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

"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."

Surely you agree that most words don't fit this rather stringent set of requirements?

my favorite band tries to sound like the second half of an eyebrow twitch (the wry kind, not the seductive one)

the "stringent" definition is (at its most concise) "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".

again i ask, what is earth-shaking about saying that ideals are unattainable, and
people argue about and redefine them continually? what is news here? that words are malleable, and mean different things at different times? that ideas aren't super enough to hold in art, and that art isn't super enough to live up to words? it's not even an idea

surely you agree that ALL words about ideals fit this generic and loose set of requirements?

besides the meaningless of it all, there's something really sad about a music writer calling ideals "superwords". i'd feel the same way about a carpenter talked about his superhammer and supernails.

Pretty sure hammer and nails came up already via Wittgenstein in this thread. Worth reading, it was bumped earlier today.

That seems to me the most interesting part of the definition, SuperCharlie, the part that explains the social use of a Superword.

oh, break me a fucking give.

It wasn't so much that reviews of the guitar-bass-drum-centric Rubies celebrated its rockness, but moreso that reviews of the MIDI-based Your Blues were so dumbstruck that he would use synthesizers to make an album, reviewers acted as if he'd recorded it with a ball of twine and monkeyguts. There was a lot of "he must be joking" or "what a put-on," as if an album can't be taken seriously if it's recorded using MIDI. Perhaps it was just a confounding of expectations (since his previously 5 albums were glam/indie rock/singer-songwriter stuff) but it seemed like indie reviewers were bringing a lot of rock baggage to the table.

Also, I'd guess that though most superwords might be genres (unless they're not), certainly not all genres are superwords, right? (Only the ones that people fight over the meanings of, as I understand it.)
-- xhuxk (xedd...), May 10th, 2006 5:02 PM.

rocking is a superword, or was, maybe, but rock is not? classical is a genre but not a superword, and even if ppl. fight over the meaning of classical (which they do with all genres) it isn't. "mystery novel" is a genre but not a superword, but did patricia highsmith write mystery novels? (we can fight)
pie is neither a genre nor a superword (thought what a great superword it would be) and people fight over the meaning of that too.

punk is a genre and a superword, but nobody fights over the meaning of it (only what its meaning applies to), i think?

-- Sterling Clover (s.clove...), May 10th, 2006 6:20 PM.

This is the problem at the base of genre definitions. Genres are by nature slippery. Since they are defined by individual artistic works' relation to each other, they are always argued about, their definitions get shifted about by time and taste. If you think people aren't violently debating whether something is or isn't part of a particular genre, you're just not moving in the right circles. The more Frank says about a superword, the more he defines the problems inherent to genre. Genres are always battled about; some art theory says there is no such thing as a genre, just random (and always incorrect) associations of individual works, associations that cloud judgment rather than sharpening it.

As far as debating whether a specific genre expression falls short of a perfect ideal, Plato came up with that one 2,000 years ago and plenty of people have rolled that ball of wax around; the world of ideas vs. the real world, material things as the imperfect expressions of perfect intangible forms.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html

Nothing earth-shattering aside from the fact that it's clearly written.

some theorists have argued that there are also many genres (and sub-genres) for which we have no names

Obviously these theorists don't read ILM! We've named so many we invent ones that don't exist.

But I suspect superwords aren't defined by some inherent potential so much as the fact of their social usage. "Punk" as a genre term is undeniably more contested than "ska" - it's not merely that words' meanings change and their usage is slippery (this is indeed true of all words) but that even people who've never thought about linguistics or literary theory immediately and intuitively recognise that something is up for grabs in the usage of the word, and feel the need to obsessively redefine it in the service of their own cause. Of course this could happen for "ska" (and probably has in a very limited, micro So-Cal sense) or even "table", but it hasn't, not to the overwhelmingly obvious sense that it has for "punk".

Hi folks!

To clarify two or three things (and some of you guys have been trying to make the same clarifications and others haven't been noticing):

In saying (1) that "rockist" isn't a Superword, and (2) that "rockist" is a lousy concept and we should get rid of it, I'm making two unrelated statements.

"An ideal that has the potential to keep shifting so as to defeat all attempts at embodiment" is actually a pretty good thumbnail definition of "Superword."

It's not written into the concept "ideal" that it keep changing, even if the ideals designated by a word often do change. In fact, you can use the word "ideal" to designate what doesn't change. I'm not up on my Plato, but I think he'd think of "ideal" (or whatever word he was using) and "Superword" as antithetical notions.

Not all words that get fought over are Superwords.

I do think that all genre names can get used as Superwords. But nonetheless, the word "genre" doesn't contain within it the idea that it represents an ideal that keeps changing. Hence, the value in a word such as "Superword."

Also, obviously, most words that get used as Superwords are also frequently not used as Superwords, sometimes within the same sentence. E.g., "punk isn't punk anymore."

I was actually wrong in calling "rockist" a stupor word - it's just a bad word - since what I mean by "stupor word" is something else. The word "immediate" for example: in most instances, it's neither a Superword or a stupor word. But you can find someone who aspires to "immediate" or "direct" experience but keeps upping the ante so that he's never satisfied that what he's got is truly immediate enough. Philosophy tends to do this. So in that sense, the guy is using "immediate" as a Superword. But "immediate" can shift over to being a stupor word when someone doesn't aspire to immediacy but rather aspires to go around saying, "Everything is mediated." When the discourse reaches this point, it's just spinning its wheels. (I realize that this explanation of "stupor word" is inadequate, but to go further takes me further away from what most of you guys are concerned with here.)

My beef against the word "rockist" is not that it's vague or that we disagree on what it means, but that it doesn't describe real human beings or real arguments - or, anyway, I can't differentiate these human beings and real arguments from myself. (And I got into bashing antirockism in the first place because Sinker seemed to think at one point - and perhaps still does - that I'm the epitome of the antirockist.) For example, it bugged me when Michael Roberts called Ricky Martin "watered down" in comparison to (supposedly) real Latin music, but I can easily myself criticize someone for making a watered down version of my "real" argument. So I don't see where Michael Roberts and I are different in kind. He's just wrong in that particular instance. So I don't think rockism exists or ever existed, though I realize that I'm not going to convince people to stop using the word.

Carry on, I enjoy this.

and im actually not name dropping--im being genuine about bow wow wow

Frank the problem is that yr. identifying the term "rockist" with the FORM of an argument as though it were a category of logical fallacy. But it's the character and intent of valuation that's what's really at stake. My def. of rockism currently would be more about being afraid to put yourself (not "the listener" or "the audience" but YOU YOURSELF) ahead of the music (and equal to the artist).

If someone made a watered down version of your "real" argument by saying, "Frank says..." and then presenting it, then yeah it would be be watered down. If they were to say it without the prefix, then it would just be a different argument. Also there's a difference between "Frank's argument" which, assuming we can agree on who frank is, is a rather specifiable thing, and "latin music" which assuming we can agree on which latin we're talking about is still a much less specifiable thing except maybe it couldn't have been played before people started to speak latin?

Yeah, and, I'm sorry, but this isn't ... like ... obvious? Frank, I apologize if I am wrong here, but I suspect that your argument is game-playing. I suspect that you don't like the word "rockism" because it is a scholastic word; "people don't talk about rockism in the hallway, but only in the classroom," etc.

Again, I am sorry if I am wrong.

One of the issues at stake in rockism/antirockism is perhaps not whether something can be real/fake, but how the notions and categories of realness/fakeness are constructed and used in discussion. Writers who strike me as being "rockist" tend to talk a great deal about realness, but then don't seem to be able to talk about what realness actually is in a way that I can meaningfully connect to the music that is being discussed... nor do they consistently establish why the categories of realness/fakeness are central to the issue of judgment. Maybe this is a failure of imagination rather than judgment - this would fit with my belief that the problem with rockism is not "bad" listening (or ideological listening, as per Jody Rosen) but lazy writing.

As Sterling notes, a fake version of Frank Kogan's argument can be objectionable in its fakeness only insofar as it holds itself out to be (or is perceived by others to be) a real version of Frank's argument; otherwise it's just a bad argument (albeit one which might resemble Frank's better version). If there is no stated link b/w the bad argument and Frank's argument, why is the real/fake dichotomy even being invoked? What does the difference between real and fake even mean in that context?

And this links into my point about lyric-authorship: it should only matter that someone doesn't write their own lyrics if you think you would like their music if they did (or said they did) - because then the category of real/fake self-expression can be meaningfully invoked. Otherwise decrying the fakeness of the non-lyric-writer seems mostly irrelevant to the process of judgment, a mock-trial put on for show when the guilty party's verdict was already decided in advance.

One of the things that what-we-tend-to-call-rockism does is to obsessively install the issue realness/fakeness as a (or even the) central category of judgment, to always make it appear to be the ultimate thing at stake. It may well be a relevant consideration - hence the Christgau thing on Ani which I posted upthread - but a lot of the time it's a distraction, an impediment to discussion about what is really going on in a person's (lack of) enjoyment of a particular piece of music. Mostly what bugs is the failure to allow this issue to rise and fall in importance on a case by case basis, and to make the case for its prominence when you think it's relevant.

And even then, its heavy presence wouldn't be so cloying if it wasn't applied so unknowingly and unimaginatively.

(Anthony, soz for spelling jokes, it was just goofing rather than a dig.)

OTM like a thousand fire alarms on fire. and to take it to the next step (following the ambrose bierce formula of "good writing = clear thinking"), lazy writing is lazy thinking. of course not all lazy thinking is rockism -- rockism is a subset of lazy thinking, or a caricature of that subset or whatever. but as a subset that directly protrudes 'pon the fields of criticism, it is no surprise that it attracts ire therefrom.

The danger of course is that you just end up substituting one set of lazy buzzwords for another set. So you may not be able to dismiss a band as being "manufactured" any more, but if you're pressed for time, you can still get away with dismissing them for being "rockist" - and no one will really be any the wiser, though you'll be more in tune with the zeitgeist.

You've hit at the roots of the "authenticity" issue for me. An audience that requires performers to be authentic sets up a system with inherent flaws. Musicians who act out joy/desire/rage/fear are expected to be "real" in ways that aren't expected of, say, actors.

Above all else, an audience wants actors to be convincing. It's what an audience should want of musicians, too, but somehow this requirement gets expressed in terms of realness/authenticity. This transforms the desire into one that can never truly be met. The illusion that it has been met can be created/maintained, however, "I'm buying into the dream so I can believe it's real" is always gonna break yr heart - and when it does, the results can be ugly.

A recent reminder was Scorsese's Dylan doc, which portrays him as sort of an empty vessel, a man-boy trying on different masks and appropriating aesthetic poses. Both his audience and his fellow folk musicians got hung up on issues of authenticity and we ended up with JUDAS! (the cry of the heartbroken dreamer waking) Which is ironic, since Dylan is a rockist totem nowadays.

Just goes to show this desire for authenticity isn't inherent to rock. It's been around in folk, country, jazz, who knows what else. John Jacob Niles (also in No Direction Home) was snubbed for years because of his crimes against authenticity - even though he was the most striking folk performer of the many shown in the doc.

Frank, if I get time I'll follow up on the Plato stuff. Would you mind if I call you Superfrank?

It's interesting that recent trends in popular hip-hop have kind of turned this dichotomy upside down. If you make a song because you want to be rich, but then you go ahead and sing about (or rap about) the fact that you want to be rich, can you be accused of inauthenticity any more? If you wear your motivations on your sleeve, how can you be accused of being fake? Now it's the people who are singing "I love you, I love you" who seem to be faking it, and those who are singing about their expensive cars and homes who are being real.

The more attractive a genre is to artists, audiences, critics, or industry, the more it will be hotly debated. No one fights over what doo-wop is, but if we suddenly have a doo-wop revival and there are artists redefining its borders, audiences reacting, critics spilling ink, and industry counting the till, there will be debate. What does it mean that Ashlee Simpson has recorded a doo-wop album? Is it authentic?

I guess what I'm saying is that ANY genre has this potential. It's inherent to genres. When one is hotly debated, all you're commenting on is its vitality. Punk is debated because it had legs. It created an industry of labels, magazines, distributors, clubs. It resonated with subsequent generations, and countless hardcore, goth, indie, alternative, grunge, and emo bands have lived in its shadow.

Are there inherent qualities to a genre that increase the likelihood of debate? Probably. When a musical genre stands in for social ideas/ideals that's bound to happen, whether it's folk, disco, punk, or freedom rock.

I suppose we can say D MOB's "We Call It Acieed" (mainly instrumental, IIRC all-electronic except for the banshee cry of ACIIIIID) is fake because (as Simon Reynolds puts it in Generation Ecstasy) it sounds like a crass techno cash-in record, because it tries to ape the conventions of a new genre, but does so poorly. But if I say it's fake or unconvincing when Celine Dion sings "My Heart Will Go On" in Vegas for the umpteenth time, I think it's understood that I means she's singing about or enacting or performing emotions she doesn't feel, doesn't feel any longer, has never felt or could never feel. It seems like two different things are happening here...right?

What constitutes "performance" in a predominately electronic recording is an interesting topic for discussion, but I don't think it changes the terms of what we're talking about here. It's still an artist making decisions / taking specific actions to realize a piece of music.

Can a band (or someone's music) be rockist? Or is this primarily a pejorative to fling at critics/fans (or at musicians speaking outside their role as musicians, e.g. in interviews).

"In most principle respects, this album is straight, rockist Brit-pop."

"Hammond and Rhodes organs, guitars, and drums kick out the jams trio-style (keyboards at the front), and their muscular output sounds about as authentically rockist as possible in 2003..."

"Lenola take a decidedly rockist approach to their influences..."

"...the Pin-Ups represent the absolute bottom of music's barrel-- they're burned-out studio hags so entrenched in rockist dogma that they lose all frame of reference."

Hm. What about something like one of Glenn Gould's piano recordings, which uses a lot of splices to create an "ideal" version of a Bach prelude, or a track from one of Miles Davis' '70's albums, where bits and pieces of in-studio jams were stitched together to create an entirely new piece of music.* In these cases, the recordings aren't a snapshot of a performance. If a recording is a recording of someone playing the guitar, but sped up ten times as fast, then it's not even a recording of something that's theoretically performable. So the Glenn Gould, the Miles and the superfast guitar recordings aren't snapshots of performances. Unless, of course, the studio work involved is the performance. But...hmm...we don't call On the Corner a Teo Macero album so much as a Miles Davis album...uh, right?

Is "snapshot" redundant? "A recording is a snapshot of a performance" = "A recording is a recording of a performance."

*These may be mischaracterizations, sadly.

Thinking a little more about the D MOB / Dion point. Instrumental dance music operates under same strictures that all instrumental music does - it needs to communicate to/elicit in the listener a set of emotions and ideas non-verbally. Every choice of chords/instruments/effects has an impact on a musician's ability to convince you that they have created a valid musical statement (or even a valid genre entry) - just as a singer's/actor's choice of words or tone has an impact on their ability to convince you that their performance has aesthetic value.

I'd say that splices are aesthetic musical decisions, and "stitching together" becomes another method of composition. Whether Miles chooses not to play a particular run, or Macero or Davis decides to remove one he's played on tape, both are examples of aesthetic decisions (and deciding not to do something can be as important as doing it). You bring up another point, which is the trouble of authorship in collaborative arts (e.g. is the director really the "author" of a film? it's usually assumed so but generally not the case), another factor complicating the defense of authenticity.

In a way, they are, but it's the performance of Macero/Davis on the studio-as-instrument at a given point-in-time. If you were provided the same set of musicians and tools, trying to recreate In A Quiet Way would be just as difficult for you as recreating Birth of the Cool (perhaps even more difficult). An ex-girlfriend of mine was dumbstruck when she tried to learn the guitar solo from "Comfortably Numb" - how did Gilmour play it? His fingers seemed to have the ability to be in two places at once on the fretboard! She learned years later they had spliced together the best bits from several different solos. Can't remember where I heard this (Dylan doc again?) but there was some folk guitarist marveling at someone else's playing ability on a certain recording, only to find out later the tape had been sped up, even the guy he was admiring couldn't play it that fast!

Another way to look at it is - a director shapes an actor's performance by editing longer pieces of film. Is the actor no longer performing?

"In most principle respects, this album is straight, rockist Brit-pop."

This doesn't tell me much, aside from the prejudices of the reviewer.

"Hammond and Rhodes organs, guitars, and drums kick out the jams trio-style (keyboards at the front), and their muscular output sounds about as authentically rockist as possible in 2003..."

This is slightly more defensible, one could argue the reviewer is speaking to the music's perception-by-others rather than any inherent properties, i.e. this music will be acceptable to rockists, though again that's not saying much at all.

"Lenola take a decidedly rockist approach to their influences..."

Understandable, since it addresses the musicians as listeners, but who knows what tosh came after the ellipses.

"...the Pin-Ups represent the absolute bottom of music's barrel-- they're burned-out studio hags so entrenched in rockist dogma that they lose all frame of reference."

See # 1.

For years, Queen printed "No synthesizers" on their album covers (untill, of course, they started using them). Rockist?

I guess one could argue that the "No synthesizers" label was rockist, because it seems to be a claim for a type of authenticity that rockists would value. In this case "synthesizers" are like some kind of synthetic food additive (think MSG) that might make the food taste better for a moment, but is bound to give you headaches and dizzy spells afterwards. A synthesizer tuned to sound like a guitar might be a way for bands who lack real chops to fake the sound of a real band.

Projecting onto an artist's intention = can of worms + can opener. Or building yr house on sand. Or setting yourself up for a broken heart (see my Dylan comments above).

I'd also think rockists would adjudge Negativland to be a load of crap, since they do not rock. Rock on U2!

(Anybody see the MTV interview where Kurt Loder asked a squirming U2 if they had cleared all the copyrights for the clips they projected behind them on the Zoo TV tour? Classic. He should have gone for the gold and brought up Negativland, though.)

Supposedly Queen did it because so many people assumed they had to be using synthesizers to get the sounds they were getting. Then again, what's the difference between using a synthesizer and laying down 20 vocal tracks running through 10 rack processors? Both smoke and mirrors anyway.

My favorite no-machines-used-and-proud-of-it band, as I've said many times, was Tesla, who always named their albums after mechanical stuff and who were named after the guy who discovered alternating current (or something).

It's not written into the concept "ideal" that it keep changing, even if the ideals designated by a word often do change. In fact, you can use the word "ideal" to designate what doesn't change. I'm not up on my Plato, but I think he'd think of "ideal" (or whatever word he was using) and "Superword" as antithetical notions.

I'm no expert in Greek philosophy and y'all are probably better off reading Plato entries in wikipedia, but here goes: Plato divides the world into two realms: the world of things and the world of ideas. The world of things is populated by objects: horses, tables, poems. We recognize these various horses, tables, or poems as being alike because they are expressions of an idea, the abstract conceptualization of a horse, table, or poem. The relationship between the two are kind of like the cookie and the cookie cutter. The cookie cutter is the idea, with straight lines and perfect curves. The cookies are the real things, bumpy edges, broken corners. In Platonic terms the words idea and ideal become interchangeable.

Plato took this to a metaphysical/spriritual level - he believed there is actually a World Of Ideas, kind of a heaven of forms, where these perfect things (the Universals) live. Human endeavors are attempts to recreate that World Of Ideas on our own plane. If you make a table or a poem, you're trying to make the perfect table or poem, but you never do. A thing in the physical world is an imperfect expression or instance of a perfect form or idea. We're separated from the World Of Ideas, but are painfully aware of it - a perfection we can't ever attain.

It's a powerful concept, and it's had broad applications in everything from art theory to physics to manufacturing to programming (object oriented programming borrows a lot from this - forms, instances, objects). People use it and aren't even aware of it. A lot of genre theory is bound up in these terms.

So when I hear "there's a perfect ideal and each expression of it falls short of someone's expectations, causing debate and further attempts at expression," I think Plato (minus the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo).

I do think that all genre names can get used as Superwords. But nonetheless, the word "genre" doesn't contain within it the idea that it represents an ideal that keeps changing.

I'd say the modern concept of genre contains exactly that idea. Some theorists think that every instance of a genre modifies the genre's definition in some way. Check out that Chandler link above, if you get a chance.