Can a music matter if its fans don't especially want to read about it?

Matters to me: gives me pleasure, has an emotional impact (however brief). Not necessarily changes my life in any noticeable way.

'matter'= i think i would still need to hear music even if i stopped reading abt it?

another distinction needs to be made here too: not reading about music doesn't equal not WANTING to. i wasn't aware until very recently that so much writing existed about music i used to scaffold with my own (largely invented/ill-considered) mythologies, for lack of exposure to, say, much rock-crit. even now, i'm not reading about Elvis's MGM years or mark's once-mentioned "real story of commodification" or a non-muso take on Gould's JS Bach work, but it's not for lack of wanting to.

Not everybody is an obsessive music freak. Personally, when I hear something I like, I like to find out everything I can about it, and find as much like it as I can. Some people just like catchy songs, and that's fine.

A) Who cares?

if these people can't be asked to engage with the secondary texts surrounding their primary thrill how could these thrills possibly become circulated meaningfully in a wider culture of readers and writers?

Everything counts in large amounts?

(um i'm still trying to work out whether this affects the second half of the question or not. i should have an answer to this and kim's question upthread sometime before the next ice-age)

mark - you used a CAPITAL - you growing up?

i don't think rock's unprecedentedly close relationship with writing-about-rock is accidental, in terms of history and value (and you could certainly elaborate a Why-Rock-is-Grebt and a Why-Rock-is-Rub out of this non-accidentality)

The success of that music is for history to decide.

Academics aside, the ear not the eye, is the primiry conduit.
¥

How is rock's relationship to writing essentially different from that of jazz (is it just sheer quantity?)

I think we can at least agree that a music doesn't matter if fans don't especially want to hear it.

I mean, Creed matters. They're clearing giving a lot of people what they want (or at least they have been, I think their peak has passed), and if you want to understand people, you should look at what they enjoy. Much more press has gone to The Strokes, but they certainly don't matter as much...yet.

Also, the question is whether or not people want to read about it, not whether people want to write about it. How do we gauge that? Magazine covers that sell? Cuz then women artists matter a hell of a lot more than guys. Except for Eminem.

(radio programming in the uk is today disproportionately in the shadow of rock-paper ideals, so the ear is being led by the eye there at least)

(how do things enter history? = they are written about)

Classical Music: Why Bother?

Doesn't something precede this? - and is writing the only way to preserve history? I wonder if the fact that a lot more people can read now (and have access to free writing) than, say, the non-aristocratic public of Mozart's time, impacts rock's (and everything else's) relationship with writing.

Compare: the number of words written about Mozart written during his life vs the number for the Thompson Twins during the 80s. (Not that I know the answer, mind you!)

The article "Classical Music: Why Bother" Yanc3y links to, on the other hand, really is a disgraceful piece of writing/(not)thinking that Salon should be ashamed to publish.

I'd have been pretty interested in hearing the case for elitism in music/the arts generally if it was properly argued. Instead it's a lazy, complacent, question-begging listing of unproven assertions, arts establishment prejudices presented as fact, and circular argument.

If this is the best rationale a Harvard professor of music can give for listening to modern classical music the answer to his question seems to be "no reason whatever".

No, it comes from the word FANcier. (Cat fancier, boxing fancier, etc.)

I know a lot of you folks write professionally about music; do you do so expecting that your readership consists of fans? (I mean as opposed to an audience who might potentially be exposed to the music through your writing; or an audience happy to engage in intellectual reflection/discussion of the subject, without being committed fans.)

revive!

so the last decade implies an answer: "yes! as long as music critics wanna WRITE about it!"

"poptimism"=writing about kinds of music whose fans don't care for reading about music.

(and, often, writing from the standpoint of "giving a voice" to those fans and their values, which are implicitly or explicitly evoked as a rebuke to the evils of rockism)

Moratorium on anyone who started posting on ILM after 2004 using the word "poptimism". Ever.

hey, I used quotation marks! would you prefer "anti-rockism"?

Dancing about music is a bit like sitting down about architecture, singing for people that can't dance.

what about people who just like pop music without making a big movement out of it

if the audience for writing about music was the same size as the audience for music, there'd be many more music publications and jobs for writers. QED

q: can a music matter

Anybody who doesn't read about the music that matters to them is a poseur

Music only matters if it's worth reading about, screw listening, let alone thinking for yourself.

What if everyone that chips in their twopenneth on the music you like depresses the fuck out of you, so you choose to avoid their discussions?

#ILX