Sasha Frere-Jones I Kiss You

JT: "There's always so much emphasis on how much control artists have. Even with these new artists who've come up, like Avril Lavigne--I don't want to seem like I'm talking about people, but from what I've seen, it's like, "Well, is this real?" There's always that question. But all I can do is just do what I do, and people can judge it any way that they want.

It was so funny to me because on one hand, when I read the reviews of "Justified," they were like, "Wow, the Neptunes have never sounded like this. Timbaland has never sounded like this." Then, when the actual statements come forward when they want to review what Justin Timberlake's record was about, it's, "Well, he had the Neptunes and he had Timbaland pulling all the strings." Aren't these the same people who just said that these producers never sounded this good, or they never sounded like this before? I went through this whole thing of, like, "Well, didn't I have something to do with that? Doesn't me contributing the lyrics and the melodies have something to do with that?"

Finally, I was just like, "Screw it! People can say whatever they want to say." I don't make these records for the critics. I make them for people who want to listen to them, and I make them for myself."

* Five of Hornby's TNY columns, incidentally, are being republished in the forthcoming paperback edition of Songbook--not the Radiohead one, interestingly, but the one on the Billboard top ten. phear!

Kim OTM. it was much more than irritating and this is like shooting fish in a barrel so I don't see the big deal here.

I sorta wish this line (or rather sentiment) wasn't buried so deeply. My own problem with the article is that while I see the battleground SFJ is working on and with, meaning he has to turn on the hyperbole, he ends up creating two particular cartoons -- boring 'chin-strokers' and unabashed but also apparently uncritical pop-lurvers, both of whom are apparently locked down into their own particular canons (in some cases dependent on age) and not stepping out from them. Not very nuanced, and the effect of the extended Madonna/Timberlake comparison -- or in contrast, the more subtle Beatles/Radiohead one -- is to imply (not directly claim but still imply) that to lurve one is to lurve the other. For all that there's a period of her career I'm not thrilled by, Madonna remains pretty great for me -- my feelings on Timberlake are clear enough at this point. Ultimately I'd think, 'great general point, pity about the specific example.'

Isn't the point that Justified shouldn't need defending (on whatever bases, for whatever reasons) but rather celebrating because it's a fucking good record?

On another point, how much suspicion is there of people like Madonna and Timberlake because they seem so in control (of their careers and themselves) that we (I'm not sure who this we is) become jealous and almost fearful because we don't feel as in control of our lives? And why doesn't Bowie suffer from the same syndrome?

Also, how much has the idea of figureheads got in opposition to the idea of the creative auteur? ie; Justin or whoever is confident enough to push themselves forward in order to present their music but the twin ideas of the svengali and the figurehead mean we become automatically suspicious, because like body + soul we like to think fo the two as seperate when really this division is totaly arbitrary, and possibly false anyway?

I'm totally distracted by Whistle Down The Wind so I'm sorry if this is rubbery.

No offense, but this sounds like exactly what too many people have said about the Beatles and all le standards du rockism. No arguing, no defending, no discourse -- and while the whole point of initial musical engagement IS to be so overwhelmed one way or another, I agree, eventually you end up dealing with people who might not feel the same way as you, after all.

"This is great! Don't let's get into it, it's so wonderful!"
"But I think..."
"No, don't. You can't and shouldn't, it's great! Who could disagree?"
"Well, but I..."
"You just hate rock/pop/dance/fun/life, don't you?"
"No I don't, jeez!"

Etc. etc.

As a primer on the issue, SFJ seems pretty OTM to me. I just think the issue is a big mislead.

He's not writing about music. He's writing about music criticism. He's pointing out a problem with music criticism, and SO AM I.

You seemed to recognize the difference upthread.

What I am saying is that writing about music should probably be at least in part about music. I have ceased caring about critical in-fights that focus more on critics than music. In fact, I suggest that ILM be renamed to "I Love Hating on Other People Who Write About Music," and then I can just stop fucking reading it.

x-post, I'm guessing.

(xpost)

invoking rockism and its subset of rules != actually being rockist

they don't?!

Its lame and just too easy to attack other critics.

Now, I'm done, I said my piece, and I won't be participating in this discussion anymore. Have a blast.

to suggest that rockcrits shouldn't take each other on is to suggest an end to discourse, which i don't think anyone is saying (except possibly julio?)

that said, i hardly think that the rock vs. pop divide and its ensuant squabbles say nothing about music...

"...the numerous comparisons that have been drawn-name any combination of hip artists and have them swap bodily fluids or ride funny cars together-have mostly been bunk."

Not to prove anything, it just seemed to make sense.

(Quick—think of a single solo disc by a famous producer … that's any good. We'll wait.)

Did Here Come the Warm Jets or Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) (or a couple more examples from the same artist that are also not merely good, but excellent) slip SFJ's mind completely here?

Precisely - SFJ never asserts that Justin is good because of the rockist arguments he refers to; all that stuff about 'the same number of people, or less, are involved in a Justin song than a Radiohead song' isn't thee to prove a point about Justin, but to prove the point about rockists. All his praise of Justin is still centred on the music. It was a great article.

of course, one could argue, that it is the bypassing of *those* people, that can make them annoyed with pop protagonists, "hey, i never said this could happen, i never gave my stamp of approval!"

Not what I'm saying.

''to suggest that rockcrits shouldn't take each other on is to suggest an end to discourse, which i don't think anyone is saying (except possibly julio?)''

ok, critics should test each other's opinions and so on: I just really agree with what trife and Kim are saying here and that he isn't saying that much.

automatically defending anything by invoking genre is proof you're NOT taking it seriously: rule one of critical thinking, pretty much, is making distinctions within the category

rockism = reaching for a set of values which rock (supposedly) defends against the crimes of chart-pop: but all of these values *predate* rock, and — if genuinely pursued as values — devalue rock (in favour of earlier musics which exemplify them much better)

in order to value rock against these earlier musics — which rock lovers presumably would like to do — the exact things being decried in chartpop have to be invoked

i have never thought the word "popist" had useful meaning in this context: as i define rockism, if you're critically pro-rock as having developed cultural values new to the world and worth holding onto, then you're NOT anti-charts per se, or indeed anti-popularity or anti-success per se

Also, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure I read that Egan piece and I remember thinking it was one of the best Madonna things I'd read... I don't recall it dissing Madonna at all, but rather making the case for why she was the preeminent musician of her era (which did involve some distinguishing of her from the preeminent music of the previous era). Those Egan quotes in the piece are a bit thin, really.

PS Of course critics should fight with each other. More often, preferably. It's entertaining.

PSS I never get why people cite that Christgau Nirvana piece as an example of the New Yorker doing pop criticism right. I thought it was deathly dull, full of conventional wisdom, and neutered Christgau's voice (presumably in the edit).

PSSS Also don't get how people can use 'pop' as a genre term. It seems meaningless in that sense to me.

Most critics I know would rather not have this kind of information when reviewing an album or performance as they are most likely going to be prejudiced in their reaction/assessment. Knowing very little about what exactly happened in the studio and actually, probably knowing more about the influence of certain producers such as Timbaland, it seems at least somewhat logical to conclude that the influence Justin Timberlake had on his album could have been relatively minimal.

But actually, I think the larger point is the assumption critics make on a day to day basis is often just as flawed as the one Ross made. I don't even think the bad rap "pop" stars get is even that significant.

also i thought the review liked the record (& if you wanna argue tatu have creative control or that they wouldn't be more interesting if they did (i mean they can come up with a line like my ***** h***s from the new yorker) then actually do so).

i.e. just coz arguing creative control is good in itself is rockist does not mean that no artist should have creative control ever.

Oh, the above argument is super-sexy; albeit incomprehensible.

In some respects the article seemed very primeresque on the older debates about pop v. rock. But when I wrote the intro to my book on Bubblegum music I felt the same need to hammer at the key points until they were blindingly obvious. Most notably the long role of producers and session musicians in canonical rock meisterworks which were treated as exceptions rather than its own tradition within rock. Phil Spector, Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks, Studio One, Motown, Stax, Disco, Hip Hop and on and on.

That head shaking moment reminds me of my inner monologue when my ex-housemate once asked me if I thought Coldplay were "amazing".

It's just to say that pop artists are critic-proof. Bad reviews don't matter, and neither do good ones.

One reasonable corrollary to this claim: pop artists are listener-proof as well. If you're a critic or just a listener, your opinion about a record isn't going to matter one way or the other. Greil Marcus or uberfan, the only way you figure in this equation is if you buy a record. Compared to the consumer perogrative, having an opinion -- "I like it." "It's pretty." "I can't dance to it." -- is royally besides the point and an essentially masturabatory exercise as any review is.

I don't think Phil Freeman is saying this or thinks this, but I do think it's something you could conclude from that stance -- I think any reason you can give for discounting what the reviewer thinks can be used to discount what the listener (the "fan," whatever) thinks as well.

dig those heels in steve!

In a certain sense - i.e., the commercial sense - it is true that pop doesn't need music criticism. I doubt that even a landslide of bad press could sink a hot album with a big promotional budget. However, there are still other senses in which pop criticism plays a valuable role - ie., in helping us to think about it and understand pop. And why wouldn't you want to think about and understand something that plays such a ubiquitous role in so many people's lives?

Also, I don't think that SFJ was denying critics the right to champion obscure, unpopular albums if they wish to. What he wast taking issue with was their tendency to badmouth popular albums for poorly thought out reasons. And in this effort, I wish him well. However, I do think there is an element of hysteria in his desire to portray Alex Ross as the anti-pop bogeyman. As others have noted, his piece was more nuanced than SFJ gives him credit for. And SFJ seems to be working too hard to deconstruct the anti-pop fallacies in brief tossed-off lines from Ross's piece, while ignoring the main thrust of it.

I suspect this attitude ("ewww, *girls* listen to that stuff") is prevalent among people much older than nine.

anti-rockism is not necessarily "pro-pop", since many of rock's virtues are anti-rockist (and the ones that aren't are anti-rock)

rockism (my def) doesn't have an "influence" (even separately from my probs with the idea of i. influence at all, and ii. philosophies having influence) bcz what it is is a bad — self-demolishing — argument

actually what it is is a sequence of bad (related) self-demolishing arguments

a) in the first place, we should not be making judgements based solely on what genre a piece of music belongs to.

b) besides, any rockist vs popist dichotomy is essentially false, because they actually have much more in common than not. In fact, rock's values are essentially the same as the values usually associated with pop in this argument. Rockists, who think they're defending rock, are actually drawing on a set of values that predate rock altogether (and are fundamentally conservative.) Therefore, they are fundamentally anti-rock.

And I don't think I've ever seen Mark post his definition of rockism before, so I for one am grateful!

Also, the idea that "pop doesn't need music criticism" is only true if you accept the premise that being "a consumer advocate... is the primary purpose of music criticism in a capitalist/consumer society."

Which is a highly debatable premise. And one could just as easily claim--as Mr. Frere-Jones implicitly does--that because everybody supposedly already knows about pop, writing about it is a way to connect with the general populace and the things that matter to it--ie, the opposite of masturbatory.

Plus, what exactly is wrong with "aspiration/health & efficiency/self-realisation"? Or "hypersexuality/glamour/black music"? Why do these things need to be critiqued? I mean, personally I'll take any of that over "studied innocence, lo-fi naivete, and purist white-only musical sources" in a heartbeat! (Nietzsche would too!)

I dunno, maybe this is just too simplistic, but the "commercial" (which seems to be what people mean when they say "pop") aspect of this is just beside the point to me. a) The definition of what is and is not "commercial" is really slippery and hard to pin down. b) How many records somebody sells is no guarantee of quality, either positive or negative. c) The qualities that people associate with being "commercial" are very blurry and instinctive. What does it actually mean to be "against commercialism/pop/capitalism" in 2003, anyway? (ie, what does that mean you're for? The Green Party? The SWP? Having a small audience? Hand-tooled music-making?) And do these things really translate into each other so easily anyway? Can you really just equate Mr. JT and your corporate villain of choice? I don't think so.

The commercial aspect of music-making is vital and crucial and interesting. But as an axis to spin a pro/con argument around, it's a red herring.

however
i. i think the tendency is much more common/pernicious in rock writing (not least bcz jazz had stopped being "pop" by the time these "jazzist" defences emerged)
ii. lots of other funny and persuasive and brilliant reasons which i am not going to give away just yet

anyway, bottom line:
a. a pro-pop argt can be bad bcz it's rockist
b. a pro-pop argt can be bad despite not being rockist
c. a pro-pop argt can be good

there's no need for any of these cases to have their own name: of course there are pro-pop bigots and also pro-rock bigots — i prefer not to use "rockist" for the latter bcz "rockism" is a TYPE of bad argument, and the pro-rock bigotry may be based on a difft bad argument

the assumption that there is an equivalent type of "bad argument" emerging from pro-pop i find (to date) unconvincing, partly bcz "pop" is such a vague term anyway (which of course encompasses lots but not all of rock)

http://images-jp.amazon.com/images/P/0156729601.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

i read this as meaning that the latter was made in the belief that the former should not be the only type of music-i don't think it was supposed to be a dichotomy

The RAMONES? "SERIOUS" musicians? Want to ENLIGHTEN me? ME? THE RAMONES? ENLIGHTEN?

The FUCK?

Ok, now does Michael call Sasha again after the 3rd date(or does he just grab serious and enlightening cds from his collection and leave)...

But nate as mark has been explaining pop and rock are more overlapping sets (which do NOT intersect at "pop-rock" which is something else entirely and often v. much more in the camp of a certain vein of rockism [via indie]) than counterposed camps and rockism isn't even ABOUT the values of "rock" since one can be rockist w/r/t the field mice twice as easily as w/r/t the beatles.

I thought the tack about creators and perfomers was interesting ... if another distinction that'd probably crumble under much scrutiny ... seems to hold up pretty well for the playwright/actor, composer/opera singer thing, anyway ...

1. Everything ever needs to be critiqued.
2. SR was talking about a particular time in the mid-80s when aspiration / health and efficiency / self-realisation" were bundled up (in the UK at least) with a shiny new model of right-wing thought which was a force for badness. Conscious naivete and introspection was a kind of ironic resistance to that way of thinking. (It may have been an ineffective mode of resistance but even now it seems no less effective than the other forms of resistance which were being crushed at the time).
3. The fact you'll take hypersexuality ect ect over naivete ect ect is only interesting if you think that at any given time there is a small palette of correct responses to the prevailing pop conditions. Lots of people think this way: mostly they use the word "relevant".
4. I have always thought that SR was wrong about his "purist white-only musical sources" bit and certainly most of the prople who were deep into the indie world at that time would have bridled at the suggestion that they only listened to music of white origin. Mostly *old* musical sources would have been much closer to the truth, I think. SR's right in that '80s "black music" was pretty much ignored by UK indie until the very late 80s.

FN's subsequent revised position (= wagner-guilt, after wagner had turned into, er, weezer) is a return to unapologetic bubblegum-love (ie bizet)

By taking the rockist assertion at face value, SFJ achieves something that simply dismissing the assertion out of hand does not, which is to expose it as an utter red herring, a screen which pop-haters can use to obscure the real motivations for their antipathy towards pop. Whereas saying "the writer doesn't matter" (despite its merits!) allows the rockist to say "well I think it does matter so it's your word against mine".

The problem I have with the "why celebrate pop when it has won?!" argument is how it solidifies pop into a chart-topping monolith, every facet of which hits no. 1 and stays there forever. But obviously a lot of those people who would be called "popists" on ILX aren't necessarily listening to and talking about records in the top 20, but rather records which are loosely termed pop by dint of not being sufficiently 'underground'/'indie' (inverted commas b/c obviously these words have multiple meanings) - so 'pop' includes Project Pat, Dizzee Rascal, a rare Kylie b-side you can only get in Japan, a failed Victoria Beckham single which only hits no. 48 in the charts.

Now obviously Justified is not any of these, but on the other hand none of these records/artists (except maybe Dizzee) will come out looking good from a rockist analysis - certainly none of them will actually benefit from one. The "war" SFJ is waging, if it is one, is not only on the behalf of Justin, but a multitude of diverse, interesting and frequently obscure records and artists, who are often punished by critics for no good or discernible reason.

Disagree with this. In my blogrant, I say (to use your paraphrase) "why celebrate pop when it has won" not from the angle of "pop sucks" (in fact, I said I like a lot of pop singles), but from the angle of "record-review space would be better spent on records people can't form their own judgements about because they're not being shoved down everyone's throats 24/7 on radio & TV." I don't think there's any point in covering big pop stars like JT, because they're already media colossi. Good records are good records, but some need help getting to the attention of potential record-buyers, and some don't. Cover the ones that need covering, whatever their genre, is my argument.

That's pretty much a total misrepresentation. Justified was recorded and pre-marketed while Justin was still nominally with N Sync, and he was dominating media (by "media" I mean stuff like Entertainment Tonight and People magazine and whatnot) for virtually the entire timespan since No Strings Attached came out. He was huge long before his solo album dropped.

For the vast majority of people, I'd say this is the case. Most folks treat record reviews as buying guides, and I think they should, and I think reviews should be written in that spirit. The Meltzerian game of "actually telling people this record is good or bad is beneath me, so I'll just make fun of the cover or talk about how I want to fuck my next-door neighbor" has never held any attraction for me, as a writer and certainly not as a reader.

If you're saying that music writing can't help us to think about, or hear, or talk about, records in different ways?

Vast majority of people, period. The vast majority of people who are interested in reading about music...well, they're probably a little more inclined to grant a reviewer some leeway, particularly if they're familiar with his/her other work and can thus parse the in-jokes and style stuff and figure out what he/she is actually thinking about the record. To go over to movies for example, you wouldn't want to stumble in cold and read an Armond White review of a movie. Your average moviegoer needs a Roger Ebert-style thumbs-up/thumbs-down.

When I write my blog, I just write my blog. I only recently started giving a crap whether anybody reads it or not, which is why I enabled comments, as a sort of gauge to see if anybody was actually reading it.

>If you're saying that music writing can't help us to think about, or hear, or talk about, records in different ways?

Of course it can.

>Of course it can.

And you think a buying guide is more valuable than that?

I realize all of this, Sterling. However, I just think that my definitions of rockism and pop-ism are more intuitive and more in line with what most people think of when they hear those terms. Of course there is a lot of overlap between "rock" and "pop" - both are amorphous concepts with fluid borders - but that doesn't mean you can't set up an opposition between them - as lots of people in fact do. Maybe people are mistaken to set these concepts against each other, but a belief doesn't have to be logically self-consistent in order to exist and have a name. Surely, racism isn't logically consistent either, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

If you define "rockism" as having nothing to do with "rock", then I think people would be justified in asking, why call it "rockism"?

"3. The fact you'll take hypersexuality ect ect over naivete ect ect is only interesting if you think that at any given time there is a small palette of correct responses to the prevailing pop conditions."

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this... but what I was not very coherently trying to say was that things like self-realization, health and black music do not strike me as self-evidently in need of critique. (And btw, critiquing everything by default=no fun). Perhaps they were wrapped up with a "shiny new model of right-wing thought" at the time (I was around, but not enough into music at that time to remember), but I think critiquing that shiny new model, rather than what it latched onto, or at least attempting to elucidate the connections between the two, would be more appropriate. Wrapping up all these aesthetic qualities with economics and class politics into a big bundle of dominant culture is too simplistic, and you wind up being against some things that are actually appealing to a lot of people (which, if we buy the dominant culture line, is presumably why the dominant culture is latching onto those things).

So saying that I would take those qualities over those of introspection, etc., is my way of saying, as you did, that the critique was ineffective. And if the critique was ineffective, then why should I pay any attention to it? Simply because it's a critique? Not good enough. If it's going to have any power, the critique needs to offer a better alternative that appeals to more people than the rather closeted demographic we associate with indie.

the argument we are contesting is the one SHARED by yr defns of "rockism" and "popism" (and in fact hidden by this naming, hence the endless flailing around)

I like pop but cANNOT STAND the typical avenues for its promotion (ie TV, radio, magazines). (P2p sharing and mindhives like ILx make it possible for pop fans to "opt out" in this way. I wonder just how atypical this makes me.) So I don't feel like any small select group of things are being shoved down this particular throat 24/7 -- the record industry, at every level of the totem pole, at every point on the x, y, and z coordinates, feels just too godamned cluttered for me to make much sense of, so I do need reviews of just about everything, Justin Timberlake and failed Victoria Beckham singles and the folksingers named Josh and whatever Improvised Music from Japan just released. I miss a lot, always.

Also: I can think of any number of cases where I've heard a song a gazillion times on the radio but it takes a CRITIC to make me realize a song is good or shit. Sometimes even media supersaturation isn't enough.

Pop can be quite good at symbolism and is pretty bad at coherent socio-economic statements, remember, and maybe the review of the world which was '80s indie was more successful than we think, at least in providing symbols of anti-Thatcherism. Certainly when Thatcherism was (at least theoretically) unfashionable in the 1990s, big chunks of 80s indie style were widely fashionable overground(albeit in a way I hated).

NB a critique need not always be negative and cutting things off from consideration ("this is not in need of critique") is really no fun at all, I'd say.

I agree that "pop can be quite good at symbolism and is pretty bad at coherent socio-economic statements"--which is why I'm objecting to drawing simplistic connections between the former and the latter!

I wouldn't cut anything off from consideration. I just mean, something like "self-realization" does not automatically connote bad things to me! (It's a Romantic quest, too!)

"rockism = reaching for a set of values which rock (supposedly) defends against the crimes of chart-pop"

This is pretty much exactly the same as my definition. Your point is that the rockists are wrong to think this, but this doesn't change the definition of what a rockist is. The only point where we disagree is that I define an opposing view called "pop-ism", and you don't think there is such an animal.

if both (as it clearly is on yr definition), then we can't ever discuss any music which partakes of a contradictory mix of these values, within this framework

ie pop-ism = PRO-ROCK

?!?!

a) I'm suspicious of reading politics into aesthetics in general. It's not that I think art is totally apolitical, but I think it can rarely if ever be boiled down to a neat political position.

b) Nevertheless, if we were to read a political position into, say, 80s UK indie, I personally am not very convinced of the effectiveness of that political position, because (at least as we have been discussing it) it defined itself in reaction to a nexus of aesthetics and politics that I don't see as intrinsically connected, or universally evil. (Perhaps this makes me yuppie scum.)

Put it this way: if the real meaning of Morrissey was as a symbol of anti-Thatcherism (which, while not being the most knowledgeable person about the Smiths, I have real doubts about--his xenophobia, for instance, would seem to align rather neatly with Thatcherite values), then I think he would have done much better to sing about privatisation rather than not getting laid. And if he'd sung about privatisation in some kind of sexy, life-affirming fashion, maybe I would have been into the Smiths ;o)

OK: (a) in those days (when I was indie) we really believed that taking that particular aesthetic stand was a political position. Not a neat political position but an oppositional one. It's not that you could boil the art down to that position (I can't see why you'd want to) but that a particular attitutde towards the dominant culture was tied up with that aesthetic approach. At least, we felt it was.

(b) It felt to us at the time (and when I say us I can really only speak for me and my paltry handful of mates) that a lot of the overground pop of the 80s was a kind of cultural expression of Thatcherism and that one of the ways of opposing Thatcherism was to oppose its aesthetics. This still makes a degree of sense to me now, because remember it doesn't exclude more overtly political action.

(c) Morissey singing about privatisation = worst mental image of the day by miles and I think pop can be potent symbolically where in terms of detailed economic or political arguments it is not especially useful. Oppositional pop is always contradictory at its heart but that doesn't mean the opposition is always pointless.

The Smiths were ROCK anyway.

Our publisher was interested in highlighting things like Gary Glitter's childporn bust, but honestly the vast majority of the book is just music history - trying to track down who actually played and sang on the records. Also interested in the weirdness that happens when rock music for children is sold as cartoon pop right at the height of the counterculture.

Rockism (as I understand it): presumes the music is better because it is more authentic and reflects personal/poetic values. That the music created by autonomous rock bands (i.e., bands which write their own material and play it on their records) is superior for all the auteurist reasons. Rockism also presumes that pop music which is created and marketed primarily as product-to-be-sold is inferior, pap, or merely manipulative.

The fundamental problems I have with Rockism: obscures the fact that rock music is marketed just as thoroughly as pop (i.e., it doesn't exist free of market pressures); autonomous production guarantees nothing about quality (cf., Kansas); conveniently overlooks the huge strain of pop production methods within canonical rock masterpieces; has a puritanical bias against music-as-pleasure; it presumes a kind of folkie (I think it's more of a folk than jazz bias, but they're similar in their resentment of commercial success) purity which is historically false (thinking mostly of Nick Tosches book about Country which reveals that much of folk music was and always has been influenced by the pop music of its time).

But is that what "pop" is now, anyway? Is Justin Timberlake an expression of Bushism? Hardly.

They did?

that was a very mediocre post.

Sure. The folkies hated pop (which at that time included rock) because it wasn't folk. The rockists hate pop because it isn't rock.

I realise that this has moved on a bit to the "rockism and popism - a false dychotomy?" teritorry, but I'm still baffled to the growing use of term "pop-ism" as it still doesn't have a fixed meaning at all!

As Mitch said on some other thread, rockism is amazingly widespread (anyone who thinks it's only a property of rockcrits and babyboomer casualties should go out more)... and it's easy to identify: "that's not real music played on real instruments", "tell me who will listen to this disposable shit in ten years time" etc etc y'all know the deal. Rockism ain't no make-believe meme, it's REAL and deeply rooted. (Even often among casual pop fans, ie "I like this Beyonce single, but it just can't be compared to Sting, a really serious and deep artist who will stand the test of time")

On the other hand, can't see anyone agreeing on what the proposed term "pop-ism" would actually mean. As Mark S pointed out, some seem to use it as a synonim for pro-pop, which renders it useless. From all this debate, I can't see it meaning anything other than a set of critical tools used to battle rockism (which != an ideology in itself), and the accusations that it's just rockism in reverse don't make sense. The problems with rockist isn't that they think rock is superior (it's their prerogative after all), but bringing pop to court and demolish it using unfair criteria and a load of biases and prejudices. Aside form occasional kneejerk comment and popjustice.com, I don't see these alleged "pop-ists" doing the same to rock.

(BTW, anyone see further Reynolds' ripostes to this thing on Blissblog? More strawmen action, but also some rather interesting point too. I'll just note concerning - "although to be more charitable there's perhaps also a genuine yearning to leave behind the game of hip altogether" - FUCK YES! I don't even know what "hip" means anymore - of people I know who are closest to what'd be considered "hipsters", half of them love White Stripes and half of 'em hate their guts, me included. And that thing about Paul Morley, Tight Fit and Led Zep mentioned in a few blogs almost simultaneously - that it caused such a furore once seems silly from my perspective! Which I'd say is a sign of progress...)

Sounds pretty much like the rockist critique of the soulless pop machine to me.

It may be a relatively rare phenomenon, but as you acknowledged, it does exist in places.

nate- doesn't pop include rock now?

You want my opinion? It's a matter of usage. In a sense, you could say that all rock is a form of pop. You could also argue that some rock is pop and some isn't.

Sounds pretty much like the rockist critique of the soulless pop machine to me.

I don't know about that. I think the folkies really hated Dylan going rock because they knew that it meant he was abandoning their little club. I don't think they were against the idea of being popular or selling records - a lot of those folk records did very well during the folk craze in the 60s. To them, going pop meant abandoning a liberal humanist cause that they felt themselves to be part of. There's not the same sense of being part of a cause in rockist circles today.

Pete Seeger attacked the power generator with an ax when Dylan played Newport. People in the audience called him a sell-out. Sure, folkies felt like Dylan was betraying them personally, but more importantly they also felt like he was betraying their values.

I think that the recording industry was pretty far down on the list of folkie bugbears - coming after such items as racial injustice, war, the political establishment, etc. I don't think the folkies were really opposed to pop so much as they looked down on it for being politically unaware. Rockism today has pretty much lost the political element. Calling the folkie ideal of purism "rockism" is ahistorical and anachronistic.

"Rockism" is defined by its fear of pop much more than its privileging of the putative values of the genre it's connected to at any given time. Thus the difference between folk and rock is irrelevant, b/c the unity is provided through fear of Dylan, Britney etc. Just as folkists and rockists listened to different music, your popists were at one stage defending Dylan but now Britney. It is this relationship of fear and defence which comprises the rockist/popist (or, rather, rockist/anti-rockist divide).

So yeah, to that extent "rockist" is a mislabel (could easily be folkist or jazzist etc.) but "popist" is even more inacurrate b/c it is not just chart-pop that needs to be defended against rockism. Eg. what about dance music? It's easy to talk about a rockist/anti-rockist tussle in dance but v. difficult to talk about a rockist/popist tussle, for example are people who like Chemical Bros but no other dance music rockists or popists in re dance music?

Also I could easily say: "If anything, I would say that today's rockists have more similarities to the folkies than the popists do. There is a similar sense of being part of a cause, of suffering injustice, of being anti-capitalist, and of embracing "the people" (b/c the question for rockists, folkists and popists would have to be "which people?" And "which cause"? "which injustice"?)

The book I am reading at the moment, about ABBA, is militantly pro-pop in quite an obnoxious way but is rockist at the same time.

SR in his blog has a good point about stripping away external reasons to like/dislike music - the pro-pop agenda can easily end up in an "I like it because I like it" black hole. I think "what happens to music writing when it goes there?" is an interesting question though.

fair enough: so do you still feel that it was the right thing to do or that you had no choice and had to do it?

I suppose you could take that to an extreme by attending company week (yes, improv events) (maybe...).

C'mon, Tom, you've gotta go back and read about Mike Batt living in a Wombles suit for a week before he wrote wombling tunes. (Wombles = UK Banana Splits, except with eco-bent and Green England hobbittyness.)

sashay bare cajones, amirite??

huh? Explain por favor.

aww never mind.

sfj is sort of a dunderhead for rap.

he needs to stop pretending hyphy doesn't exist

he needs to stop pretending hyphy doesn't exist

lol

even as probably the biggest hyphy booster on ilm, LOL WAHT?

classic wrinklepaws imo

oh, right. I didn't take note of the poster.

Is anyone gonna send SFJ a question at his New Yorker blog?

February 3
Do you have anything you’d like to ask me? About Beyoncé? About anything at all? Please do.

Posted by Sasha Frere-Jones
In
Sasha Frere-Jones

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/

Dear Sasha Frere-Jones, who is the best black ever?

Ha.