TS: Dilettantism vs. Fanaticism ... Or can ILM have a good discussion?

But I also like having a special relationship to a particular music. Because I dance to salsa, I sometimes feel a more intimate connection to it than to most other music. And I find it has to make up a certain percentage of my listening, or I start to lose some of that connection. I don't really want it to be just another type of music I listen: oh, I listen to world music, a little salsa, a little Fela Kuti, a little Oum Kalthoum. I want to claim some sort of connection to salsa (and to Arabic music) that has some depth to it, because at times I've felt that.

The trick must be to find a way to shift gears between different types of listening.

I choose instead the Bucky Fuller juxtaposition of:

"Specialism" vs. "Comprehensivism".

So there you go.

i'm a dilettante and i don't care. i like too many different kinds of music to be anything else. as much as i love garage rap (and i do...it's the only genre i'm particularly passionate about right now), i'm also just as interested in things that (to me) are super entertaining one-offs (like the lightning bolt album. to someone deeply invested in this nu-pigfucker/noise/hardcore underground the lb album is as much of "scenius" rhizome as any of simon's beloved garage anti-auteurs. it's just that by and large i don't care about the rest of the bands in this scene.) i think that's one of the main problems with simon's basic argument re. "devotion": his tunnel vision comes from having his head wrecked by uk rave culture and the fanatical devotion he saw it inspire in others and himself. but he's only ever partially honest about this. being "devoted" in his eyes means being devoted to the uk rave continuum (whether he talks up marc acardipane or timbaland or whomever), and the underlying pointed finger that taints his argument is that if YOU aren't down with THIS scene, then you're WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. there's a bit of a blinder there that prevents him - i think - from seeing that many people view nu-pigfuck or neo-garage rock or microhouse or whatever as the bleeding edge to be followed to the (almost) exclusion of all else. it doesn't devalue his argument (personally i think he's right re. ukg, but that's just me) but it does color it funny a bit.

"A NAUGHTY BIT OF CRAP

“We’re all dilletantes now.” – Tom Ewing, ‘Download This’.

"She's like [xXx] but without all the bad qualities." - Indie fan, about dilletante xXx.

I think what I like about garage is its refusal to let me not be a dilettante. I’ve been extremely wary to the point of inaction about even starting listening to garage because there is so much of it and I don’t have any idea of where to enter and I’d have no chance of catching up, keeping up. Then I realised that this was me approaching it from a rock mindset (I hesitate to use the word “rockist” because I see it increasingly used and I’m not exactly sure what it means; some form of conservatism, completism, and centralism, I think) which means that I approached it wanting my appreciation of and collection of to be complete, my appreciation of and collection of to have a center to revolve around (a canon?) and a comprehensiveness that I don’t associate with garage 'thinking'.

I suppose such a shift in mindsets was occasioned by the emergence of dance (note: a genre of dance is Album Dance) but that has completely passed me by as of yet. Coming from indie leanings one of the main values it covets is integrity: integrity of soul / spirit / attitude, integrity of your worldview and integrity of your collection (to mean purity and comprehensivity). So what’s so enthralling about garage (and I have Matthew Ingram to thank for ‘getting me started’) is that it forces me to be a dilettante: it is built into the very music. The way it is distributed, the white-label culture, its London-centricity, the keeping up with ‘the pirates’, everything, means that ‘integrity’ collapses as a tenable value. And it’s exciting.

(Side note: you might ask why hasn’t pop-centrism forced such a shift to dilettantism. Well in a way it has in that it’s meant I have dabbled a lot more but there is no necessity [physical or otherwise] built in.)"

For now, I would say this -- I think there's room for other approaches than the binary being outlined. As I've muttered more than once in recent threads and posts and all, I seem to be moving towards a curious stage of being increasingly disconnected from any sort of desire to be In the Thick of Things, Musically. I don't see this as either being a dilettante on the one hand (I am not coasting through every last recommendation immediately or scrounging what is out there to find what is there -- my odd little notes on the "I Love You" thread about me not yet listening to the song even though I actually have the mp3 on my computer and have done for a couple of months is perversely symptomatic of something, even if only forgetfulness) or being a fanatic on the other (there seems to be a vision of me that insists all I'm doing is listening to MBV with healthy doses of the Cure and Smashing Pumpkins -- I was tickled if surprised by Jess's surprise over the fact I had heard the More Fire Crew album, f'r instance). The binary dialectic may be Simon R.'s point, to set up extremes for the rhetoric, but it disallows a position like mine where I'm either content with maybe something familiar, maybe something new, but often *nothing at all* -- a desire for silence which initially surprised and scared me a bit but now seems quite natural.

That said, my only other comment right now is on this line:

The open-to-everything stance flattens the landscape-- turning a cultural battleground into a harvest festival.

I guess I don't see this as a bad thing at all. The point he's making about belief in *something* -- even if it's to chase down the perfect sound -- is excellent. But is the battleground metaphor accurate in all senses when it comes to how one defines oneself? If an artist creates and a listener listens (of course artists are listeners too), why does the listener also have to fight like an artist might? A ridiculous oversimplification of the situation described on my part, I know, but seems to me that if the world is there to be enjoyed -- a globalization that doesn't involve ecological disruption or political instability or oppression -- then allow for this small pleasure in this mess that is 2003.

I mentioned this a few days back on a revived Moby thread but I understand exactly what Aaron means about feeling early musical fanaticism to be naive. I get that feeling sometimes reading old rockcrit. Just picked up the Clinton Heylin Da Capo Book of Rock Writing, reissued by Da Capo in paperback so it's no longer the Penguin book, for like $6 off the remainder table at St. Mark's Books, and boy if I thought that book's scorched-earth rock-or-nothing tone was naive before it seems almost impossibly dumb now. That said, I do think there's an inherent frustration involved with rewriting the rulebook. One thing that being a critic has involved for me is learning what my own responses mean--when they're a momentary thrill or something with a little more staying power (and there's nothing wrong with wanting this at all), and even more to the point when the former is more desirable than the latter, which is plenty of the time, and more to the point than that, when the former becomes the latter.

I am now out to attempt to find the new Mover CD!

I do allow myself the possibility that I'll be listening to completely diff types of music next year. but i do like to concentrate.

I could never concentrate on one thing for ever but just for a while. I have a colleague from drone on that kinda does this. he buys loads of recs from a 'genre' and once he is ready to move on he does and he will look at the best recs and keep these and sell the remainder.

so he's gone from indie to jap noise to bossa nova.

It's the old disillusionment syndrome. No scene can sustain you for that long--it all turns into sad old rockers with their Eddie Cochran records eventually. Plus a dilettante is someone who makes art but isn't serious about it, right? A dabbler? Anyone who is serious about listening to music is going to want to listen to everything, since that's the only way to gain perspective and to be analytical about it. Musicians sometimes listen to a lot of different things but my experience with most rock/pop musicians is the opposite--they don't read, first of all, so they miss out on that aspect of the history of the "art," and they tend to have this romantic notion that analyzing their "art" kills it, which I think is true for certain people, like Brian Wilson, who once he started thinking about what he was doing became a parody of himself (I love everything he's done, almost, so I think his innate talent carried him through), but untrue for people who lack that basic, ineffable talent. There is a knack that some people have for doing what appears to be a simple thing and which is impossible for others to get. But most musicians would benefit from being more analytical, which mainly means "does it sound good" or "do these things work together" and figuring out how you did it--making it repeatable. All of which is the very opposite of being a dilettante. And if you want to write about music it helps to know and like everything. The problem that jess above talks about is the problem of having to choose a scene for reasons having to do with music on the one hand and how you dress, etc., on the other, which again is the very opposite of being a dilettante since being part of a scene with the right attitude and the right clothes is very hard work--unless you're Brian Wilson and you create a scene through sheer talent. Being fanatical about a scene or a style is really, in the larger view, being a dilettante since you become so narrow in your interests you lose perspective. Being a professional at anything entails getting to know everything you can conceivably learn about what you're doing and this includes local lore as well as the bigger picture. So I see what Reynolds is trying to say, I guess, but it just seems silly to me to put it into these terms. Moving around freely in your field is not being a dilettante, that's being an informed person who realizes that all professions are limited and that being a complete person is a lot more important than adhering to some silly-assed idea of the right "scene." Unless you're a fucking genius, of course, then all rules go out the window.

GO FOR SERIALISM!!!!! ;-)

I think there may be something deeper to what Simon is saying in that they're are different ways of thinking. Completely separate. Madness and reason. And thus maybe this point doesn't really hold for the dilettante. (Or the geezer, as I understand what they're saying over there on ILe). Doesn't hold because it's laying the critical matrix of the Fanatic over that of the Dilettante. (I mean I'm still not sure that that is the proper dichotomy, I prefer my Dilettantism/Integrity divide but.)

The negation of the negation for me isn't a return to "this is the only music that matters" but a recognition of the sociality of music and its collective ability to matter on a level beyond the individual, but ultimately only manifest in the individual act of listening.

music-crit like music can only be "resolved" beyond its boundaries.

I need to stop reading motherfucking hegel.

OK, to put it another way: George Jones > Momus

i think matos' response is OTM, but it also depends on the idea of being a critic, because it's useful for a critic to have very open ears. the more music they are aware of, the more vocabulary they have to draw on when they go to write about it. a critic who only knows one genre is often not a very interesting or useful critic, because they're too invested in the minutiae of a genre to communicate what's great about a record in a larger sense (see jazz critics since *forever*).

I do find something really great and meaningful about genres with deep shared histories -- genres that have that evangelistic quality Reynolds loved about hardcore and jungle, that near-political sense of "this is where it is at right now." But the paradox is that being able to say that in any actually valid way necessarily involves dilettantism -- not on the level of the album, the level of constantly taking stock of good/bad releases in each genre, but on the level of taking a full view of the field and still throwing one's lot in with a given sector of it as The One that Matters. (This is where the binary starts to dissolve.)

D to me means a flitting between several different things frenetically. Not necessarily being active at all times but always looking outwith what you have in front of you. Fanaticism can be built into this. So they're definitely not mutually exclusive. Whereas 'integrity' implies a comprehensiveness, an austerity of purpose perhaps (but I don't want to propose a false binary of serious = comprehensive, fun = dilletante). It has a purpose: to maintain integrity. Whereas, dilletantism perhaps doesn't have an end. It's an endless means. I may just be misunderstanding.

I think that's a great point, Amateurist. Talking to "civilians" reminds me of this, as it should most of the specialists around here.

I should've put "dilettante" and "fanatic" in quotation marks up at the start of this thread... they definitely are fairly arbitrary terms Reynolds is setting up, which was a bit of my point but I wasn't consistent.

(this is a great discussion btw... I'm proud... keep it up... etc.)

Like when I start to examine plenty of "areas" of music enuf I find they inevitably have far less of an organizing principle than I started off thinking. Enter hegel -- how to resolve the organizing principle of genre as simultaneously real (socially) and not real (er, genetically I guess)?

However, to make this observation in this fashion, critics like Neil Rosenberg and Bob Cantwell had to be schooled in a wider variety of music--had to be open do it--than Bill Monroe ever was. On the other hand, Rosenberg and Cantwell fall somewhere closer to "specialist" than "dilettante" on the continuum, and that's what allows them to place Bill Monroe's music in the context of the other kinds of country music that was being made in the 1940s.

So I guess the terms of this "debate" shift greatly if you see yourself as a listener or an artist.

i agree with jess and matos, basically: i read reynolds for his taste, which i usually agree with/am thankful for (without him putting so much effort into chronicling the quote-unquote hardcore continuuum, how many tunes would we never have known about), but find the ideology behind it (the-cutting-edge-is-the-only-thing-that-matters-social-scenes/movements-are-all) pretty tiresome at this point, after so many years of hearing it over and over again.

at the same time, i always take the "stuff really does mean something/there is truth!/there are values" line against tom in the canon arguments, so i can't really get down with the language games position entirely.... tho i am definitely a dilettante, not a warrior at this point in life... which leaves me somewhere in the middle, not sure where exactly...

this is important and true. in the last 6 months or thereabouts my active engagement with dance stuff has been somewhat half-hearted but the throngs of vibe-feelers that joined me in going nuts to "la la land" last december didn't have to know that and, at the time, neither did i.

Which leads to other issues. Do you have to know a lot of history and context to be able to understand, say, Skip James? What if Skip James is first and only pre-1940 bluesman you've ever heard, but you just happen to love him, and then you -- as a musician -- sample bits and pieces of his music and incorporate them into something new and wholly different? And what if it sounds lovely, because you've taken some music you don't really "know" and brought it into some music you do know, just to see how they get along with each other? The "blues expert" critic might listen to it and say, "God, this guy doesn't get Skip James at all, that's not even Skip James' best song, and anyway, he should listen to Blind Willie Johnson, etc." Where the universalist critic might just say, "Yeah, nice."

Jesse, your post is wonderful. It was what I was trying to get at, clumsily, with by Bill Monroe example.

But I'm most certainly not a universalist. Here's my thought: as a writer (and former musician, by the way) I'm willing to draw on anything from anywhere, to use in any way I can, though that doesn't mean I don't concentrate on some things and ignore others. But as a thinker, I'm trying to know far more than I can know, and this is just to keep up with my intellectual neighborhood: Say ILx is an intellectual neighborhood; imagine the knowledge that you would need if you were to understand all the references and cross references HERE, the music that's been listened to, the books that have been read, the TV shows, the political events, the history. And it's not as if the only people I converse with are those on ILx. And now the point isn't to draw on whatever I can to use it however I want, but to genuinely understand more than I'll ever actually be able to understand, to understand ideas on their own terms, to understand how you use it on your terms, not just on mine. Ideas that run at odds with other ideas. And wanting to do this in no way prevents me from committing to my own terms. (But sometimes I have to bracket my terms in order to take in another's.) The point is, I have to leap before I know, if I want to participate. Tiny example: my intuition tells me that Sterling is off on a wrong path whenever he brings in Hegel, and somehow I want to know enough about Hegel to figure out how to make this point to Sterling, but I want to do this without actually having to read Hegel. This makes me a dilettante, right?

I don't think it's a matter of prescriptive-ness. George Jones is kind of a funny example, actually. As someone steeped in a "tradition" that sounds simple on paper but was actually made up of several different things, and who was furthermore a singer and not an arranger/composer/thinker (I don't mean to denigrate Jones either, he's an incredible interpreter of the most inane shit), he was analytical about certain aspects of his art--but it wasn't necessarily conscious. And who is to say he wouldn't have benefited from more "analysis"? Howlin' Wolf took music lessons in later life and tried to think about what he was doing, but it didn't slow him down any I can hear. And I think Howlin' Wolf incorporated what he heard into his music, and he heard a lot--Jimmie Rodgers, for example--through radio, records, etc., much more than what he would've heard if he had been born earlier. And I think too that someone like Wolf was rather self-conscious about what he was doing, as evidenced in his phrasing. It's a mistake to see someone like him or Jones as supremely intuitive/un-selfconscious artists, I think.

Jesse's point above, in which he uses Skip James--another very, very self-conscious, calculating blues artist, perhaps the most calculating ever--is interesting to me as well. Taking part of "I'm So Glad" and sticking it into a song is "interesting" and I'm not knocking that kind of juxtaposing at all, it's a different kind of art from what James was trying to do. I'm not sure, however, if taking a snippet of James is the same kind or same level of musical analysis as, well, taking a banal Tin Pan Alley song and turning into whatever you want to call James' "I'm So Glad." I also see a lot of this argument centering on eclectisim vs. staying with one genre, and I for one don't really think eclectism produces great art, necessarily--sticking with one or two things and learning from other, perhaps unrelated art forms, how to go about refining and stylizing what you know, is more to the point. It could be as simple as a funk musician hearing bluegrass and realizing something cool about compression of song form--play the solo over half the bridge but come back in before the bridge is over, perfect, I'll do that!--rather than any idiomatic transference, which brings us back to the dismal days of "jazz-rock" and all that bullshit.

I'm not pretending to know the answers--I think immersion in one area of expertise is a good thing for a while, but you do it to get humble about what you can really know, even about one thing, and to show you how to apply rules that are universal to all disciplines to anything you want. As does everybody here, I think, I am always a little conflicted about where my allegiances lie, because there's very little music I don't like.

is the key Reynolds text to read on this I think. Cf. Timbaland's insistance that everything he does is absolutely new and he doesn't listen to techno etc., or uk garage's relentless purge as much as incorporation of the musical landscape -- intensity of focus and insistance of meaning as necessary artistic self-deception?

http://empty.org/review/2001_10_01_archive.html#ir6562523

is where I talked about this once ages ago in a v. different way, essentially making the argt. that reynolds view of the scene in that essay is born of someone who wasn't of that scene -- even noticing the monomania of a culture puts you on the outside of a monoculture somehow.

I thought the Beatles White Album was mediocre, while I love their first three; the first three drew on just as much (or more) than the White Album did, but the White Album had "ECLECTICISM" tattoed all over it, so you could go "Wow, and now they're doing calypso."

(i.e. so rotten liked van der graf etc. but could the pistols have been the pistols if he talked about van der graf all the time?)

(motherfucking hegel fucking with how i think and use words and making me incomprehensible grrr...)

I mention that because whether or not Timbaland actually ever listened to anything having to do with techno, it seems sort of inconceivable that he didn't have enough of a sense of its moods and sounds to know when he was leaning toward it. (If he were really so remote from it his answer to "do you listen to techno?" would be "I don't know, what exactly is techno?")

People claiming not to be influenced by things always reminds me of Paul Simon in The Rutles, talking about how uninfluenced he was by The Rutles. Or, in real life, Lou Reed strenuously asserting the same thing about the Beatles. Or PJ Harvey saying she'd never heard Patti Smith -- she might not have, but she was sure as hell influenced by her.

None of which has much to do with fanaticism or dilettantism, I guess. It's just that old "purity" or "authenticity" shtick.

anyway, the notion of "pre-techno" is a red herring anyway. cybotron and the other detroit techno guys were developing their sound concurrently with electro, house, and the digital version of dancehall, most of which predate the looped sample aesthetic of dre and premier anyway.

The more I think about this the more apropos hegel becomes -- the disjunctive syllogism:

"But particularisation is differentiation and as such is just as much the either-or of B, C and D, the negative unity, the reciprocal exclusion of the terms. Further, this exclusion is not merely a reciprocal exclusion, or the determination merely a relative one, but it is just as essentially a self-related determination, the particular as individuality to the exclusion of the others.

A is either B or C or D,
But A is B,
Therefore A is neither C nor D."

Exclusion is itself a universality. Fanaticism defines a worldview through defining itself. Reynolds' link to the hardcore continuum perhaps because he knows he is a part of it? He recognizes that he is in a position where how he defines it shapes how it evolves? As such his "fanaticism" is the fufillment of mutual obligation, maybe.

The irony is his attacks on soulboys are for their single-mindedness, inability to recognize the diversity of "influence" on techno etc. -- but he binds himself to a different sort of single-mindedness because he recognizes that he's imposing as much as exploring an esthetic in a certain realm. Hence, perhaps, the confusion/relation between producer and consumer, critic and creator which is at the heart of the recent Reynolds piece. I & many other listners would never ask "could this esthetic serve me as a music producer" because it would never cross our minds that we would actually engage in such a pursuit. A characteristic of scenius then -- the sense that everyone creates, perhaps the illusion? To make a scene means to give yrself to it, sacrifice for its artistic growth, limit yrself to recieve the effects, abandon disbelief?

Also contrast rave auterism with chart-hop for example -- timbo's for the dilettantes as much as the heads, just as exacting on himself but less on his audience. The professionalization of obsession as the genius or downfall of modern pop? Meaning already stripped from words and sounds, packages already processed for competition rather than cohesion -- a song in three minutes; a meal in a pill. "The Club" transformed into a fantasy topos like "The Street" where we all dance in our heads.

Related question: if pop didn't have subcultures to plagerize, would it invent them, and would it be successful?

have come late to this thread, apologies, but i'd like to offer a reductionist psychological-type viewpoint, if no-one minds.

this idea has been touched on by some of the posts above, but needs to be taken further i think - the extend to which your taste in and attitude to music is used to build your identity/sense of self, whatever. we define ourselves externally; as obsessive music listeners (whether fanatic or dilletante) one of our most important touchstones for our identities is what we listen to and how we do it. i think part of the reason the disagreement between simon and tom seems to become personal ('you're a limp-wristed aristocrat,' all of that) is because their conflicting listening attitudes represent important differences in their personalites, backgrounds, self-definitions etc.

or, in other words: i'm 22. i don't know what i think yet, about anything. i'm trying to find out what i do think, and part of that exploration is listening to as much music as possible. at this stage in my life, what matters is possibility and confusion and connectivity, and those things are expressed in my passionate (in fact, fanatical) musical dilletantism.

simon reynolds has fixed forever the hardcore/jungle explosion as the supreme, defining experience of his listening life - and therefore, as an obsessive listener (which we all are), of his self-defined identity. this moment has passed, and as such his focus is already there: he has decided who he is and what he is about. this leads him naturally to the 'fanatic' position, because it matters to him that all his opinions will be forever formed in relation to that single experience.

for me, for lots of you i guess, that experience hasn't happened, and may never happen, and so we're forced to keep on searching out new things, trying everything, not stopping looking. one day our identities might be fixed and then maybe we too, like simon reynolds, will think of ourselves as fanatics. i kind of hope it doesn't happen to me.

this doesn't make a lot of sense, sorry it's so incoherent. i just wanted to suggest that the apparent division between fanatic/dilletante might be more about the process of self-defintion that anything else.

I do think that what we read at University may have something to do with the different outlooks, though!

I also think there's a full-time/hobbyist professional/amateur divide which informs them, too.

Very interesting thread of course and I'm working on some kind of reply and clarification.

i didn't mean that i thought there was any personal animosity in the debate (that aristoctatic thing was a red herring). i was just trying to fix its terms more on a personal/identity-based level, simply as an alternative to the more rarefied philosophical/idelogical area it was in.

i'm inclined to see choices as to music taste and listening attitude as more based in the life situation of the individual, than in belief in whatever critical theory.

see how oxford has turned me into a reactionary?

I'd be quite happy with scattershot fanaticism, though.

This is a heck of a thing: Ewing on Baran on Reynolds on Ewing. I want to contribute properly when I get time.

I'll say two things now:

1) presumably, from my point of view, my original strictures and doubts about Ewing's 2002 work still hold, though I don't suppose they figure in what Reynolds has to say.

2) Reynolds on Rorty vs Nietzsche is somehow awfully off the point. I'm not entirely sure what he means by 'milquetoast': but Rorty's style is part of his point, his persona, his philosophy. Rorty is a substantial contemporary thinker, even if his aim is to get away from illusions of substance. To me, for one, he's long been a point of reference, whether or not I've 'agreed' with him. To compare him disparagingly to Nietzsche on the basis of 'style' is folly.

PS / I'm not sure whether it's worth adding that 'language games' was late Wittgenstein, revived (like an old thread) by Lyotard c.1979. As far as I can recall, Rorty's vocabulary is more one of... "vocabularies".

Cultural battleground vs harvest festival: that sounds straightforward, but actually, no: a harvest festival sounds a fair place to be, in a world already full of violence enough.

But there are still some substantial issues here, beyond these perhaps minor-looking points.

Nipper to thread, surely.

no, i'm not him, and i'm sure he is grateful, and i am too.

But for the time being, a tangent: pop criticism and the anxiety of influence. I've been rereading an old Simon Frith-edited book of essays recents called 'On the Record. It includes an old Monitor essay by Simon R. on new pop and its discontents. What I find interesting about it is the way that you can see SR thinking very hard about how to get out of the gorgeous ludic labyrinth of his inheritance from Paul Morley and Ian Penman. How he eventually escaped - to put it in simple terms was by valorising what they had left out, or chosen not to emphasis, finding a way to like Rock which was contemporary and fresh and adventurous and exciting.

For a lot of us in our late twenties and early thirties, SR is a similar kind of problem - someone who articulated a rigourous and thorough way of thinking about music and the world, which is almost too seductive. Like Billy Blake always sez "I must create my own system or the be the slave of another's" (or words to that effect). Tom's solution to the problem of Reynolds was to reverse Reynolds Barthesian opposition between jouissance and plaisir - where plaisir is all that confirms our identity in a community, the everyday, the pleasures of sociability. Why not talk about the ordinariness (in a Raymond Williams sense)of how pop enters our lives, and leads to new conversations, communities. (If it weren't so obviously reactive to SR, Tom should publish an anthology called PEER TO PEER - THE PLEASURES OF POP, where peer-to-peer is less a technological fact than a social metaphor). This changes the focus of writing from how pop uses us - the awe, the rapture, the dismay or disappointment - to how we use music - as a way to make our social lives more fun. Pop is seen less as a "spell" or a drug or a dream - something that consumes us, that we become infatuated with, but as a ticket, the actual value of which is less important than the journies it allows you to make. In this sense ILM is TE's real achievement, a kind of emanation of a pop ideal and sensibility - pop as sensible conversation rather ecstatic sermon delivered from on high.

That said - I am still on the romantic end of the equation (Romanticism is like a very powerful drug, and can be hard to shake), but I'd like to try and think of a kind of way out of the binary. I think somebody like David Thomson is pretty good at this, conceiving of film in both romantic terms - as dreams, as ghosts, as fantasy - but also practical - how those ghosts stray into the everyday, sometimes in ambivalent and damaging ways...

Excellent post JtN. Particularly because the "problem of Reynolds" used to be something Alex T and I would talk about in exactly those kind of terms.

An extended football metaphor for your probable article is also doing the rounds. We don't know if it's accurate yet, or whether it's flawed by its own innate geezerishness.

The Ewing you describe sounds like a writer I'd like to read.

One thing you've left out: 'the actual music'. Sometimes it can get in the way.

I recognise this is reductive, obv., but it is obstacular.

My reply to Simon R's piece, and sort-of to this thread though I need to read big chunks of it more closely.

I am k-flattered by the need for the thread in the first place, of course!

I possibly agree with you about 'history' as well, though I'm not sure about the 'nobility' of RoMo: a movement I never managed to hear before it seemed to have already ended.

And I don't have such a big problem with your word 'pretend'. Here's yet another alternative verb, probably the one I'd use: 'imagine'.

Now I think about it, this problem of [pretending / assuming / imagining] seems to me a bogus one: I don't think I can see how it implies a lack of passion. Passion, it might be said, is always of the (a) moment: its longevity might not be the most important thing about it. In effect, I agree with you: one may as well start from what one enjoys, and attempt to give 'reasons'.

One big problem I still have is your projection of your own situation on to others. Your claims about technology and the way people listen apply to you, and some other people. They don't apply to everyone; they don't apply to me, for instance. I have said this many times, but you never seem to have given it any credence.

My other problem is the one Tim H and I agreed on earlier: 'the music'. I don't think I like 'the music' you're talking about. I probably don't like Reynolds' either. So - to echo Mr Hopkins - that makes a dent in my ability to buy your more general arguments.

I couldn't agree with that sentiment more. :-)

(Oh and Kogan yr. right --… Like Marcello and punctum?

Like when I start to examine plenty of "areas" of music enuf I find they inevitably have far less of an organizing principle than I started off thinking. Is this what Mark S was getting at when he started all those “is xXx rock?” threads?

When I said don’t stop the fan to Tim, what I meant was that I think that perhaps its useful to suspend the normal moral connotations of the two words to try and grasp at the systems’ worth. So no-one had mentioned the obvious flakeyness of the term ‘dilettante’ which historically blah blah, and the potentially mobile element of the argument was not getting touched because the ‘morality’ of the two systems is equally questionable. (Isn’t another word for a fanatic a ‘zealot’?)

What I was getting at within my piece on dilettantism is roughly similar to what Tom’s on about. What I’m talking about when I say “dilettante” is to do with access to music… The prime example of the dilettante’s genre has got to be currently gutter garridge: now on a pragmatic level its accessibility is almost zero to dial-up internet users (“its London-centricity, rooting around in the white label bins”.) It’s a system of consuming music, a practical approach, sure you can be fanatical within it. Or am I conflating fanaticism with passion?

Are the people on this thread fanatical about being on this thread?

Not really, I’m interested in what some of the people say. And I haven’t read everything just scrolled down through some posts with interesting buzzwords. I’m much more fanatical about the film I’m going to see. Because I’m going to see a film, not because of the film it is.

Are you committed to your writing?

I’m committed to my writing but that’s the only thing I am committed to. I’m definitely not committed to the music. The music is committed to my writing.

Are you committed to this interchange, to this particular bit of social intercourse? Are you?

No, not just now, n’night.

(re:my last post - And I don't want to to turn this into a language game, I just thought I had to explain my visibly glib current favourite phrase - "don't stop the fan").

good rejoinder, Tom! i especially enjoyed the quip about the Raj colonialist getting sent his copy of the Times. yeah being 3000 miles from the action i am unavoidably a dilettante when it comes to gutter-garridge, and not too bothered about it -- since the committed garageist lifestyle would involve risking getting shot in clubs or at least getting the skrewface for having the wrong clothes/being the wrong age

i thought one possibly illuminating and at least amusing way of looking at this fanatic vs dilettante binary is to map music-love onto person-love. Which would give you: True Love vs. Promiscuity. Whichh makes the dilettante stance immediately seem a bit cold:
oh it’s so naïve and juvenile and old-fashioned to believe in true love, the sensible way is to have multiple sexual partners. Which might actually be sensible (that’s what some in the Sixties believed), but at the same time if you’ve never had that This Is The One Thing Grand Passion experience with music, total involvement and total partisanship, at least once in your life -- sorry, but I can’t help feeling you’ve missed out, in the same way that someone who’s never fallen head over heels in love has missed out.

Also, i would be interested to know, surely most people here would have gotten into music at all in the first place through exactly that kind of ultra-intense cathexis (excuse the jargon), ie falling in love with a band or a scene or movement?. With me it was the Lydon double-whammy of Sex Pistols/PiL (and incidentally folks I was into music for almost 14 years--that’s fourteen years---before rave, there were many fanaticisms before ‘ardkore, trus me). For others it was probably the Smiths (actually another Grand Passion), or Public Enemy, or MBV, or Madchester, or Slayer/Metallica...

I suupose i find it hard to imagine how one would ever enter this discursive field in the first place, get inducted into the culture of taking-it-all-too-seriously, without some initial Grand Passion. But I could be wrong.

I'm trying to work out what that would make my relationshp with music, in romantic terms. Serial monogamy? An open marriage with various flings (microhouse, et al) orbiting a hot core of passion (at the mo UKG-rap natch)

Of course, culture and romance aren’t equateable; as a consumer you can fancy and flirt with and Biblically ‘know’ loads of different musics. But, really it’s just a mathematical/arithmetical thing to do with time/energy -- if you’re doing that with lots of things, how intense can any one engagement be? Aren’t you quite literally spreading your self a bit thin? I’m just thinking aloud here, any finger pointed is at much at my own tendencies in that direction as anything.

Simon R

I will say that I hope I DO get to experience the sort of unique immersion in one style/genre of music (being aided by a tightknit communal feeling, and good drugs, wouldn't hurt) that informs, um, your thinking. Like you and others have mentioned, the closest analogy I can come up with was when I first started actively getting interested in music in my early teens and before. But maybe that's the difference between first love and true love?

I guess what I'm saying is (it seems to me that) for people under 30 who really really really love music, it's almost impossible now to have one singular grand passion, because there's such a surfeit of stuff out there, and it's all so easily available. this was true already c. 1991-5 or so, and is at least doubly so now. granted, I always liked music a lot more than most of my friends, always was a proto-critic before I had the nerve to attempt to sell my opinions for money, and I liked rave a lot more than I did indie. but I think (hope) you can see my point here.

The idea of investment is useful because it embodies an ambiguity about how we "deal" with culture, how we manage our (cough) libidinal economies. Dilettantes could be seen as cynical stock-market whizzkids, exploiting the peaks of market fluctuation while craftily avoiding the the recessive troughs. And, in one sense, who can blame them? It smacks of a kind of Puritanism that pleasure must be tempered with the kind of despair that, for example, football fans are only too familiar with.

Alternatively, like those of us who are given the choice over our pension scheme, you might see investment as having a kind of ethical imperative, that it's a moral responsibility to bring something of yourself to the party (unlike, for example, those fuckers on slsk who download your entire c drive and share no files themselves). This makes me thing of the idea of "engagement" that we used to find so important in the twentieth century... that's it's an existential obligation to commit yourself whole-heartedly (and whole-mindedly) to your enthusiasms. But again, this might seem moralistic - why should duty have anything to do with the Bataillean spree of desire?

I think (worryingly) the drug metaphor might be the most accurate. Dilettantes prove the lie of the idea that soft and sensible recreational use inevitably spirals into a tailspin of harder and harder fixes - it's quite feasible to enjoy a spliff most weekends after the boozer with your mates without winding up a gutterdwelling crackhawk. But for those with, for whatever reasons, the synaptic crackle of "addictive personality" there's a smack of the sublime that's going to be chased wherever it leads, beyond sense and reason. I don't think there's very much choice in the matter, just as there isn't for those stricken romantics who are doomed to attempt to recreate the first-step-off-the-diving-board vertigo of first love... eternally.

I guess you could probably boil the whole debate down to:

“but that’s such an unRomantic way of looking at music!”
versus
“but that’s such a Romantic idea of looking at music”

>universalizing his experience
but everybody’s really doing that, aren’t they? Otherwise it’s sociology. Which is useful in small doses but…

Re, What Matos said -- just guessing here but maybe a major historical break or divide in terms of sensibility, is for those who came of age after hip hop really became an undeniable claim on one's attention. Which would be roughly circa Public Enemy. The sense I get is that if you got into music around then or thereafter, your focus had to be equally divided between rock and hip hop. I get the impression for many in the generation that’s like ten years or more younger than me, things like PE’s Nation of Millions and Fear of A Black Planet and the first De La Soul are as important to them as Pixies/MBV/Nirvana/whatever. So your passion/consciousness is pluralized from the start.

God forbid there should be any music worth paying attention to, aside from those two genres.

Huh?

Anyway, my experience of getting into music in a way that would lead me to end up at a place like this came precisely as a result of suddenly being exposed to several unknown and intriguing musical worlds all at once (punk/post-punk, etc., reggae, avant-garde/experimental, progressive, electronic music--as the term was used in the early 80's, free jazz, various traditional types of international music) by way of one particular college radio station.

(I don't really belong here ayway since I'm not obsessive enough about what's happening this very moment in music.)

Are you saying I am Robert Christgau without knowing it?)

Great post, Nipper. Elegant use of analogies, graceful.

Everyone be nice to our guest. Simon R: welcome aboard.

Slsk?

Tom E still hasn't addressed his claims about technology/modes of listening. Take your time.

Naturellement. I can redeliver the radical subjectivist rant again if desired.

My induction into liking music was the Smiths, obviously. But they couldn't be a Grand Passion cos I discovered they'd broken up about a month before I got into them. Also a few months later I heard Public Enemy and they seemed to go against everything I'd just 'learned' from Moz & co. at the same time as being against everything I'd rejected via Moz, too. So maybe it's that cognitive dissonance - two contradictory things going off at once - that I got addicted to.

>Huh?

whether or not you use the first person singular, a piece of critical writing is really just an elaborate validation of your particular taste, which means that it's ultimately a validation of your self, with its limits and biases and blindspots. if you go beyond that into second-guessing the feelings/motivations of other people, or groups of people, then you've moved into sociology -- amateur sociology (because nobody's actually going out doing field-research), which of course i'm rather prone to.

i'm suggesting there's no higher ground you can get to where you're beyond 'universalizing your own subjectivity'. although trying to get there, to that non-existent place, might be a worthwhile struggle.

i thought of a more glamorous romantic/sexual analogy for the dilettante: Big Pimpin' a la Jay-Z 'girls girls girls' or ludacris 'i've got hos in different area codes'. the stance is 'i love women' plural (c.f. I Love Music) rather than singular.

there's also a less glamorous way of looking at fanaticism in this light -- as a marriage. where at best it's a deep abiding attachment, the play of familiarity and surprise. but at frequent worst, the genre-ist who plights his troth is like the unhappily married bloke. like house-heads forever complaining about how the genre's not coming up with the goods, or the way a lot of hip hop headz are constantly going about it was better in the good old days. it's really like they've got trapped in a for better or worse deal.

Or maybe (to step outside the herosexual framework)being a dilettante in the age of mp3's is more like cruising...

It's my life... and it's my wife.

i'm suggesting there's no higher ground you can get to where you're beyond 'universalizing your own subjectivity'. although trying to get there, to that non-existent place, might be a worthwhile struggle.

I guess I understood you in some sense, but the comment about you universalizing your experience came up after you made assumptions about what the typical biography of a music enthusiast (if that's not too weak a word) would look like, based on the pattern that you yourself followed.

To give another example: there's a William Gass essays about how readers visualize characters while reading fiction. I was especially interested in it, since I am a virtual non-visualizer and have often been fascinated by the way other people decribe hearing vivid visual mental imagery. Gass mentions some things that are commonly said about it, and disputes them based on his own experience. But then he makes the mistake of assuming that his experience is in fact the way readers in general picture characters in fiction. This is just a silly methodology for making generalizations. I guess you could call it sociology to consider that other people's experiences might be different, but it seems pretty basic (albeit, I know that, speaking only for myself of course, other people periodically surprise me by just how different they can be).

How about polygamy? I feel that I have about three or four musical wives who I genuinely love, plus a number of mistresses, on and off flings, and one-night-stands. (In my love life, when it's at all active, I'm more inclined to monogamy.)

(The broader issue of values is another matter, and it's harder to see what stable thing there is outside of yourself to appeal to, in order to make up your aesthetic (or other) value judgments.)

where it falls down for example is that reynolds gives his last name to the fast lane -- fanatacism is like the opposite of settling down.

topos seems a more productive metaphor (precisely becuz it goes beyond the bounds of metaphor of critical method and approaches the actual metaphor/relationality underlying critical method) -- the sonic space of the rave vs. the sonic space of the pub vs. the sonic space of the festival vs. for me probably the sonic space of the car.

anyway, i can't claim to have read this whole thread < /kogan>, and i do wish ilx would learn to pair down its ideas (diarrehea of the keyboard must be a midwestern vice), so shoot me down if this has already been flogged but it seems to me that the unspoken fear of almost all music criticism is a paralyzing fear of being wrong, to look back on your "lifes work" and realize that you had backed the wrong horse all along, as if the whole affair wasn't just a cottage industry of personal obsession in the first place, that by being "right" you're on the Side of History, while neglecting the other side of the rockcrit idea(l), that it's all houses built on sand from the outset and History (and its litany of important people/places/events) shifts with perspective not only from year to year and generation to generation but from listener/reader to listener/reader. (which is how in 2003 you still have people venerating the lester bangs horse and why in 2023 you'll still have people backing the simon reynolds horse.) and this whole notion is so antithetical to my listening pleasure that the dilettants have the sanity advantage from the outset. the loyalists, on the other hand, are the ones who (despite evidence to the contrary) draw up the distinct canons in the first place (not the niggling, endlessly refined dead horses of VH1 list culture but the ones who say "maginalized music A/B/C is IMPORTANT, if not MORE IMPORTANT that dominant paradigm A/B/C") which assures them their place of importance/respect, much like i respect people who work with the mentally ill or terminally ill sacrificing their own sanity/pleasure in the name of helping others. then again, like tom, i'm not convinced that mp3 culture really means we HAVE "marginalized music" anymore, so they might be on their way out. (anxiety of obsolescence?)

As always with Hitchens's work, one gets the strongest possible sense of how much it matters to prove that one is and always has been right: right about which side to be on, right that there are sides and one has to be on one of them; right about which way the world (in the rather narrow, political journalist's sense of that term) is going, right about which policies will work and which regimes are wicked; right about the accuracy of one's facts and one's stories; and right when so many others, especially well-regarded or well-placed others, are demonstrably wrong. There is a palpably macho tone to all of this, as of alpha males competing for dominance and display.

And it's this kind of attitude one occasionally runs into on ILM...

It's protestantism, that's what it is.

My plans to read Simon Reynolds are now scotched. This is a lousy excuse for lazy criticism (that's what it is, isn't it?).

Sorry for the glibness of my last few posts, by the way.

Another way of putting it: I think taste is but one parameter by which to appreciate/understand music.

And actually, if you look back at the orig. quote he's acknowledged quite strongly that he goes far beyond simple crit in this regard, and further the more "elaborate" the validation of taste, the more I'd argue that it has to go beyond enumeration of taste into the social -- heck I'd even argue that much academic work be it in sociology or lit-crit or even history is driven by something that might be v. v. loosely termed "validation of taste" (which in no way invalidates their scientific and ultimately objective character).

One final point: drawing a distinction between "appreciation" of music and "taste" seems somewhat odd to me, since by my estimates taste IS the appreciation of music. Similarly to jess, I have a hard time differentiating "taste and perception" from music.

Hopefully I'll have the intellectual fortitude tomorrow to talk about taste vs. appreciation.

Also, re: Simon's linking of Tim F's new post, and his ending, which seems to mock some of the more simpleminded aspects of this discussion (i.e. probably mine). I hope I'm not beating an old horse here, but I think that "dilettante" means "nonideological" as much as "noncommitted." I'll try to think of some concrete examples but does this seem redundant?

I think Jess should breed a microhorse of his own.

Plurality, presumably, like many things, is in the beholder's ear. Some people's version of pluralized passion might be the one described above. But maybe everyone is plural, or singular, according to how you take them. I like Cole Porter, George Jones, Hendrix and MBV - does that get me into the pluralized gang? Who gets to define plurality?

extra syllables are so much more punk than abbreviations.

(Dan Perry to thread with a "but I wanted to put it somewhere" joke.)

On Tim Mosley: In that interview, he resisted talk of influences SUPER hard, obviously understanding what it would look like in print. He ended up saying he liked Dre and Premier but never actually admitted to learning anything from anyone. Which leads one to think, inevitably, that he's studied everyone obsessively (which is what it seemed like when he started in about Jerkins). But that was 5? 6? years ago now. 4 years?

http://www.good.is/?p=12364

Music is just another way for people to express their obsessive-compulsive disorders.

People like being in clubs not so much to share the music as to refuse others entry at the door.