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

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."

Trying to read Frank Kogan's new book, but keep putting down my advance copy because I WAS FRANK KOGAN, except I was born about eight years later and three time zones westerlier. But it's all there: the relationship to music, the poetry of young revolutionaryism, the funky despair that leads to brilliant insight (well, Frank really IS kinda brilliant as a kid, I was just our town's functional equivalent). It's painful but it's awesome like an opossum and my teeth, I don't floss 'em.

The Afterlife Of Pop

Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black is a devastatingly good book. The first evening I read it I found that it shook me up a lot - I recognised the ideals and ideas Frank was chasing, even if I couldn't have articulated them, and I was ashamed of my own inability to follow then. Not that Frank is appealing for 'followers'. Not that I want to 'follow' him. But the first chapters made me feel tentative and timid. After that initial cold splash, the rest of the book has been exhilarating: I've been reading it in a more positive mood, feeling stimulated and inspired. I'm not sure I'm ready to respond yet to the ideas in the book - either intellectually or by example (though the rest of this post has turned into a partial response).

Partway through the book, in the chapter discussing "Superwords", I get quoted, a quote from this odd piece, which I've not dared read since I wrote it. My reluctance was based around my never finishing it - I never wrote the subsequent parts, and after a couple of weeks I'd forgotten what was meant to be in them. I was also afraid I'd read it again and think it was wrong - which I now do, but it's not wrong in any terrible or humiliating way so I don't know why I was so fussed.

The 'death of pop' piece sits as one of my most grievous examples of that Kogan bugbear, not following through ideas. I'm never sure how seriously I take this - I think a lot of ideas are un-follow-through-able, or rather than if you try to follow them through you get ground down and tired, so it's better to just spray them out and see if anyone else can do anything with them. This was always a guiding notion behind ILM, which I actually started half-based on a description I'd read of a Frank Kogan zine (its other parent was the "Question of the Month" box on 80s Marvel editorial pages). But maybe when I say "better" I simply mean "more fun" or "lazier".

This actually ties in a bit with what I was talking about in the Death of Pop piece. The bit I like most in the piece now is the section near the end about stage magic and pop existing in the same precarious showbiz state. In stage magic, pretending that it's all for real (i.e. that you actually possess supernatural powers) is seen as vulgar or a cheat; showing the wires is also frowned upon. A magic performance, in other words, is an idea that refuses - or cannot survive - a follow-through. Somewhere in the tangle of the article I'm suggesting a similar thing about manufactured pop.

Except stage magic is - or used to be, I don't know enough about how it works these days - a stable form where this refusal is built-in and understood by performers and to an extent by audience. Pop is unstable, judging by the continual movement of its performers towards perceived autonomy and credibility (which very rarely translates to achieved cred). The 'death of pop' I was getting worked up about four years ago is always with us, a constant career trajectory. So the question is: why? And also - to paraphrase a question Frank Kogan asks a great deal - what do the performers gain by that? What does the industry gain? What do we listeners gain?

(I think Tom meant to type "follow them" rather than "follow then," and "old piece" for "odd piece"; and I think the description he'd read of WMS had been in The Wire, a pseudonymous review by someone called Hopey Glass.)

I just read an advance of a bock by Village Voice rock critic Frank Kogan. He's a friend of Chuck Eddy, and has a writing style reminiscent of Richard Meltzer's. He's got some interesting ideas: about "Superwords", "The WHAT THING", legitimacy and non legitimacy, the "PBSing of rock"...he's very smart, compassionate in a way, but it ends up making me sort of ill...its solipistic, self obsessed, and lacks an understanding of what musicians are doing.

The best part is when he talks about how "non legitamacy" is the essential element of "legitimacy" in rock...for example, the thing that confers" legitimacy" on Jerry Lee Lewis, in a lot of peoples minds, is his illigitimate act of shooting his bass player. He gets a lot of cred from that...Kogan talks about how, for musicians, dying is the utmost in legitimacy creation, cause yr surely not kissing anyone's ass then! There is wacked out truth in this, this is a true picture of us...it gives me a headache as he starts to say, then, that once you have legitimacy in the eyes of the rock fan, you are in fact on yr way to becoming the opposite thing. For example, hard rock is seen at one point as being the most rocking form, and ballads are out...this confers "legitimacy" on ballads in the next round.

Hmmmm...think I'll just stick with what I was doing, get that book away from me!

The point is the hunger in our culture for justification...everyone feels ignored, tiny, a loser, invalididated by the machine, etc...its the way that it is! There is an image of truth in Kogans idea here.

Oh well I just wanna play! Cant wait til I get over to Amsterdam, I havent played there since 89, or was it 92?

Ex-leader of the Plimsouls.

Also, I have a great understanding of what musicians are doing: E.g., band in rehearsal, song peters out, the keyboardist says to the guitarist, very tentatively, "Was what I was playing all right?" and the guitarist says, "Oh, yeah, I guess so," while thinking to himself "How the fuck should I know? I was so busy struggling with my part that I wasn't paying the least attention to what you were doing." Meanwhile, the bass player tells the drummer, "You need to play with more concentration," and the drummer snaps back, "What are you talking about? You come here and play with 'concentration,' asshole," and throws a stick in his direction. The singer, meanwhile, hums to herself and goes and fiddles with something on one of the amps.

I'm sure his plim is very soulful.

Real Punks Don't Wear Black offers an adventure by pairing a university mind with a high school dropout phenomenon. Frank Kogan to me is a writer who would write fascinating treatises even if he were comparing new brands of carpeting. While the rest of us in our writer's group encourage Frank to write about other things, the man is clearly set on a life's path of writing about something he can't let go of, and his obsessive compulsion is to our benefit.
—Denver Daily News, January 20, 2006

Freddy drastically misinterprets the letter that gives the book its title. Among other things, the letter is an obvious work of fiction, written by me. (Obvious? Well, I didn't imagine that someone could take it for real.)

And one of the things the book does is to challenge the claim of the pierced and tattooed to speak for all of punk.

I think "solipsist" gets over-used to mean anyone who's self-involved or writes mainly about their own thoughts and internal mental states and perceptions. Clearly any critic who gets deeply into constructing a personal system of aesthetic values is going to be accused of building castles in the air that no one else can see. There is a very real debate here which has been held many times on ILM about whether critical judgments can ever be anything other than subjective. Perhaps "solipsist" is a short-hand way of denoting someone who takes the position that critical judgments are inherently subjective and it's pointless to deny that they are.

Never even rented one. (Nor read Vollmann, though he and Woody Allen are now on my to-read list.)

uga library still ain't got the kogan book.

Well, I don't think the for-reals version (rather than the reviewer's promos) are even printed yet.

Except what I keep trying to hammer home in the book is that critical judgments are inherently social, and I keep emphatically rejecting the idea that you can talk about yourself or about the world but that you can't do both at once. I wish the word "subjective" (and "objective," its partner in infamy) would vanish from the language. People don't know what they mean when they say it.

hurrah!

Well, in my sentence where I used the word "subjective" to refer to a view of the nature of claims of truth in aesthetic criticism, I simply meant that one who held that aesthetic judgments are "subjective" would hold that such judgments are only true for the person who makes such judgments and are not true in a universal sense. Perhaps an example would make this more clear. If I say "The Rolling Stones are the best rock band of all time" and if it's true that such judgments are subjective, then there is an implied "to me" that should be added to the end of that sentence (and any sentence which makes claims in this manner).

And I'm saying that those aren't the only two choices, which is why I think "subjective" and "objective" need to be shitcanned.

"The Rolling Stones are the best rock band of all time" is obviously not only true for the person who makes the judgment, since more than one person has made that judgment, and someone's stating it as a judgment rather than a matter of taste is in itself a claim that the judgment has a validity that goes beyond oneself; i.e., more than one person should make that judgment.

Let me take another example. Suppose there are several people in a room. One person says "It's cold in here". Some others agree. Another person says, "Actually it's warm in here." Some others agree with him. So is "It's cold in here" a subjective statement or not? Clearly more than one person agrees with the statement, and the people making that statement are implying that the others should agree with them. However, not everyone does agree, and there doesn't seem to be any objective way of measuring whether or not the room is in fact cold - simply because there is no objective definition of the word "cold" that will resolve every grey area. Say they had a thermometer in the room - would that settle the issue? No, because regardless of what the temperature reading was, to some people the room would still be cold and to others hot.