Simon Reynolds - C or D

this is not a rhetorical question.

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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?

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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.

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-- 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.

Mmm, I still hold that a canon of the personal exists for every person, that you CAN have lots -- I may only be playing games with the language, but to me this demonstrates the crypto-religious power that individual musical (or artistic or whatever) obsessions has for an individual. The 'potential for agreement' lies less in what is agreed on than the recognition of the ways in which are moved (and even that is intriguingly fractured). That said, while I'd love to get into this more I've got a full day's work ahead of me and I won't be near a computer much until the evening, so have this discussion without me and I'll say more tonight!

Ned I totally agree with this. The point is not so much that there is a potential for agreement but that we explore it; the desire to write about music is in some ways the desire to tell stories about our experiences, to give people something that they can use. In this sense the differences and fractures we discover (which obstruct agreement) are as useful as the commonalities.

not sure if there's an album out yet but if/when it does get publicity expect all the mia arguments to be dragged out again.

Why not? That seems as relevant and vital a way of responding to things as any other; and probably better than if you reverse the polarities, and like nasty things and dislike nice things.

But in truth, I probably don't really know what this discussion is about any more, or was at that point, or whatever; never mind.

I think this might be one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Also Tim, do you have some kind of cult set up - or at least a PayPal account so that we can just send you a portion of our income?

Yeah I'm finding this hard to believe myself.