"We" the concept, "we" the reality, or, How does consensus build when nobody seems to agree on anything?

A cynical view might chalk up this consensus to A) the atavistic yearning for community (as detailed by you folks up there) and B) subconscious / blantant coersion through some strands of viral marketing & branding.

that too, though.

As with the coporate consumption of art as the entire entity, without prejudice to classification, in the 80's so, too, has 'the Man' bought and branded individuality as the new 'cool' of modern times. As a result, to the collective concious, any artist deemed unique or (big quotes here) 'punk,' benefits from the media's established correlation between 'cool' and 'different.' In other words, though obviously not in all cases, the clique-defying popularity of the aformentioned bands can be attributed to plain ol' corporate brainwashing and the individual's need to be cool - not a need for community. The human condition, when boiled to its essence, is still about survival and emotional well-being.

wanting to be cool is all about a person's desire for community.

I don't believe in the idea of "pop community," when it comes to massively successful records. It's like claiming you've got something in common with everybody else that's ever eaten a Big Mac. I'll grant there's more auteur-ism at work with OutKast than Britney, but still—each person that responds to OutKast is responding in a unique way. To pretend there's something shared there reveals a rather pitiful neediness.

What you said was absolutely correct for a world that hasn't been turned upside-down.

you DO have something in common with everybody that's ever eaten a big mac. all these things add up to a common/communal experience.

Do you go all the way back to the Joe "Must Go" Kuharich Iggles?

They care about the horns on "Crazy In Love," and quite honestly, that's enough.

Hmmm, not a lot of commonality in the USA anymore if my read of the daily morning paper is accurate.

Though, personally, I'll admit one of the things I like about "Hey Ya" is that it sounds like that song at the end of the movie where even the old people are dancing WITHOUT (yet) sounding to me like the next "Macarena" or "Electric Slide." I'm all for consesus when it can win me over in an absurd end-of-Zapped kind of way.

So? This is pop music we're talking about. If you don't buy, your opinion doesn't count.

but anthony they are trying to form a mass consensus. a mass consensus of coldplay fans!!!! no, seriously.

As Scott said, art often transcends political partisanship. So can religion AND YES I KNOW that's sometimes not the case, but still key to a lot of religious belief in this country is the idea that we all have the capability within us to make the turn towards God.

The differences go way beyond political partisanship. It's in education, religion, sex, food. Christ, you can't even hire a house painter or someone to take a beehive away without having to do through a bolt-out-of-the-blue harangue about how some perceived group, other than the house painter or bee exterminator, is breaking the law, dragging us all to perdition, worse than Commies, stupid, bad for children, probably a traitor, too rich, a worthless bum, a drug pusher, cooks food that smells up the apartment complex,
plays white music too loud, plays black music too loud, plays computer music too loud, is a computer geek, is a Luddite...

Huh? My experience has been it's mostly a complicated mechanism for making or finding an other, not us, to fight against and judge damned.

which kinda ties in with the coldplay (or even better, Pearl Jam - "not for you!!!") thing, don't it?

Then why does it seem like everyone's busting their buns tryin' to convert each other to their side?

Hmmm, the head movie critic and features editor at the metro daily
I worked for was one of the most closed, uncurious people I ever knew. His picture was part of the definition for boilerplate in Webster's.

yeah, that's what i was getting at earlier. that agenda thing. that they just know that the world would be better off listening to.....whatever they love instead of whatever is actually out there being loved.

I'll try and remember to bring that up that the next time I'm accosted by an evangelical Christian. Or my Catholic gramma. Or a Jehovah's Witness.

Prince refuses to work with Wendy & Lisa again unless they renounce homosexuality. He belongs - he shuns!

Yes, but the very fact the he makes it conditional means he still believes they're capable of seeing the light. And from what I have read, Prince actually has been going door-to-door lately!

I agree, except I think this is a Good Thing. I despise generalist critics—daily-paper types. They're useless, because they never get deep enough into anything to provide understanding. They review Britney today, Cradle of Filth tomorrow, depending on who's in town on tour, and they don't have a coherent artistic philosophy, they don't want to contextualize (within the genre or within the larger music universe or anything else). I wish the whole criticverse was made up of specialists—a guy who just covers black metal, a guy who just covers free jazz, a guy who just covers indie rap, etc., etc. That's what I try to be. I only pitch reviews of jazz records and metal records, because those are what I listen to 90 percent of the time, and I flatter/fool myself that I know something about those genres, at this point. And yeah, I'm writing a book right now.

The world doesn't need 5000 hacks with half-baked opinions on every record that crosses their desks. It needs 5000 critics who've studied one thing and are able to give a genuine insight into it.

there has to be some middle ground between those options.

TS: fox vs. hedgehog

You think so? If so, it likely errs toward option #1, and I really think #2 is the best possible critical stance.

By the way, "despise" was probably too strong a word. Substitute "don't like."

True, it only needs about ten in the US. One from each of the six largest newspapers, a couple for the wires, maybe a couple more for the Internet pop cultural portal most often cited by the six largest newspaers and the wires. That will result in hundreds of duplications throughout the infosphere, making it seem like the business of 500 or a thousand.

I thought the rock critic world was dysfunctional enough.

Resurrect Baboon Dooley.

slow down! ANY genre? And there are general practicioners, you know.

I've heart trouble quite recently (nothing serious) and I went to my general practitioner first, THEN a cardiologist. Following your analogy (unless you've got something against GPs), it suggests music lovers need both generalists and specialists.

This might have something to do with the fact that most musicians rarely listen to only one kinda of thing, even if they play only one kinda thing.

But isn't that part of the fun of reading crit.? No one will ever be "right", it's just interesting to get a look into how others interact with art and allowing it to broaden ones own perspective. That's why I love Accidental Evolution of Rock N Roll so much. I rarely agree w/Eddy, but I finish the book not only with a very clear picture of what someone else is looking for in music, but also an entirely different canon based on those interests.

(I hope I didn't just jinx it.)

The original piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1144561,00.html

The response:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1144602,00.html

How does Lit's canon compare to Pop's? The whole established infrastructure of litcrit in university's seems to be the major difference to me. Will there be a Ned Raggett chair of Pop Music at the Berkeley in 2121?

I'm on the vanguard!

Will there be a Ned Raggett chair of Pop Music at the Berkeley in 2121?

Jeepers. I'd better start the endowment fund now.

"Rejoyce 2004, the six-month arts festival that will commemorate Bloomsday will draw hundreds of thousands for a Joyce symposium, exhibitions and a light and music 'spectacular' along the river Liffey. A new film version of Ulysses has also been made."

Bloomsday in Dublin, I mean. "Bloomsday on Broadway" sounds more promising.

I think there NEEDS to be that toe-stepping that Barry Bruner makes note of - yes, it's nice to hear about a genre of music from an expert of that genre, but it's also interesting to get a "second opinion" from someone coming from a different perspective, even if that person knows crap about fuck. When I began my site/blog (back in 1997! egads!), I made a point to write about certain things (Jewel, Grateful Dead, DMB) that my indie-pop&rock-lovin' ass didn't really enjoy or know much about, and approach them fairly, trying my best to "figure them out", interact with them on neutral ground based on what I knew. When I started writing for NYLPM, I came there with my indie biases, but damn if letting down my guard and approaching what I once considered unapproachable affect some serious change in me.

Yeah, I get my eyes rolling when I hear certain folks sound off about this & that from a place of willful or inadvertent ignorance, but that's only if they present themselves as unimpeachable experts (there's a fine line between learned confidence and dumbass stubborness), and even in those instances, their opinions aren't completely dismissable. Those opinions are as valid (or invalid) as you allow, in as much as they are usable to you in your own thought processes. (Well, that's a clumsy sentence.)

I feel i should mention why i'll be sticking with ILM until that long dreamed of day when rockcrit wakes from its boozy slumber: i have always responded better to fanaticism than i have to calm, measured, deliberate opinion when it comes to music. The latter never makes me want to hear or buy a record. please don't take this to mean that i want all mags and rags to froth at the mouth over whatever they are keen on at the time. And i do know that when i'm reading a genre mag like SOD and they give an album 666 Fucking Skulls that the album in question does not always deserve 666 Fucking Skulls. What i admire is the CONVICTION behind the vote of confidence that is 666 Fucking Skulls. I hope that's clear.

Matos mentioned back at the beginning something about (and I quote) "the idea that pop needs a center, or a couple of centers, in order to function as a universe". Could this sense of consensus be a result of the "critical" center coming into alignment with the "popular" center? Also: would it be fair to look at the omnipresence / acknowledgement of THE CANON in popular music (or rock music) as the opposite, where the "popular" center capitulated to "critical" consensus?

Begs2Differ, yeah, i mean, it's a no-brainer. everyone should be as creative as they can be. no boutadoubtit.

strongo: "I'm pissed off"!
Matos: "No, I'm pissed off"!
strongo: "No, really, I'm really pissed off"!
Matos: "No, I'm telling you, I am really pissed off"!

Ha Ha! sorry, i'm getting tipsy. i love you both:)

Yeah, fair enough. I think there do need to be daily-paper pop writers, but I'd use the term "reviewer" rather than "critic" for them, because "critic," to me anyway, implies study and expertise and intellectual rigor, and "reviewer" implies someone who gives something the once-over as it crawls down the cultural conveyor-belt towards the poop-chute that is the next VH-1 nostalgia special. Anyhow, there's a place for those people, and it's the pages of Time Out. "Hey, [insert band name] is fun, go have a nice evening with your date." That's necessary, and not at all despicable. But that's not what I do, and those aren't writers I read. So for my own purely selfish and careerist reasons, I want there to be more room in the criticsphere for obsessive specialists, and maybe a little less for blithe hipshooting "This week is the greatest week for pop ever, and next week will be even greater!" types.

sadly i think mark s could proble say it all clearly in two well chosen sentences and i wish he were around now to do so.

er, but there are historical reasons why a consensus has formed around these particular things

for example citizen kane was released in 1941 but in the 1952 sight and sound poll it didn't place very high at all; either people didn't think much of it, or it didn't occur to them to consider it a 'greatest' film. in the 1962, it placed first and has done so ever since; this can be credited to the crucial influence of bazin and his disciples at cahiers (see also 'rules of the game', about which virtually the same story can be told).

so there are two questions always, the answers to which revererate off each other: what are the intrinsic qualities of the work, and what are the reasons for its (often shifting) public perception

when I wrote the question out I was going to include a parenthetical graf about how yes, I know people generally listen for their own pleasure solely--I do, most of us do. the question was more along the lines of whether the coming-together of disparate tastes might push people to pronounce their commonalities a little more loudly than their differences, rather than have those commonalities speak for themselves. no "right" answer, obv., to any of this.

can you read?

sorry

You really think there's no difference?

I love ya Matos I do the same thing all the time

Actually I do like 'em, usually you can see whether someone has actually thought abt a record in about 10 words. i only need a killer line or two.

I quite like to read about people who aren't experts but they are getting into some other thing. The process could make for good reading. I kind of find it sad that one person will just stick with one type of music for all their listening life.

Not at all. Every subgenre, whether it's pop-punk, French disco, jam-bands, or whatever, deserves the services of a few informed, expert chroniclers. I think hip-hop, for example, is extraordinarily ill-served by critics, but I hope for hip-hop fans' sake that that'll change. Maybe if The Source goes under, it'll be a step in the right direction.

Okay so now I guess I need to follow through or ams will never let me live it down. Anyway I don't think there's such a thing as a "passive listener" but simply more or less self-consciously "active" ones so I'm gonna take ILX as an extreme case of v. self-consciously "active" listeners and run with that experience.

The most striking thing is that in ILX where really nobody DOES seem to agree on anything, we nonetheless have ppl. railing against the "hivemind" fairly consistently, waves of difft. trends of thought, types of music, and terrains of debate.

I'm actually really against Matos' idea above that "I know people generally listen for their own pleasure solely--I do, most of us do." coz it eclipses what "pleasure" means and turns it into this "we just LIKE IT okay" raggetsubjectivism when pleasure is a socially defined act (or an act on a socially defined field even) and e.g. listening for rebellion IS pleasurable (or maybe ultimately self-defeating and frustrating but some people dig that and hence/concommitantly music for rebellion is also about self-defeating and frustrated feelings). Listening is a statement, not just for those self-righteous about it but especially for those not who pick which songs they like based on how they like/relate/agree/disagree/misrelate. (this is just frith).

So look back at the Avril wave ILX went thru and everyone was fighting over a percieved consensus which then made the "importance" of Avril (for better or worse depending on who you were) an ILX "consensus".

Which is important to me -- that these things are hashed out against opponents real and imagined, that where cannons don't exist people who like things outside them have to *invent* them and sometimes it wills those cannons into counterexistence and sometimes it fails, depending on what's already out there and what might be percolating without a name.

Which leads me to teleology -- how people make something which they support something "whose time has come" and demonstrate it (or fail to) by MAKING that time come.

Recordcos seem to complicate the picture only slightly, coz they're following and guessing as much as leading. Similarly polls which only speed things along coz Outkast was "consensus" before P&J et al but only thanks to them could we AGREE it was "consensus".

Which is to say in glib hegel-speak that "consensus is controversy" or sterl-speak "consensus is reached over the terrain of controversy" (i say this "terrain" stuff more than anyone else i think) which is to say that the key thing isn't just what side you're on but the unexamined question of how just THOSE sides came to be (and the terrain of controversy probably has much more to do with things far outside music tho the forms of music which array themselves on the terrain have to do with the switchbacks of prior music and what IT meant to ppl. -- which itself is getting "consensus" redefined based on how ppl. are taking CURRENT relations of sound/meaning).

Which is to say in Lacan terms [finally!] that "consensus <> controversy" or "consensus (misrelates) controversy" or alternately "Symbolic (misrelates) Real" which is to describe the process of realization of symbols and not suggest the the symbolic determines the real. And what's lost and chased then in the mistranslation is the a of " 'consensus' " which is not the *symbol* of consensus but the actuality of consensus -- which doesn't exist, but whose absences and pursuit frames the (mis)relation.

All of which may leave ams thinking I am a rilly big time-waster instead of just the little one I was prior (and leaves me wondering too). But to me the Lacanian-inspired model is richer, more concise, and more nuanced than my other sphitzing above.

Outkast, Avril, Norah, Wilco were in the right place by making the right place and each in a difft. way which is part of the job of crit to describe? And sometimes, say Wilco were in the right place despite making nearly nothing (or BECAUSE they did -- which is a sort of making too, in the right circumstances) and more power to the crit who can find a clear way to say that. (coz this sure isn't).

(sorry.)

(very sorry.)

Er, you actually had me until you hit the Lacan.

And clarifies for nobody except possibly myself.

see, i was gonna point that out, but i didn't want to be rude.

The "terrain of controversy" - a lot of this is about participants grappling with ideas as much as records, innit? Avril's controversy = can punk be a girl-pop construct as much as, well, girl-pop? Outkast's controversy = does hip hop gain something or lose something by self-consciously trying to expand "outside" its own borders? Wilco's controversy = Is there still an idea of pop that circumvents the parameters and dictates of populism (record companies)?

I think that while critics may not agree on individual records, they do agree on ideas, like, all the time. The overwhelming preponderance of Outkast votes in the P&J poll doesn't bore me half so much as the overwhelming preponderance of "album of the year" pieces which justify Outkast's no. 1 spot in the terms laid out in the paragraph prior. Most big P&J winners - songs or albums - feel like idea-records to me: records which act as a shorthand for a certain critical concept (eg. "Get Ur Freak On" is critical shorthand for the experimental production aesthetic of millenial R&B/hip hop). It's the consensus that surrounds how we approach these records (defined, as Sterling points out, through their controversy) that creates as a corrolary a consensus around the record itself.

one point I do think got missed earlier on (not in a contentious way either, on my part at least, just something I'm realizing) by Phil F and a couple others is that I was talking very specifically about a consensus of the active listenership, not of the culture at whole or the entirety of the population. obviously feel free to disagree (that's part of the point), but just so we're on the same ground here.

If I was going to be snide I might say that a lot of the ideas that inform P&J "consensus" tend to be on the half-baked or simplistic side (eg. I think the "pop=innovation" equation is still a motivating factor behind the success of Outkast, but it's the form of that equation that demands the least amount of effort from critics in terms of thinking critically about the different guises that innovation might take.

But I'm not a snide person so I don't think I'll say that.

For myself it feels different because in both those cases I heard/enjoyed them at the time -- Sterling's comment above ('"we just LIKE IT okay" raggetsubjectivism') to me just suggests what I was feeling at the time of release and [relative] attention, I heard it, I liked it, it just didn't happen to be famous but I wanted to share it as I could and I did as I could. But it seems like there's a different idea being suggested here that is retrospective as much as current as mediated through something like pazz/jop.

Ha ha maybe Disco Inferno are only now finding the terrain of controversy ("Almost all indie-rock after is creatively bankrupt by comparison"/"they are the only rock band to have exploited the full capabilities of sampling") which will allow their support-base to swell.

"Loveless" topping Pitchforks Best of the 90s poll is a good and similar example of how the increasing talking-pointness of a record upgrades it retrospectively - arguably the esteem in which it is held is based on the growing consensus idea that it took indie-rock songform as far out as it could sensibly go without mutating into something else. Such a position could only really coalesce into a consensus once shoegazer had subsided and post-rock had given experimental indie-rock a contrasting soundboard.

This is why discussions of timelessness and ephemereality are interesting despite usually missing the point. It's not the records themselves which are of-their-time or, conversely, timeless, but rather the consensus-idea they are linked to. Geir loves such discussions because he in his critical wordview the connection between idea and record is unusually transparent and mechanical ("it reinforces white pro-melodic musical values = it is good").

Could well be! Of course part of the appeal (for some) could be that it represents a sampling path that It Represents The Art That Isn't That Hip-Hop Thing I've Heard So Much About Lately, but then of course in turn it's not like DI and Timbaland (for instance) are mirror images, because they're not!

It's not the records themselves which are of-their-time or, conversely, timeless, but rather the consensus-idea they are linked to.

Hm...*thinks*...well, K. Shields always spoke of things like Public Enemy as being a key reference point at the time of his Creation run (consensus of sound construction as particular signifier?), Ian Crause at the time of DI's shift to sampling integration (post "Waking Up"/"Fallen Through the Wire," pre "Summer's Last Sound") with reference to, interestingly and specifically, Consolidated -- who I don't think were anyone's consensus point of anything.

*from stage*

"Uh, we heard this song by this band called Disco Inferno called 'Emigre' and it seemed sorta cool but we couldn't understand the words so we came up with our own. 'Oh SAAAAAARA you IGNORED me in HOOOOOOOOOMEROOM.'"

Oh my god, the memories.

or maybe it's more a question of over-determinism? you know, the kind that makes people force themselves into renouncing things that other people like because, you know, other people like them? that's what I'm getting from that post, anyway--it smacks of some of the lamest "if I'm not, like, COMPLETELY INDIVIDUAL in every single aspect of my life, I am just a cog in the machine maaaaaan" thought I've ever come across on this board.

[this statement applies to all of scott's statements, esp. beatles-renunciation and adam ant love. krokus came later.]

Sly&TheFamilyStone-Beatles-DonnaSummer-BlackSabbath-AdamAnt

(and all rock that i love is contained therein)

i'm comfortable with see-sawing back and forth between embracing and rejecting "the mainstream," sometimes within the same week. wish i knew what the mainstream was for realz though.

i'm listening to Junior Senior right now. they can't decide either.

i don't see a contradiction between this and having personal tastes; there's a lot of music we can choose from (ever more so in this age of electronic media), there are reasons why we listen to the particular range of stuff we listen to.

1) Judging 'consensus' purely from a poll is a little misleading. Polls are always going to demonstrate a 'consensus' even if there is not one. That is what they are for. I note that (without knowing anything about P&J) apparently the winners talked about have been 'decisive'. But remember, this is only 'decisive' in terms of a poll.
2) Also, 'consensus' is very different from 'community'. Even if you could say that eg there is some kind of consensus with Outkast, I don't think you could say that leads to a 'community' of Outkast fans. In small group examples perhaps, but I don't think you can draw the conclusion that nationally/internationally there is this kind of community.

1) I think that scuppers your initial point about consensus.

Especially as, as I was just going to type, I don't think you can find 'consensus' in any meaningful sense beyond a small group talking in generalities, especially if it's about whether or not yoi like something. So, you can probably find some (very, very interseting) examples of consensus around things like 'people enjoy listening to music', 'people like songs', 'for some reason, some things sound 'right' and some things 'don't'' but little else, and even with these examples I not so sure.