Frank Kogan's forthcoming "Real Punks Don't Wear Black"

David, do you still have that picture I sent you last year w/ good-looking friend and beard? I lost the file for it in the great computer crash of '04. Anyway, you can post it if you'd like.

(My rationalization for using the old picture is that since the writing covers a span from 1970 to 2004, I'm justified in using one that plops in the middle at 1985.) (To be honest, the vast majority dates from after 1985.)

(They really shouldn't even be listing the hardcover, since my understanding is that it's only going to be available to libraries.)

And here's the link for those of you who use U.S. currency.

And Asian.

it isn't out for three months!

i also think its possible people (and maybe particularly masculine types) in general have a hard time reconciling parts of their experience with art and their intelligence. for instance, on ILM we talk this way about rock alot, but less so about disco. and it's interesting that you see WAY less of this type of writing in europe, particularly spain/italy/france maybe too. men are warmer there...just ask mareisa sabiel.

Prat Power! Guilty as charged!

also maybe this discussion is best had elsewhere.

To answer your question Drew, "Yes," though I hope I don't (in the book or here) come off as reductive/dismissive as your summary, "people who use critical theory are just avoiding the direct expression of their hopes and fears," makes it seem.

I just realized that actually my complaint might best be summarized as "crit theorists do a shit job of romanticism when they mire themselves in philosophy" or "hahaha, I'm more romantic than Derrida, nyaaah nyaaah." (My argument would be that "Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street" or "Do you think that you could make it with Frankenstein?" are the real deal when it comes to romanticism, whereas Husserl's or someone's "metaphysics of presence" uses such a bizarre and dysfunctionally extreme concept of "presence" that deconstructing such "presence" is beside the point and has little to do with the romantic impulse to be face-to-face with "Frankenstein" or whatever you're trying to be alive and present and involved with. Got to go soon, so don't have time to make this argument intelligible.)

Isn't lots of critical theory trying to undo this disconnect, though? My problem with (some) crit theory is that it deploys arguments that were used to successfully blast to pieces Descartes' "mind-matter" and Kant's "concept-intuition" dichotomies, whereas people's reasons in the here and now for retreating to the emotion-intellect divide have nothing to do with Descartes and Kant, hence the blast misses its target. (And yes, my book talks about this too, though there's way more to be said than the book gets around to saying, obv.)

And if all goes well, my book will inspire people to dig into the socioemotional reasons why such apparently stupid accusations and expressions of annoyance carry such cultural weight.

Actually, I didn't claim my intellect was the biggest in the biz, merely that no one in Rockville questions and probes the way I do, which is the truth. But there's a lot that intellects do beyond questioning and probing, and I'm hardly the best at everything.

It doesn't come close, unfortunately, and various lists trail off with "too many others to mention" and "several zillion more" and the like.

I'm not sure what the heading of this thread should be- maybe "theory and music criticism and embarassment"? / "music criticism and theory and etiquette"? / "don't hate me because i'm theory damaged"? / "vent your frustrations with theory here" / "vent your frustrations with the prevalent anti-theory backlash here"?

It seems like there is a weird transaction going in when "theory" discourse pops up in alt weeklies and reviews and such. Hell, in journalism at all- I just found an article on Heino's farewell tour in The Economist which quoted Adorno and Jello Biafra. And this is the Economist, which, in its political and economic coverage, is as pro-capitalist and pro-business as it gets. So what's with the punk rock singers and ultra-Marxists being raided for juicy quotes about a German folksinger? Clearly this kind of having it both ways (relying on Marxist cultural critique on the entertainment page while carrying on waving the business as usual free market flag on the front page and editorial page) is a handy index of two things:

1) theory is safely dead and non-threatening
2) theory still constitutes a hoard of cultural capital

so how are the two related? What kind of push-pull is in effect when we need Adorno to feel smart about Heino and hip to the way the culture industry works, but we can only do so from this position of total security in our smug sense of the impossibility/ "deadness" of Adorno's own project? Anyway, this is part of what I am interested in, and also could be a way to speak to Susan's concerns and Sterling's observation.

At the opposite end of the rock-writing spectrum from Hoskyns' canonical professionalism, Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black (University Of Georgia Press, £15.95) eschews consideration of the exact point where David Crosby ends and David Geffen begins in favour of broader issues such as "Why does triviality protect awesomeness?" Spin and Village Voice veteran Kogan - himself part of a distinguished lineage of committed contrarians which includes Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs and Chuck Eddy - laid the intellectual foundations for the "Blogging" era with his interactive fanzine "Why Music Sucks". And this first collection of his works promises (and delivers) "not just 'essays' and 'record reviews' but the whole mess of Frank" - using e-mails, diary excerpts, and chat-room postings to memorialise that moment of high-school satori when Kogan realised "I'm so obsessed with my own mind that I can't think of anything else."