theo parrish s/d

vahid u on fire on this thread, those are some great posts

yes i find them very 'soulful'

yeah, vahid, wow. best of ILM, easily...

moonship journey to baja for president

yes we can

u should write a graphic novel abt ur childhood i bet u could win some award

surely there are ways to consume music that I can't conceive of, to conceive western music that I can't conceive of, in different countries all around the world.

Once I was in Sumatra and this local girl took me to this shack in the middle of nowhere. And there were drummers, and flute-kinda things, and about 70 people dancing to that trad Indo music in this smelly old shack, including all the old ladies from the village. Especially the old ladies actually. And the music peaked & intensified and people starting having fits, dancing like they were possessed, rolling round out the floor. Proper trance musically, basically, and I’d never heard anything like it.

I got a lot out of it.

The question is: if I’d made a recording of it, and someone bought it on Aquarius Records, and fell in love with it and constructed a whole fantasy world about how they’d always wanted to ride on elephants in India, and this record reminded them of the Jungle Book, which was a book which they always loved as a kid because it was adventurous, etc, etc – the question is do these points of view have equal legitimacy?

I think not.

so what makes yours more legitimate

what power does your memory have that the other person's doesn't? what does it do for you that it doesn't for the other person? what do you have that they don't? what can you do that they can't? how does it benefit you while not benefiting them?

furthermore, do you want an award for going to sumatra?

so what makes yours more legitimate

Because it actually exists outside of my head

wowww you are truly a legitimate music listener

or how about i win the argument by paying you a compliment: even though i've never been to sumatra, i got something out of your story, a momentary sense of transportation to another place, a rich and fascinating and compelling place. you did that from four sentences, and possibly also by being lucky enough that something about the details in your story matched my memories of similar experiences among persians and maybe also parties in dirt lots in san diego and partly also hours that i've spent watching films about india and looking closely at henri-cartier bresson's black and white photos of indonesia.

now, to turn your argument back on you: do you want to argue that your three or four sentences that had this transcendent effect on me had no power? that you are powerless to communicate your lived experience, and that it was of no benefit to me to try? that my second-hand sense of your experience (in which i breathed life into your hollow sentences through my memories and dreams) had no power? please, don't diss me and you and your sentences like that.

should the less legitimate people abstain from music because of their unworthiness?

"proper" trance blecch

"Tricky, I can guess where this is going but I'm not sure. Are you saying that some kinds of explaining destroy the "mystery" of music listening (we should feel rather than think)?"

yes, but it's not an either/or. sometimes language gets claustrophobic.

"Or that some fictions are too precious/productive to be held up to the light of reasoned analysis - that irrationalism ought to be protected if it's culturally significant?

There's probably quite a good argument to made on that basis. The difficulty is that you can't make it without acknowledging the irrationality, which results in the very destruction you're trying to ward off."

that's not what i was saying, but it's interesting. i would say that myth-making might fall into this category. what if we just accepted the irrationality instead of bringing it to the clinic?

"If as you say the devious quality of the reasonable participants is that "the other side has no argument", that's not a de facto win but a win outright. It's not my cleverness that determines the quality of the argument anyone else brings to the table."

nice. my reasoning behind the original comment was that the "other side" doesn't have an argument because no argument could possibly be discursive enough satisfy the evil subjective monster.

i think we have done this one to death eh?

also, i think it should be clear to anybody that your memory of your trip to sumatra, your experience of that hut, actually doesn't exist outside of your head. i mean, sumatra exists. and you've been there. and maybe other people have too.

but what are you getting at? that people who haven't been to sumatra have no right to listen to sumatran music? that your "listening" of sumatran music is more important than my "listening" of sumatran music? well, i hardly see how that benefits anybody to entertain the notion. that you can probably tell me something i don't know about sumatra? sure, but probably i could tell you something you don't know about sumatra too, even though you've been there and i haven't.

i guess maybe what you're getting at is that if i said that this sumatran music was *awful*, based on my experience of it through a CD sold at aquarius records, you'd tell me maybe i have something to learn by going to sumatra. and i'll agree on that point, too.

but that's not really what i see happening in this thread w/r/t pipecock, ronan and theo.

this is sort of the equivalent of ronan saying "damn i love this euro-sumatran gamelan fusion" and theo saying "that euro-sumatran music ain't shit, because i am from sumatra and i say so" and ronan says "that's a damn shame, i am perfectly happy liking this euro-sumatran fusion music" and pipecock says "i have been to sumatra, and actually know some sumatrans"

i mean, imagine if we took theo parrish up on his fela kuti fandom. what is this fela kuti shit? how come he doesn't respect the essentials? ever noticed that most afrobeat fans aren't even nigerian? did anybody ask king sunny ade what he thinks of afrobeat? has theo even been to nigeria?

do you want to argue that your three or four sentences that had this transcendent effect on me had no power? that you are powerless to communicate your lived experience, and that it was of no benefit to me to try? that my second-hand sense of your experience (in which i breathed life into your hollow sentences through my memories and dreams) had no power?

Yes, language has power. But language is just a representation of the world: the world directly has the real power. I’d say the more levels you are removed from the thing itself, the less powerful your perspective is to other people. A murder is powerful, a retelling of the murder to the police less powerful, the summary of that account in the newspaper less powerful again. Pretty soon, people are at the watercooler, filling in the facts. Making up myths about the killer. Making up myths about Detroit, etc. This is the Achille’s heel of subjectivism: all accounts are equally legit only if the thing under discussion has no objective reality. And music, in fact, does.

My favourite Pipecock post on ISM was the one about Detroit record stores ;)

yes, music has objective reality, but in what way is a record like a murder? i certainly hope nobody is at the watercooler discussing theo parrish records they haven't heard. and i'm pretty sure i don't spend much time discussing detroit record stores.

i hope you wouldn't have to have gone to a detroit record store to understand detroit techno: otherwise it'd be pretty shitty music. can you imagine if you'd have to have gone to india to understand a salman rushdie book? if so, i'm pretty sure we'd rule that salman rushdie was a pretty awful writer.

that's precisely the power of art (writing, music, sculpture, etc): access to states we can't inhabit ourselves, the interior states of others, the shared states of group listening and the personal state of ecstasy that is above the everyday experience of the world.

Well, not Salman Rushie, but I read The Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes (a book analyzing Japanese society specifically written after only having visited Japan for a week or so) and I thought it was amazing. Really opened my eyes.

Then I lived in the damn place for a decade (No, I don't want a medal). My impression: it was a terrible book.

so why did you decide only that it was a terrible book? the logical conclusion should have been that pre-japan good dog was a terrible reader. anyway, i don't really see the connection here. you're essentially saying that you though "empire of signs" was factually wrong. how can you be factually wrong about a theo parrish song? i wasn't even aware that theo's music presented an analysis ...

anyway, your post has so many logical problems that i'm not even sure where to begin

1) language is not a representation of the world in the sense that you mean. my condo actually has windows that look out onto the ocean (jealous?). that doesn't mean i wouldn't trade that for hokusai's "the wave", or that i know something that you don't when we look at it together.

2) re: levels and "less powerful your perspective ..." i don't even understand what you're trying to say. there's a rather violent discourse at work here. the point of perspectives is not that we wield them like weapons, or use them to arm-wrestle each other over music. i thought the point of perspective was communication? if i should want to understand another person, why should i worry about whose perspective is better or more powerful?

3) re: the watercooler. do you distrust people? do you distrust the power of art? should people be allowed to make up their own minds about art, or should they be told what to think?

If I show you a room full of dancing people and say "see? this record is good because it's danceable", they can counter "well, I dance in a different way" or "not important to me. I just prefer to listen on my little white earbuds."

A room full of dancers is totally an objective fact!

-- good dog

^^ what happens when i show you a room full of country line-dancers?

what happens when you want to discuss "empire of signs" with a japanese person that likes it?

I hope that you answer me someday, because is really difficult find in spain people who love and understand theo parrish concept, as a dj as a producer.

Enjoy da good fucking shit.

-- poe, Thursday, April 10, 2003

also how come you didn't step up and break the bad news to poe?

;_;

I keep forgetting to cosign all the compliments heading Vahid's way.

"nice. my reasoning behind the original comment was that the "other side" doesn't have an argument because no argument could possibly be discursive enough satisfy the evil subjective monster."

At the risk of annoying you tricky by extending the argument - I agree with this (except that it's not "subjectivity" that demands discursiveness, I don't think - perhaps a better term would be "the evil dialogue monster"). This is kinda what I meant earlier when I said my construction of the relationship between each side is unfairly weighted in my favour because it still imports a standard of reasonableness to weigh the claims of each.

This may well be a deadlock as you say. The myth that nourishes the gatekeeper militancy cannot survive if it has to explicate itself according standards of reasonableness, but I agree that it seems a bit unfair that it therefore should perish, since it is bound up in the experiences of a community and their cultural production.

Which is fine. The difficulty only begins then when an agent of the community seeks to assert to people outside the community that the community's myth also governs them.

If we do wish to protect the right of "the community" to say that their music is soulful, does that protection extend to supporting their claims to other communities that their music isn't soulful? How far does this suspension-of-reasonableness-zone extend?

Pipecock is always hypocritical on these issues anyway. He will happily slag off dubstep, but then admit that according to his beliefs he wouldn't be able to understand it as much as a person living in Croydon and going to local club nights, but then still maintain that 90% of dubstep is awful and soulless.

If he were consistent he would refrain from passing negative comment on any music belonging to a community that is so far from his own. As I recall his defence at this point was that he had been able to understand early jungle and 2-step through their (ab)use of American stylistic idioms - as if jungle was just sped-up funk. Which is precisely the kind of filtered, distorted understanding of someone "outside the community" that he otherwise decries.

And this is the ultimate problem with assuming that this proximity-to-community argument works in any reliable way: hardly anyone who uses it is prepared to sacrifice their opinions on music outside their zone of proximity.

In fact when pipecock slags off dubstep he is merely doing what so many people do all the time: he's using his ears and he's making a judgment about the music without any special knowledge of the community that has created the music.

Is the opinion of someone who does live in croydon going to have something to tell him that he can probably learn from? Yes, most likely. Does that make him "wrong" and the person from croydon "right"?

how can you be factually wrong about a theo parrish song?

It's like you said upthread, give the jazz dude 5 amazing techno records and he says "machines, boom boom boom, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." He's listening for jazz values in the wrong place. A category mistake. Like the guy who dissed trance back a few posts ago: I could give him my perspective, play him X, Y and Z, ideally transport back in time to 2000 and take him out, and with luck he'd get it. Because there was something to get there, which was different from other stuff. As it stands, (I'm assuming) he's relying on secondhand and thirdhand info. The myth.

should people be allowed to make up their own minds about art, or should they be told what to think?

Yes, they should. But they should also be correctly where appropriate (gently though)

"t's like you said upthread, give the jazz dude 5 amazing techno records and he says "machines, boom boom boom, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." He's listening for jazz values in the wrong place. A category mistake."

This assumes that it's always clear which category applies, which values to refer to.

Should we judge Theo by "house" values, "techno" values, "jazz" values, "soul" values, "funk" values... what?

You can't just chop up music like that. Most music is an articulation which ties together different ideas from different places. Even if a track is pretty squarely in a particular tradition, it will often resonate with music from outside that tradition in unexpected ways.

And so often "getting it wrong" becomes "getting it right" - according to Derrick May, UK hardcore techno was an abomination, a devolution of original detroit techno. And from one perspective it is exactly that, but from another perspective it is so much more, exciting music in and of itself and also the seeds of so much that was to come. Who is right? Who is wrong? Whose "getting it" or "not getting it" are we supposed to privilege?

The complaint so many people had about trance - people who were there - is that the creators and listeners didn't "get" techno.

Conversely, the people who disliked your Digweed review claimed that you don't "get" prog.

How are we to determine who gets to sit on the bench and make these decisions?

i slept on sumatra's couch once

i know, tim: we'll let "the community" decide

barring that, we'll ask the narrator from "losing my edge".

"take him out, and with luck he'd get it. Because there was something to get there, which was different from other stuff. "

Is the "something to get there" something that exists independently of the listeners who are there doing the getting?

I mean, a "genre" as such does not really exist as a concrete thing. It's a mental exercise whereby we group disparate records together under the one heading. The fact that many of us basically agree about what a genre is (at least, we know it when we hear it) and so have specialist record stores, DJs, club nights etc. - all that doesn't change the fact that the notion of genre exists in our heads. We choose to see commonality between two trance records and call them trance. We could chop up the music in different ways if we want to (e.g. "I'm really into 135 bpm music").

So the "something to get there" is as much the shared understanding of other people on the dancefloor as it is the music. You need both sides of it. This is the kernel of truth in your Sumatra example: of course someone participating in the dance feels more of the dance than someone merely hearing about it. But nothing in and of the music itself determines that that dance is the appropriate means by which the music ought to be experienced. What does that is the shared values of the group of people who use the music in that way.

So when you say "if you haven't been to Sumatra and witnessed a dance you won't "get" Sumatran music", what you mean to say is "if you haven't been to Sumatra and witnessed a dance you won't "get" the way in which Sumatran music is used by Sumatrans".

That's still a very important statement that's worth thinking about, but it's a different statement entirely.

I think perhaps good dog you're confusing subjectivity with shallowness or obstinate ignorance.

Like, if a school kid says "I don't care about what other people say Wuthering Heights is about, in a subjective world my interpretation is the only one that matters to me" - well that's a stupid way to approach learning about literature. I saw a kid make this exact complaint on TV as part of a special on how literature teachers were "indoctrinating" kids by pointing out gender or class-politics issues in texts.

The mistake she makes is not to assume that her experience of the text is valid (it is), but that her opinion is static, that nothing ever could change her mind, that she already has all the information that might influence her understanding of the book.

But that doesn't make her teacher right if they claim that Wuthering Heights is *really* about Heathcliff as the a symbol of the working class. The "meaning" of the book is a matter of contention among many literary scholars all of whom are very smart and have read a lot.

So, similarly, the guy with the five jazz CDs who obstinately claims that they're the best 5 jazz albums in the world is a bit of a dick, and the guy with 20,000 has every right to think so.

But that doesn't mean that, if the guy with 20,000 jazz CDs thinks that one of the other guy's 5 albums is shit, he is right and the other guy is wrong.

Because there's probably another guy with 20,000 Jazz CDs who disagrees with his fellow collector and thinks it's a great album.

But nothing in and of the music itself determines that that dance is the appropriate means by which the music ought to be experienced. What does that is the shared values of the group of people who use the music in that way.

What hath technology wrought? It is those shared values which gives the music it’s meaning in the first place. Roy Montgomery takes the Flying Nun sound and its genre values and does X, Y and Z with it, then releases records which people find “lonely” and therefore impute various associations (the lone genius, etc) from that. That’s fine, people can take things however they want, but it’s perfectly legit for a Pin Group fan from Christchurch to turn around and say “You’ve got it wrong. I was there. Roy is a beermonster, and that record was just him mucking about. Let me explain” etc.

So to answer the question of who you are to believe, who is right and who is wrong: you take those two POVs, and then you listen to the record again, and you see what you can hear differently. You can make up your own mind of course, and most of us do that directly from the music, using our understanding of its shared values it is trying to express (genre, etc), using the music we’ve heard before and the pleasure zones we’ve developed in our brains through that. But then if you were to make a list of things that came after that – and after all this discussion is about which view should prevail through the power of words and about how to convince people to your POV: I say that objective information trumps subjective fantasy every time.

after all this discussion is about which view should prevail through the power of words

quite rong

But that doesn't make her teacher right...

If she has better info or a better grasp of the story, etc, does it make her more right than the school kid? Does relativism have a sliding scale of correctness or are there as many answers as there are people?

let's just give all kids 100% on their English exams

don't start.

can you imagine though, if everyone got 100% on their english exams, how horrible the world would be.

i actually gave all of my kids 100% on their final exam last year.

of course, the point of the test wasn't what the students *couldn't* do, but rather what they *could* do. so i gave them a task to do, and if they could complete the task they'd get a 100%. i wasn't so interested in picking out the gaps in their knowledge. as an expert, i could pick out so many. but that didn't transmit to me a whole lot of useful information, nor to them.

maybe it is because i actually am a professional teacher that i am so forgiving of people for not "getting" detroit techno. after all, if i held "not getting it" against people, i'd never be able to do my job effectively. also it's important that i realize the difference between "getting it" and "doing things exactly the same way i do".

i will admit that post ("let's just give all kids 100% on their English exams") is the first one on this thread that really got me heated. it's that fatal work/fun intersection.

"If she has better info or a better grasp of the story, etc, does it make her more right than the school kid? Does relativism have a sliding scale of correctness or are there as many answers as there are people?"

I dunno, IS Wuthering Heights about class struggle? I tend to think that's a big stretch, but I enjoyed discussing the idea in my final year of school.

If the student told me that her interpretation of Wuthering Heights was that its predominant theme was of how the extremes of passion (love/hate) can become indistinguishable from one another, I would say she was closer to understanding the themes of the book than her teacher who thinks it's about class struggle. (this is not necessarily my exact view of wuthering heights btw, I studied it too long ago to remember precisely what I thought about it)

On the other hand, if another student took the teacher's interpretation and wrote an essay supporting her own view, I might find it much more nuanced and persuasive than the first student's essay, even though I might agree with more of the basic tenets of that first essay. The second student may have shown a greater awareness of the context in which the book was written. She might have conducted a closer reading of the text, with more textual examples to support her argument than the student used. She might simply write more coherently, poetically and persuasively. She might structure her essay more effectively.

So, what mark should i give each of them? I would be inclined to give the higher mark to the person who wrote the second essay, even though based on my own reading of the book I think they have less of a grasp of what 'Wuthering Heights' is 'about'.

Interpretation isn't a single sliding scale from right to wrong. I hate it when people throw in the word "relativism" here and then say something like "let's just give all the kids 100% on their English exams", as if there was no choice available except that between a single right answer and the absence of any judgment at all about rightness/wrongness.

As in my answer above, sometimes someone can be "right" and STILL not deserve 100%.

Likewise, who understands Roy Montgomery music better? The fan who has listened to it regularly for ten years and has written moving articles on its evocation of loneliness? Or the friend who knows Montgomery is a beermonster and "was there" but doesn't care about the records? Why does what Montgomery do or not do at the pub determine what his music is about???

"sometimes language gets claustrophobic."

At the risk of annoying tricky even further, I want to return to this point, as I think it's pretty much the central issue here, good dog's recent crusade on behalf of objectivity not withstanding.

If there's a meaningful debate here, it's not subjectivity vs objectivity but discursiveness vs non-discursiveness. The question being: is the experience of music something that is discursive or extra-discursive?

I think it's neither completely. Certainly the experience of music is sensual but never solely so, it's always mediated through conceptuality, which is to say discursivity. There is no "immediate" experience of music. This was my point re tricky hearing music as "empty" - so many such notions are actually borrowed from metaphors, which interpose themselves between the music and yr ears at the moment of reception. Even simply recognizing a kickdrum and its purpose in a house track entails an awareness of the "language" in which the track speaks.

I don't really believe that music contains ineffable (that is, indescribable) qualities or properties. I do believe that the relationship between its (describable) qualities or properties and the experience of those qualities/properties by the listener can approach ineffability in a limited sense - i.e. it is impossible for me to write an account of my experience of a piece of music that fully accounts for my reaction to it in such a way that you can entirely share in that. Although I don't think it's a pointless task either: it's just that there is an infinitely receding horizon of identity between my experience and my discursive account of my experience.

I'm not sure that I ever experience language as "claustrophobic" in the way that tricky means, if I understand him correctly.

http://www.indierockfan.net/images/31242f.jpg

heh. i didn't think we were really finished. it's just that in some sense the position i am supporting via playing the devil's advocate has become a bit of a caricature though i do support a part of it (i.e., that which constitutes the ineffable/mysterious, but which is obviously a product of experience as vahid so eloquently demonstrated. i think it is dangerous to explain away intuition, but here we are discussing it and it's generally a positive thing so there you go. it is hard to do effectively without parable i think. maybe we can add "extra-linguistic" to extra-discursive.) so obviously i think this, "Although I don't think it's a pointless task either: it's just that there is an infinitely receding horizon of identity between my experience and my discursive account of my experience." is otm.

i think i should have said "sometimes language creates claustrophobia" because it involves choices that ultimately flatten out complexity. and also the bit about respecting criticism could have been better phrased as "i find it useful" and that's useful less so as a tool for say, discovering new music (that's just too easy now) and more so as learning how someone else relates to music and culture.

"The difficulty only begins then when an agent of the community seeks to assert to people outside the community that the community's myth also governs them.

indeed, i don't think it's come up yet, but there is a lot of "if you have to ask ..." going on in that stance and that is potentially the most destructive thing about it although it is there because of much bigger reasons than music. there's a strict door policy at this club.

The second student may have shown a greater awareness of the context in which the book was written. She might have conducted a closer reading of the text, with more textual examples to support her argument than the student used.

Exactly. So whether a reader find something persuasive or not depends on factors such as the critic's awareness of the context the art was made in, their grasp of the idiom it is working in, their awareness of the purpose of the art and how it is intended to be consumed. These are objective matters where there can be a single right answer, or at least where one answer can be more right than another.

Just to note: I'm not defending the idea that the only people who can talk about TP convincingly are those "in the community"; I'm just that evidence for your argument most definitely comes in a sliding scale, and "imaginary worlds" and such like are right near the bottom

it still doesn't sound right to me. if adventurous musicians (sun ra, joe meek, klaus schulze, kraftwerk, derrick may, chain reaction etc etc) can make music based on "imaginary worlds", why can't a fan base their listenership on the same?

basic channel dudes weren't reacting to a dancefloor that already existed, or working in a tradition that had already been established. same for derrick may and kevin saunderson and gang.

and as a somewhat related tangent: their music wasn't great because it carried with it the essential elements of sharevari, or george clinton, or kraftwerk or whatever. the greatness is in the stuff it got wrong, the stuff that didn't fit with the existing elements of other musics. that was the stuff that made it techno. just like with jungle or disco or garage rock or whatever, the parts that didn't fit, that didn't turn out just like the tradition the artists were working in, were the parts that made the music great, that made it a template for future traditions.

basic channel dudes weren't reacting to a dancefloor that already existed, or working in a tradition that had already been established. same for derrick may and kevin saunderson and gang.

lol really?

so these dues invented dj culture from scratch in 1992?