What Is Rockism ?

Brogrammer was robbed

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F-Jay-37MaNi8%2FUQdPTD5x9gI%2FAAAAAAAAFtw%2FyLF3qRYJ-Ww%2Fs640%2Fbrobee.jpg&f=1

LOL IRL

Rivers: There was this one time in Japan that was really emotional for me because this is when I was first starting to figure all this stuff out about being really aggressive. I'd been in Japan for a week and every night there were ten or fifteen girls in my room and nothing happened because I wasn't confident enough to say "Let's have sex or get out of the room." So finally, at the end of my stay there I said, "Whoever wants to stay in the room has to take their clothes off and get on the bed."and most of them left but four of them stayed. It was a very difficult step for me to take but I hadto take it. It was the truth about what I wanted.

cool story bro

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, December 12, 2018 11:19 AM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um this is h0t as fuck lol. almost as good as some of mingus's stories

hm something tells me you didn’t make it to the end of his book. ffs that’s almost like saying “lol dude malcolm x was a badass dope dealer with an awesome conk, love those old stories !!”

also mingus’s stories are way more depraved, interesting, and far darker and more insightful than anything this idiot has to say. are you high

somehow weirdly I thought that was about Sam Rivers and was v surprised to hear he had that many groupies in Japan

lol

Actually it was Joan Rivers.

also mingus’s stories are way more depraved, interesting, and far darker and more insightful than anything this idiot has to say. are you high

― budo jeru, Saturday, December 15, 2018 8:53 PM (forty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i said 'almost'

I doubt Weezer does any roundhouse kicks to people in cowboy boots ala Dickie Betts.

um this is h0t as fuck lol. almost as good as some of mingus's stories

― esby, Saturday, December 15, 2018 8:06 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol...

looks like ilx has a new bad boy deej

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61vr%2BT2ougL._SX355_.jpg

My fantasy would be a roomful of people leaving me alone, so I can sleep for 9 hours straight.

#dadjoke #happytodoit

https://jezebel.com/the-united-states-of-bros-a-map-and-field-gide-1550563737

― aloha darkness my old friend (katherine)

this is good but "portland bro" actually lives in beaverton

10 years ago, I worked at a 7 night a week karaoke bar and there was a group of bro regulars (boat shoe and polo bros) who would come in and drink Bud Light and Jaeger and take turns night to night singing "Africa." No idea if it had permeated bro culture at that point or if it just had special meaning to them but they seemed to love it unironically.

Apparently "SNL" had a sketch about Weezer last night -- characters debating their greatest "era," etc.(?) Are they, like, "canonical" now?

The sketch doesn’t really depend on that distiction

*distinction

Right, in theory the sketch could have applied equally to people talking about Seventeen Seconds vs. Disintegration, or Fables vs. Up.

But it wasn't, because "has Weezer gone soft / sold out / jumped the shark" or whatever is a comparatively current topic (indeed, ILX discussed it at length just this summer). Other mainstream white middle-ager bands' career arcs are not - or not as much - topics of current discussion.

Tried to watch the SNL Weezer skit, but the uploader has not made this video available in my country. That's not fair, we're very concerned about rockism too.

i was also unable to watch it in my country

I just watched it, and I’m not even sure I really get what the “joke” is supposed to be... just the randomness of a big dinner-party argument over Weezer?

yea. i thought it was p funny that they'd get that niche (lmao arguing about 'Pacific Daydream' and 'Raditude')

I feel like this dude is really brimming w/personality: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/snl-weezer-rivers-cuomo-768140/

It does seem like the sketch captured something about the way some fans feel about Weezer — this intense loyalty to specific parts of the catalog. Why do you think that is?

Well, let me ask you, as an outsider, do other artists have this kind of intensely opinionated and passionate and conflicted following?

I don’t think so. I don’t hear people having the same kind of debates about, say, Pearl Jam or Radiohead that they do about your band.

I wish I knew why. It’s almost worthy of an academic study to figure out what’s going on in the psyche of these few hundred thousand people. I feel like it must come back to something in the four of us, or something in me. There’s some character flaw or some quirk of my personality that is permitting a vacuum, where a normal band leader would be projecting some kind of stronger leadership. Or maybe he’d just be a more consistent artist stylistically.

https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic/image/private/s--tEwGNnSu--/t_Resized%20Artwork/c_fit,g_north_west,h_954,w_954/co_000000,e_outline:48/co_000000,e_outline:inner_fill:48/co_ffffff,e_outline:48/co_ffffff,e_outline:inner_fill:48/co_bbbbbb,e_outline:3:1000/c_mpad,g_center,h_1260,w_1260/b_rgb:eeeeee/c_limit,f_jpg,h_630,q_90,w_630/v1478638693/production/designs/801115_1.jpg

I don’t think so. I don’t hear people having the same kind of debates about, say, Pearl Jam or Radiohead that they do about your band.

Radiohead and Pearl Jam didn't start to totally suck like Weezer

nor have they always sucked like Weezer either

lol otm

actually wait I don't care about Radiohead or Pearl Jam either, but neither of those have been as actively offensive as Weezer

the lebowski fest of bands, total bacon

It's true, 50-75% of Radiohead's catalog wasn't seemingly ghost written by a bunch of middle schoolers.

50-75% of Radiohead's catalog isn't songs.

Thank God, few things are as boring as bands that never stretch songs until they break.

songs could be anything man, think about it

I did and it broke me.

Right. Not songs; they're cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike.

This thread has achieved escape velocity.

somehow both as smooth as the gleaming facade of a sleek new coupe and as weathered as the prematurely aged face of a train hobo

ok lol

50-75% of Radiohead's catalog isn't songs.

― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 19, 2018 4:39 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

now that's what i call rockism (TM)

or maybe poptimism

Could it be that… they're one and the same? mindblown.gif

We're sick and tired of your rockism and poptimism game
Die and go to heaven in Jesus' name, Lord
We know when we understand
Almighty God is a pop rockin'man

yeah, nobody ever debates the merits of radiohead and pearl jam

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AjarDaringAsiaticmouflon-small.gif

Reposting (in pieces) from the "dis hyped releases" thread:

As long as we move away from reductive poptimism (the worst kind of objective wrongness, by far), all is well with the world.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 9:20 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd much rather read trying-too-hard praise for a top 40 act than for the kind of 90s indie that'd have occasioned a trip to the toilets during a 90s festival

― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 9:24 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why not neither?

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 9:30 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

when pop music is good it's politics at its best. unpop(ular) indie delivers more subjective pleasures which end up being more common

― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 9:40 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Politics, whether at its best or at its worst, is the last thing I want to hear in a musical work. It's always a part of it, of course, even when kept at bay, but aesthetics is more exciting to me.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 9:58 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was talking about reading about music, i.e. about the hyping of music, the subject of this thread : how we write about music is political, and thus so is how we stand on pop music. anti-pop snobbery is a sure sign that I have no time for a person: eventually they will have me also up against the wall.

― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:14 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't hate pop music by any stretch of the imagination, but any discourse that enshrines it above all other genres (this is what I meant by 'reductive poptimism', which is indistinguishable from rockism) is, in fact, politically violent in that it silences less populist approaches to listening and music making. The amount of music out there is more overwhelming than ever – I don't think the solution is to systematically fall back on the same melodic contours, the same simplistic rhythms, the same comfortable timbres that are tautologically popular because they are popular. I always come back to that Kafka line about how a book should be the pickaxe that shatters the icy sea within us – I want music to do the same, whether it be pop or (more often) something else entirely.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:27 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

We will spare philosophy PhDs (but not critical theorists) when it is time for the cull. xp

― Locked in silent monologue, in silent scream (Sund4r), Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:29 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with pomenitul. The idea you touched on before euler—that the “subjective” pleasures of indie are worse politically than the pleasures of the masses—seemed really sinister to me.

― Trϵϵship, Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:29 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Systematically favouring works that are short and earwormy (loosely speaking) is an impoverished way of looking at music imho.

xps

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:30 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Like, I love that experience, but I can't imagine wanting it more than everything else music has to offer.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:32 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pop's always been a way for me to square my alienation with the world as it is. to turn away from it is to turn away from the masses, and that not a politics I want any part of.

― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:35 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i’ve skipped over the reductive poptimism convo bc it reeks of “this SOUNDS like a real thing that no one actually practices”

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:55 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i do disagree with almost everything euler said though

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:57 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pop's always been a way for me to square my alienation with the world as it is. to turn away from it is to turn away from the masses, and that not a politics I want any part of.
― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 10:35 AM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― Trϵϵship, Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:04 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh treeship the zing hits the mark, I can't deny

brad in my world of overeducated people I hear things like pomenitul is saying all the time, which is why I like coming here, rather than talking to those people, about music

― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:18 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pop's always been a way for me to square my alienation with the world as it is. to turn away from it is to turn away from the masses, and that not a politics I want any part of.
I get what you're saying, and that's why I'll never disengage from pop music completely, but its triumphant prevalence can and does often preclude aesthetic diversity from seeping through. Basically, pop seeks to maintain the status quo, i.e. the fact that, genre-wise, the top 1% dominates 99% of the musical market. Sure, the analogy is flawed, in that it's not just about concentration of capital but also about concentration of collective affect, yet insofar as ears don't come with lids, we are so used to having certain sounds thrust upon us in public spaces that I can't help but feel like we've been 'groomed' to dislike anything that diverges from the Earworm God. If anything, there's a political point to be made (not that it hasn't been, but I feel like it's less audible in our current century) that exposure to un-pop music attunes us to other ways of listening, which is a potentially ethical act.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:20 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

By the way, I have also gotten into such arguments with stuffy (mostly French) academic types who in reality care very little for music, and I tend to adopt a stance similar to yours, Euler, but I'm no less wary of overcorrection, which I encounter far more often in the English-speaking world.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:22 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I get that; ILM has never seemed to me to be a home for pop-as-status-quo, so these discussion are different than when I'm talking with someone sneering at anything written during the twentieth century, which is more like the people I spend my life with

― L'assie (Euler), Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:27 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel you, those are the absolute worst. They usually care more for the prestige that ostensibly comes with such an opinion than the music itself, which they don't even listen to anyway.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:32 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you guys really need to read more late 20th century rock crit if you don’t get why poptimism became a thing in the first place. raging against the 1/99 split of pop and everything else while denigrating an ideology that came up *because* of a similar elitism (from the ruling class within media) is... ironic? utterly white dude?

― maura, Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:55 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

market poptimism, which is uncritical and rooted in the hope that an artist retweets praise and lifts the social media profiles of the writer/publication, is closer to the straw man against whom you’re railing

― maura, Sunday, December 9, 2018 11:56 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm not exactly defending rockism here. If anything, it's a tired debate – there are so many genres that get little to no attention at all.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:03 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Incidentally, my (French) wife has far, far less patience for poptimism than I do. The whole 'lol white dude' thing is so clichéd and American-centric.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:07 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and yet it isn’t untrue if you actually go back and read old music writing and look at the bylines

― maura, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:08 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry to annoy your lady with facts

― maura, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:09 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't really get what you're arguing tbh. That the diversity I'm clamouring for is wrong because pop deserves its continued revenge on rockism?

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:12 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean theres no such thing as apolitical music - every choice and every sound is the result of a political positioning, whether it's avant-garde experimental sounds or heteronormative pop love songs. Your relation to a piece of music is informed by the interplay between your own beliefs and how they integrate with the aesthetic choices made

― boxedjoy, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:17 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean theres no such thing as apolitical music - every choice and every sound is the result of a political positioning, whether it's avant-garde experimental sounds or heteronormative pop love songs. Your relation to a piece of music is informed by the interplay between your own beliefs and how they integrate with the aesthetic choices made

i agree with this! it absolutely feeds into phenomena like white rappers having an easier time of it on pop radio than their black counterparts, and rap breaks being shoehorned into songs by women in order to appease men

my argument earlier was that “poptimism” has become as empty a term as “fake news” and that railing against it mows over the conditions that led to it becoming a thing
― maura, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:20 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also, generally I find that people who claim they have no time/interest for politics are people who have the privilege to switch off from it and not constantly be engaged - lucky you if that's the case but as a gay man in a world still populated by huge numbers of people who literally dont want me to exist I can't afford that luxury. That permeates everything I do even if its on the tiniest level and to pretend it doesn't is disingenuous

― boxedjoy, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:20 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZYHP6IBoac

― Locked in silent monologue, in silent scream (Sund4r), Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:22 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean the finer points of poptimism are there for debate if you like but I really get my back up when people think it's easy to seperate aesthetics from politics and wilfully disengage with their own positions of power and privilege as a listener and consumer

― boxedjoy, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:23 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My position is that music is ever political but that it doesn't boil down to politics.

As for poptimism, of course the history of the term matters, but if anything, it didn't go far enough. So many sounds are still excluded.

― pomenitul, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:32 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

progtimism

― imago, Sunday, December 9, 2018 12:34 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink