Simon Reynolds - C or D

"If Morley was the original Popist, then Hoskyns was the original nu-rockist: one week writing about Black Flag, the next Donna Summer, the week after some anthology of Lost Soul from the early Seventies, the week after that some NYC postdisco electrofunk 12 inches, the week after that the Blue Orchids… but never as mere generalism , always with an underlying vision-quest and value-scheme somehow connecting these seemingly disparate or even incompatible sounds."

I find it astonishing what opinions and positions people ascribe to SR, especially after looking at the articles that provoked these judgements!

And it's interesting that Simon says he couldn't choose between Morley and Hoskins (although it's implied he'd come down on Hoskins' side now) - both writers' critical visions were so attractive.

It's like, to be really interesting, an either/or option has to be one that you want to be plus/and, one that inspires you to look for some point of nexus or mediation. The choice b/w Hoskins and Morley strikes me as more compelling than the choice b/w Reynolds and Petridish because with the latter I know immediately which side I'd choose, it's not an open question.

What is the job of the critic then?

I guess at a base level it is to invent choices out of nothing, to say, "you could get this or you could get that, so get this cos it's better". And, similarly, to point to mediation points that unite oppositions ("what the very different [x] and [y] share is a certain [z]").

So we can immediately identify even in this most basic description of the critic's task a sort of endless back & forth between drawing and dissolving lines in the sand, between dividing something into 2 and reuniting 2 things into 1.

It would appear that, for Simon, the trick is to keep things divided, but to recognise that this very division is the source of both sides' power (i.e. what unites is the line which both sides rub up against)?

But it seems difficult to to practically distinguish this approach from what he might call weak-minded ecumenical listening - by which I mean, how do you know just from looking at a person's "most played" list in iTunes whether they're either/or-worshippers or Uniting Church congegration-members? And how do we rejuvenate music criticism in the sense of turning the latter into the former?

Funnily enough, the Morley/Hoskyns opposition reminded me how I could never choose between Reynolds and Roberts when reading MM c.88...

I think SR's line about "nu-pop" - that it's like if New Pop had never got beyond Dollar - is on the money.

perhaps this is all part of simons problem at the minute, a sort of veering rudderlessness, a recognition that if street based scenes come and go, with flashes of inspiration, ephemeral bursts of creativity and excitement, but then flicker or mutate, that, if you are a critic, or an outsider, you have to be like a moth, moving flame to flame. its only possible, really be 'part' of one scene, possibly two, if in quick and related succession, after that, you are a dilettante, chasing after the next flame

i suppose for a long time, simons been able to stretch the rave aesthetic out, into hip hop and dancehall, as one long extended sonic archipilego (and, ironically, away from house and techno music itself), but really, i think, over time, its become a more and more tenuous join the dots affair, or flame to flame

i think coming to terms with that, places you in this new category hes dreamed up, this nu-rockist position, this position of the moth. a position that wants to take account of the links between all these genres, mapping them onto some kind of web, where context, and location, and position matter, as they do in street musics, rather than the purely "ooh shiny!" magpie pick'n'mix of the popist

I do not mean to ascribe to SR views that he doesn't hold. I just think that people, in general, should not talk about 'the street' in that exclusive way. Anyway, the people who really spend their whole lives on the street, rather than inside buildings, are homeless. Presumably when SR or anyone else says 'the voice of the British street' they are not primarily thinking of homeless people.

I have just decided that the voice of the British street is 'Another Day In Paradise'.

I don't mean to distract from the perhaps interesting discussion of Morley, rock and other things.

there are, then, very clear lines between streets and avenues. most people are aware of the different class connotations between streets and avenues or streets and lanes. just as acacia avenue invokes suburbia, just as lanes invoke rural scenes

homeless people?

i've always wondered about your dislike for this g - do you value (or in my opinion possibly OVER-value) authenticity in a method>outcome sense? i came to define rockism as that which prioritises the former over the latter, and popism or anti-rockism the opposite. but this appears to be at odds with the idea that rockism and eclecticism are keen bedfellows (i can see how this might work in some cases but not sure).

if not an issue of authenticity/purism (rockism), why hear eclecticism/hybridisation as sludge?

anyway i think its eclecticism thats rockist. eclecticism=artist picking and mixing from scenes, to create something 'greater'

fair enough but in the case of House let's not pretend there's a single template based on a very narrow palette of influences. thematically House has always been narrow of course, but 20+ years have seen practically everything co-opted with it, fused with it - sonically I suppose I mean. Meaning you could pick ten 'THIS - IS - HOUSE' tracks and there'd be reasonable variation within that.

artist picking and mixing from scenes, to create something 'greater'

is that rockist? it's not conservative. it's also surely how styles like House were created in the first place.

exactly

im not saying rockism is concerned with influences, i am saying its concerned with the artist being greater than the scene, the auterist model

xpost, fusion food, i like that analogy. fusion food is vile

Reynolds wants to somehow separate the mere liking of various genres (which is the no-good fusion food sludge thing) from the good embracing of genres with "an underlying vision-quest and value-scheme somehow connecting these seemingly disparate or even incompatible sounds."

eclecticism is something seeks, perhaps only implicitly, to abandon genre, to be above genre, to be judged on its own merits

you make it sound good! but i aim to extend an anti-rockist/purist approach to include judging by track and not artist. scenes themselves are largely irrelevant to me now. so in that respect maybe i do value artists more than scenes, but i also value tracks more than artists, if you will excuse the generalisation here.

Back to the 'eclecticism has won' idea as that's how i feel where things are now, and the nebulous concept of Pop Music is where it is working best. And that is what is currently interesting and exciting me. Not scenes (nothing new I can connect to now, maybe mash-ups was the final one). Not particular artists.

PWN n00bS

I don't think anyone disagrees with this, least of all SR, which is why I thought this whole conversation was ridiculous in the first place.

I like gareth's revalorization of genre! I am reading a Dick Francis novel at the moment.

I mean shouldn't actual eclecticism, by dictionary definition even, mean people picking stuff from different eras, different sources, etc?

er, yes, that is what it means! but that is also 'just dabbling'. why does it bother you if people 'just dabble'? whence the moral imperative to get stuck into things in a big way?

I am indoors now - shortly I will be on the street. Then, I will be part of The British Street. I don't suppose that the records SR is pushing will say much about that experience.

Yo motherfucker!
Over there is RADA.
They have a cafeteria
Open to the public
No fucking discount
Though

because if everyone just dabbled there would be nothing to dabble in.

I think one of the key issues is not whether music is eclectic or pure, but whether it forges a sound that is distinctive and singular enough that it sounds "of a style" - hip hop is eclectic, sure, but when you hear it you still think "hip hop" rather than "one-off fusion of two other genres". Bad eclecticism is, I guess, where there doesn't seem to be any point to, or logic behind, the polystylistic choices being made - it's just a jumble of musical signifiers whose only purpose is to demonstrate the diversity of the set. But this is not an indictment on eclecticism as a whole - there are bad versions of most things!

sure we do *now*, 25-30 years on; but i'm wondering how g-man wd have reacted to 'adventures' in the day.