What Is Rockism ?

yeah, if the journalism industry wasn't largely populated by miserable sons-of-bitches whose self-loathing extends as far as everybody they work with things would be better. what's the enforcement mechanism? what makes this a policy rather than "wouldn't it be nice if people were nice?"

never said this was enforceable, or doable really

i don't like half the music writing i even agree w/sometimes because the nastiness and contempt extends into the pieces themselves...

[halo]on RYM I only review my 5-star albums[/halo]

i mean maybe if journalism as a career wasn't precariat in perpetuum journalists wouldn't be constantly miserable?

lol @ john mayer and him being a philosopher

gis'd john mayer fans

http://i.perezhilton.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/jm1__oPt.jpg

https://peopledotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/john-mayer-300-4.jpg

yep makes sense

HIS BODY IS A WONDERMAN

welcome to the real world

she said to me

this thread discussion has actually been good!!

"actually, it's good" - d-40, poptimist

I wonder if the problem for poptimism is that it took the existence of the marketplace too much for granted. Contextually this made sense, particularly as a way of dismantling the self-valorising semantics of rock criticism. But Poptimism can seem a realist perspective that sortof closes the loop. In becoming so entirely pragmatic about markets, it makes it impossible to think about, as an example, folk traditions and cultural production that emerges from a more communitarian or even utilitarian context.

― plax (ico), Friday, May 12, 2017 4:38 AM (eight hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This post is 10000000x right. We can talk about good poptimism and bad poptimism all day, but i feel like ive been waiting a decade plus for the conversation to have advanced enough where we can talk about (where i can properly articulate) a problem w/ the poptimist ... not consensus, but what it leaves out. historically on here i think a lot of the convo was so focused on bringing ppl up to speed on the notions of authenticity & etc that you just found common cause w/ most ilx poptimists (save maybe lex on occasion) bc the alternative was stone ages rockism & bc the poptimists here tended to be the most thoughtful

but i think the current wave of socio-political concerns actually does underline a shortcoming poptimism has had for years—and I mean both good & bad poptimists, like, common to 21 year olds and even tim f's approach (which tends to be close in many ways to my own way of thinking). which is to look at music not just as a product for you, the consumer, which has come to u naturally through those objective capitalist forces—to see The Market as a force that happens to often coincide w/ innovation.

basically i think a major shortcoming of poptimism is readily apparent when we look at a highly developed poptimist industry, and its creative output: why is K Pop so terrible? the answer is that popular music, by and large, is still driven by a post-colonial & post slave dynamic that puts black america at the cutting edge of innovation in pop music, and that poptimism inadvertently elides the ways in which the music industry co-opts those creative forces and turns them into polished accomplishments

an auteur like Prince for example (i could use recent rappers but then the thread would devolve into controversy from ppl who haven't paid attention to rap since Bush I) was ripped off left & right (likewise there was a counter-pressure from the Jam & Lewis-produced electro R&B of the era which was also ripped off) so people in the music industry made lots of money. Pointing to the fact that Prince is seen an "auteur" isn't to suggest we should buy into some uncritical cheerleading narrative (which tbh is the status quo right now lol but i dont mind) but also points to his centrality to the musical conversation and the way that it drives the entire *economy* of pop. And there are other examples who never achieve his level of fame, who toil in the industry and are ripped off but through the objective nihilism playground (or w/e) of that industry are under- or never recognized for their contributions. Much of my experience has been that the further i go into writing about music, the more i'm trying to identify those tributaries where innovation and trends really take place, and how they flow, and what inspires them; and explaining the context for it, because no one from The Industry managed to swoop in and A&R than innovation so that you didn't *need* context to "get it."

This isn't so much a critique of poptimism as a "but also...."

as katherine and maura have already discussed this debate is way more about the changing nature of journalism and its inability to monetise the internet than the particular music that critics like

there's def a big irony in that we live in a mega-auteurist age now - vast swathes of pop, both popular and not, are still dismissed as frivolous or meaningless or dumb. but then a lot of the big pop megastars have always forced critics to Take Them Seriously just by dint of sticking around, i guess.

(save maybe lex on occasion)

!

i feel like 90% of the debate about poptimism over the years has been based on misunderstanding what it is and how deep it's meant to be. precisely zero "poptimist" critics have ever focused solely on pop as genre or pop as success

haha not a diss i just never came around on paris hilton

still time tbh

there's def a big irony in that we live in a mega-auteurist age now - vast swathes of pop, both popular and not, are still dismissed as frivolous or meaningless or dumb. but then a lot of the big pop megastars have always forced critics to Take Them Seriously just by dint of sticking around, i guess.

― lex pretend, Friday, May 12, 2017 1:51 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for what its worth the POV im articulating above is *also* critical of this—i'm suggesting lots of 'innovators' are marginalized by the Fame Industry for various reasons

Taking the existence and the exigencies of the marketplace for granted strikes rather too close to home -- critics who deal with pop as libs or, in the eyes of rockists, cynics.

well, sure, there is a broad, almost tautological assumption that music only becomes worthy of consideration when touched by a celebrity, so the exact same song is treated as unremarkable pop sluice when recorded by Bonnie McKee or Wynter Gordon and then a masterpiece when recorded by Katy Perry or Beyonce. sometimes you'll get a blithe statement of "it's how they inhabited it, it's their conveniently unrefutable presence," but it always comes off as justification after the fact

but this is at least 102-level stuff. the discussion hasn't even gotten past the pre-101 tautology of "pop music is bad." I haven't heard the Harry Styles record beyond the two singles, which are okay, but nevertheless: why *can't* it be good? "Because it's a boy band member trying on classic-rock clothes." OK, but what if it's still good? "Because the market rewards Harry Styles writing to the exclusion of Hardworking Busker Misty." OK, but that still does not prevent the Harry Styles record from being good. Nothing answers this question but the tautology: "because it's pop music, of course it's bad."

innovator is perhaps too narrow a term for what i mean but you get it

i think a major shortcoming of poptimism is readily apparent when we look at a highly developed poptimist industry, and its creative output: why is K Pop so terrible? the answer is that popular music, by and large, is still driven by a post-colonial & post slave dynamic that puts black america at the cutting edge of innovation in pop music, and that poptimism inadvertently elides the ways in which the music industry co-opts those creative forces and turns them into polished accomplishments

deej, you've got a conference pitch for next year. Start polishing.

"well, sure, there is a broad, almost tautological assumption that music only becomes worthy of consideration when touched by a celebrity, so the exact same song is treated as unremarkable pop sluice when recorded by Bonnie McKee or Wynter Gordon and then a masterpiece when recorded by Katy Perry or Beyonce. sometimes you'll get a blithe statement of "it's how they inhabited it, it's their conveniently unrefutable presence," but it always comes off as justification after the fact"

isn't this part of the theater of pop music though? Stars are canvases for our anxieties & neuroses and uhhh the good stuff too

have to disagree with the premise re: K-Pop

i am suspicious of the current vogue for Celebrity but dont want to throw the baby out w/ the bathwater, is what i mean

xp

I feel the line between using the star as canvas to project on to (with all the...magic??? that entails) and assessing them for what they actually are is not one writers currently show much self-awareness of

though maybe seeing 30yo buzzfeed staffers desperately mimicking tumblr teenspeak every day on twitter has got to me a bit

This has been a tendency in criticism about Hollywood film too.

Also, whenever the star-as-canvas line comes up someone in the audience inevitably goes, "Yeah, well, she means nothing to me" and it's the star-sucking population that's deluded. In 2017 this person is a man in skinny jeans who likes egg foam on everything.

i made a thread about that jpop documentary that talks about how toxic it is (k-pop is relevant to this i think) and no one budged

I feel the line between using the star as canvas to project on to (with all the...magic??? that entails) and assessing them for what they actually are is not one writers currently show much self-awareness of

― lex pretend, Friday, May 12, 2017 2:00 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes agree

there's a distinction between "using the star as canvas to project onto" = "writing about one's subjective experiences" (excellent, when done well; banal, when not) and "using the star as canvas to project onto" = "absorbing the stew of memevertising and PR and tabloid journalism and Wikipedia credits as truth" (terrible, everpresent, nearly impossible to dislodge)

Yeah. And sometimes a blank canvas remains a blank canvas with gelled hair drawn (Posner, Chainsmokers, Twenty-One Pilots) yet they don't inspire 1200-word essays.

The son of a friend of mine who starts college in August told me last xmas that his favorite band was Twenty-One Pilots. I almost encouraged him to write a 600-word defense on his Tumblr lol.

sure but enjoying pop music requires a willingness to let it be 'fake' is my point—that ppl want to buy into beyonce over bonnie mckee is not as much an accident of history ( i dont know who mckee is so maybe i'm wrong w/ this example) as it is a temperature reading of america & what it looks for in its biggest pop stars... i dont think its *all* PR (although the stretch from PR to the "reality" of the pop song is a spectrum not absolutely separate i would imagine)

bonnie mckee is the writer of much of teenage dream

as far as what people "want to" buy into there's no hope unraveling that. like, people complain about the radio being all Ed Sheeran or Shawn Mendes or whatever but people also fucking love Ed Sheeran and Shawn Mendes, and actively reject alternatives (radio/playlisting analytic data, if you have access to it, bears this out). how much of this is PR, how much is fan adoption, how much is astroturfing turned fan adoption when everyone got used to it? no one is ever going to figure that out. but again, none of this necessarily has any correlation to the quality of the music. (nor is it just pop, this process in indie is well-ripped-into albeit by other people)

popularity is... like, why the hell has this gotten 136,000 views in the past month?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goRegJa8Nww

https://www.reddit.com/r/listentothis/comments/63knqa/osamu_kitajima_dragon_king_japanese_folkjazz/

xp

136k compared to what?

almost the entire world has access to youtube

136k is a small number (ie not popular)

compared to the 8,000 views in the same period of time of the other stuff he's posted. that subreddit is the same way - i sort by most recent and i get 1, 1, 1, 0, 98, 8, 0, 0... like, where the fuck does the "98" come from?

136K in a month is pretty popular

like, not Taylor Swift popular, but certainly jazz fusion popular

and then on the front page there's that parekh and singh video posted yesterday which has over 3,700, apparently because the video is a homage to wes anderson and people really like wes anderson? or something? god knows the music is wholly unremarkable.

Bonnie McKee is a great example. Why is she much less successful than Katy Perry when she writes so many of her songs and has a better singing voice? As far as I understand it's because (1) Katy Perry had a big novelty hit which got her in the public eye and had her pick of collaborators after that and (2) Bonnie McKee has one of those faces which, while attractive, just doesn't look particularly striking and therefore doesn't get the prerequisite clicks. None of that seems fair, but it sort of makes sense in its own way. What I don't understand is why nobody round here seems to get behind BM.

That dragon king shit is great!

usually I don't fuck w Japanese folk jazz fusion jawns that have less than a milli but I'll make an exception

or it's because Katy Perry's topline writers have a better grasp on tight melodies and the songwriting's less diffuse? when i listen to bonnie mckee i hear well-crafted pop songs that nevertheless feel a little more "cluttered," especially when held up against something like Teenage Dream. image crafting has something to do with the disparity in popularity, sure, but it's annoying to see people make these assumptions about pop listeners that imply they literally don't listen to the music.

if most clicks/views are coming from that subreddit i wouldn't say he is popular, but more like he, because of that dude posting the music to yt/reddit, has a niche following

popularity to me suggests mass appeal, and if you're referring to local fame as mass appeal, sure, he has it, but in terms of comparing popular mainstream music and non-mainstream, he seems to be pretty clearly on the niche side

there are yt vloggers with more views than this guy who appear to be nobodys

it is good shit, totally, but if i'm going to try to explain why that's up to 136k in a month and, say, sister irene o'connor's "fire", which i remember back from when wfmu featured it on their blog and which got upvoted to 750 when it was posted to /r/listentothis last week, is still only at 30,000 since january of 2014... i can't do it. it's completely and totally arbitrary. as far as i can tell the reddit zerg rush pushed something on youtube's back end where it started randomly recommending that record to people, and that's had a snowball effect, and sister irene o'connor never hit that trigger? god, the whole internet is a fucking invisible rube goldberg machine.

and yes i'm aware that audio-only posts of albums from 1979 don't compare in the number of clicks to man-babies cursing at video games.