pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

I'd bet most lute slingers were more intinerent drifters than well paid musicians

so compare travelling from village to village playing a lute vs being a serf

the serf was likely to get fed and have a support group, itinerant musicians generally lived hand-to-mouth and were disreputable as shit. this is true going back to the Greco-Roman era. The exceptions were musicians that were supported by royalty/essentially servants of the ruling class. And then you had a broad class of amateurs musicians in the lower classes who basically just played to entertain themselves/their communities. This is broadly true across cultures and most of history.

Thread title still relevant.

I'd rather talk about lutes than Imagine Dragons tbh

even today touring is where a lot of musicians make the dough

as ums points out fwiw this is also not true, esp if you're not a one-man band

it paid higher wages and many didn’t have bosses. if you did you often lived in their house. you might not fully realize how shitty agricultural labour was for most of history.

in any case, musicians did not make ‘zero’ money throughout history and there’s not something intrinsically nonvaluable about music; its a service performed by a skilled person. today price of *recorded* music is close to zero because of a combo of zero marginal cost and supply glut

luting for grog >>> grappling with a hog

they were disreputable *because* they were free

it paid higher wages and many didn’t have bosses.

I think the key distinction between itinerant musicians and serfs in the pre-industrial age is that one was generally homeless and the other wasn't.

but oh the freedom of freezing/starving to death on a back country road - hey at least you weren't pushing a plow amirite

if you have fans and play a lot you can make a good living from touring. yes the pace is brutal and touring is hard. my friends in mid- or third-tier indie bands tour 1/3 of the year and don’t have to work the rest of the time

iirc minstrels were more likely to be eaten in times of hardship. there was sometimes even 'much rejoicing'.

it helped to have a poptimistic attitude

if you have fans and play a lot

some big ifs there

it paid higher wages and many didn’t have bosses. if you did you often lived in their house. you might not fully realize how shitty agricultural labour was for most of history.

The musicians in the situation you describe are closer (as a percentile of the population/musician population) to contemporary artists who can sell out arenas than artists touring in a van.

In ancient times rockist critics were people who actually stoned you to death

lmao

mmmhmmm, that's some nice literal humor there. well done.

it paid higher wages and many didn’t have bosses. if you did you often lived in their house. you might not fully realize how shitty agricultural labour was for most of history.


i literally walked bean fields pulling weeds by hand when I was a kid. I walked in front of a tractor with a rock box on in and put rocks in it so the plough wouldn't get fucked up, and I didn't get paid at all because I was 10 and it was our family farm, what don't I know?

have you ever detassled corn by hand?

it's still better than driving to Fargo to play for no one

narrowly it’s just unapologetically liking pop music (rejecting concepts like ‘guilty pleasure’) and affording it the same critical/analytic seriousness as rock music or any other art. more broadly it’s about acknowledging that we come to music with inherited preconceptions and biases about which music is ‘serious’ or ‘authentic’, and unpacking those as well as trying to move beyond them. ned raggetts 90s List is a beautiful example of an alt-canon that a less rockist critical frame can be. in the context of mid-00s indie when indie people started to embrace pop sounds and terms like ‘perfect pop’ were everywhere, poptimism was in part a backlash to the hypocrisy of doing so while ignoring actual pop

not complicated; surely you all already knew this. i know some of you have humanities backgrounds and are averse to defining terms but it’s a pretty easy and useful one imho

Right, the parts I disagree with are that: i) these are extremely simple and unproblematic ideas and ii) they get applied and used in a consistent way.

They get applied inconsistently on ILM. Critics have written about pop music for almost fifty years. It was in the early 2000s when taxonomies for this sort of normal practice arrived.

I'd rather talk about lutes than Imagine Dragons tbh

Imagine Flagons

i literally walked bean fields pulling weeds by hand when I was a kid. I walked in front of a tractor with a rock box on in and put rocks in it so the plough wouldn't get fucked up, and I didn't get paid at all because I was 10 and it was our family farm, what don't I know?

have you ever detassled corn by hand?

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, October 15, 2019 2:33 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ok first of all i absolutely love that i've made you this mad because i don't agree that touring in an indie rock band in the midwest in the 90s is as bad as being a peasant in 15th century ireland. are you going to argue that reviewing video games is a harder job next, too? i've toured in punk bands across canada and the US; yeah it sucks in part but you get to play a show every night with your buds

i also love and am totally here for this economic history derail. btw my friend is looking up historical wage series for musicians and farmers so we'll have some evidence soon

but like, we were talking about history ok--you were born in the twentieth century. a kid growing up with parents who were agricultural workers wouldn't expect to live to 5 for most of history. there's no "tractors". people didn't go to "school" and farming wasn't a summer job. people didn't work for their "dad", their dad worked for a large land-owner who paid them subsistence. and if your dad did own his own farm chances are it was small and your parents would have to choose which of your siblings would starve if there was an early frost. i know opening for Hüsker Dü at the Banger's Pavillion in 1997 and then sleeping on StrawDog Sam's basement floor must have been brutal, and i truly feel for you. i just don't think it's that comparable to hardcore child labour if you're lucky enough not to die of typhus, ymmv

even making the comparison with contemporaneous musicians of the 15th century, like Shakey is right that people hated them and they were disreputable. but they were mobile and they were free and probably nasty and godless for the most part. they were skilled; they could have become farm labourers (and some would take up a job at a farm during bumper crops) had they wanted to. if a region was experiencing a drought they could hitch a ride somewhere else; they weren't tied to the land. when a group of musicians would tour through your village people would go and pay a few coins cus otherwise you'd just not hear music for another 3 weeks maybe

you never answered the man's question about detassling corn

i) these are extremely simple and unproblematic ideas and ii) they get applied and used in a consistent way.

― All along there is the sound of feedback (Sund4r), Tuesday, October 15, 2019 2:57 PM (forty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

(i) i mean it's pretty simple; you could condense what i wrote into 2 or 3 sentences (ii) they mostly get applied inconsistently by the same whiners who pretend to not know what they mean, so that's not fair

back to m@tt: no i have not detassled corn, but you know like 99% of agricultural workers in the US come from latin america, and are paid minimum wage or below? like they can't actually find americans who are willing to do that job?

otm

xpost

great thread today btw, great lols everybody

To quote Springsteen:

I learned more about farms and lutes here
than I ever did in school

hey flopson yeah I know I worked with them at the green giant canning factory and walking beans

though we all had dreams of being homeless lute players

mean it's pretty simple; you could condense what i wrote into 2 or 3 sentences

I condensed it into a single phrase, seems I hit it accurately enough? (it sounds like a rock critic trying to convince himself that pop music is “valuable” and “worth attention”), and I was subjected to Ye Olde Series of Sicke Burns! Maybe working thru the dialectic of snark, I'll someday understand how professional music lovers needed to construct a theoretical framework for something as basic as "unapologetically liking pop music (rejecting concepts like ‘guilty pleasure’)."

"trying to convince himself"

i don't know man, go post on RYM or reddit i guess?

We didn't construct a theoretical framework for something as basic as "unapologetically liking pop music (rejecting concepts like ‘guilty pleasure’)" -- pedants did.

So you guys just gave a name to it (and use it enthusiastically)?

this site was founded by the guy who wrote this column https://pitchfork.com/features/poptimist/

and every word of it is absolutely brilliant

i always simply considered poptimism being the critical POV that takes pop music seriously and without condescension and attempts to understand it at the same level of seriousness and scholarliness that critics have long taken rock music. and pushing back against the received wisdom of authenticity and authorship and idk even "real" instruments being what sets certain music apart from others.

^yup

...which was already happening when critics wrote about disco, Michael Jackson, Madonna, and hip-hop before it crossed over.

were people writing like that about neal sedaka or frankie valli?

There were a couple considerations of the Carpenters.

there was the Abba reconsideration (my least favorite Ludlum novel too btw)

have you ever detassled corn by hand?

- bruce springsteen

I think one way to think about this (and the confusion) is that there are actually two critical continuums that cross over one another:

1. The first is whether to take pop music seriously.

2. The second is the choice between what mark k-punk called a romantics of production versus a romantics of reception.

So while all all brands of poptimism and pro-pop writing took/take pop music seriously, item (2) is something that takes on a greater or lesser role in pop-focused criticism depending on the historical moment.

It’s at a low ebb at this point, but that’s perhaps because we’re in a period of strong emphasis on what you might call artistic engagement, which makes it a lot harder to decouple reception from production.

but like, we were talking about history ok--you were born in the twentieth century. a kid growing up with parents who were agricultural workers wouldn't expect to live to 5 for most of history. there's no "tractors". people didn't go to "school" and farming wasn't a summer job. people didn't work for their "dad", their dad worked for a large land-owner who paid them subsistence. and if your dad did own his own farm chances are it was small and your parents would have to choose which of your siblings would starve if there was an early frost. i know opening for Hüsker Dü at the Banger's Pavillion in 1997 and then sleeping on StrawDog Sam's basement floor must have been brutal, and i truly feel for you. i just don't think it's that comparable to hardcore child labour if you're lucky enough not to die of typhus, ymmv

lol what is this apples-to-oranges bullshit. the gap you're assessing here is between *different time periods* with different standards of living, not between a farmer + a musician in 2019 or a serf + a musician in 1623.

because in 1623 the musician was probably just as likely, if not moreso, to starve and/or die of typhus as a farmer (didn't have anyone to care for them, after all)

back then, the farmers had the pitchforks