That's it! The only ism I want to come out of your mouths is jism. Overacademic Bullshit Must Die.

and what the hell is listening to all music ever going to accomplish? I guarantee you that 90% of the musicians i listen to have not read one single word of 'intellectual' music criticism.

Also, careful about my reference to "people who 'get it.'" In the context of my post, I meant something like "people who are intimately acquainted with theory" -- i.e., "people for whom 'Gramscian' is a meaningful term." There is no value judgment here. When I ask "Who should we write for?" all I'm asking is "Can we use jargon and short-hand, knowing that a certain segment of people here are more familiar with theory (and thus can follow it more easily), or should we explain more for those of us who aren't as familiar?" What are our responsibilities to our community? And Oops, if you'll notice, I don't understand what "Gramscian" means, either. So I'm not being snobbish. If anything, I want more of the explanations.

Why academicese should never be allowed to pollute music writing:

1) Cleverness is a poor substitute for intelligence

2) It swaps one form of reference spotting for another

3) It's fucking lazy. Parrots parrot because they have nothing to say. Or can't be bothered to coming up with their own ideas.

4)It's inherently exclusionary and elitist, which is surely not the point. Or is it?

5) Audiences don't need "improving."

6) But some music writers might.

7) Phrases like "zones of proximal development" Ugh!

8) Theories deal in generalisations, not messy specifics. Like pop does.

9) Nine of out ten musicians don't give a shit, though they might nod emphaticially and service your self importance, if they think you're further up the chain than they are. Which you probably aren't.

10) There are plenty of words and ideas audiences do understand (see 5) - the question is, do you? (see 6)

11) It provides a convenient filter for ideas - but what's being filtered out?

I'm going to bed. You all play nice now.

ha ha ha

you'd know at least that I wasn't talking about music theory per se when I mentioned it if you'd actually read my post. go eat a bag of dicks.

Vgotsky's not a name I came across whilst sitting my Joint Philosophy/Psychology degree a decade ago, nor did I encounter during my admittedly brief teacher training, since teachers, bless em, are mostly concerned with the practicalities of classroom management. "Zones of proximal development" will be of no use to me next time I confront my students, who will be expecting me to have a coherent plan and some sensitivitity to their individual need.

I mostly concern myself with reading proper books by proper writers, and not the kind of people responsible for what Alasdair Gray (talking about talking about a critic that described Lanark as "postmodern," if memory serves, though I don't currently have the book in question to hand) "critical effulgent," Noam Chomsky and Nabokov being the honourable exceptions to that rule. Mostly though, I'm with Gore Vidal on academics; most of them are poor writers and poorer thinkers.

Jess - you may have a point about my overgeneralising about uh, theories overgeneralising (it was late, and I've slept very little this week), but the fact remains that most theories inevitably require a set of hypotheses/assumptions, and nine out of ten are more interesting for what they exclude than include.

"Go eat a bag of dicks"

Our intellectual elite has spoken. Tremble, proles!

Have a good day, Sterling.

Just coz the ZPD is only a small element of Vygotsky's thought (he's mainly known otherwise for correctly calling out Piaget on the supposed solopsism of "inner speech" (kids talking to themselves)) doesn't mean its not useful. The general idea is that a child who is five and tests at the level of a five-yr.-old will test at the level of say a six-yr.-old if put to work with a seven-yr.-old or a twelve-yr.-old to help them. That area of overlap of social and thought skillz is what Vygotsky termed the ZPD. 'course there's more to it than that.

I'd suggest the lack of vygotsky in yr. classes is more an indication of the poverty of current academia rather than academic "methods" like, y'know, thinking and writing and being rigorous about it. Not to mention which thinking just coz something is boring means its no good is rockism of the worst sort [not to mention "proper books by proper writers" -- I suppose you prefer proper musicians who play proper instruments too, y'square.]

(besides which, the phrase is translated from Russian -- cut the guy an even break don'tcha.)

& I think you miss Jess' point which isn't about the specificity of theory but rather the generality of pop.

The "generality of pop?" Pop may well have general appeal, but its basis is always specific individual experience, and by proper writers I meant folk who make me appreciate the generality (though I prefer *universality*) of the human condition by focusing on the nitty gritties. Given the purpose language is communication, there's nothing "proper" about the impenetrable polysyllabic doublespeak that constitutes a lot of academic writing.

I don't have a problem with thinking. I do it every day. Sloppy thinking, however..........

"I suppose you prefer proper musicians who play proper instruments, y'square."

Heh heh. This is the other problem with (let's be fair: a lot of) academics, people. Beneath all the cleverness, they're just snidey namecallers, using dubious assumptions to justify indulging in dull oneupmanship.

And there's nothing rigorous about that.

Ecfuckingzactly

I think the purpose of communication is to confuse and conquer.

i'm gonna go way out on a limb here, did you go to UC?

you remind me of someone...

*Unless we can somehow recycle the concept of the great artist so that it supports Chuck Berry as well as it does Marcel Proust, we might as well trash it altogether.* - Robert Christgau

But rock criticism does something even more interesting, changing not just our idea of who gets to be an artist but of who gets to be a thinker. And not just who gets to be a thinker, but which part of our life gets to be considered "thought."

Say that - using rockers like Chuck and Elvis as intellectual models -young Christgau, Meltzer, Bangs, Marcus et al. grow up to understand that rock 'n' roll isn't just what you write about, it's what you do. It's your mode of thought. And if you do words on the page, then your behavior on the page doesn't follow standard academic or journalistic practice, and is baffling for those who expect it to.

To explain this new behavior, and the bafflement it causes, I use "school" as my metaphor for the psyche, and I say that school tries to enforce a split between classroom and hallway. The split tells us that to be intellectual we have to live in the classroom and to obey the classroom rule, which is to talk not to and about other people but just about some third thing, "the subject matter." It says that to talk to and about each other, as we do in the hallway, isn't to think but to merely live our lives.

And so - the split claims - either we can use our intellect or we can live our lives, but we can't do both at once. And living our lives (as the hallway narrowly construes this) becomes "visceral" by default, since our lives have been ejected from the "intellect." And the hallway's vengeance on the classroom is to say, "You may be smart, but I'm *real*, and you're not." But this is an impoverished realness, since it expels anything that the classroom defines as "mental," and forbids our putting something off at a distance and reflecting on it.

Good rock critics, by and large, don't honor the boundary between classroom and hallway. This puts us at odds with most editors-in-chief, department heads, and those horrible people the readers. The rules have no intellectual validity; we're not following them; and the reader who wants reassurance through us that he's smart isn't going to get it from us in the standard way, and the reader who wants reassurance from us that he's real isn't going to get it either.

Simon Frith points out that most magazines now "edit every contributor into a house style expressing house opinions." This is in order to match taste with publication, publication with reader. Even those "intellectual" magazines that wouldn't think of editing someone's opinions will nonetheless choose writers whose styles fit the magazine's brand. "Intellectual" is itself a style, a brand.

There are arguments to be made in favor of imposing a uniform style, maybe the best arguments being analogous to the ones for school uniforms: suppressing personal characteristics also suppresses social and class characteristics and therefore suppresses social conflict and gang warfare, thereby allowing the school to get on with its business. But no one claims that school uniforms are somehow more *intellectual* than regular clothes. Yet academia and journalism do try to claim that the enforced style is more
intellectual or "objective" than any other.

I first came up with the "classroom-hallway" metaphor 12 years ago, in this passage:

"'A fifteen-year-old's relationship to a pop song also puts her in relation to other fifteen-year-olds and to *their* relationship to the pop song and to other fifteen-year-olds etc.' Yes, and believe me, all fifteen-year-olds know this. But the sad thing is that the fifteen-year-old who writes empty truisms like 'a fifteen-year-old's relationship to a pop song also puts her...' etc. and shows it to the teacher gets an A-plus, whereas a fifteen-year-old who writes something that actually puts her in relation to other fifteen-year-olds knows better than to give it to the teacher, knows
that it's not welcome. E.g., from recent *Smash Hits* (Australia):

"'Calling all gorgeous guys on Earth who are 14 or older. We are two 15 year old chicks who are absolutely in love with Guns N' Roses, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Poison, and stax more! Interested?'

"'I'm sick of it! Once again I was game enough to wear my Bon Jovi badge to school and what do I get for it? A black eye. I'm sick of people always saying that Jon Bon Jovi has AIDS, they know it's not true but they say it just to shit people up the wall. So to all you terrorists out there, I think you're jealous because you're not as good looking or popular as him!'"

Of course, the fifteen-year-old's relationship to the *teacher* puts her in relation to other fifteen-year-olds too, so I'm not claiming that she's failing to live her life when she's writing down teacher-pleasing generalizations. And I'm not saying the *Smash Hits* letter style is in all circumstances *better* than the vague social generalization, especially given that this piece itself is full of such generalizations. If you lean
towards generalizations you'll go for the "classroom" prose; if you lean towards analogies you'll lean towards the "hallway." My point is that when she's out in the hallway, amidst the flirting and fighting, she's sure as hell thinking. She's working out her relations to others; she's working out who she is. And if a big deal of her caring about music is that it helps her do so, she might wonder - in the event that this caring leads her to becoming a rock critic - why she's not allowed to continue using the music
on the magazine pages as she always had in her life. What's the rule that says you should stop being a person when you become a writer, and what do the rules of journalism have to do with being a writer in the first place, or being a thinker?

Of course, the glam-metal chicks and the black-eyed battler are *in* the magazine, but they're safely off in the penpal section and the letters pages, where they're business-as-usual. Put them doing the same thing on the main pages, though, and they're suddenly wild things, gonzos, transgressors, a threat to... well, what *are* they a threat to, and why? And, if we assume that what's on the main pages has something to do with what the readers want there, the crucial question is why do they want to keep this prose style, this part of themselves, off the main pages? Are they trying to protect this
part, by keeping it off the main screen? Are they trying to protect the main screen from their lives?

I'll give an answer that I never would have imagined giving 20 or 30 years ago: In today's culture, print is a more potent medium than music, at least for presentation of self - more potent, and therefore has to be kept under more control.

Rock critics do the same thing that an Elvis or Jagger or Eminem does: they put themselves at issue, their personalities, their social stances, and in so doing force the readers into an attitude towards *them*.

When rock 'n' roll first hit, it had the effect of calling social status into question. But such a thing can be disconcerting, even for those whose status is low. After a while it's hard to continually lose one's sense of place, even if you don't have much of a place to begin with. Fact is, though, rock criticism barely has a place anymore. That's because it doesn't match up with the world's grid. There's this pseudo-equilibrium right now, in its prose style, semi-casual, somewhat jokey, moderately snide, tastefully feisty, not too over-"analytic," not too "wild," and still fundamentally subservient to the supposed subject matter. This is nothingness, not balance. You don't need to strike a balance between thinking and living, since one doesn't detract from the other. Real rock critics do both in their prose, and it's always too much for someone. Marcus
gets attacked for being too academic, Meltzer gets attacked for being too undisciplined, but it's really the same attack, the hallway-classroom split trying to reassert itself from one side or the other. I've heard Marcus's prose attacked for being too dry. Compared to what, the Great Flood?

Whether the style is wild, academic, or a casual balance, once a magazine or a profession imposes a uniform writing style, it's forcing the writer to suppress his own social characteristics in favor of the magazine's or the profession's. And once some writers get away with defying the dominant style, then another writer's conformity to it becomes a personal characteristic anyway; there's just no escaping the personal; it's so tied to the social. And social relations get called into question, and the self gets called into question, and the reader gets uneasy.

But that's where ideas arise, from this uneasiness. Because that's one of the things that critics do, whether they want to or not: they call social relations into question.

Robert Christgau: "[Chuck Berry] was one of the ones who made us understand that the greatest thing about art is the way it happens between people." And music makes us understand that *ideas* happen between people too, but we need the page and critics to drive this point home.

Not that I don't have that reaction now. (In fact, probably more so after hanging out with you folks for the last few months.) But one thing that I am more inclined to think about now is the idea of "obligation" to one's readership. Kogan discusses how writing in a hallway-style is more similar to actual readers' lives. On principle, I'd agree. But shit, I tried reading that "Disco-Tex" essay and had no fucking clue what Kogan was talking about. Even though I generally think criticism would we wise to admit more personal/anecdotal content and more conversational style, I worry that this can be taken to an extreme and thus rendered not useful. (I also allow for the possibility that I gave up too easily, wasn't willing to meet Kogan on his own terms, etc.)

(since it's published on my website and all)

(jamie conway's Big Second-hand Theory of Theory is more interesting for the nine tenths it leaves out)

"a clear idea is a little idea"

So here is my argument against it: occasionally people who are bad (as in unconfident?) writers happen on a *good* new idea about something — or let's say the door through to a good new idea — which they then lose hold of, and they squish the life from it as they try and turn what they're saying into someone else's conception of good/clear writing (sort of the same as lots of rock bands get more ordinary the "better" they get at what they do). Intuitions w/o showing the working aren't intrinsically an anti-communicative idea (in fact I suspect "showing the working" generally needs difft kinds of expressive skills to "bold state the intuition", tho some are good at both, obv).

Fucking hell, I live inside that paragraph.

besides, if it's a BAD idea unclearly expressed you can always misread it yrself, and enjoy the better idea yr actually projecting onto it!!

it's win-win!!

trans. = "osmotic alien tongue pressure")

(this shd really go on the kuhn thread)

(since I wasn't trying to dispel anything nor leave you w/a greater appreciation of criticism, YOUR criticism is empty and petty)