Simon Reynolds - C or D

Roffle. Well done.

3. Raise your hand (don't worry, nobody can actually see you raising it!) if you touch your naughty places when looking at the oiled up shirtless poster of Tupac hanging on your wall next to your bed.

I call bullshit on that. Once again, my offer to take you to East Oakland and to Sweet Jimmy's stands. Your mouth's writing checks your ass can't cash.

metal shows
Harumph.

long live the American/Brit humo(u)r divide!

then return and continue to rip throats

thanks

i don't know whoever said that popism had won; and why would the p&j poll reflect this anyway? fuck knows who chooses who votes, and, given i don't even live in new york, i could care less.

but the key line is "And as I say, not talking here about the merits or demerits of these works (few of which I’ve actually heard), just purely about the value scheme that enfolds them."

OKAY THEN THANKS FOR THAT.

None of this stuff "mean[s] diddly outside the crit-bubbleworld", does it?

"looking at the grand decades-spanning scheme of American critical consensus, there’s a sense in which even art-rock is marginalized (the relatively low presence and this year and every year of instrumental or mostly-intrumental abstraction--prog, fusion, ambient, industrial and the more abstract forms of postpunk, post-rock, experimental electronics; the abiding suspicion of artifice in re. glam or New Pop). See, rather than art-rock, what the critically esteemed stuff really is, most of it, it's lit-rock: music as dramatic backdrop to words. "

has Simon been reading my blog for conceptual ideas ? ;-)

And I think that outside the crit-bubbleworld, music with rockist virutes means a whole lot to a lot of people. Certainly it has broader appeal than whatever it is that Reynolds is pushing.

Plenty of people love "music with rockist virtues" for non-rockist reasons though, wouldn't you say? It's just that only in crit-bubbleworld do we spend our time second-guessing those reasons and making pronouncements on their merit.

Naw, if anything, if there's any "serious" non-musical cultural form that rockwrite draws on, it's probably the cinema. Where do you think all that stuff about "the auteur" comes from? Who gets read more by rock critics: Clement Greenberg, Edmund Wilson or Pauline Kael? Does anybody really believe in rock-as-poetry anymore, even unconsciously?

i dont understand the concept of nu-rockism really. it seems to just involves picking up on things that old-rockism forgot. but, this doesnt make sense! rockism is an attitude is it not? deciding that some things fit into the schema, when they didnt before, isnt a new form of rockism, its just the same thing. the taste of 'a rockist' is tangential

i'm puzzled by the desire to, somehow, 'defeat' rockism. it is merely an attitude, i'm not sure it should be defeated. perhaps, it is perceived to have too great a power in the media. this may or may not be true, i dont know. but one look at the charts says...its not that powerful really! and 'rockists about pop', isnt that just another name for 'hi! i'm in the blogosphere!" ;)

Gareth: I agree.

I think I stopped trying to map taste onto political progressiveness some time ago, and so that tone of "we should be listening [to this] / [in this way]" strikes me as odd, now, and it's still about. I don't think there's a battle to be fought anymore, I think there's a conversation to be had. That's likely because I'm OLD and IN THE WAY.

Perfect Sound Forever - Simon Reynolds on post-punk
http://www.furious.com/perfect/simonreynolds3.html

All the debate about rockism over the years on ILM has made me realise that I haven't got a clue what it's all about anymore now the whole things has had several lifecycles. All I can conclude is that any notion of the pop/rock or popist/rockist divide is kind of redundant now and has been for years. I think it had a purpose back in 81/82 when people were trying to set up a context for nu-pop. Even then I think it was the punkist idea of having to be 'against' something that spawned rockism. Of course all the writers and nu-pop class of 81/82 were all punks in in 1977, so that's natural.

the blog screeds... I dunno, seems more like the urge to document ("here I am comin' atcha straight from the grime trenches at their realest") takes over from rational thought. complaining about the presence of "long-form Works that take effort and perseverance and time to unlock their depth and detail" on a BEST ALBUMS list, good god.

I quite like the use of imperatives! and exclamation marks! in fanzines!

It is sweet that you kept them, Tim.

Who did "KoA" mean stuff to? As Matos says, clearly it meant a lot to a whole lot more people than just music critics and whatever the 1980s equivalent of blogosphere fluffers was (zineosphere?). It seems fairly clear to me that "crit-bubbleworld" here must mean the kind of people who would scour the NME and take what it said seriously. I was one of those, too. I should give up completely, really.

The answer to original question is, I think, classic. That's even though I disagree wth SR much of the time and our tastes barely coincide.

I think college radio figures in here pretty heavily, as much or more than print media, at least in the U.S.

and yes, christ, everyone please stop talking in incoherent generalizations about 'rockism' and 'popism' and hyphenated variants thereof

speaking of which