P&J stats

nate is (unsurprisingly) the most ahem conformist ilxer and kogan is the least (tho i come a close second [i shouldn't have voted for the mekons -- i knew it.]

Mr. "obscuro" harvell turns out to be less so than doug, yancey, simon r, jane dark, chuck eddy, mark prindle, tim haslitt, and more (in that order).

Stacy Meyn takes the cake for sharing NO VOTES with ANYONE:

http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/pazznjop/02/critic.php?criticid=1162

Therefore Ed Condran [whoever he is], picks up the award as the most conformist critic bore of 2002 http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/pazznjop/02/critic.php?criticid=1223

the lower down the ranking = individualist maverick that makes up their own mind up, follows their own path.

Then we could find out who most resembles a walking Billboard.

Because they are lazy fuckwits ! who don't know about anything else - and bore people stoopid with their identikit-authentic-rock critic opinions! [I bet there are hundreds of these critic types scattered across local rags in the US.]

I have PLUMMETED from 50 points to 25!! I thought I had my most lazily mainstream year ever but not by P&J standards it seems.

& the gag is that "mainstream" for rock crit is inverse to actual "mainstream" -- i.e. the more you like what everyone else does, the lower you go.

(also could you do singles if its not too much work?)

1 THE EMINEM SHOW Eminem Web/Aftermath/Interscope
2 WEATHERED Creed Wind-up
3 NELLYVILLE Nelly Fo' Reel/Universal/UMRG
4 M!SSUNDAZTOOD Pink Arista
5 [HYBRID THEORY] Linkin Park Warner Bros.
6 O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? Soundtrack Lost Highway/Mercury/IDJMG
7 SILVER SIDE UP Nickelback Roadrunner/IDJMG
8 BRITNEY Britney Spears Jive/Zomba
9 NOW 8 Various Artists EMI/Universal/Sony/Zomba/Virgin
10 WORD OF MOUF Ludacris Disturbing Tha Peace/Def Jam South/IDJMG

Actually, this is no fair since several of those are from 2001.

http://www.billboard.com/billboard/yearend/2002/bb200_2.jsp

And the singles chart:

http://www.billboard.com/billboard/yearend/2002/hot100_2.jsp

(Obv I would think this because I'm an inveterate fence-sitter and because I got dead-centre 50 points last year so am best ha)

(Is someone who doesn't like *any* of these an 'independent thinker'? Cause I've heard most of Stacy Meyn's picks and most of them are total cack.)

maybe I'm not an official ILXer (I've got posts dating back about a year and a half, but I'm sporadic), but I placed lower than Kogan.

if its not there its not there mark.

are american critics sick? (at least the ones that voted for fucking wilco)

Will Derek Bailey ever get a lifetime achievement award in the future? - we need The Wire awards - because everyone else runs awards these days.

(Sorry, I started this tangent because I'm trying to imagine a type of sharp-eared open-minded critic who would believe that Wilco / Beck / Lips etc. were the best records of the year.)

What's so fucking "unsurprising" about it?

My #1 and #2 albums were 36th and 56th respectively, two albums I voted for placed below 200th (the Chemical Brothers album I deemed three points better than YHF placed 329th), but because half my picks were albums that, for some odd reason, a lot of people liked... I'm dull-eared and close-minded? Hey, thanks a lot.

< /self-pity>

Cause this is something I find really interesting. For instance: most of the critics who dislike the Wilco record presumably feel they nevertheless "understand" it -- not why it's good, but just what it is. Presumably they could address an audience that would like the record and explain exactly why -- not by parroting good things the band's fans say, but by actually getting at why that particular audience might enjoy it. Obviously I understand the reason that doesn't get done: if you don't like a record it'd be sort of joyless and embarrassing to go around telling other people why they would. I'm just thinking that every so often you see certain critics who wind up, for whatever reasons, using their knowledge banks to do exactly that, and there's something about that ability that I find pretty impressive. I doubt I personally could write something for a newspaper explaining why that newspaper's readers would probably like David Gray -- not without coming off condescending or snarky or overtechnical or something annoying.

For me to do that would demand a sense of empathy I'm rarely capable of.

1. Anthony Braxton- Solo (Koln) 1978
2. Derek Bailey- Ballads
3. mimeo- The hands of Caravaggio
4. Annette Krebs- Guitar Solo
5. Sonny Sharrock- Black Woman
6. Revue OU Box set
7. John Coltrane- The Last concert
8. Morton Feldman- String Quartet (II)
9. James Tenney- Forms 1-4
10.Alice Coltrane- Universal Conciousness

Could we start a "I Didn't Vote in P&J but Here Are My Picks: Compare and Contrast" Thread?

Also, since it's tha Pazz n' Jop, where the hell are the jazz crits on that list?

ARGH. What a horrifying thought.

"I understand why you might really like Coldplay's new collection of songs. No, really, I do understand. It's an understanding born of PITY FOR YOU FOOLS...ahem."

Eminem: 93
Creed: 1 (2001)
Nelly: 12
Pink: 23
Linkin Park: 4 (2001)
Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?: 42 (2001)
Nickelback: 0
Britney Spears: 3 (2001)
NOW 8: 0
Ludacris: 2 (2001)

...for a rating of 18.0, which would have been 495th of 693. Sales lists never match critics' lists in popular art forms, of course, but this does lend a little more weight to the not-new idea that critics underrate metal. It would add more weight if these particular examples of "metal" weren't so awful.

If there weren't a HUGE fucking gulf between criticland and realworldland then it wouldn't be such a great thing to be a "nonconformist" since its rilly a question of WHO you conform too like Kogan sez -- i'm throwing my lot with the plebs right now, tho none of my choices matched the billboard tops EITHER.

The problem with nabisco's lovely theory about crits who talk to people about music THEY like is that hardly anybody likes Wilco or Beck or etc -- it seems the appeal is LIMITED to the crit-crowd so its hardly "talking-down" to deal with it. I mean to write convincingly about Wilco for most foax you'd have to say "here's why some freaks are so excited about what to you sounds rather bland and uninspired."

Something about the idea of "quality" music lately makes my stomach turn, and music which "endures" the ages instead of capturing a moment in time even moreso. But then I'm the only cardcarrying member of the "cult of the new" who hasn't accomidated an inch. Mainly coz I want something from culture it will never give, but the joy of watching it trample over itself at least halfway makes up for that.

But in any case it wasn't a theory or a suggestion, just something that's impressed me that some critics are willing and able to do.

Like I disliked plenty of books in high school just coz I was assigned them and I'm sure if I was told they were not for me coz they'd corrupt my mind then I'd have adored them. But then again I liked books with sex and violence mainly anyway, and the crap they sent us reading was pretty preachy except for Shakespere and I managed to like him anyway, tho it was like me & jm were the only ones who got how damn DIRTY he was.

What I dislike is the music takes me places I don't want to go, like the co-op rock answer to everyone's corporate rock nightmares of the late 70s. And even then the bands turned out some GREAT singles, while here they're afraid of success. YHF = Chicago 18?

And not just so worthy, but so sexless and bloodless (christ I sound like a rockist right now) albums for coronations and sainthoods but nothing to just make me happy.

[haha okay well Eminem AND The Streets AND Missy but of ALL Missy albums I mean this one? Any reason except for brand recognition, I mean compared to the other stuff out this year? And of ALL Eminem albums THIS one, so patchy and hit & miss when compared to the 8 Mile soundtrack, but who puts soundtracks on top 10 lists anyway? except for me i mean. Streets I'll give you tho. But bear in mind none of these albums were particularly party records either.]

So yeah I think running away from the consensus "wins" coz in this place its a deliberate move towards what people actually listen to, which has plenty to recommend it if for no other reason (and there are plenty of others). Right now in this atomized landscape there's no clear head-and-shoulders albums like Discovery or Rooty or etc (except, again, The Streets coz they're the new thing) so people are going to find their pleasures in odd places. But for god's sake VOTE YOUR PLEASURE not your abstract internalized vision of what it SHOULD BE.

We have a nation of critics who fear their ears, fear their groove and fear their booty starting to shake. "Rock" should go and cloister itself like classical and then we can smack that history weighing down like a ton on the brain of the present.

My favorite record store is the Tower in the loop coz it doesn't even STOCK rock on the first floor anymore -- just R&B and Rap and Electronic and a selection of porn mags and a selection of music and literary mags. And the R&B and Rap sections are relatively TINY -- virtually no "classics" [tho there's a seperate classic soul rack to the side for a few of those] and no back catalog just the NOW-TIME and a screaming commitment to make it ETERNAL.

Whose world is this? th-th-the world is ours.

(There was a time in Italy tho when more plebes knew (and cared!) who gramsci was than knew (and cared) who Shakespeare was. Those days are past)

Also you changed horses midstream coz way uptop you said "I would love to read anyone who could take the P&J top ten and explain them all, accurately, to someone like my dad." By which I assume that yr. dad knows and cares little at the moment for the P&J topten.

I mean it would take the fucking MUSIC MAN to make most people care about that top ten.

I mean, it's exactly this kind of prizing of non-conformity you're talking about that created the big gulf between what people buy and what critics talk about -- that and the fact that the people most likely to read critics are the ones who want that non-conformity, no matter how smallish it might be. It looks to me like plenty of the people who like what's on the radio just listen to the radio and don't need any of us to tell them which bits of it are good, thank you very much. If you want to claim the great actual-music-listener masses as your audience, it's not enough just to talk about what they like -- there's the additional challenge of, wahey, empathy, of talking to them about what they like and why, and not just the same old crit-speak circles you're railing against. Otherwise you sit around trying to hoist the masses up on your shoulders when it would be so much better the other way around.

(i am drunk right now, can you tell? i bet this will make no sense in the morning, but at the moment I am on a MISSION!)

Like kogan sez, bring teena marie into the academy, bring discussion of her in, and bring her voice in, and tear down the walls so the academy can interpenetrate with all else righteous in the world.

The point is to help things along, to help people care about the things they really would if they just had a nudge, to knock down the critical precepts which hold them back. To overturn the world every week so only the best and most durable things remain intact. If it was too fragile to last, then it didn't deserve to -- history will be our judge and and rhyhtm our sword!

Fun in that rock critic way, I mean. Not, like, fun on a date.

I see it as more, not less specialized -- as evinced by the crowd of readership that FT attracts.

(Nabs you wanna write what people actually like to read!? do you have any idea what mire yr. walking into with that? [sidenote: lad mags actually have great music sections, coz they're so devoid of "image" concerns, or maybe so folded in on themselves w/r/t them. at least they're not afraid of sex] theory: americans have poor reading skills, but great ears coz music is a part of social development for the majority while reading only for the few. Also a deliberate confusion of art and criticism never did nobody no good.)

So if rockcrit was just another set of opinions about music, more trusted or not, it would be WORTHLESS. It plays a role in mediating between individual opinions of music and their relation to the general social climate, by formulating social opinions of music which individuals don't even need to be DIRECTLY engaged in to nonetheless act in relation to. The center defines the peripiary, and right now it defines it as crap -- the struggle in the center for validation of the periphiary is simultaneously the struggle for the periphiary to come to appreciate and define itself.

Pink & Punk come to mind -- she's despised becuz she IS, becuz in culture unlike the rest of the world to declare something revolutionary is as good as it being such, if you can con enough folks into beliving it for the right reasons -- shatter the hopes & dreams of teens and tell them that punk is dead and pink is crap, then they go out and give up. Nurture their dreams, let them cheer pink against the establishment, and they arrive knowing they were part of something and maybe can be again.

Rockcrit is the embodied contestation for societal self-definition.

Most of the people I know don't read lots of music reviews. These are people as different as my friend who likes Interpol, my coworker who likes Norah Jones, and my dad who likes Craig David and Faith Hill. Their reasons for not reading criticism are, I think, the same reasons most people don't read loads of music reviews. Sometimes it's because the reviewers use lots of terms they're unfamiliar with and make references to obscure 70s bands they've never heard. Sometimes it's because the stuff the reviewers say is good bears no resemblance to the stuff they would actually enjoy. Sometimes it's because, without ever thinking very hard about it, they have faith in their own judgments and don't really care what complete strangers think is good or bad. They're not bothered by criticism, and they're not against it -- most of them actively admire it and the knowledge it usually involved -- but they just don't see it as relevant to their experience. In this sense they are as against the concept of "worthy" as you are, only not about music, but about writing about music. The ones who care most tend to wonder why critics can't do a better job of sorting out what's good and explaining why, in ways that "everyone" can understand. This is what my friend said to me about Interpol reviews: "Critics always seem to be writing for other critics, when they should be doing something to actually let the people who would like this record know that it's out there."

I am in favor of rockcrit. I am in favor of esoteric "insider" rockcrit, because I know there are people like us who like to read it, like to talk about it, like to be academic about it. What I am not in favor of is those people waving a big populist flag and claiming to have destroyed the critical insularity just because they wrote about pop records. You've just pointed out where the really tough-going minefield is: not bringing a more democratic array of voices into the rockcrit circle, but finding some way to reach the rockcrit circle out to a more democratic array of readers -- actually finding a way to talk intelligently about the records people listen to and what they mean and actually having more of the people who listen to those records be interested. You're talking about switching who's talking, and switching what they're talking about -- and I think that's terrific, but I'd be slightly more impressed by someone who could do the much more massive job of actually changing who's listening. I'd be impressed by someone who could write something meaningful about Ashanti -- not her hair or her lovelife but her music -- and have that sort of mean something significant to the people who are buying her records. And I say that as one of the most pro-academic I Love The Ivory Tower people up in this whole entire ILX thingummy, as a guy who has never had any sort of problem with people sitting in a corner and analyzing what the people in the center of the room are doing.

To repeat myself boringly once more: you're not down with the plebes; you're up here with us talking about the plebes. And you're doing great work of it, so far as I'm concerned, but that's just not the same thing as talking to them. I'm not even saying you should be talking to them -- I don't think you should necessarily want to, and even if you wanted to I personally have no idea how you'd go about it without writing a lot of slop. But any ideas on how that trick could be accomplished will blow me away a million times more than a pop-content article in crit-speak terms. Because that trick is what will honestly change the stuff you're complaining about.

I'm probably not the best example of what Nabisco is talking about, but more and more over the past year-plus I've been striving to write for that mom-and-dad audience to some degree while still not dumbing it down. I don't always succeed, but I'm getting better at it. I started by trying to learn as much as possible about this stuff--jargon, history, standard critical lines (knowing /= hewing to, incidentally, for any of these). filling my head up w/that stuff for 15 or so years now has clogged it to some degree, and it's shown in my writing, maybe still does. trying to figure out what I genuinely like about something took a long time, and I think I'm pretty good at it now; trying to figure out how to say why I like it without falling into crit-clichespeak is just as time-consuming and maybe rewarding, for me and the reader both. I hope.

But for god's sake VOTE YOUR PLEASURE not your abstract internalized vision of what it SHOULD BE.

Well fuck, maybe that's what 95% of non-DeRogatis crits actually DO (except when they vote for Sleater-Kinney, har har).

Would a lion who could talk have anything to tell us about what it means to be a lion? Isn't a 'reader'/'plebe'/'non-critic' who would be receptive to listening and talking back to a critic -- somebody who gets beyond the above-mentioned authority issues -- already a critic themselves? (They BECOME a critic after making that leap, not from reading Lester Bangs or whatever.)

Everybody is on the EXACT same page.

Had dinner with a friend last night who told me that she and a co-worker had started looking at the individual charts with mine, Franklin Bruno's, and Daphne Carr's, and wondered what this amazing _London Is the Place for Me_ complation they'd never heard of before was all about. We were in fact the only three people who voted for it...

(I still think anyone who likes that Wilco album needs their head examined, though.)

No one has pointed out how OTM this description of the critic's image is. My parents absolutely love music. My father has spent his whole life playing it, recording it, running a club to put on shows, etc., and the only criticism he reads is what I write. It's for these reasons that Nitsuh lists, as well as the fact that criticism moves so fast. For us, we get tired of seeing feature after feature on Wilco (part of what soured my love for YHF), but it's that repetition that makes people take notice. It's pieces in USA Today and the LA Times and the Washington Post that sell records to the audience that by and large lives in a critical vacuum, not the glossy mags. That's where the O Brothers, the Norah Jones' and the Alanis' come from.

And I totally agree with Douglas and James about the elitist and naive tone of Sterling's jihad on rock critics. I understand where Sterling is coming from, but it's just swapping one critical darling for another in an attempt to feel populist, which I find condescending to everyone involved.

Although, at the other extreme, Stacy Meyn's ballot tells me absolutely nothing, because I don't have any context. As a list, it's useless to me, but I bet her explanation of it is very interesting.

So I'm being terribly misread here (my drunken incoherence last night doesn't help really, so i only blame myself) -- The Streets is an album with much more to recommend it than Wilco as far as I'm concerned, whether its populist or not (and mainly its important becuz of its situationing in the current music climate as much as for what it is in itself).

& again you have to distinguish between music journalism and music-crit. Ashanti gets interviews and "behind the scenes" specials while Wilco get music-CRIT. Do you get what I mean by the center defining the periphiary -- everyone KNOWS that there's "real music" and then "pop whatever" -- and this is whether they prefer *either* one. People treat Wilco like they have something important to say, or the Lips, or etc, that they put you in touch with "deeper" emotions or whatever -- treat Ashanti or most pop outside of a few elects brought in (Aaliyah maybe, but not the Neps coz people are like "ooh crazy beats" and leave it at that) like that -- i.e. respect and engage WHY people like that pop -- and allovasudden its considered bogus.

The point is to treat Ashanti with the same attention as Wilco in the crit-zone, to help people understand why and how they're connecting with what they are and how it fits in a broader picture, to transform the individual experience of music, or even the small-social group one back into the larger social experience which generated the music.

To make the music-listening process reflexive (haha rather than "reflex").

& The problem is that A&L sections etc. can go two ways, either reporting on the popworld for an out-of-touch audience as the NY times sometimes does like "oh look what those crazy kids are up to, it has some things to recommend it" or trying to "steer" people to the "good stuff" they should really be listening to -- but out of touch with what people WANT to be listening to. I'd love for A&L sections to give thoughtful writeups of music people listen to, but it hardly ever happens -- moviecrit does far better in this regard.

So what do you do if you want to make rockwrite relevant to people's experiences? You start talking about those experiences, and your experience, and how the music relates, and about music which IS relevant to people's experiences.

I mean my big objection is Nabisco is like "I respect critics who talk about Wilco to foax who don't know about Wilco" and I'm saying "Fuck a Wilco, nobody needs to know about THAT!"

Rockwrite is an institution, and there's no way around that -- to effect a change it has to be gone THROUGH.

And Sterl -- As far as the treatment of Ashanti and Wilco, yeah it's different, but I also think that it reflects how the artists treat themselves (which could be a chicken-egg thing but who really knows). I remember seeing some quote from, I think, Ashanti a while ago asking her why she writes her own songs. What the inspiration is. Her answer was something like, "If you write your own songs you get more of the cut from the publishing royalties." And as a journo or a rockcrit, this is going to heavily influence your piece. Tweedy would answer that question with some sort of literati mindset, while Ashanti's yelling BLING. Journos/Crits are guilty to a large extent in how these things are portrayed, but the artists still have a large say in their image, you know.

Not sure what it means, tho.

it seems to me there cannot NOT be a professional deformation of taste/pleasure/whatever if you write about music for a living: you will tend to require yrself to listen to things you enjoy writing about, rather than things you maybe secretly love much more but can't think of anything to say about (under deadline pressure, if you need a get-out clause there)

i don't actually listen to a vast huge amount of music and never have, though i do listen seriously ? if that's the right word ? to music of extremely different kinds, bcz i'm interested what (difft) ppl mean when they say music works for them (including ppl who don't write reviews for a living): this has always made it a bit awkward, come polling time, and i wasn't going to send a poll in, for this reason, but frank said i had to (!)

(i don't think anti-laziness necessarily means listening to MORE records; maybe it means listening to the records you are listening to better?!! — listening to a record is a LOT of work for me, which is why i never finish anything i promise to write for FT or anywhere else these days)

So your question really is: if people don't really want to read about music, how can we convince them to? And my answer is, A) Why should they WANT to? And B) Well if it acted fundamentally different than it now does, maybe they WOULD. and therefore C) it needs to be transformed.

Your answer as far as I can tell is that rockcrits need to be able to provide better song and dance routines about the same crap. My problem with that is even assuming this is pulled off, then all you'll do is convince more people to listen to the WRONG albums for the WRONG reasons (which is why it'll never work anyway). Unless the nature and subject matter and method in which rockwrite confronts music is changed, "reaching out" can only mean spreading the Wilco virus, and all yr. doing is looking for new Typhoid Marys.

It's the same argument either way!

I agree with your second graf, though.

Problem is (which you hint at), these are the questions that artists ALWAYS get and thus have pat answers for, and when a journo asks something outside of that, one-word or indecipherable answers are often returned. It's a vicious cycle.

(with about 75% of interviews I've done, with artists both indie and popular, I've been told by the artist afterward, "It was nice to actually talk about our music for a change!" So what the fuck are other people asking???)

MTV wins.

(i.e. the point of music crit for me is to engage with what ppl like about music and why -- i don't find the ppl who like wilco or their reasons A) interesting or B) important [nb all ILXers excepted, okay? just because.] but I think the converse about MTV and many other things.)

The problem with arguing "its the same thing" about all argts. which prefer one form of music to another is then you become a do-nothing relativist. & anyway I'm not saying the crit-apparatus needs to TRASH wilco et al. just to put them in their place.

[also indecipherable answers are the BEST]

vs

5: Better writing abt music for ppl who generally enjoy reading abt kinds of music that get written abt = current loop at best

1-4 = exact history of rockcrit 1965-90-ish
5 = history of rockcrit since the mid-90s maybe (except the sameness of the loop's has lopped off the "better" bit maybe)

The mere assertion that people in the same profession (rockcrits) are anchored by groupthink is intellectually lazy. Rather, it should be assumed that people who operate from a similar cultural constraint would have like tastes or similar standards/expectations of quality. The fact that the voting is not more closely aligned should actually come as a bit of a suprise.

I am always suspicious of critics getting called lazy just because their preferences or good reviews go to more popuar acts. I am a nobody writer and I get literally hundreds of CDs sent to me every year without even requesting them. Beyond that there are the piles that I have to request and the piles that I buy. There are tens of thousands of CDs released every year in the United States, so which ones am I supposed to listen to? Which 500 or 200 or 100 or 2500 are deemed appropriate to consider assessing for the P&J? Is there a list to choose from and if so, who makes up that list? If I hear other critics or friends singing the praises of an album must I avoid those albums lest I be branded with a hive mentality or should I seek out a record that has a growing reputation for merit? Oh, but if I do that and so do a lot of other writers, then it's suddenly groupthink.

It may be that a writer is actually lazy because of the choices they made on their ballot, but unless standards of quality are defined it's a very difficult argument to make.

You keep pretending like I'm saying people should talk about Wilco records. I HAVE NOT FUCKING SAID THIS. I don't give a shit what the records are that are being talked about, as I've said a million and one times now. My point is that right now rock criticism consists of a lot of people telling Wilco fans what Wilco means; you've taken the step of telling the same Wilco fans what Ashanti means, but maybe you should think about what it would take to start telling Ashanti fans what Ashanti means. I know you're smarter than me, Sterling, so this cannot possibly be so hard to follow.

A genuinely exploratory Christgau piece on Ashanti (or Billboard Star X) would be just as engaging as a genuinely exploratory Sterling Clover piece on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; on some level, you're failing by your own criteria here.

I made the (largely warranted) assumption that "which records insiders are currently talking about" would mean Wilco et al. and probably not Ashanti or Trina or etc.

(No one wants to talk about Nivea. I think I've started two threads on "Don't Mess With My Man" and no one replied!)

nivea - dont mess with my man

Also: Kalefa Sanneh! Yes! Upthread where Amateurist said "What about the NYT people" and I said "yeah yeah" I was thinking of him but couldn't remember his name. If I'm remembering his stuff right it definitely shows that he knows his insider-crit stuff but just manages to crop it all out and talk about what's actually relevant to the reader. (A lot of the NYT stuff is interesting because you can read it as criticism or just as "news" -- a person who would never want to hear anything on DFA could read that DFA article and just be interested to know what's going on in town.)

Sanneh is a great writer. Writes plainly in an easy to read way. He's fantastic.

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0217/hoard.php

As that Wilco pieces linked to while I was writing this shows, everything I've said above is a bit of an overgeneralization.

Also I said it would "impress" me, because it sounds really hard. Basically I think it'd be an awfully cool thing to do, but I'm not about to criticize anyone for not doing it. I love academia with all my heart; that won't stop me from being excited by anyone who can make it relevant without selling it out.

I suppose the situation is a mirror of what happens in the academy proper, where cultural studies professors imagine they are being populist by choosing to focus on popular culture, when the very nature of their discourse excludes everyone but the same people that were paying attention when they were writing about other things. Its the heroicizing of this activity as "subversive" or, alternately, populist (though it's the first word that gets bandied about academia more than the second) that bugs me, certainly.

And I agree that I can enjoy writing that is academic (even that writing which is academic despite protestations to the contrary) and more populist in nature. I would say that I am more impressed with the latter, when done well. For example I am much more impressed with David Bordwell than Slavoj Zizek (sp?). And furthermore, I would argue--and I think here is where we perhaps differ--that the quality of writing deteriorates because of the gulf between the pretenses of faux-populist (or to be more generous, "failed populist") writing and their actual use-value.

(P.S. Re. Mato's point that the deadline pressures of journalism have much to do with lousy or imprecise or super-mentalist writing, I would like to say that any points I have failed to make clear can be blamed entirely on the pressure of posting these comments between work tasks -- and have nothing to do with faulty thinking or even a modicum of doubt about my own preferences and abilities, um yeah.)

Okay Ams you don't like "heroicizing" this activity as "subversive" or "populist" but how about simply vitally necessary?

Jess stop thwarting ILM's post-Cartesian ambition.

So I don't want to call that "faux-populist" or anything -- it's a great advance. But then there's this thing beyond that ... which I've probably already killed this thread repeating.

Ahem - "comprised of" ? No such phrase. You mean COMPOSED OF, or COMPRISING.

Bring up this pedantic peeve only because many aspiring young music critics are likely see this thread and then go and try this stuff at home.

So what I'm talking about (in 3 minutes or less) is writing which: addresses popular culture, *narrowly* defined; intersperses language appropriated from said culture into mostly mentalist-style language (mentalist for my purposes = academic without being attached to the academy or with all the careerist implications of "academic"); takes a tone implying they are breaking down canons, identifying and cursing and bringing down pockets of elite thinking; imagines it has bettered its neighbors by doing so.

I don't see at all what "formal" aspects of criticism you think keep it limited to insiders.

As for the "tools" I use I think they're mainly extra-musical and social and very accessible.

[Am: yeah I agree that things which spend all their time trumpeting how "revolutionary" they are like those cultstud departments are often k-weak on the followthrough. which is partially my point to you -- even if you don't valorize what yr doing every other sentence, isn't it necessary to enage with popcult anyway? maybe better than you're doing it, mind you.]

But that's not a revolution: that's just good record-keeping. (Cross-posting: Sterling agrees about the revolution!)

So Sterling, you don't think rock-crit is inaccessible. I'm curious as to how, since the bulk of people I know who I've discussed music criticism with seem to disagree with you. This includes people who know much more about music than the average person. And if it's not inaccessible or formal, then why again is it such a "minefield" to open its doors a bit more to attract the readership of such interested but usually offput folks?

Oh yr talking about this: Nabs you wanna write what people actually like to read!? do you have any idea what mire yr. walking into with that?

It was a joke about american literacy mainly, i.e.:

You want rockcrit to read like this!?

1. 2ND CHANCE, by James Patterson with Andrew Gross
2. THE SUMMONS, by John Grisham
3. THE HOURS, by Michael Cunningham
4. THE STONE MONKEY, by Jeffery Deaver
5. TRULY MADLY MANHATTAN, by Nora Roberts

And also it was a sad comment on the literacy level of America: 8-9th grade reading comprehension.

Top Selling Albums (Placement in Poll)

1. The Eminem Show-Eminem (8)
2. Nellyville-Nelly (114)
3. Let Go-Avril Lavigne (134)
4. Home-Dixie Chicks (42)
5. "8 Mile" Soundtrack-Various Artists (225)
6. M!ssundaztood-Pink (47)
7. Ashanti-Ashanti (1675)
8. Drive-Alan Jackson (317)
9. "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack-Various (19) *2001
10. Up-Shania Twain (127)

Top Grossing Films (Placement in Poll)

1. "Spider-Man" (48)
2. "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones" (136)
3. "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" (didn't place)
4. "Signs" (didn't place)
5. "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" (didn't place)
6. "Austin Powers in Goldmember" (didn't place)
7. "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" (29)
8. "Men in Black 2" (didn't place)
9. "Ice Age" (didn't place)
10. "Scooby-Doo" (didn't place)

As you can see, fully 7 of the 10 top-grossing films of 2002 didn't even place in the film critics poll. Now, admittedly the P&J list is much longer, but even if we cut it off at 143, which is the lowest ranking published on the film list, we still see that only 3 of the top 10 selling albums didn't fall at that point or higher on the P&J. So clearly, the P&J was much kinder to the popular albums than the film critics poll was to the popular films.

So your question really is: if people don't really want to read about music, how can we convince them to? And my answer is, A) Why should they WANT to? And B) Well if it acted fundamentally different than it now does, maybe they WOULD. and therefore C) it needs to be transformed.

Now you're back to saying they're illiterate anyway so who gives a fuck? No no no: I am not asking you to explain Zorn to housewives. I am saying that there are certain types of critics who do a better job than others of writing intelligent non-fluff criticism that's relevant and accessible to people other than the usual circle of review-readers. And these people often impress me. And even when all they're doing is hooking some middle-aged 12-cd strawman up with the Wilco record he's going to love for reasons you don't approve of, they're sort of doing more for the plebes than you seem to think is even possible.

(sorry there n., i just thought maybe you needed some encouragement after our tiff)

Say it with me slowly... It Was A Joke. And also understand I am making no argument for indecipherable crit. I am all for ALL writing being clear, and for actively seeking to reach out. You say the transformation has to come, I guess, in writing style (but I don't see style as the big problem). I say it has to come in writing subject matter and manner of approach.

And time and again you flat-out-refuse to explain just what you think makes most music-crit inaccessable to most people.

And these people often impress me. And even when all they're doing is hooking some middle-aged 12-cd strawman up with the Wilco record he's going to love for reasons you don't approve of, they're sort of doing more for the plebes than you seem to think is even possible.

Belive me hooking up 90% of the population with a Wilco record does them no favor.

Round and round again: so per your current tack, do you really think your Voice articles reach out more to a wider portion of that publication's readership than a by-numbers Wilco review would? Explain how, for example, your Madonna piece might have accomplished this.

Also some of your ground-reclaiming is really bugging me: why are you saying I'm avoiding the question of why rock criticism is inaccessible? I was the one who brought it up, and I wrote like ten really overlong paragraphs on why I think this: because it's what every single person I know who doesn't read music reviews tells me. To my face, and often at length.

But instead your position's really unreadable: at present you're saying: "(a) I think my criticism is accessible and expansive, and also (b) hahaha it's not like book reviews cater to the average reader either!"

(2) I've never heard Wilco. I'm not proud of this, but hearing them isn't high priority. I assume they couldn't afford to swamp the Voice with promos; otherwise, Chuck would've sent me one. (I'm totally passive-aggressive when it comes to promos: I want other people to give me things and to take care of me but I don't want to ask or to be beholden.)

(3) I get the impression that even the people who like Wilco don't care about them.

(4) Wilco embarrasses us. This is because we see Wilco as of us, from us; they represent us both in the parliamentary sense (supposedly act out our interests in the public sphere; speak for us) and the pictorial. They resemble us. And we don't like what we see.

(5) For the first time ever, the Voice put the singles winner on its cover and kept the albums winner off. Of course, the singles winner got more votes than the albums winner, which is rare but not unprecedented.

(6) But we're acting here as if Wilco and not Missy represents rockcrit. See point 4. (Hey, Missy MUST represent something in us, right? We voted for her.)

(7) My low P&J stats are seen as triumphant (triumphant? that I couldn't convince my colleagues of the value of Celine, Paulina, and the Gore Gores?) not really because they indicate independence of mind but because they distance me from something that sucks.

(8) So isn't the issue here not that we as voters are conformists but that we as a social group produce BAD MUSIC? I'll get to Nabitsuh Cloverino in another post, but I take Sterling's argument to have nothing to do one way or the other with elitism or populism but rather that, since the plebes LIKE BETTER MUSIC, we need them to storm our bulwarks so that we will write better and will make better music ourselves.

Because people have HEARD the madonna single and maybe it made them think think "this is wild, all this weird shit is going on" and they formed some OPINION about the single and so would want to READ about the madonna single and see how their opinion stacked up to that of others, and maybe because it cast new light on the single for them it would provoke them to agree or disagree, and then maybe think "hey, i got something out of that experience, maybe I want to read more about music". DUH

Okay, point by point through your explanation y3 quoted next, to try and put this to rest.

Sometimes it's because the reviewers use lots of terms they're unfamiliar with and make references to obscure 70s bands they've never heard.

Right the Xgau problem, but hardly a common one I think. Unless your argument is "music critics use too many big words" and THEN who's being condescending.

Sometimes it's because the stuff the reviewers say is good bears no resemblance to the stuff they would actually enjoy.

Which is MY gripe as I keep saying.

Sometimes it's because, without ever thinking very hard about it, they have faith in their own judgments and don't really care what complete strangers think is good or bad.

Which is exactly the problem with reviewers who just throw out opinions instead of capturing the sound and social fabric of the music. And comes from a sense that critical taste is out of touch with theirs -- they'd trust a friend with similar tastes surely (i mean no man is an island) -- but they don't trust what they see as a crit-establishment with vastly dissimilar tastes.

They're not bothered by criticism, and they're not against it -- most of them actively admire it and the knowledge it usually involved -- but they just don't see it as relevant to their experience.

So the task is then to make it relevant to their experience -- my madonna review talked about Iraq -- surely THAT's relevant. My 3LW review talked about growing up -- surely THAT's relevant. My Ja Rule review talked about perceptions of race, and hearing a single over and over without noticing it -- surely THAT's relevant.

But instead your position's really unreadable: at present you're saying: "(a) I think my criticism is accessible and
expansive, and also (b) hahaha it's not like book reviews cater to the average reader either!"

Surely Nabisco you realize that books and music are entirely different things with different social functions and not just "types of art"? Music is a part of social identity formation in a way that books aren't to most people. Only real geeks walk around wearing McSweeney's t-shirts, but plenty of people will have band t-shirts. People listen to music to help them through all sorts of emotional hoo-hah but read paperbacks mainly for a thrill-ride. In modern pop the texture is half the thrill, but in paperbacks its just a carrier mechanism. If I'd posted the "self-help" portion of the NYT bestseller list it would be a while different story.

The running gag is that most of those authors ARE awful writers if good at plot and suspense (which is something of a contradiction with most popular pop being good technically, but like I said different mediums evolved for different uses and with different criteria) and thus that to ask critics to "write how people like" can imply (if not otherwise specified) that they learn to write poorly. That's it, and you keep seizing on it like its more than an offhand joke. I wouldn't expect any critic to stick up for Grisham's prose style any more than I'd defend Snoop Dogg's morals.

I mean, I guess what I'd like to see here -- not that I expect this any more than you expect Wilco's fans to go "oh wait he's right this record sucks" -- is for you to say: "(a) I think it's important for criticism to be about the music most people like, but (b) I don't think it's necessary for "most people" to actually read the criticism, and thus (c) yeah I guess I'm making the critical case for the stuff they like but I shouldn't be tooting my horn all that much."

Look I agree with all that, and if yr. only gripe was that I used too many exclamation points while explaining it, you're being a dick. The only amendment I would make is on point (b) -- to again reassert that what ideas dominate the crit-establishment have a reach and power far beyond that crit-establishment, and also to reassert that the more criticism engages what people actually listen to, the more people WILL read it (though I doubt ever "most people").

If ILM were the French Revolution]

(So I write some interesting comments and everyone goes home!)

Anyhow, just to complicate things further (and to take all the burden off of Wilco, who are apparently worse than baby sodomizers), some other albums that won P&J despite "nobody listening to them" - i.e. unspectacular sales in P&J's native USA:

1977: Never Mind the Bollocks...
1978: This Year's Model
1979: Squeezing Out Sparks
1980: London Calling
1981: Sandinista! (with X's Wild Gift at #2 no less)
1982: Imperial Bedroom (Thriller didn't catch on with 'em until the following year)
1989: 3 Feet High and Rising
1993: Exile in Guyville
1995: To Bring You My Love
1998: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
2001: Is This It

Do what you will with those facts.

(also remember that YHF actually had a fairly high chart debut; also keep in mind the Soundscan modus operandi of tallying units shipped, not sold -- gotta keep a steady rotation of Norah Jones CDs to keep the 10-deep row of 4 at the front of the store perpetually filled, which means push out the "college kid" stuff)

2000: Stankonia

but honestly somebody must have smacked you, anthony, and half of ilm with a stupid stick because again, I never said that "winning pazz & jop = crap" or even implied it.

Might be time for a thread revival:

Common ILM Misconceptions: AKA shut up you stupid fuckers

And I even already SAID that I never said that, on the other thread:

I never said "if people don't like you, you suck". Like I've said over and over the only problem is that the rock-crit establishment isn't engaging people because obv. the rock-crit establishment has tastes that run to wilco and most people don't. And that something needs to change there

Wilco albums don't sell=People's tastes don't run towards Wilco=critics champion stuff that doesn't sell=FUK ROK CRITICS, right? Enh. Can you at least understand how I came to that conclusion?

OK, theory: people who see a lot of films prefer "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" over "Kangaroo Jack" and literary enthusiasts value Paul Auster over John Grisham and music critics like Wilco more than Creed. You know what the crucial factor here might be? Experience. From where I sit there seems to be a connection between the amount of time one dedicates to ingesting art/performance and the likelihood that their tastes will diverge from the charts; most people hardly get to listen to 50 CDs in a year, much less pick 50 favorites, and eventually a disconnect arises where both camps have their own canons; the die-hards like arty stuff and the casual people like Hollywood/Billboard/Barnes & Noble and that's why neither camp will agree on whether Kurosawa/the Velvet Underground/Dan Clowes or Spielberg/the Doors/For Better or For Worse is worth more effort.

Now the bad news: unless you want a music magazine staffed by a bunch of people who can really write but only listen to music casually, there will always be esoteric tendencies (relative to mainstream thought) in critical circles. And should we replace all the "yay for Wilco" writers with "it's not on the radio so who gives a shit" people when all you're doing is replacing one set of narrow interests with another?

I agree. I think this issue is more about a difference in the overall (ulp) aesthetic between artists who get consensus raves and artists who dominate the charts than it is about the sales gap between them. After all, as some have already pointed out, where sales are concerned, the two categories bleed into each other more often than we admit - Wilco did reasonably well on the Billboard 200 whereas Tweet and say, Trina did not.

So, all that about populism and plebes aside (and really, has any artist been dissected by the rock crit brigade more often than Eminem?), I'm reading Sterling's complaint as general frustration with critics for dismissing music that sounds 'popular' regardless of whether it actually is or not. The inverse would of course be true for music that sounds important...

Nabitsuh is very modestly and sensibly expressing admiration for critics who write about Teena and Trina in ways that speak not just to the prime audience for rock criticism but also to the Teenas and the Trinas and the Aunt Mildreds and the guy in the next cubicle etc. Now I've decided to read into this the wish that critics would storm the audience and therefore make it complementary to Sterling's project; Sterling wants us to open rock criticism to Teena and Trina, to bring them to us. Nitsuh wants to speak to Teena and Trina, to bring ourselves to them. But what makes me uneasy reading Nabitsuh here is that I don't feel that what he's really suggesting is that we bring ourselves to the Teenas and Trinas and Mildreds and co-workers. And I'll leave it at that for now, and add that I know that you expressed many other ideas upthread.

And I'll add one thought: I don't assume that if I wrote better and more clearly that more readers would like me. Maybe fewer would.

And a suggestion: Look for the strengths in the other guy's argument, rather than pouncing on weaknesses and discovering contradictions.

Nate sez: . From where I sit there seems to be a connection between the amount of time one dedicates to ingesting art/performance and the likelihood that their tastes will diverge from the charts;

Which I would like to point out is EMPIRICALLY UNTRUE as a general rule (cf. the entirety of 1960-1970 maybe) although it is perhaps true today. However the direction & reason of that causality are highly suspect. Nate's ultimate direction since he's now too savy to dis pop outright is to stand aside and say "music critics should be informed and talk about everything ever and if that's not possible, then the status quo is as good as anything else." which is a perscription for throwing hands in the air and going home, or rather a tricky rhetorical move to justify the current state of affairs by implication.

And this is partially why I can't get to where Kogan thinks this thread could go -- because instead of exploring this stuff I get hit with the "fake-populist" stick and get all these "i triumph! end of discussion!" sort of responses which are rhetorically dishonest and rather frustrating.

I've been pressing Nabisco so much on why he thinks current rock-crit is inaccessible for precisely this reason -- what does it NEED to do to reach a new audience that it doesn't do.

Okay more later.

These words taste funny. How'd they get in my mouth, anyways? I didn't say they SHOULD all be Christgau-ian walking encyclopedias, I merely theorized that the prevalence of (cough) "geek" types in criticism is the reason WHY things are making you sad, and the fact of the matter is it's in the nature of criticism to spur this sort of approach. I wasn't all "YES, THIS IS HOW CRIT SHOULD BE".

My stance on how it should be, actually, is this: I prefer it when critics have an evenhanded view of how both popular and esoteric music function, as opposed to the Popjustice/Pitchfork warring faction bullshit (or the Nate Patrin ca. late 2001-early 2002 bullshit). Which is WHAT WE GOT IN P&J: triumph of college rock albums and pop/hip-hop singles (as well as vice versa in lesser numbers). Back to the topic of the conformist stats: have you heard of ANY of the top 40 critics? I haven't, save Keith Phipps.

Footnote:
I get hit with the "fake-populist" stick? Does that even conform to the definition laid out in but honestly somebody must have smacked you, anthony, and half of ilm with a stupid stick?

But somewhere on this thread (at the first post, perhaps) poking at each other's ideas began to feel like poking at each other's character, and so ideas were defended and attacked rather than explored and played with.

I recommend that future posts to this thread begin with the statement, "In Frank's very interesting post above, he says..."

I thought, a part of what natritsuh was saying that what he wants is that we bring the Teenas and Trinas to themselves. (Rather than us to them, it would be us as them [where us as them = us writing FOR them, UNDERSTANDING them. I don't put chimeric capital letters in my square bracket asides] to them.)

"4) Wilco embarrasses us. This is because we see Wilco as of us, from us; they represent us both in the parliamentary sense (supposedly act out our interests in the public sphere; speak for us) and the pictorial. They resemble us. And we don't like what we see."

The self loathing of this statement astounds me.

You don't like Wilco because of the reflection you see of yourself? You're embarrassed to see yourself in Wilco? Why?

It's just so predictable that a group of critics would be "embarrassed" by Wilco.

My main beef from Frank's posting is that it's not at all clear why he's so embarrassed with what he sees--it's just a glib observatory statement and not at all descriptive, forcing us to conjure what on earth would cause some form of embarrassment by YHF finishing #1 in the P&J.

"Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot capped our Top 100 Editors' Picks of 2002, while Norah Jones's alluring Come Away with Me was our customers' favorite of the year."

Oh christ.

(killed by everyone)
(dies)

The dog ate my homework.

Don (as opposed to Don) seems to be under the impression that I don't like Wilco. In fact, I have never met Mr. Wilco, and I so far have nothing against him or any member of his band.

I (as opposed to me) seem to be under the impression that there are rock critics who are unhappy with Wilco's winning the Pazz & Jop albums poll, that this victory is seen as reflecting so badly on rock criticism that it has provoked an anguished and vituperative conversation on this thread about how to change rock criticism, and that one observer has even gone so far as to see the band as sharing (and expressing) the impotence of "almost all our finishers and the vast majority of our respondents." That particular observer followed on with the observation that the poll "sucks." You can look it up. My explanation for "our" behavior may be all wrong, but so far it looks pretty good. But of course I'd like various Dons, Mandarins, Sterlings, Nabiscos, etc. to offer their own analyses, which was one reason I made those comments.

You now have my permission to begin your posts with "In Frank's very boring post above" or with "In Frank's very Sunset Strippy post above" or with anything you want. The purpose of my rhetorical gambit was to get Sterl and Nabs to turn their heat off of each other and onto me instead. But now they've gone away. Sob!

This is one of the things Nabritsatuh is saying, but I don't think he understands the implications. He seems to believe - quite naively, in my opinion - that if we do this well, the readers (incl. the Teenas and Trinas and members of their prime audience) will like it, and will like rock criticism. Whereas my experience is (1) that Frank as Teena/Trina is no longer permitted in the commercial rock press (if it ever was, and if Frank or anyone in rock criticism was ever capable of doing it), and (2) that Frank "understanding them" means Frank's (not Teena's or Trina's) understanding of them, which they and their prime audience may very well dislike extremely. Teena did.

Nabs and Sterl (should you ever return to the thread), I'm going to give an extreme example: Suppose the subject matter were not Teena Marie but B*cky L*cas. What we're recommending is that I put some B*cky in my prose - not just write about her but to some extent write like her to convey her to the reader while also conveying my understanding of her to her and to the general reader, to the guy in the next cubicle, etc. This to me raises a lot of issues.

(For those who have not experienced it, here is some typical B*cky prose: "You just made yourself look like the biggest cunt on net space, I read your post and thought 'Where the fuck does this idiot make his point?' I am talking about the 'epic sega' You posted on here about blah blah blah; complete and utter trash." I'm not sure this is Times Arts and Leisure material, though Blender on the other hand...)

hmmm i'm not sure that gramsci is that obscure! i was surprised to hear that he was undergoing a resurgence though; i never knew he had fallen off...

Sterling, are you related to Joshua?

Apologies to Frank Kogan for not responding to your fine arguments/statements/threads/whatever. But you were talking about "music" or "criticism" or some shit like that. Wanker.

As for whether this argument has been a personal one, it was, I was hoping explicitly on my part: I was really just offput by what I thought of as Sterling championing something in a way that seemed just sort of wrong to me. So Frank, I think you summarized what I've been saying pretty well, except I honestly wasn't advocating that anyone "bring criticism to the people" -- just sort of asking if it could be done, and implying that maybe it's the greater, harder bit of part Sterling was celebrating. And I found this an interesting idea because the critics that are closest to doing it are sort of the same critics a crowd like this one would be most appalled by.

Can I mention another semi-related question, one that might seem pointed but which I earnestly mean as a question? One of the rationales offered here for writing criticism about pop has been that criticism, as a project, should talk about the music people actually listen to. Great point, and I agree. Another reason people give for writing about pop is that they just like it, and that it contains just as much substantial content as the stuff critics like. These tend to get brought out when more critically-minded person says, e.g., "pop music isn't innovative, etc." -- people will respond that it, well, is. I agree with this too. And I don't think the two points are at all mutually exclusive; the latter argues that pop music is just as critically value-judgment "good," and the former argues that so long as it is (and even sort of if it isn't), then it should be talked about. I'm interested in which of these responses gets used when. For example, instead of talking about what the public listens to, Sterling could emphasize that critics should be talking about Artist X because they're just better, for all the high-minded critical reasons critics should care about. This is an honest question with no agenda behind it to argue any particular thing.

(Also so long as I'm back here it's occurred to me that film critics get more leeway than any other art critics I can think of to address popular audiences and still have high-minded "critical" credibility. I said I don't know how music criticism could engage the masses, but when I try to imagine it the first thing to mind is some music version of Ebert and Roeper who come on TV for a half-hour and offer "serious" opinions about which albums they like. Actually, I remember VH1 sort of trying to do this once: during this late-night show they'd go over some new releases in a "critical" way, meaning they'd actually -- on TV! -- say "yeah, this album isn't very good." I'm not saying it was great criticism, or anything, but I think it's the only time I've ever seen someone on TV say something critical about a record.)

(I've just realized my problem with liking that idea: people being more engaged with politics would be a lot cooler. Nevermind, people, don't watch Christgau and Meltzer at the Record Store when McLaughlin is on.)

They're not the world's greatest critics, to be sure, but few are, and nobody else does anything like what they do. Even when I disagree, I like listening to two guys talk about rock.

Nabs has a good question here I think, and I'll try to answer because this gets at some of the heart of this, becuz this is a long-running frission between myself and virtually everyone else on ILX. My criteria for good albums is that they are good at what they do, and that what they do matters. I don't think there's any objective criteria to judge music on timelessly that are worthwhile (chops, complexity, etc.) but its not all solopsistic "i like it" either -- there's a social accumulation of signifiers (lyrical, melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, sonic, otherwise) which determine how we approach music.

Like nearly everyone could agree that a piece of music like the one I'm listening to now is sad (Ari Sleepy Too, from John Cale's "Dance Music") because it has echoey vocal samples and weepy violin (minor key glissandos) and is somewhat slow and has delicate (soft decresc. in dropping rhythm) keybord flourishes and SOME I'm sure is biological, but mainly these bits all signify something like "sad" although more nuanced and complex because it's a particular kind of sad, and other signifiers (like being about Nico, the accent in her vocal samples) give it further specificity. Later on the album there's a song using very middle-eastern harmonics and bends over a way echoed-out dubby backbeat. There's obviously something invoking distance and alienation and a sort of drugged-out opiate bliss, probably heroin. But this is even more evidently reliant on recent social definitions of musical signifiers -- completely reliant on a set of associations and constructs of orientalism. [& no I'm not calling John Cale a racist, even a closet one].

And the production of this and other songs (more popular & well known ones too most certainly) went on to influence how we'd view the signifiers they used in the future (including us in the future listening to albums produced even further in the past) and how other artists would use those signifiers.

What am I getting at here? That thus when I pick albums I'm picking those who feel vital to that process of social definition and change, or feel like vital commentaries on that process or feel like they're using those signifiers to make vital commentary on society more broadly: albums which tell me something about the world and where its going (or has been). Which is I think a more nuanced way of looking for what most people look for in music -- when I talk about pop songs with friends (Em for example), they mainly don't talk about the beat or production, or even the flow, but whether they'd like him as a person, or if its good because he's such a jerk that its funny, or if he really hates gay people or not. And okay Em is an extreme example, but the same conversations come from Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style" or etc.

And depending on what stand they take, they say something about themselves as much as anything else. But without music critics (who even if they don't read them themselves, are a key componant of socializing attitude towards music) they're not defining themselves beyond an immediate circle of friends. Good criticism I think should help in making people aware of the social process which they're part of without preaching to them, because when people gain distance and awareness from their tastes, they gain a new awareness of self. Not to praise or bury Eminem, but to come to terms with him and sort him out, and maybe to mock him as we mock all our stars to bring them back to human size.

So critics need to know and understand what people listen to and why, and try to devote thought to sorting through the same issues everyone else does and help lay out how they sorted through and what's at stake. The irony of Nabisco's continued Gramsci refs (& Mary I think he's back in vogue a bit coz of the Hardt & Negri book but I don't think a vast portion of the Voice readership knows anything about him, or maybe they've at most heard the name: Pat Buchannan on the other hand thinks Gramscian thought is behind the entire "PC Academy" -- and sadly Pat can sling Gramsci better than most of the academy, i think) is that this has a great deal in common with Gramsci's idea of the nature and role of intellectuals.

The P&J results were a jumping off point, but I'm obviously not basing this all on a fluke Wilco win because otherwise I'd have to argue that an otherwise fine critical establishment who could vote for Stankonia etc. just decided to throw its critical chops in the air one year. My problem is that I think which albums people choose sez loads about how they evaluate what makes a "good" album sez loads about how they think about criticism. And that's where my real gripe is -- with a critical establishment that seems blind to its own role, and when these issues are raised prefers to just throw up its hands and say "I just direct people to the good music, man". And thus my gripe with Nabisco's proposal: "I direct MORE people to the good music, man." And my antipathy to Nabsico's apparent (maybe I mis/over-read) negative correlation between saying complicated things about music and talking about music with "the people".

This also doesn't mean that I think popular opinion is always right -- but if you wanna reach the people who listen to Ballad of the Green Berets you gotta talk about the Vietnam War, y'know? And maybe a review of Ballad of the Green Berets would have been as good a place to do this as any -- but then you'd need to talk about what the music was, and why they liked it, and what it represented, and then convince 'em that its powerful represntation was of something that there was good reason for 'em to find reprehensible (i.e. end up talking about the Vietnam War). [Ironically Kogan did something very similar to this for Toby Keith, tho his audience probably needed more convincing to by the album than to oppose its sentiments -- hence my complaint about the voice music section being trapped in the voice]

This is really my ongoing concern, hence questions like "Why Are Music Critics Afraid to Write About Love?"

And in writing this I've realized that something went completely backwards when I said Frank summarized my point well: when I expressed admiration for critics who seem to talk to lots of people an element of that was the complete opposite of "bring criticism to the people" -- it was "some people don't really want 'Criticism' and these guys are admirably polite in terms of giving them the kind they do want (e.g. information about this David Gray guy they might like, and why)." Those two impulses, combined, work out to something like "meet people halfway -- give them what they want, show them what you want, hash out something containing both." Hence the reference to film critics: Ebert can totally say "your kids will love this movie about a cartoon badger" or "this Tom Green movie is funnier than that other one," but then he can also put on his academic's hat and say "oh I think this particular art film is really fantastic." And voila, that particular brand of film criticism totally doesn't have that huge gap between critical opinion and the way films are consumed by the public -- which is to say that plenty of "high-minded" insider "serious" folks can still take Ebert's opinions seriously, plus Mr. and Mrs. Average Moviegoer can get a lot out of it, too. I can't think of anyone who occupies that position in music, and my earlier admiration was for anyone who could get close to it. Opening the door is great, but paving the front walk is helpful as well, etc.

(NB my references to the Gramsci thing were born of the fact that I don't know anything about Gramsci and I even work for an academic publisher. Hardly anyone I know knows anything about Gramsci, though they do discuss Ebert's takes on various films, and seeing his name in the first graph of a piece about Ja Rule would likely make them say "ehh, over my head" and flip the page. That's all I meant.)

Not every critic has to have some agenda, man. It's okay to just think that a record is good without having to SAY SOMETHING IMPORTANT ABOUT THE WORLD.

Nabisco's acknowledgment that writing about Gramsci in a Ja Rule review will make the overlapping venn diagram larger is v. important - this stuff works both ways, and while it's correct to say that writing style can be alienating, so can writing content, and both can also be intriguing if the reader has a way in (by identifying with the content or the style). It's not just about deigning to consider Ja Rule on high-critical terms, but also about deigning to see critical theory on Ja Rule's terms. That doing so threatens to come off as compromising or condescending says as much, if not more, about our expectations as readers as it does about Sterling's motivations. But expectations can be changed if they're contradicted enough, and it's only our expectation that the worlds of Ja Rule and Gramsci cannot overlap that makes such an overlapping seem unnatural (which is to say: Gramsci himself would very quickly be able to explain why Ja Rule fans aren't likely to recognise his name).

Critics writing critic-like things about Wilco feels a lot like a closed circle: the content and the style both reaffirm the act's apparent separateness from the world of populism. Deliberately writing non-critic-like things about Ja Rule does likewise. Doing either of these things isn't bad inherently, in the same way that being a housewife within a nuclear family isn't bad inherently, but both encourage the existence of social trends and expectations that, if dominant enough, feel like restrictions. Contrarily, writing non-critic-like things about Sonic Youth (eg. Amy Phillips) or critic-like things about Ja Rule (eg. Sterling) topples the binary - but crucially, only if both happen at once. Otherwise you are merely seeing Ja Rule absorbed into the critical hegemony or Sonic Youth (temporarily) excluded from it.

Seeing Wilco win the no. 1 spot can be a bit peturbing because it can look like a signpost for the Ryan Schreiber-isation of music criticism. Of course, it will only do so if you believe in the Ryan Schreiber-isation of music criticism - although Stankonia isn't really evidence to the contrary in my opinion - otherwise it is a meaningless fluke (it should be obv. that Wilco themselves are of little importance to the entire argument). By Schreiber-isation, I mean the assumption that content and discourse are inextricably bound within a moral relationship, a belief in an unspoken "in-house style" that exists not just at Pitchfork or at the Village Voice, but within the hearts and minds of all true, self-respecting critics everywhere.

Nabisco is right to say that changing - or rather, opening up different possibilities for - writing style is just as important as changing content, but it is impossible to see these things as separate. Seeing Ryan Schreiber enthusiastically tackle Ja Rule would only be part of the equation, but it would be an important part, as much as seeing MTV do pop-up videos for Xenaxis.

I agree with everything you've just said, but on some level that argument still assumes shit like the Voice poll is the canonical center of all criticism and thus needs to address all these issues. But there remains such a thing as audience; people who write about Wilco will keep writing about them for as many people as care to read, and the alternative isn't some "storming the barricades" revolution but just writing about what you like and seeing how many people you can get to appreciate that. Quite possibly in different magazines entirely.

I mean, you say "Seeing Wilco win the no. 1 spot can be a bit perturbing because it can look like a signpost for the etc. etc. of music criticism" -- but does the Voice poll even pretend to somehow represent "music criticism" as an endeavor? Are the people at The Source not "critics?" How about the people at Entertainment Weekly? How about the people at Newsweek?

If I extend my definition of "music criticism" out to the "music criticism which is endorsed by the Village Voice" I think I'm still sticking with my argument - calling this Pazz & Jop the worst ever only makes sense in comparison to past Pazz & Jops, presumably drawing on a similar group of people. Surely Christgau's beef is that this very group of people have become, as a conglomerate, more Schreiber-ised as time has gone on, more disconnected from the people at The Source and Entertainment Weekly, whose lack of participation could only be evidence of informal segregation (it's not as if there's any particular reason why they can't participate).

(And I do think that Pazz & Jop presents itself as halfway-definitive, with an increasingly expansive invitation policy and state-of-the-nation responses by Christgau. )

"In other words, why does Sterling want to write about Ja Rule for the Voice and not for the Source?"

Why should there be a necessary nexus between Sterling's listening habits and his writing style? Does the suggestion that he should write for The Source mean that he should write like The Source? Is writing like the Village Voice an implicit acknowledgment of their critical pre-eminence? I agree that it would be great for Sterling to write for The Source if he didn't need to conform to their in-house style, but it's part of the same fight as changing Pazz & Jop I think.

& Also I mean.. The roots in the top ten, you think the source isn't represented? (haha tho em is in there too, so maybe its not).

In the Gotti piece in Rolling Stone I thought his comment about men wanting to hear songs about women commiting themselves to them was really interesting -- a good interview would have explored that more, because that's really true about Murder Inc. stuff, and poking and pressing Gotti on why he thought men wanted that, and maybe what sort of man needs to hear a chick crooning over him to know he's a man and maybe the author thinking about that more too -- that would have been really interesting. And at a certain point, it doesn't go further without more theory coming in, but that doesn't mean that its stepping into theory-world I don't think, but it means that its trying to talk about the same thing, just with a different toolset to ask more precise and rigorous questions.

[In response to yr. next post, who said I didn't want to write for The Source? This is like me saying, "if nabisco wants to broaden crit why does he write for p****?" and I don't "write for the voice" so much as got lucky and got a few freelance pieces in which was very exciting. Also yr. value-neutral refusal to engage gets frustrating. I haven't said "voice type crit is the most important" but you seem to think I have -- so why not explain why other types of crit would be more "important" or even try to get a grasp on what each of us mean by important in this argt. you imagine we're having. It's rhetorically dishonest to say "You're saying this is better than that but really PEOPLE LIKE BOTH" like its some revelation, rather than a starting point for investigating why people like different sorts of things, what roles they fill, and if those are necc. the BEST roles. (Side note: yr. method seems very kuhn-ish to me)]

The ILX Readers Poll 2002 - RECORDS OF THE YEAR

(Tho tom's lists of things like "records which people heroically sacrificed large amounts of points for but got no other votes" is pretty good)

The ILX Readers Poll 2002 - Singles of the Year!

The ILE list, which is way down in the best records thread, is fantastic however:

1. The Streets - OPM
2. Sleater-Kinney: One Beat
3. 2 Many DJ?s: As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2
4. Boom Selection_Issue 01
5. Paulina Rubio ? Border Girl
6. Missy Elliot - Under Construction
7. Golden Boy with Miss Kittin ? Or
8. Mekons ? Oooh!
9. Prefuse 73 - 92 vs 02
10. Sugababes ? Angels With Dirty Faces

1)Would Ja Rule be worth writing about if he wasn't "popular"? Would you personally want to?

2)Did you know Wilco had sold over 55,000 copies in its first week according to soundscan when they won Pazz & Jop (to put that in perspective, 3LW's A Girl Can Mack sold 53,000. not to mention that when an album is popular in college markets you should probably add another 40% in sales from the numerous mom'n'pop stores that don't use soundscan)? Had Wilco sold 200,000 copies in their first week, like Ja Rule did, would you still have a problem with them winning?

3)Would you have felt better if Bruce Springsteen had won Pazz & Jop, seeing as he debuted at no. 1 on the charts? If Shania Twain had? Creed?

4)How would you feel if there were more articles about Ja Rule, but they were negative? Do you feel critics, in order to be populist, should approve of successful albums or do you just want them to discuss them more than unsuccessful groups whether or not they like it?

Sterling: we both live on a planet where more people are making music than just the ones most of the P&J critics tend to talk about. I believe I also live on a planet where more people are writing about music than just the ones voting in the P&J poll. This is why I don't think the critics voting there need to be corrected by the Great Cloverian Revolution.

Of course, I don't recognize all 600+ names on the poll. But from what I can tell, they represent a particular slice of "who writes about music" -- and judging from your talk earlier about opening that group up to underrepresented voices, you agreed with this up until two hours ago. I also think the people reading the thing represent a particular slice of "who reads about music." And this is basically why I'm being "value-neutral" -- because what I've been saying here is that I'm less interested in how the Voice poll turns out than in the greater scope of loads of people writing about music in loads of different ways, and doing loads of different jobs of making that writing work for loads of different audiences. I don't want to privilige the Voice as "critically pre-eminent" any more than you want to privilege Wilco as same.

That's why I've been feeling so misunderstood and wounded here and posting over and over at length: because by your earlier formulation I am "just being a dick" -- I'm explicitly not advocating anything in particular and just taking offense to the tone of those first "up with plebes" posts of yours. In fact I've said over and over that I completely agree with what you're happy about, and just don't like the way you were being happy about it: my argument is best summarized as "yes yes great Sterling but shut up about the plebes, it's unsightly."

I think what any given publication covers is a minor point; I think what any given publication is able to do with regard to its audience is a major one. The only thing I advocate is less plebe-talk and banner-waving and "populism" when it is -- TO ME -- more "populist" to be able to bring something to people in cut-rate nursing homes, whether Wilco wins P&J or not. I'm being value-neutral because I really don't care whether people are liking the Flaming Lips or Zorn or Nivea or Faith Hill or even what they're saying about it: right now I'm interested in how they do that in relation to the particular people they're talking to. That's not so hard to follow either, I don't imagine?

And the other reason I've been so worked up about this argument is this. We're sitting here writing criticism of criticism, aren't we? And I felt like when I applied your mode of criticism of music to your criticism itself -- and found something disconnected in there -- you said it couldn't work that way. I don't see why it can't. I'm all in favor of your sociological approach to what music is being consumed and who's consuming it and what it means to them. I guess I'm just also in favor of thinking the same way about who's writing what and who's reading it and what it's doing for them?

On those grounds, ya'll should BOTH give up.

Well, for me, that's always meant music writing that is a) snobby b) poorly written c) smug beyond all belief and d) desperately trying to be clever.

I just honestly want to close this out on some sort of productive ground, not least because I actually see you around and like you and think you're awfully bright about this stuff. So I'll just say that the reason I've kept restating my position is that none of your responses to it seem, to me, to actually "respond" to it -- it feels to me like I've been stating it and you've just been saying various things that I don't even necessarily disagree with. You've also come at this from a lot of different directions, which has just further calcified my argument -- from what I'm reading, you've stressed in one spot that it doesn't matter if more people read criticism, and in another that it does and that the form of criticism you advocate will accomplish that; you've stressed in one spot that there's a particular closed ring of criticism that needs to be opened up to new voices, but claimed in another that the P&J poll actually represents a broad array of critics and they're all closed off. Neither of these are completely mutually exclusive, but I guess they move around the questions too much for me to figure out what your answers are. So I want to try and clarify:

You began by arguing -- in your "world is ours" post -- for the demolition of a particular reigning form of crit-speak. (Is this correct? Maybe not "complete demolition," obviously, but keeping it from remaining this all-consuming dominant thing?) And I responded that I'd be happy to see it go as well.

But I also wanted to ask a number of questions, mostly about audience. One of them was "What if you destroyed that reigning form of crit-speak but nobody heard?" Another one was "What if the reigning form of crit-speak doesn't really matter, because there are actually millions of people reading about music completely outside of that circle?" And based on those questions, I became hesitant about celebrating the destruction of a particular kind of crit-speak in what's possibly a sort of small portion of the landscape (these bigger questions would loom over the party). As a side-note, I also became uncomfortable with attaching allegations of crit-think to particular records, like the Wilco record -- which is what you and others have sort of done in your disappointment with the P&J results. I'm uncomfortable with this because it replaces one hegemony with another. This is why I want to ignore what a given critic writes about or votes for in the P&J poll, which we don't have to consider "authoritative" if we don't want to: once again, I think a bigger issue is what that critic brings to his or her readers, whoever they are. Since they may want or be brought different things, I don't like the idea of judging how good a job critics are doing without taking them into account.

Those are my questions.

So. I've reread your posts across this thread and I don't see consistent answers to those questions. I ask whether it's a great victory to destroy crit-speak on the "inside" if only the insiders notice -- whether talking about pop raises the greater question of talking to pop: you said at first that it doesn't matter, that "writing what people actually want to read" is like "walking into a mire" -- you even half-joked that people are practically illiterate anyway and it's not like book reviews talk about thrillers (?) -- but then at other points you said talking to new people is important, maybe even essential, and that the sort of criticism you advocate will accomplish that. And I agreed with that last bit: it probably helps, some, and writing to what people want to read is really vexing and difficult, but does any of that really answer the question entirely? (Or stop me from saying that I'd be really impressed by any critic with a radical answer to that question?)

And then that second question: "What if the reigning form of crit-speak doesn't really matter, because there are actually millions of people reading about music completely outside of that circle?" And I guess I just haven't seen your answer to that question -- the only rejoinder I've seen is your contention that the Voice poll represents a random sampling of the nation's critics, and I seriously dispute that. What about all the people reading about music in two-page newsletters about bluegrass, or in YM -- how do they enter this equation? This is why I'm able to agree with 90% of what you say and yet still be bothered -- because those questions aren't fully answered to me, and I think they're important questions, and until they get answered I'll be slightly less heated up about the existence of a prevailing crit-speak and more interested in how a given writer can interface with audience.

(There's a third question I don't know your answer to, either, which is the difference between music and criticism. Here's what you just said about it: "Even if crit was the same of music the analogy doesn't make sense. Because I'm not saying that ppl. shouldn't listen to indie music or that indie music is no good." But I think you're reading me backwards, maybe? You say there's this mass of "middlebrow bland-crit" that you want to "storm" and "transform." This sounds a lot to me like those same middlebrow bland-critics saying there's a mass of "lowbrow bland-pop" that they want to "storm" and "transform." You reject that contention of theirs because you're more interested in the sociological approach to what people listen to and what it means, not what critics decide to declare is "worthy." And on some level I reject your approach to "middlebrow bland-crit" because I'm more interested in the sociological approach to what people read and what they get out of it, not which hegemonies are being attacked or defended, labeled progressive or middlebrow or bland, here. Does that sort of make sense?)

Okay. So. Since I agree with the bulk of what you've said and just nevertheless have these nagging concerns, well ... we can just say we agree but I happen to be a dick and a worrywart about some tangential issues -- that's one option that I'd shake hands on. Or ... or what about those questions, I guess? Maybe I'm just a horrible reader but I don't see your answers to them.

For example here:

More to the point, my experience with the non-specialist music press (i.e. coverage in the NYT, in other daily papers, in tabloid papers, in lad mags, in gal mags, in Entertainment Weekly as far as I know etc.etc.) is that its got much the same ethic.

And earlier here:

Do you get what I mean by the center defining the periphiary -- everyone KNOWS that there's "real music" and then "pop whatever" -- and this is whether they prefer *either* one. People treat Wilco like they have something important to say, or the Lips, or etc, that they put you in touch with "deeper" emotions or whatever -- treat Ashanti or most pop outside of a few elects brought in (Aaliyah maybe, but not the Neps coz people are like "ooh crazy beats" and leave it at that) like that -- i.e. respect and engage WHY people like that pop -- and allovasudden its considered bogus.

What I'm trying to get at I guess is that there's a generally accepted way to approach music which most people accept, no matter what they cover or where they cover it. Like people accept that "artsy" music is to be treated a certain way an "pop" music another way -- and that as long as there's a commonly accepted center then it *is* the center unless something else challenges it or it transforms from within.

So maybe the voice is "critics criticism" (i dunno) but if so it effects how the critics then operate.

Like I'm sure you see the difference between somebody in office talking about the war with Iraq, or the NY Times doing so, and some small zine talking about the same thing. The Times isn't important because of who reads the times, but also because of how those people are also important and how it defines a national set of discourse.

Another way to look at this is hip-hop. Its contested terrain, everyone is arguing over what is "real" -- now if your answer is "the realest thing is doing your own thing" that doesn't solve but compounds the problem, because then you have to decide what your "own thing" is without having a social playing field to place it in and decide what that thing is. This is why people are forced to argue what they think hip-hop should be, and are making such arguments even when they're studiously trying to avoid them.

What I'm getting at here is that in any system (haha think network theory) there are some supernodes and some subnodes, and if you find the right supernodes and operate on them (or create alternate supernodes -- hello cream!) then that's more effective.

And what I'm also getting at is that "hegemony" per se isn't the problem as far as I'm concerned, it's the type of hegemony. And I'm actually quite certain that if criticism began to engage popular music in a different way, it would have a long term positive effect on what people DID listen to, tho I honestly don't have a clue what it would be.

Right, Sterling, okay, I see all of that and think it's mostly true; all of that is why I centrally agree with your project, if I can call it that, to straighten out with that top level of recognized criticism talks about and how it approaches it. What you've just delineated is a way -- to put it over-simply -- of using the credibility of these outlets to reframe the ways people think about what criticism is supposed to do, sorting out the top and letting the rest fall in line. I have additional questions about the "bottom."

You say this particular conception of being a critic is widespread even among non-specialists, which is a valid point. It's a popular conception of what being a critic means because it's traditionally the role critics have assumed in literature, visual art, etc. It's also a powerful conception because it concentrates on the one thing critics can actually be "qualified" to offer readers -- specialized knowledge -- and arranges a critic/audience relationship where those who want specialized knowledge and opinions about music come to capital-C "Critics" to get it. People who want other types of information about music go to sources that aren't so capital-C, and while those sources might be influenced by whatever hegemony reigns among the capital-C guys, they're nonetheless forced to give their particular audiences what they're looking for.

What you want to introduce is a third thing, I think -- a thing different from the prevailing mode of criticism, and a thing different from puff pieces about Amerie's favorite color. It's what I've been calling a "sociological" criticism, so we'll just take that as shorthand. Let's also just provisionally agree for a moment that we want to see this sort of criticism grow. What interests me is that your main approach, here at least, is to call for the top capital-C realm of criticism to convert to this new Cloverian Sociological Criticism -- you do by disapproving of capital-C critics who stick to different paradigms, and by making grand rhetorical calls for a changing of the guard. All of this is a preface to another question I'm interested in your answer to, which is: why is that your way of promoting your form of criticism? (Cause look: it has me, someone who agrees with your project, put off by your approach to it.) Why, put simply, is the right route to knock off whatever percent of the capital-C critics and replace them with Cloverians?

It's in that sense that I worry you might be grabbing at this supposedly "serious" audience and then using them to validate your own project, one they might not even agree with. It allows your project not to have to think about audience very much; in the early stages it just validates itself using the preeminence of the people and publications coming around to it. But don't you wonder if more thinking about audience could make the Cloverian project grow on its own? Couldn't it take over from the capital-C critics not just by pushing them out of their posts, but by actually commanding the attention of different audiences to such a degree that the capital-C critics become just irrelevant? I take your point that these things go together; maybe it's just the particular "audience" of ILM that makes me feel like you're too heavy on the former.

Oh, so in answering those questions there's something to consider: how did the current critical hegemony get there?

altho i guess this thread in its own way proves the utility of occasional manifestos, eh? they get people's hackles up and start discussion over big issues wheras if people go all humble "in my opinion maybe" they sometimes get dismissed or ignored whereas if people get all "you wanna do wha!?" then it generates a need for engagement.

(i think "engagement" is my new favorite word and I don't know why)

(Yeah, fair enough, I think we've got this worked out -- although just maybe sometimes replace "grand rhetorical announcements" with, like, "monitoring other critics and calling them out for writing X or Y or Z," or claiming there's some "responsibility" or "duty" to approach things a certain way, or anything that turns criticism into some centralized endeavor with party lines vying for control. ["You're fighting for the readers, not the papers!"] But obviously we all root, vocally, for what we prefer.)

I do have some responses here, but first I wanted to repeat a story I told over on ILE and have just realized is pretty relevant here.

Tom Frank’s One Market Under God made a very similar argument to the one Sterling’s making here—he made it about business writing, which in a lot of senses we can think of as just “market criticism.” His argument was roughly that throughout the 90s a concept of “market populism” swept the business-writing world and became its reigning paradigm, and that in the end this concept was a shitty one, one that sold people a false bill of goods and generally failed to achieve anything worthwhile. I’m taking this as the generally agreed opinion here regarding current “orthodox” music criticism—in fact I agree with both that and Frank.

At a reading I went to, Frank was talking about this and said something that amounted to “people were given a crap line and they fell for it.” So I asked him what he thought about the people who fell for it, expecting any one of four answers along a spectrum: (a) they were maliciously manipulated by the market-criticism elite; (b) they were led astray by a bad idea that happened to seize the world of market-criticism; (c) they actively participated in going astray, since they were as enamored of “market populism” as the people writing about it; or (d) they were dumb enough to buy and pay for the whole thing themselves.

Frank wouldn’t answer the question: he said something like “I guess the intelligence of the common person just isn’t my concern.” And I understood his point—this bad line of thinking had come over everything, and he did his part to combat it by writing a book that made a very careful argument to that effect, convincingly pointing out the flaws of “market populism” and advancing better paradigms to replace it. But even though I obviously didn’t have the opportunity to argue with him as stubbornly as I have with Sterling, I was disappointed with that answer, because ... well, because as someone who’d made a really successful argument against “market populism,” I thought he should be in a really good position to talk about how better paradigms could function on the ground. He’d done excellent work of advancing better ideas, powerful ideas that themselves would be influential on exactly the class of writers he was criticizing—and in doing so solve the problem he was identifying just by his articulating them. But I imagined he might have something to say about how those ideas actually worked against readers: Were they just passive recipients of whatever they were told? Were they active participants in developing and supporting the same ideas and paradigms being hashed out among the “insiders?” Did they actually dictate what got written, by just listening to whoever was saying what they wanted to hear? Frank made a great argument about a set of ideas and left it at that; he didn’t want to go into how the ebb and flow of those ideas actually affected people. And he’s right, they’re separate issues—but surely he had some opinion about the latter one?

Anyway. Frank-whose-first-and-not-last-name-is-Frank, in his very interesting post above, asks who I think is doing interesting things with the reader/writer interface, and I’m trying to think of good examples and not just half-good ones:

(1) I guess up top I said Josh Klein, though I don’t know enough about him to be confident in it—I’m making this assumption that he’s an indie-loving Onion-type writer (based on his being in indie bands and having written for the Onion) who’s just really generous (or just better paid, I know) to explain to a Chicago Tribune audience why they’d like David Gray. But maybe he really does just like David Gray. Anyway, let’s pretend there’s someone who really is this thing I’m imagining. And no, I don’t think anyone’s necessarily lying to anyone in this scenario: in the best case it can just be the generosity of saying “I know a lot about music, and I’m willing to use that knowledge to help anyone, anywhere, find and understand what they like.” It recasts the music critic as the world’s most helpful record-store clerk, who can help you find what you’re looking for no matter what it is, who can act as your guide but keeps his own agenda to himself while you do all the steering.

(2) I also said some of the New York Times people, because they sometimes write about “insider” music to an “outside” crowd, and they do so by writing about it as “news”—I like to imagine that person with very little interest in listening to DFA records could have read that piece and been interested just to see what was going on with the music world. (It’s in this manner that I’ll read pieces about dance or certain types of visual art—I have no knowledge of the stuff, but I’m often interested in accessible reports of what general aesthetic currents are moving over it, of what issues are at stake in the field at that moment.)

(3) And I said Tom. I’m biased by having knowledge of this “character” of Tom and what’s he’s like, but I find it interesting that he can write in an entertaining first-person form not always about how records fit into critical context, and not always about what they “mean,” but just what places they occupy in his life, and how. My friend Erin, for instance, never reads criticism except as consumer-guide, so she can find new albums to buy: the only non-guide pieces of music writing I’ve ever seen her enjoy have been Tom’s—because (I think) she can read them almost as personal stories about records as part-of-life, and not truth-telling “criticism.”

(4) I actually know of at least two teenaged girls who fell in love with indie music via that whole thing with Death Cab for Cutie appearing in Seventeen or whatever it was. Yes, I know, this is an example of exactly the prevailing strand of criticism we’re tired of here. But guess what: these girls and their friends love loads of bands now, and say they enjoy music more and are more engaged with it in general. It’s a damn small sample set, I know, but my point is that someone did something unusual—for reasons right or wrong—that actively helped some people find music they were excited about. This is why, Sterling, I hope it didn’t seem like I was trying to use you and the Voice as a stick and not just an example: I hope your writing about pop for that audience can do the same thing. And in my own small neck of the woods it’s sort of the agenda I have. I’m comfortable writing for an indie publication because that’s where my background is. But I’m sick of most indie now, and I want to find new things that excite me and theoretically report back to people “like me” about what it is, and why they might like it, too.

Those are slim examples, I know, which is exactly why I wish I had more current ones.

Since this is working better now, more questions: Sterling, how much do you make distinctions between “serious” criticism and not? (Bad phrasing, but hopefully you’ll see what I mean.)

A) Kuhn. It was a throwaway line, but essentially the idea that "critical revolutions" like "scientific revolutions" come from whole new ways of doing things and that inbetween there's no room for play mainly coz yr. stuck in someone else's paradigm. But I was wrong in saying that about what nabisco was saying.

B) Voice "ethic". There's been a confusion between the P&J and the voice when the two are pretty clearly in conflict. If anything, my gripe is probably more with certain patterns of lazy writing/thinking more prevelant in non-specialist than specialist press [tho not completely obviously] but which result as critical "defaults" in the absence of pushing harder for insight. So I don't think its the pitchfork ethic either, coz neither the voice nor pitchfork hit this middlebrow tone, but another one entirely, one which comes from critics writing for an audience which they percieve as one that they don't particularly like.

Market populism/people led astray: Okay so I don't know gads about Thomas Frank, but I think I sorta get his deal. I'm gonna go on some limbs here and make weird analogies which aren't where I think nabisco is coming from, but come to mind anyway. Market populism was a hucksters game sure, but one based on a certain type of impressionism -- a narrow ahistorical reading of the weird markets of the period would innately generate thinking like that *and* make people prone to buying into it becuz as far as I know, Frank brought into play things that most average people didn't know and which most business writers conveniantly forgot becuz they no longer fit into their new worldview. Music critwise however I'd argue the opposite -- the problem is inertial, certain ideas getting ensonced when they were good enough for the time and landing in places where nothing stood a good chance of disrupting them. Then factors lending to further inertia, a feedback loop, and enough disengagement that much of the population didn't care enough to hold critics accountable, or rather was able to cede them their lazy thinking because it didn't affect them enough. Like the world changed and nobody noticed, alterna-nertia (which maybe means that people THOUGHT the world changed when it didn't instead).

These are the big questions again like raised by Jess' article and etc. -- but from a different standpoint, not what happened to indie music, but the indie-critic ethos, how it developed underground and broke just in time to chronicle its decline, etc. On a broader scale, everyone thought the "end of history" was spectacular after 91-92, then everyone thought it was all "brave new world" [remember pepsi in the former USSR was a symbol of freeom to ppl then pepsi in mexico became a symbol of homoginization] and just now its turning out to be like 1900 all over again [i.e. pepsi in france is damn upstart yankees].

Sociology: Yeah I agree with DA sorta. I wasn't gonna object to n's use of the term but its not what I'm getting at exactly, becuz there's a concern not of just capturing the artists conception of the world or the readers but engaging the artists conception so the reader defines themself against both the artist and the critics and begins to grapple with their own conception of the artist therefore as a sort of social act.

Sterling, I follow you on the differences with the Frank thing. I guess I don't mean to map the state of business writing onto the state of music writing, though: what I mean is more that Frank's critique of "market populism" as a concept revolved around the idea that the people caught up in it were doing a disservice to their readers -- and then when asked, like, "how do the readers relate to what's written?" he sort of brushed off the question. Whereas I found it one of the central questions raised by his critique, especially since he used it a little as a stick to beat market populism (to the extent of implying that that set of ideas held some responsibility for making people lose money).

I'm interested that you say indie modes of criticism developed underground, because this is one of the things I was thinking about earlier. Zines were without doubt a giant new development in the writer/reader interface. Was it a good route? Do you think that at present there are any similarly-new opportunities for that sort of thing that haven't been seized upon yet? (How about blogs, what influence do you think they've had? I can imagine a lot of good arguments that blogs aloow the "critical establishment" to react much more quickly to new ideas that seem to be successfully engaging people.)

Why is it supposed to be admirable for me to rank low on the P&J stats? I still think this question is worth asking. I also think it's worth asking the Ashanti fan and the Wilco fan similar questions - not about P&J stats but about their own fandom: Why is it supposed to be admirable to have different tastes from one's fellows? I mean, I'd expect that when people have different tastes from yours, you'd tend towards believing that their taste was worse than yours, rather than that they should be admired for it. (By "Ashanti fan" and "Wilco fan" here, I mean members of their prime audiences. Of course, other people can be Ashanti or Wilco fans too.)

I would admire a writer who could get the Ashanti fan and the Wilco fan and the guy who doesn't think he cares about either to ask themselves what it means socially to like Ashanti or Wilco, or to dislike them, or not to care. But whether in general I would admire a critic whose writing appeals to the Ashanti fan or the Wilco fan or the guy in the next cubicle etc., well, that would depend on what the critic writes, obviously, and what the reader does with it.

By the way, it's wrong to say that rock critics in the commercial press are writing only for other rock critics. By and large we're forbidden to write for other rock critics; at least, we're forbidden to write about other rock critics or about their ideas. This is one reason that rock criticism is becoming so intellectually worthless.

It'd be naive of me to say that readers simply get the rock criticism that they deserve, since I know that the readers aren't aware of all the choices available to them, that they're not presented with an interesting array of choices, that publishers and distributors can do things to control the market in defiance of consumer wishes, and so forth. Nonetheless, commercial rock criticism has something to do with what readers want. In fact, I do think that readers get the rock criticism they want, even if it turns out they don't want it. Reasons why the guy in the next cubicle might not like rock criticism are: (1) Conveying music is impossible to do in writing, and describing music is difficult and unsatisfactory: the writer has little choice but to resort to vague ("rock") or esoteric ("dark metal") genre names and to make cross references to other musicians, which the general reader often finds incomprehensible. The guy in the next cubicle gripes about this. But (2) he pretty much refuses to accept anything but description, albeit description that's augmented here and there with a hero-or-villain story in which the performer under review is championed for being daringly different or reviled for being conformist. The guy in the next cubicle rejects anything else. Look even at the response here in ILx when Chuck occasionally goes out on a limb and prints something "personal" by Jessica Grose or Amy Phillips. And if rock critics were to do in the official prints what we do here, which is to play with music and joke about it and use it to fight each other and to flirt with each other etc., not only would the guy in the next cubicle object (even though he probably does the same damn thing himself, among friends), so would a lot of you. (The guy in the cubicle does accept artist profiles and wisecrack-laden news 'n' notes, but those aren't expected to be criticism - though at this point the news 'n' notes in Rolling Stone are far more worth reading than the record reviews.)

I'm convinced I'm the only person in the world who understands Kuhn. Briefly, the way you and Nabitsuh are using the word "paradigm" isn't the way that Kuhn used it, which is fine, since he was applying it to the evolution of scientific ideas, whereas you're applying it to very different subjects. For Kuhn, a paradigm can be something like the problems in the back of a physics text (once you've solved one, you use this as a paradigm for how to solve similar problems), or it can be something like Newton's concept of motion (which is simply movement of an object through space). For paradigms to be reigning paradigms, everyone in the field has to share them, which means that everyone has to solve similar problems and have the same concept. If you're an Aristotelian, you think that a man being restored from sickness to health is analogous to a rock falling towards its place in the center of the universe and to fire seeking its place in the periphery and to an acorn growing into a tree, and that all are examples of "motion," which is a change in quality, asymmetric change from an initial state to a final state. And if this is what you believe, you simply can't do Newtonian science. Anyway, there are no such reigning paradigms in rock criticism. In rock criticism you've got habits and styles that are shared by some people, and that's it. I don't mind you or Nabitsuh calling these "paradigms," just bear in mind that these have nothing to do with Kuhn's model of scientific development, that I can see, and you're not going to get Kuhnian "paradigm shifts." You simply can't come up with a history where, let's say, everyone in rock criticism is modeling themselves after Ralph Gleason and then, because of anamolies and inconsistencies that the Gleason paradigms can't eliminate, people develop new Meltzerian paradigms that entirely replace the old.

Also, in "normal science" there's plenty of room for play; the play simply models itself on the standard paradigms, that's all. Sorry to be so pedantic. I'll do a Kuhn thread someday.

But basically it goes like this: everyone in the 90s goes nuts about the idea that (this is Frank summarizing sarcastically) "in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets are mediums of consent . . . they manage to express the popular will more articulately and meaningfully than do mere elections. By their very nature markets confer democratic legitimacy, markets bring down the pompous and the snooty, markets look out for the interests of the little guy, markets give us what we want." In other words, sort of what you were just saying about people getting the product they want.

Frank's arguments against this are pretty much the ones you'd expect: that markets are not perfect expressions of democratic desires, that they're skewed and manipulated not only by loads of systemic things but, by definition, also by actual elites who have the capital or power to skew and manipulate them. These elites, Frank says, love market populism more than anyone, because it serves as a weapon: "Since markets express the will of the people, virtually any criticism of business could be described as an act of 'elitism' arising out of despicable contempt for the common man. According to market populism, elites are not those who, say, watch sporting events from a skybox. . . . No, elitists are the people on the other side of the equation: the labor-unionists and Keynesians who believe that society can be organized in any way other than the market way."

And of course Frank notes that at the end of this 90s period of hooray hooray for the common man and the everyday entrepreneur beating out snobby old-guard elitist with his fascinating market-approved dot-com concept, after all the day-traders and the mid-20s CEOs and the "market belongs to you!" talk, what happened? The average "you" was in fact worse off, and the actual elites were doing great.

(The reason I talked about this w/r/t criticism is that Frank's books are based on reading, well, lots of business and management literature: they're critiques of prevailing ideas in that realm, sort of like this discussion critiques prevailing ideas and conceptual tools in music writing. Frank's great at calling bullshit on the bad ideas, and I really wanted to know ... you know, all the crap about readers and if they believed the bad ideas and why and etc.)

Oh and Frank -- I hate to say it, working for his publisher and all, but I think Kuhn long ago lost all claim to the meanings of the word "paradigm" and the term "paradigm shift." I'm not sure how sad I am about that -- I would say that flexing the meaning makes it more useful in other things, but then I suppose we could just talk about "trends in thought," etc.

I wuz trying to play fuller to N's kuhn, and assumed given who publishes fuller's book that he'd catch the jibe:

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13944.ctl

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000C138A-D70A-1C73-9B81809EC588EF21

Beyond all the macroeconomic stuff, even if markets worked in the way that classical economicists wished, they still wouldn't guarantee populism, based as they are on one dollar one vote.

"Paradigm was a perfectly good word, until I messed it up," said Kuhn in an interview shortly before his death. Before Kuhn, "paradigm" was just another word like "example" or "model," and like those words could be used to refer to something precise or something vague, as needed. The trouble now isn't that people are simply non-Kuhnian in their usage, but that they're pseudo-Kuhnian, using the word to evoke the idea of great conceptual shifts à la Copernicus when all they're really saying is that, e.g., people are using digital samplers more than they used to, and this conflicts with some long-dead high-school English teacher's idea of creativity. So that's why I try to avoid using the word when talking about non-Copernicuses.

Ha, Sterling: long ago I tried to pimp the Fuller book to Mark S on here, and he said something like "oh I don't care less who Fuller is, whoever he is he doesn't understand Kuhn properly."

Sterling, what you said about "market populism" as a paradigm versus "current rockcrit" as a paradigm is funny becase -- this isn't going to make any sense but whatever -- Fuller is actually sort of talking about let's call it "Kuhnianism" itself as a destructive model/trend/paradigm (yes there's a funny paradoxical twist to this but not really), by the same sort of inertia, I think, by which you're saying rockcrit model/paradigm has gotten that way. (As opposed to something like market populism, yeah, which in the 90s was sort of an active celebrated trend on the upswing, absolutely, not some calcified entrenched old way of thinking. It billed itself as revolutionary and was thus, I imagine The Other Frank might say, all the more powerful/dangerous.)

Like I said to nabisco ages ago on another thread -- "you think that by explaining the problem you've solved it when in fact you've only compounded it": the general methodology of examining why things are the way they are (but not where they're going and what pushes and pulls on and within them) leads, i think, only to panglossianism.

& kuhn too coz yr. either some rebel out to re-establish the foundations of human knowledge (and 99% of the time therefore to be laughed off) or yr. just another cog. There's no inbetween. you can see this methodology in the scientific american review where if fuller doesn't like the way things are, then he must be asking us to believe in MENTALISM and RAINING FROGS -- WHERE DOES THE MADNESS END I ASK YOU!?

you think that by explaining a problem you've solved it when in fact you've only compounded it.

I don't see Kuhn as explaining a problem, any more than I see Darwin as explaining a problem or Einstein as explaining a problem. How are the theories of natural selection and relativity descriptions of problems? (Kuhn did see problems in philosophy of science and history of science, and he came up with what he thought were solutions to the problems, though his solution became a problem for the former, since I don't see how once you accept Kuhn you can even do philosophy of science. Of course there's no law that people have to accept Kuhn, but if they don't, they ought to at least try to understand him and to come up with alternatives.)

*(this is true even if that was sterling not fuller**)

**(i assume i had only just read a review of the fuller book nabs, as i totally cd not recall it when you mentioned it back there, let alone my ahem robust response)

I don't want to argue over kuhn (coz i'm not up to it) but just to note that in the above quote frank defines exactly what fuller dislikes about kuhn -- that he defines interesting/important problems out of existence.8

Not possible. That's not how the word is used anymore. No one who speaks of a "paradigm shift" is using the word to refer to a particular model or example - instead, that person is talking about a fundamental, overall change in the assumptions, models, theories, and practices of an entire field or profession or - I don't know - all of Western Civilization or something. Now, a nonscientific endeavor can undergo fundamental shifts, but to call such a shift a "paradigm shift" is to assert something that is almost never true: that the field once used an old set of assumptions, models, theories, and practices and that this set is being displaced by another set of assumptions, models, theories, and practices that is incompatible with the first. I just don't see how you can have a paradigm shift in a field that was never ruled by a particular paradigm ("paradigm" in the sense not of a model but of a set of related assumptions, models, theories, and practices), a field where people never agreed on their basic assumptions in the first place. And sure, you can use "paradigm" without referring to "reigning paradigms" and "paradigm shifts," but those latter usages are so common that you'll evoke them in the reader no matter what you intend.

Unfortunately, "paradigm" has become a buzz word used to make the writer and reader feel that they're engaged in great things, doing battle against the massed forces of convention by shifting the very ground on which the conventions stand. This impulse is understandable, and maybe inspires some enthusiastic young people to start thinking about cultural assumptions and so forth. But if they (and we) just leave it at that - "We are undergoing a sea change, and aren't we grand!" - it never gets beyond posturing. And the problem isn't just that they're being pseudo-Kuhnian, but that they're being unintentionally anti-Kuhnian - because they're trying to flee the past, while Kuhn was trying to understand it. He wanted to understand discarded modes of thought, and he felt that to do so required that we learn the old modes as if we were learning a lost language, some of whose terms can't be understood from the perspective of the new modes that replaced the old. And so the historian has to work to understand on its own terms something that's now old and unfamiliar. And Kuhn, in trying to understand how old modes evolved into new ones, insisted that we could not do so by thinking of the old modes as precursors to the new. And he further insisted that we could not understand how people came up with new ideas if we treated their initial modifications and departures from the old modes as moving towards the new modes that they subsequently came up with. Now, I just don't see many people using the phrase "paradigm shift" to alert themselves to the fact that they need to suspend their new mode of thought in trying to understand an old "paradigm," or using it to remind themselves that the old cannot be understood as prelude to the new. In fact, I don't see much interest in the old at all.

(As I recall Asimov did a lovely job of capturing what yr. talking about too, in is his essays on phlogiston -- tho of course I haven't read those since jr. high or so.)

For example, historically the law of theft relied on the paradigm form of theft as 'theft as taking' [actually, it's traced back to Ancient Greece where the paradigm form of manifest criminality/theft was taking at night. AT NIGHT! And if you were thieved from at night, as long as you shouted out, then you could administer justice by death, legally, on the spot] as the central operative law. What the law found as it shifted into the emergence of Organised Police, legal positivism, Legalism's rise was that there were an abundance of activities which didn't fit within the paradigm form of theft: finding, carrying off whilst already in possession etc. As the Criminal Law became more organised and centralised (the disappearance of the moving Circuit Court in England, the police as I said) we find that the Common Law precedents which were used to help make finding, carrying away (which they found 'wrong' but 'outwith' the paradigm) etc fit - these were boundled up into a new paradigm (here's the shift) where Law was rules: legislation, statutes, etc. (And actually, interestingly enough, this drawing up of the law of theft helped recognise another paradigm shift: theft as taking became theft as appropriation.)

This is how I understand paradigm shifts. Now, please.]

And yeah, Kuhn was mentioned.

So Fletcher is trying to be Kuhnian, but I don't know enough about law to know if the shift he's describing is Kuhnian. I think not, and this is why: Law as Rules doesn't put Law as Paradigms out of business. The two aren't incompatible. The former merely organizes the latter, tries to get everyone more-or-less using the same paradigms. Even when "theft" is defined by statute, you still have to decide how to apply the term as so defined, and these decisions are made in particular cases, some of the cases, if they're significant enough, becoming (exemplar-type) paradigms! "Precedent" is what judges call their paradigms. Not to say that historically the bundling up into legislation etc. wasn't a Big Thing; it's just not a Kuhnian (matrix-type) paradigm shift.

Actually, the change in the definition of "theft" is closer to what Kuhn had in mind, though I still doubt that it's enough of a shift; "appropriation" is an extension of the idea of "taking," not a change in it (I believe).

Another side note: Kuhn used "paradigm" (meaning "exemplar") to emphasize that scientists followed models not rules, hence science was an analogical not a methodical activity (so, there's no general scientific method, and no need to write philosophical papers detailing that [nonexistent] method) - which seems right, except that "following a model" and "following a rule" aren't all that easy to differentiate. The former allows for more variation and more creativity, I guess, since the assumption is that you can follow a model in this or that way but that you follow a rule whole or not at all - but then, don't you follow rules on the basis of how you or others had previously followed them, these previous instances being models of how to follow them? It's good to think of "model" and "rule" as comparative terms (like "loud" and "soft") rather than as either-or dichotomies (like an on-off switch). It's also good to think of "comparative" and "either-or" as comparative terms rather than as...

[Tendrils of smoke start to waft from computer.]

But mainly, I wanted to point out that it is posible to begin to methodoligize metaphorical thinking. Better to view rules and models as universals and specifics, passing into one another.

mathematical analysis of statistical data bridging demography and anthropology.

models pass into rules through accumulation of followers & generalization of their experience?

"We may begin by remarking that the method of the differential calculus shows on the face of it that it was not invented and constructed for its own sake. Not only was it not invented for its own sake as another mode of analytical procedure; on the contrary, the arbitrary omission of terms arising from the expansion of a function is absolutely contrary to all mathematical principles, it being arbitrary in the sense that the whole of this development is nevertheless assumed to belong completely to the matter in hand, this being regarded as the difference between the developed function of a variable (after this has been given the form of a binomial) and the original function. The need for such a mode of procedure and the lack of any internal justification at once suggest that the origin and foundation must lie elsewhere. It happens in other sciences too, that what is placed at the beginning of a science as its elements and from which the principles of the science are supposed to be derived is not self-evident, and that it is rather in the sequel that the raison d'étre and proof of those elements is to be found. The course of events in the history of the differential calculus makes it plain that the matter had its origin mainly in the various so-called tangential methods, in what could be considered ingenious devices; it was only later that mathematicians reflected on the nature of the method after it had been extended to other objects, and reduced it to abstract formulae which they then also attempted to raise to the status of principle."

...

At first, then, model as such appears in opposition to rule; but model is itself a rule, a purely self-related determinateness distinct from the determinateness of its other, from rule as such. But model is not only a rule; it is the truth of rule itself, the latter having exhibited its own transition into model. Model, on the other hand, is in its truth the externality which is no longer indifferent but has returned into itself. It is thus rule itself in such a manner that apart from this determination there would no longer be any rule as such. The positing of the totality requires the double transition, not only of the one determinateness into its other, but equally the transition of this other, its return, into the first. The first transition yields the identity of both, but at first only in itself or in principle; rule is contained in model, but this is still a one-sided determinateness. That the converse is equally true, namely, that model is contained in rule and is equally only a sublated determinateness, this results from the second transition-the return into the first determinateness. This observation on the necessity of the double transition is of great importance throughout the whole compass of scientific method.

Suggestions: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions isn't the only or necessarily the best thing he wrote. My favorite, actually, esp. if you don't have much free time, is Section 4 of a paper called "Revisiting Planck," which was originally published in 1984 in some magazine called HSPS (14[2]: 231-52) but which he reprinted as the Afterword to the second edition (i.e., U. of Chicago rather than Oxford) of Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (which may be great itself, but I didn't read much of it, since I don't understand the mathematical symbols). I also recommend the brief essay "What Are Scientific Revolutions?" which is the first piece in The Road Since Structure and shows clearly what he means by "incommensurability" - and also puts his Planck idea into laymen's terms. And the Kepler chapter in The Copernican Revolution is excellent for showing how a great thinker wasn't being irrational or unscientific in believing in stuff that we now tend to think of as hooey.

Better to view rules and models as universals and specifics, passing into one another.

I don't know what you mean, but I think I disagree. I don't think "universals vs. specifics" is relevant to this. The analogy doesn't hold, that rules are like universals and that models are like specifics. If something's a model, then by definition it can be generalized (otherwise it wouldn't model anything). Kuhn is contrasting two different ways of generalizing, by rules or by resemblance. His point is that different things can be modeled on a model in different ways: so he's saying that we know that a duck is a duck not (1) if it has specific characteristics that define it in every case as a duck (= rule following), but rather (2) if it resembles something else that's called a duck (= using a model, and there's no decision in advance as to what way the duck has to resemble other ducks). Kuhn is following Wittgenstein's idea that (for instance) a game has to have some things in common with some other games, but that it needn't necessarily have anything in common with all other games. Whereas following a rule implies that it would. But what I'm getting at is that you can say that following a model is like following a rule ("Rule Number One: Do it like this, or like something like it, in some way or another") and that rules always involve modeling (that is, there's no rule for how to apply the rule, unless of course you want to say that "apply it more or less like this, but in different circumstances" is a rule)[smoke is now pouring out of the computer].

A rule as a generalization of models, appearing in the guise of an exemplary model. (the negation is negated). It is not that scientists more follow rules or more follow models but the systemization of science is the practice of developing both as aspects of knowledge in the process of becoming.

the bakhtin piece was the bhangra one for hyperdub.