate attempt to actually talk about something else entirely?

(x-post)

it's the classic romantic aspiration of being able to detect absolute, objective truth thru entirely subjective means. it's entirely oxymoronic, but obv very well established historically...

the idea that dancefloor abolishes all is a kind of foundational myth for dissensus as it allows 30something m-class, wannabe journalists to get down and dirty with real-life grime emcees and producers, thinking that their input is on the same-level collaborative, rather than patronising (in a kinda renaissance patron way of course)

Mark K-Punk reformulates this objectivity as something like (neurology X deleuze)/zizek, which is at least audacious!

to an extent, i do like and agree with the k-p line that it's a very british thing to regard aspiration and endeavour towards revelation as a bit much really and therefore relax back into the easy, existing world of political, musical, neurological imprisonment, which dictates never pushing the boundaries and never recognising the notion of Higher Truth.

I may be entirely misrepresenting him but i believe he wrote something along those lines a while back.

Currently her album is sitting proudly at #378 in the Amazon chart and there are a lot of copies with promo stickers on them on sale in London's second hand record shops so that'll give you some idea.

-- Marcello Carlin

Aroundabout 5,000 worldwide, considering her respective chart positions in the US and UK, and how I can't imagine any other country has gone for her.

(x-post)

-- Dom Passantino

Thanks! I'm not in a very cosmopolitan part of the country so it's a little hard to gauge things that way usually.

And good god, that really isn't much! I'm quite shocked. Although the download figures are probably astronomical.

With all the chatter she's generated I reckoned she would have still sold _much_ more than say, Ellen Allien (20,000-ish per album if DJ Mag is to be believed). So I thought saying she'd shifted 'very few' seemed unfairly dismissive. Apparently not.

M.I.A., the Velvet Underground & Nico of the '00's!! *cough*

There's an idea (amongst theory types) of objectivity/universality etc. as being "impossible but necessary". We can't really achieve it, but everything we do implies it and every time we try to throw it away we end up unwittingly reintroducing it.

The mistake of a lot of postmoderny stuff (and, in a different way, stuff like third way politics etc.) has been to trumpet the "impossible" bit and ignore the "necessary" bit. I sorta think that Mark (following Zizek to some extent) does the opposite, over-privileging the "necessary" part such that the recognition of impossibility is lost.

Whereas I think we really have to keep both plates spinning constantly, and recognise that we really need to mediate between these two poles - if we can't have universality in music criticism, we can at least look for the next best thing - be it a spontaneous shared visceral reaction or a description of a piece of music so breathtakingly spot on you think the writer's been inside your head, or... whatever. Absolute transparent objectivity remains impossible, but there are things that can fill its place.

HI DERE

I remember a long thread back in the dark ages of old-ILM about canons. There was a poster (Arf Arf?) who said that we needed canons in order to have discussions, that without agreed upon standards there was no point even talking.

I disagreed with that then and I still do, but there's maybe a kernel of it which is on the right track: maybe what we need is the desire to agree upon standards (which we've yet to actually finalise). ie. music discussions are not about canons, but about canon-building. The search for an impossible objectivity-to-come rather than the deference to an objectivity laid down in precedents.

to me, this implies the romantic objecitivity objective of acheiving a standard of communication so peerless that it denatures the author. ie there is an objective reality that we all can experience if only the writing around it is of a quality high enough to take us there.

i probably think that the fierceness of that 'shared visceral reaction' can only really take place on a dancefloor - codifying in words subjectivizes - but i guess that takes you back to the notion of dancefloors as temporary autonomous zones with happy romantic elision of class, race etc. however corny that is, tho, that is something i still sometimes personally feel and that recognition, however indididual and potentially empirically false, isn't something i can get from reading about music. this may make only subjective sense.

I didn't really mean this (i'm not making some habermasian point here). I meant more that all we can ever really access is an imagined objectivity, something that seems like it must be objective but isn't really. This seeming, though, is worthwhile in and of itself. Hence the point re dizzee - if a critic insists that the music conveys authenticity of class/race etc. whether or not the artist lives up to that in truth, what we're really talking about is a certain apperance-of-objectivity rather than objectivity itself.

the holy grail of music crit as continous enrichment of listening experience thru the inspired search for universal critical standards without the desire to ever actually acheive a static imprint.

i think the most important point about canons isn't whether or not we have them, but the fact that they don't exist as generally perceived. cultural proscription in the leavisite sense has been dead since the 60s. the universal allowance of counter-canons, even within the most conservative bits of academia, invalidates the whole notion of ur-canon in the first place. you can either have a canon or you can have no canons. you can't have lots. therefore there aren't any. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try and form them whilst happily acknowledging the hopelessness of the search.

yes exactly! But I think a lot of great something elses come from discussions about music: more intense enjoyment of music, a better understand of why we enjoy (or don't enjoy) stuff, an insight into the way other people relate. But I think it's hard to get to all that without presupposing the potential for agreement.