Frank Kogan's forthcoming "Real Punks Don't Wear Black"

Good lord that's the fuckin' weakest pitch I've ever read. That's like saying he "rocks harder than Loverboy" or "exudes the wanton sex appeal of Natalie Merchant".

Weird.

http://www.midwestbeat.com/concert%20reviews/september_2003/loverboy/reno1_web.jpg

omg so everybody's WORK is appearing here? wtf hee hee

This whole pitch has me cracking up. Is he schizo? What if I don't want to go in the car with him.

Did a pitchforker write this press release?

Maybe it needs its own thread?

decidedly not but kogan's sure as hell is - have you read his longer posts here?

I gotta say, I can't think of a music book I'm more excited for since whenever. A compilation of his stuff is long overdue.

on the other hand, by academic press standards, if all of the ilm regulars bought this, it'd be a blockbuster.

(note: i am going to assume what i read isn't the exact final version of what will appear between covers in a few months, but i would assume the bulk of it is still in there.)

actually, i am going to pull this out again tonight. (that is if the various sections of it aren't residing in different boxes since i moved.)

xpost: yes, i am aware.

This is true, sadly. For example, check out the descriptive blurb on the back of the DVD for Sideways. It's along the lines of "a scewball roadtrip filled with wine, women...and hilarity!" Talk about getting something wrong.

i raised this issue a long time ago, but not particularly successfully

Often authors write their own and I assumed that's what happened here, the sense of humor is suitably obscure and Koganesque.

(2) ILX is far better written than any commercial music publication or alt-zine ever, with the occasional exception of Creem c. 1973 and the Australian Smash Hits letter pages in the late '80s when David Nichols was Black Type. Of course, the thinking at ILX needs to be raised, which can be done easily enough if people are willing to dig deeper and truly respond to each other's posts. But you guys need to stop pretending that criticism and intellectual culture are created by the Big Intellectuals Out There. There aren't many Big Intellects out there, mainly because most of with those with intellectual potential lack a good outlet or stimulus for their ideas, and their brains stagnate. So it's up to you.

(3) At least three chapter are taken verbatim from my ILX writing, and some others have passages that are reworkings of my ILX stuff, plus quotes from ILX litter the book, so some of you are in the book directly (and many indirectly in that you can count as contributing to my ideas, hence to my book).

(4) I didn't know there was going to be a cloth version (since I'd been told otherwise). I also didn't know it was being printed in February 2006, as I was under the naive idea that something in the Fall Catalog was going to be available in the fall. You gotta go to ilxor.com to get the hot scoop.

(5) That's the full version of the Disco Tex essay at the Radio Free Narnia site. The book version will be two paragraphs shorter because I killed a couple that were so far beyond intelligibility as to be useless.

For what it's worth, here's the original copy I threw at them, which of course not only was too long but left out some who, what, where, when, and why:

One thing the original questionnaire didn't ask is what we're going to say the concept of the book is when we pitch it. By "concept" I don't mean what's really going on in the book as a whole, necessarily, but just a pithy sentence or two, e.g., "Marx Brothers stow away on a luxury ocean liner," "tough cop Nick Nolte is forced to work with wiseass con Eddie Murphy." If we don't tell reviewers what to say and consumers what to think, they won't know. So I elected "contamination" to be the book's buzz word, our selling point. Popular music is born in flight, chased by fear, heading towards unattainable glory. I ask why: Why do we define ourselves as contaminated, what do suburbia and the school system and academia and [insert your demographic here] gain by defining themselves as timid and fake and by setting the music on its restless journey? My subsidiary buzz words are "terror" and "social division": We pretend to suppress terror and social division and then send our popular entertainment off in search of what we've pretended to suppress. But I go beyond the mere asking of the question. I act out the adventure myself and insist that when other intellectuals act it out too, they keep their minds alive, their hairstyles in flux, and their tongues articulate, because they're a bigger part of the story than they realize, and if they avoid acting like know-nothings, bigots, and chumps but chase their ideals instead, they can help kick music journalism and cultural studies out of its present cowardice and stupidity (and "rock," too, if there's any hope for that moribund genre). So tough scholarly smart-guy Frank Kogan is forced to work with scrappy shifty wiseguy Frank Kogan, they define each other as phonies, chase each other into the unknown, dragging you along with them. Self-defined prankster anthropologists shun cultural-studies and leisure-industry niches. Stow away on cruise ship. Madcap adventures ensue.

You mean 'cause it comes from an author with male-pattern baldness?

see that's a valid point rarely made so i'm onside.

never heard of him mind you.

(Or maybe that was Blue Velvet.)

In later promo material we did delete the 48 Hours reference, as it's too much a non sequitur, but in the catalog it may in fact serve a purpose.

!!

Kogan has been writing about music for some 35 years—for his own blogs; for his zine, Why Music Sucks; as well as for Spin, Radio On and the Village Voice. For this anthology, he's included everything from juvenile high school essays and silly college poetry to some extremely seasoned discussions of punk and hard rock. This collection is much like the music it describes: some polished, some ragged. Readers can browse around and find their own favorite material. Kogan is great, for instance, at explaining the dynamics of punk clubs: why the performers have to insult their audiences or else they're "contaminated" by their acceptance. Unlike most music critics, Kogan's omnivorous, willing to consider music that makes him "feel things that I don't want to feel, so I have to rethink who I am, where I place myself." For example, he loathed Ohio Express's "Yummy Yummy Yummy" when he was 13, but loved it at 18. "I value most the music that I like despite myself," he writes. "The bands that change me are the ones that win me over." Readers, beware: the raunchy rap lyrics and free-floating expletives may turn off some. (Feb.)

I got an uncorrected proof

pretty good

ysi? photocopier?

Frank Kogan’s book (don't have a heart attack when you clock the price, there's a ppbk version too) looks amazing at a quick skim. As you'd expect, it's highly unorthodox in its structure and provenance. As well as Village Voice reviews and Why Music Sucks rants, there's an email reply to Geeta, chunks of ILM commentary, interviews with the author from rockcritics.com, unpublished Pazz N' Jop commentaries about 15 times longer than the longest blurbs they ever print, and--piece de resistance--a letter to Voice managing editor Doug Simmonds, with Kogan complaining that the paper is failing to utilise his intellect (the largest, Frank writes, and most self-questioning in all of rockcrit--bigger than Frith’s, bigger than mine, bigger than Bangs', and Meltzer's doesn't count because it's out of service!) to the fullest. All this and an acknowledgements list that takes in virtually everybody in this community and runs for pages. The dedicatee, naturally, is Chuck Eddy.

SR linked it to this page.

So what are we going to spend our share of the royalties on?

Is that Frank on the cover? I always imagined he had a beard for some reason.

I thought frank was that more elaborate form

David, do you still have that picture I sent you last year w/ good-looking friend and beard? I lost the file for it in the great computer crash of '04. Anyway, you can post it if you'd like.

(My rationalization for using the old picture is that since the writing covers a span from 1970 to 2004, I'm justified in using one that plops in the middle at 1985.) (To be honest, the vast majority dates from after 1985.)

(They really shouldn't even be listing the hardcover, since my understanding is that it's only going to be available to libraries.)

And here's the link for those of you who use U.S. currency.

And Asian.

it isn't out for three months!

i also think its possible people (and maybe particularly masculine types) in general have a hard time reconciling parts of their experience with art and their intelligence. for instance, on ILM we talk this way about rock alot, but less so about disco. and it's interesting that you see WAY less of this type of writing in europe, particularly spain/italy/france maybe too. men are warmer there...just ask mareisa sabiel.

Prat Power! Guilty as charged!

also maybe this discussion is best had elsewhere.

To answer your question Drew, "Yes," though I hope I don't (in the book or here) come off as reductive/dismissive as your summary, "people who use critical theory are just avoiding the direct expression of their hopes and fears," makes it seem.

I just realized that actually my complaint might best be summarized as "crit theorists do a shit job of romanticism when they mire themselves in philosophy" or "hahaha, I'm more romantic than Derrida, nyaaah nyaaah." (My argument would be that "Nobody ever taught you how to live out on the street" or "Do you think that you could make it with Frankenstein?" are the real deal when it comes to romanticism, whereas Husserl's or someone's "metaphysics of presence" uses such a bizarre and dysfunctionally extreme concept of "presence" that deconstructing such "presence" is beside the point and has little to do with the romantic impulse to be face-to-face with "Frankenstein" or whatever you're trying to be alive and present and involved with. Got to go soon, so don't have time to make this argument intelligible.)

Isn't lots of critical theory trying to undo this disconnect, though? My problem with (some) crit theory is that it deploys arguments that were used to successfully blast to pieces Descartes' "mind-matter" and Kant's "concept-intuition" dichotomies, whereas people's reasons in the here and now for retreating to the emotion-intellect divide have nothing to do with Descartes and Kant, hence the blast misses its target. (And yes, my book talks about this too, though there's way more to be said than the book gets around to saying, obv.)

And if all goes well, my book will inspire people to dig into the socioemotional reasons why such apparently stupid accusations and expressions of annoyance carry such cultural weight.

Actually, I didn't claim my intellect was the biggest in the biz, merely that no one in Rockville questions and probes the way I do, which is the truth. But there's a lot that intellects do beyond questioning and probing, and I'm hardly the best at everything.

It doesn't come close, unfortunately, and various lists trail off with "too many others to mention" and "several zillion more" and the like.

I'm not sure what the heading of this thread should be- maybe "theory and music criticism and embarassment"? / "music criticism and theory and etiquette"? / "don't hate me because i'm theory damaged"? / "vent your frustrations with theory here" / "vent your frustrations with the prevalent anti-theory backlash here"?

It seems like there is a weird transaction going in when "theory" discourse pops up in alt weeklies and reviews and such. Hell, in journalism at all- I just found an article on Heino's farewell tour in The Economist which quoted Adorno and Jello Biafra. And this is the Economist, which, in its political and economic coverage, is as pro-capitalist and pro-business as it gets. So what's with the punk rock singers and ultra-Marxists being raided for juicy quotes about a German folksinger? Clearly this kind of having it both ways (relying on Marxist cultural critique on the entertainment page while carrying on waving the business as usual free market flag on the front page and editorial page) is a handy index of two things:

1) theory is safely dead and non-threatening
2) theory still constitutes a hoard of cultural capital

so how are the two related? What kind of push-pull is in effect when we need Adorno to feel smart about Heino and hip to the way the culture industry works, but we can only do so from this position of total security in our smug sense of the impossibility/ "deadness" of Adorno's own project? Anyway, this is part of what I am interested in, and also could be a way to speak to Susan's concerns and Sterling's observation.

At the opposite end of the rock-writing spectrum from Hoskyns' canonical professionalism, Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black (University Of Georgia Press, £15.95) eschews consideration of the exact point where David Crosby ends and David Geffen begins in favour of broader issues such as "Why does triviality protect awesomeness?" Spin and Village Voice veteran Kogan - himself part of a distinguished lineage of committed contrarians which includes Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs and Chuck Eddy - laid the intellectual foundations for the "Blogging" era with his interactive fanzine "Why Music Sucks". And this first collection of his works promises (and delivers) "not just 'essays' and 'record reviews' but the whole mess of Frank" - using e-mails, diary excerpts, and chat-room postings to memorialise that moment of high-school satori when Kogan realised "I'm so obsessed with my own mind that I can't think of anything else."

Trying to read Frank Kogan's new book, but keep putting down my advance copy because I WAS FRANK KOGAN, except I was born about eight years later and three time zones westerlier. But it's all there: the relationship to music, the poetry of young revolutionaryism, the funky despair that leads to brilliant insight (well, Frank really IS kinda brilliant as a kid, I was just our town's functional equivalent). It's painful but it's awesome like an opossum and my teeth, I don't floss 'em.

The Afterlife Of Pop

Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black is a devastatingly good book. The first evening I read it I found that it shook me up a lot - I recognised the ideals and ideas Frank was chasing, even if I couldn't have articulated them, and I was ashamed of my own inability to follow then. Not that Frank is appealing for 'followers'. Not that I want to 'follow' him. But the first chapters made me feel tentative and timid. After that initial cold splash, the rest of the book has been exhilarating: I've been reading it in a more positive mood, feeling stimulated and inspired. I'm not sure I'm ready to respond yet to the ideas in the book - either intellectually or by example (though the rest of this post has turned into a partial response).

Partway through the book, in the chapter discussing "Superwords", I get quoted, a quote from this odd piece, which I've not dared read since I wrote it. My reluctance was based around my never finishing it - I never wrote the subsequent parts, and after a couple of weeks I'd forgotten what was meant to be in them. I was also afraid I'd read it again and think it was wrong - which I now do, but it's not wrong in any terrible or humiliating way so I don't know why I was so fussed.

The 'death of pop' piece sits as one of my most grievous examples of that Kogan bugbear, not following through ideas. I'm never sure how seriously I take this - I think a lot of ideas are un-follow-through-able, or rather than if you try to follow them through you get ground down and tired, so it's better to just spray them out and see if anyone else can do anything with them. This was always a guiding notion behind ILM, which I actually started half-based on a description I'd read of a Frank Kogan zine (its other parent was the "Question of the Month" box on 80s Marvel editorial pages). But maybe when I say "better" I simply mean "more fun" or "lazier".

This actually ties in a bit with what I was talking about in the Death of Pop piece. The bit I like most in the piece now is the section near the end about stage magic and pop existing in the same precarious showbiz state. In stage magic, pretending that it's all for real (i.e. that you actually possess supernatural powers) is seen as vulgar or a cheat; showing the wires is also frowned upon. A magic performance, in other words, is an idea that refuses - or cannot survive - a follow-through. Somewhere in the tangle of the article I'm suggesting a similar thing about manufactured pop.

Except stage magic is - or used to be, I don't know enough about how it works these days - a stable form where this refusal is built-in and understood by performers and to an extent by audience. Pop is unstable, judging by the continual movement of its performers towards perceived autonomy and credibility (which very rarely translates to achieved cred). The 'death of pop' I was getting worked up about four years ago is always with us, a constant career trajectory. So the question is: why? And also - to paraphrase a question Frank Kogan asks a great deal - what do the performers gain by that? What does the industry gain? What do we listeners gain?

(I think Tom meant to type "follow them" rather than "follow then," and "old piece" for "odd piece"; and I think the description he'd read of WMS had been in The Wire, a pseudonymous review by someone called Hopey Glass.)

I just read an advance of a bock by Village Voice rock critic Frank Kogan. He's a friend of Chuck Eddy, and has a writing style reminiscent of Richard Meltzer's. He's got some interesting ideas: about "Superwords", "The WHAT THING", legitimacy and non legitimacy, the "PBSing of rock"...he's very smart, compassionate in a way, but it ends up making me sort of ill...its solipistic, self obsessed, and lacks an understanding of what musicians are doing.

The best part is when he talks about how "non legitamacy" is the essential element of "legitimacy" in rock...for example, the thing that confers" legitimacy" on Jerry Lee Lewis, in a lot of peoples minds, is his illigitimate act of shooting his bass player. He gets a lot of cred from that...Kogan talks about how, for musicians, dying is the utmost in legitimacy creation, cause yr surely not kissing anyone's ass then! There is wacked out truth in this, this is a true picture of us...it gives me a headache as he starts to say, then, that once you have legitimacy in the eyes of the rock fan, you are in fact on yr way to becoming the opposite thing. For example, hard rock is seen at one point as being the most rocking form, and ballads are out...this confers "legitimacy" on ballads in the next round.

Hmmmm...think I'll just stick with what I was doing, get that book away from me!

The point is the hunger in our culture for justification...everyone feels ignored, tiny, a loser, invalididated by the machine, etc...its the way that it is! There is an image of truth in Kogans idea here.

Oh well I just wanna play! Cant wait til I get over to Amsterdam, I havent played there since 89, or was it 92?

Ex-leader of the Plimsouls.

Also, I have a great understanding of what musicians are doing: E.g., band in rehearsal, song peters out, the keyboardist says to the guitarist, very tentatively, "Was what I was playing all right?" and the guitarist says, "Oh, yeah, I guess so," while thinking to himself "How the fuck should I know? I was so busy struggling with my part that I wasn't paying the least attention to what you were doing." Meanwhile, the bass player tells the drummer, "You need to play with more concentration," and the drummer snaps back, "What are you talking about? You come here and play with 'concentration,' asshole," and throws a stick in his direction. The singer, meanwhile, hums to herself and goes and fiddles with something on one of the amps.

I'm sure his plim is very soulful.

Real Punks Don't Wear Black offers an adventure by pairing a university mind with a high school dropout phenomenon. Frank Kogan to me is a writer who would write fascinating treatises even if he were comparing new brands of carpeting. While the rest of us in our writer's group encourage Frank to write about other things, the man is clearly set on a life's path of writing about something he can't let go of, and his obsessive compulsion is to our benefit.
—Denver Daily News, January 20, 2006

Freddy drastically misinterprets the letter that gives the book its title. Among other things, the letter is an obvious work of fiction, written by me. (Obvious? Well, I didn't imagine that someone could take it for real.)

And one of the things the book does is to challenge the claim of the pierced and tattooed to speak for all of punk.

I think "solipsist" gets over-used to mean anyone who's self-involved or writes mainly about their own thoughts and internal mental states and perceptions. Clearly any critic who gets deeply into constructing a personal system of aesthetic values is going to be accused of building castles in the air that no one else can see. There is a very real debate here which has been held many times on ILM about whether critical judgments can ever be anything other than subjective. Perhaps "solipsist" is a short-hand way of denoting someone who takes the position that critical judgments are inherently subjective and it's pointless to deny that they are.

Never even rented one. (Nor read Vollmann, though he and Woody Allen are now on my to-read list.)

uga library still ain't got the kogan book.

Well, I don't think the for-reals version (rather than the reviewer's promos) are even printed yet.

Except what I keep trying to hammer home in the book is that critical judgments are inherently social, and I keep emphatically rejecting the idea that you can talk about yourself or about the world but that you can't do both at once. I wish the word "subjective" (and "objective," its partner in infamy) would vanish from the language. People don't know what they mean when they say it.

hurrah!

Well, in my sentence where I used the word "subjective" to refer to a view of the nature of claims of truth in aesthetic criticism, I simply meant that one who held that aesthetic judgments are "subjective" would hold that such judgments are only true for the person who makes such judgments and are not true in a universal sense. Perhaps an example would make this more clear. If I say "The Rolling Stones are the best rock band of all time" and if it's true that such judgments are subjective, then there is an implied "to me" that should be added to the end of that sentence (and any sentence which makes claims in this manner).

And I'm saying that those aren't the only two choices, which is why I think "subjective" and "objective" need to be shitcanned.

"The Rolling Stones are the best rock band of all time" is obviously not only true for the person who makes the judgment, since more than one person has made that judgment, and someone's stating it as a judgment rather than a matter of taste is in itself a claim that the judgment has a validity that goes beyond oneself; i.e., more than one person should make that judgment.

Let me take another example. Suppose there are several people in a room. One person says "It's cold in here". Some others agree. Another person says, "Actually it's warm in here." Some others agree with him. So is "It's cold in here" a subjective statement or not? Clearly more than one person agrees with the statement, and the people making that statement are implying that the others should agree with them. However, not everyone does agree, and there doesn't seem to be any objective way of measuring whether or not the room is in fact cold - simply because there is no objective definition of the word "cold" that will resolve every grey area. Say they had a thermometer in the room - would that settle the issue? No, because regardless of what the temperature reading was, to some people the room would still be cold and to others hot.

unless it's like 10 below then everyone would be fuckin' freezing.

Yeah, I think that's the point I'm trying to make, that "subjective" and "objective" leave most of the map untouched. My feeling is that you and I aren't seriously at odds here, but my other guess is that if you dropped the word "subjective" from your vocabulary, your thinking wouldn't be inhibited thereby. E.g., if in some instances by "subjective" we mean "we can get away with disagreeing without being called insane," that's what we should say: not that we're being subjective, but that can get away with disagreeing. This is because the word "subjective" implies a deeper principle than "what we can get away with saying," and furthermore implies that there are only two choices: you're either speaking for yourself alone or your speaking for everybody.

In your example, everyone in the room could agree, "It's too cold for some of us but not for all of us." But as soon as someone says, "No, it's too cold, period," the situation has changed. Either the guy is dismissed out of hand - is in essence dismissed from the conversation - or at least some of the other participants have to acknowledge that one person's judgement of coldness may be better than another's (in which case it's no longer just up to the individual). OK, that'd be a strange argument, to argue over whether someone feels cold or not. But to bring up an example that I use in my book, what about the person who claims that Jay-Z is too pop to be real hip-hop? Or what about the person who claims that there are witches? Or the person who believes in Intelligent Design? You can call all of these judgments and their corresponding counterjudgments (Jay-Z is real hip-hop, there are no witches, Intelligent Design is vacuous bullshit) "subjective," but how does that help you? What does it tell us about these judgments that we wouldn't otherwise know, if there were no such term as "subjective"? Once something jumps social roles from "matter of taste" to "matter of judgment" (which often then links up with "matter of definition"), then not everyone is agreeing to disagree, since some people's ideas can be better or worse than the others', some people can be right and others wrong, and we have no process that everyone will adhere to that determines who is right or wrong.

If you want to, you can call matters of taste and matters of judgment "subjective," but I don't see what you've gained by lumping the two together. "I don't like spinach" and "witches are real" seem at a pretty far remove.

But all this is also at a pretty far remove from why people call me solipsistic. In Real Punks, where I tell my story I'm not doing so just for its own sake but because there are resemblances between my story and some other people's, so by analyzing and probing my own predicament I'm analyzing and probing a lot more, too. I make this clear right on the first page of the preface, where I say that my sentences don't just come from my pen, they're a social product; and I ask, therefore, not just what do I gain by producing such sentences, but what does a society gain by producing people like me who write such sentences. So I'm saying that my story is relevant even for people whose experience doesn't match up with mine, since I'm still playing a role in the society of which they're a part. Of course, one can dispute this claim, but whether I'm being "subjective" or not doesn't touch the claim one way or another. Rather, what's at issue is whether or not my experience resembles other people's; and whether the principles I'm illustrating in telling my story can be applied to other people; and whether my social roles relate to the social roles of poeple whose story doesn't resemble mine.

You think you know me?

And if that surprises you, then either you don't know me as well as you think, or you don't know her.

You think you know me?

You think you know me
Word on the street is that you do
You want my history
What others tell you won't be true

I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep
Nobody's really seen my million subtleties

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

I hear you talking
Well, it's my turn now
I'm talking back
Look in my eyes
So you can see just where I'm at

I walked a thousand miles to find one river of peace
I walked a million more to find out what this shit means

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

I'm a bad ass girl in this messed up world
I'm the sexy girl in this crazy world
I'm a simple girl in a complex world
A nasty girl, you wanna get with me?
You wanna mess with me?

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
I laugh more than I cry
You piss me off, good-bye
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

well, i think this relates back to my issues above with readers claiming to not understand writer's metaphors, and feeling like instead of not understanding them they are just rejecting them b/c they cannot see how anyone's peculiar experience is of use, b/c it has to be individual to them and therefore must be different from everyone elses. there's no understanding how getting into someone else's understanding might help with making your own map. anyway...

Except the lyrics on the page don't convey how sexy it is when she says. It's a come on. The song is like the world's most brilliant personal ad.

And I never in my life wrote a line as great as "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep." I don't know if Jay-Z or Eminem ever did either. Or Dylan. It's like she's saying, "Here I am, stealth genius, and you didn't know." Of course, she's making promises in that song that she probably won't be able to keep, just as Dylan and Jagger and Iggy and Lennon and Johnny and Johansen never lived up to their promise.

When I go out I'm a go out shooting
I don't mean when I die
I mean when I go out to the club, stupid

That's actually a pretty good definition of "subjective". And since the difference between "subjective" and "objective" is a continuum and not a black-and-white divide, then I think perhaps you're right that the word obscures more than it reveals. It's basically a lazy way of saying, "I don't think you're right and I don't think you can convince me." And in any case, I don't think the word is absolutely necessary to an understanding of criticism. Because criticism (or at least good criticism) is a social process, good critics quickly move beyond the "AC/DC rules! Losers drool!" school of thought and they start to ask "Why do they rule?" and "What other bands rule in similar ways?" and so on, and pretty soon they find that there are things they can hold a conversation about, even with people who might not agree that AC/DC rules.

It's actually "And I'll walk a million more to find out what this shit means."

See what I mean about her making promises? I admire her for making them.

Or it could be a way of saying "I think you are right but there's no sure-fire way that we can convince even the people we respect." But my major problem with the words "subjective" and "objective" is that they divide up the universe between what's in the psyche and what's in objects; that way of mapping the universe pretty much leaves out most of the universe. Leaves out society, and culture, and people's lives, and the fact that people use objects in their lives.

(Not that people who use the words "objective" and "subjective" actually map out the universe in this way. Another thing I imply but don't really get into in the book is that the problem isn't that people's views are distorted by their belief in a mind-matter split - normally people don't think about that split at all, and it really doesn't play a big role in social discourse - but that they run to such splits when they don't want to deal with social conflict.)

Frank I really really like this point - I think I've verged on thinking it dozens of times without ever actually finally articulating it. e.g. I used to be broadly in favour of Ned's "Radical Subjectivity" position but now I'm somewhat uncomfortable with it, not because I believe in objectivity but because it feels like a conflict-avoidance-mechanism.

hahahahaha. you have brass balls, and i love you for saying this. youve just sold another copy of your book, which might have been your intention.

When I first listened to Bob Dylan's mid-'60s stuff I thought it was especially honest. It was honest to me because the vocals weren't pretty and didn't sound like singers were supposed to sound, and mistakes were left in. The lyrics to "Visions of Johanna," "Memphis Blues Again," etc. were honest because they were self-destructive. The earlier protest stuff, attacking power, prestige, and everyday commonplaces, fit into a genre of "folk" music; the electric stuff seemed more individual and true. Dylan got to be "honest" not by attacking power, prestige, and everyday commonplaces, but by attacking Dylan.

I thought if you were going to get to see Ashlee's come-on, you should see mine as well, so that's the first paragraph. Ashlee's has a better lilt. I should work on my flirting technique.

I wrote the piece 22 years ago, and it's not about any actual Dylan autobio. "The true autobiography of Bob Dylan isn't an account of his life, or how he got to be that way; but of how it got to be that way, how we got to be that way." In other words, I'm saying we get to complete Dylan's "autobiography" in our own lives and our own stories.

Harold Bloom to thread.

Yes, this thread's all about selling copies of my book.

and i wish harold bloom would contribute, but isn't he very sick? (im reading genuis at the moment. pretty good.)

I like these lines, but I don't think I'd like them as much if I didn't know about her family background (ie., ex-pastor father).

But my major problem with the words "subjective" and "objective" is that they divide up the universe between what's in the psyche and what's in objects; that way of mapping the universe pretty much leaves out most of the universe.

This is also a good point. When I say "It's cold in this room", I'm talking about things both outside myself (ie., molecules vibrating in the room, how much clothing I'm wearing) and inside myself (ie., my nerve endings, body temperature, etc.). When I say "AC/DC rules", I'm also talking about things both outside myself (Angus Young's abilities as a guitarist) and inside myself (personal listening history and tastes). To say that either statement is "subjective" may be a useful corrective to someone who denies the "inside myself" part of the equation, but it's not the whole truth.

Well, admittedly these people in my example are kind of straw men, but so is the person that denies the "inside myself" part of the equation. The whole thing is only constructed as an example to clarify some distinctions that in most real situations would be mired in grey, hence the straw men.

But I think that people who criticize critics for being "subjective" or "solipsistic" misunderstand the nature of criticism. In some ways the process is more interesting than the conclusion - the journey is the destination. This is the same reason that the considerations that led a critic to vote a certain way on a year-end poll are more interesting to read than the ballot itself. You might maintain that a conclusion is "subjective" but that doesn't mean it's not about something real, and that you can't learn something by reading how it was arrived at.

I can't quite go as far as you do to maintain that the "in here/out there" framework serves no purpose. I'll admit that it's a framework that we often take for granted, but I'm not sure there's much we can achieve by discarding it. I'm not even sure how we could go about discarding it. To discard it would seem to deny that each of us has a separate internal existence.

I should probably clarify this. Obviously there are many reasons why someone might say something that I would disagree with (not the least being that I might be wrong), but in some cases it could be that we are seeing different things because we are looking at the same thing from different places. If I'm wearing blue sunglasses and I say "The sun is blue" and you're wearing red sunglasses and you say, "No, it's red", if we don't stop and consider our sunglasses then we may never resolve our disagreement.

First, to put some perspective on Ashlee, in one of her songs on I Am Me she says that the fact that her boyfriend is so sensitive ("You finish all my sentences before they begin") is that he must have been hers in a previous life; this is a really boring and unimaginative metaphor, far duller than anything you'll find in the early work of Eminem or Dylan or Johansen et al. Stuff like this is why I won't be altogether shocked if she doesn't follow through on the potential of "Autobiography."

Second, I've revived the Death of Pop thread; not only is it one of the all-time great ILM threads, it's the one that pulled me onto the board in the first place.

should be "means that he must have been hers." Actually, what I need to do is to take a nap.

I'm not sure what you mean by "social fact" here. But I think you mean something like this: the concept of a "room" is something that we learn from society and something whose meaning is preserved by mutual agreement. In other words, even the constructs that we see as residing in our minds are part of a fabric that unites us with other people. It's only because I have been raised in a culture with the concept of "roomness" that I even think in terms of rooms. So culture becomes the all-pervading matrix of our existence, and the inside/outside distinction loses its meaning. That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is that there is no stable, unitary statement, "It is cold in this room". This statement can only be made in a certain social situation, and its meaning is entirely dependent on that context, and cannot be preserved outside of such a context.

So it would seem that my insistence that the "room" is an external reality that is independent of the social context is incorrect.

However, it was never my intention to establish that the "room" is external of social context in that way. Rather, I am saying that the "inside/outside" distinction is provided by the social context, and it is a useful distinction to use in communication, so I don't wish to discard it.

You remember those toys you had when you were a very small kid, plastic shapes - circles, squares, stars - and a ball or a table or something with corresponding holes to fit the shapes into? This is my picture of music appreciation - you like the Stones if you have a Stones shaped hole in your head, you don't like jazz if you don't have a jazz-shaped hole in your head. And I've always characterised this as something along the lines of radical subjectivity, because it's all about what's in your head - no-one can tell you that jazz is objectively Good Music because if you don't have that hole in your head you just ain't gonna see it. But it isn't really all that subjective because a) the shape of the block - an objective fact - is obviously just as important a part of the equation as the hole in your head - the subjective opinion. And ii) as Frank says, it's a social thing. No-one can say to you "Jazz is good, you are an idiot for hating it", but you can talk about why you don't like jazz - what is it in the shape of the block or the shape of the holes in your head that mean they don't fit together - and you can, either on your own or by talking about these things with other people, change the holes in your head, so that maybe one day you will come to like Jazz. And that to me is something that creates a whole other set of questions - how exactly does one change the holes in one's head? How far could you take it - could your brain eventually become a sponge, able to accept and appreciate any kind of music? Is that even a goal worth aiming for - what would happen to critical appreciation then?

But you know what? My heart's with the first album. That's the one where more feels at stake, in words and in sound. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at allmusic.com complains about the second album (he liked the first much more): "The problem is this album is presented with utter seriousness, as if her garden-variety changes in emotions and fashion were great revelations instead of being just what happens in adolescence." That's obviously not how I hear it. Is it possible to listen to "L.O.V.E." and "Burning Up," for example, and not get into the goofing around? I guess it is for Erlewine, who's always worth reading anyway. He's right that her changes in emotions and fashion are garden-variety. That doesn't mean they can't be revelations. The situations and emotions in Dylan's "Outlaw Blues" and "Visions of Johanna" and "Sooner Or Later" are just as garden variety. What is amazing is what he makes of them. Any 23 year old can say that even though he sometimes looks and acts like a weasel, he still feels like there's a hero somewhere in him (you hope that a 23 year old hasn't yet lost a sense of his heroic potential). But most won't then come up with anything like "Well, I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James" to call forth the legends of weasels and heroes past, not to mention calling forth the fear that he'll get shot in the back for it (and the subtext that says, "Look, I can make my little blues song go anywhere, try and stop me"). The risk with Ashlee is that she'll put everything into perspective - that she already has - that she'll decide that a weasel is just a weasel and a breakup is just a breakup and they have no resonance with any larger perfidy or heroism. Maybe "Autobiography" and "Shadow" and "I Am Me" and "La La" are just the pop machine making a couple of lucky shots, and maybe this garden-variety celeb (Dylan: "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine") won't make much more that's extraordinary out of her ordinariness. If a Sophie or Alanis or Lucinda had come up with a clumsy line like "Does the weight of consequence drag you down until it pulls you under" (in the title song of I Am Me), I'd mutter, "Go take a walk in the park, or a nap, or something," but in Ashlee it gives me hope. If she's still got pretentions, maybe she'll push herself to make her mind worthy of those pretentions. You know, like she's got a million miles to go before she sleeps. Or not. In the meantime, at least she gets to speak to my inner 19 year old. Important not to lose that guy.

(This mistake wasn't because I mistyped, but because I neglected to look up the spelling.)

thats your problem.

Oh, and do not do not do not order the hardcover version, which is ridiculously expensive and besides won't even have a dust jacket or a cover photo. The hardcover is really only meant for those libraries that want books in hardcover.

And remember, the book has raunchy rap lyrics and free-floating expletives.

Huk-L: Well, if you think of Ashlee as equivalent to the New York Dolls and Kelly Clarkson as equivalent to Iggy, the teenpop thread might work, though I still don't see who would be equivalent to the Kingston Trio. Aly & AJ, maybe?

"If Frank Kogan had assembled his writing a decade ago, by samizdat or whatever, it would be a cornerstone by now, read by every current and former teenage malcontent."
--Luc Sante, author of Lowlife: Lures and Snares of Old New York

On the back cover:

"Frank Kogan dares you not to listen to music in the context of your life. He knows that dare is impossible, which in itself puts him head and shoulders above pretty much every other rock critic of the past couple decades."
--Chuck Eddy, music editor, The Village Voice

"Frank is at his intellectual best when annoying academics like me. I would recommend it to students and expect any self-defined 'popular music scholar' to have read it."
--Simon Frith, author of Performing Rites

With relentless analysis and reckless screaming, Frank Kogan has made a career of asking infuriating questions about popular music. A key figure among music critics for his contentious, perceptive writings, Kogan has been contributing to the Village Voice and underground publications since the early 1970s. The first book-length collection of his writing on music and culture, Real Punks Don't Wear Black samples the best of thirty-plus years of essays, reviews, and rants, and also includes new pieces written specifically for this edition.

If you're after no more than backstage dish or a judgement on whether some song is "good" or "bad," then look elsewhere. From the Rolling Stones to the New York Dolls, from Mariah Carey to the Ying Yang Twins, through hip-hop, Europop, disco, and metal, Kogan insists on the hard questions: Our popular music is born in flight, chased by fear, and heading toward unattainable glory, he says. Why is this so? What fears, contagions, divisions are we ignoring that our music cannot?

Remember, says Kogan, this is about you, too. Keep your mind alive, your hairstyle in flux, and your tongue sharpened. Whether you're a gutterpunk or a cultstud geek, you're a bigger part of the story than you realize. It's your ideas that you're hearing on the radio, it's your song that gets sung.

Frank Kogan is the publisher and editor of the fanzine Why Music Sucks. His work has also appeared in the Village Voice, Spin, Radio On, Cometbus, and ilXor.com.

[This might give the impression that I've been writing for the Voice since the early '70s, which isn't true. It also might give the impression that I spell judgment the Brit way. This also isn't true.]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0820327549/qid=1141232969/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_0_1/202-5996931-4023045

I feel that the "sourcing fee" is some kind of badge of honour.

Doesn't this book at least partly fall into the 'academy is doomed/betrayed' genre (albeit way off on its own wing) vis-à-vis 'closing of the american mind'/'tenured radicals'? Certainly one of the questions it persistently seems to be asking is: 'what is college/knowledge for?' Obviously I think Frank Kogan's answer is a bit different from Allan Bloom's. Isn't it also about restoring the grand ambitions and claims for self of ‘60s rock-crit culture/counterculture: refusing to settle for a specialist niche, whether ivory-tower cultstud thinkage or leisure-industry enablage? (I am somewhat projecting my own dreams and hungers onto it for sure.)
—Mark Sinker, author of if. . . . (BFI Film Classics) and The Rise and Sprawl of Horrible Noise

Frank Kogan dares you not to listen to music in the context of your life. He knows that dare is impossible, and that in itself puts him head and shoulders above pretty much every other rock critic of the past couple decades. As do his tastes, which are impeccable, even though his format is the farthest thing from a consumer guide. As does the fact that he has more ideas worth stealing than anybody else writing about music; in fact, I kind of hate that this book is coming out, because now everyone will know where I stole all of mine. The book is a mess, full of trap doors, just like the music Frank likes best. He knows none of it is as simple as people pretend.
—Chuck Eddy, Village Voice music editor, and author of The Accidental Evolution of Rock'N'Roll: A Misguided Tour through Popular Music and Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe

http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/noise1.html

so how are the two related? What kind of push-pull is in effect when we need Adorno to feel smart about Heino and hip to the way the culture industry works, but we can only do so from this position of total security in our smug sense of the impossibility/ "deadness" of Adorno's own project? Anyway, this is part of what I am interested in, and also could be a way to speak to Susan's concerns and Sterling's observation.

I'm just curious if Drew or anyone ever did start such a thread (if there is one I'd like to see it).

over on the sylvester thread someone calls NS's gaffe 'situationist'.

So, the check is in the mail, the dog ate the homework, I won't come in your mouth, etc. etc. etc.

(I got in touch with the marketing and sales director, and he said the book should reach their warehouse by next Wednesday March 8. I will say that the University of Georgia Press has been golden throughout this process, absolutely supportive and willing to take risks, and I'd recommend them to anybody. Furthermore, I tossed them some formatting curveballs plus a whole lot of quoted lyrics that they had to get permission for (and that they were willing to pay for when necessary!). But there were occasional communication problems, and I had no idea there would be a delay, and they screwed up in not warning me of the delay or changing the posted release date on their Website or informing Amazon etc., and I told them so. But college presses are basically indies when you come down to it, and these things happen. (I remember that last year's Fannypack album kept not getting released and not getting released, which made it hard to decide when to run the review.) In the meantime, I'm glad to see "FRANK KOGAN Real Punks Don't Wear Black" sitting spine out on my music shelves in between "Bob Dylan, a Retrospective edited by Craig McGregor" and "The Aesthetics of Rock by R. Meltzer."

Frank Kogan's two rock-critic heroes are both Village Voice veterans: Robert Christgau, the self-appointed "Dean of American rock critics," and Chuck Eddy, the wisecracking current music editor. But unlike the writers he emulates, Kogan is piercingly intelligent without ever being pompous, pedantic or inscrutable, as Christgau often is, and Kogan is funny, perverse and contrarian without resorting to shtick or insincerity, as Eddy does. When he makes a wacky claim that Axl Rose and Michael Jackson are the only two "real punks" left on the music scene, he backs it up -- sort of.

Now, Kogan, the former editor of the giddy Why Music Sucks, has compiled his work from his own fanzine as well as the Voice, Spin and numerous other publications in the anthology Real Punks Don't Wear Black (University of Georgia Press, $24.95).

Writes the author: "A piece of music can be many things, often at once: decoration, diversion, distraction, conversation piece, mood enhancer, mood alterer, narrative signal (in the movies), theme song, guide to physical movement (on the dance floor), guide to social interaction (ditto), message to the gods, tool of the gods, mnemonic device, conveyor of lyrics, social bond (sing-alongs), social marker, scene disrupter (blasted out of car windows), self-expression, etc."

In essays about artists ranging from the Ying Yang Twins to the New York Dolls, Mariah Carey to Spoonie Gee, and Bob Dylan to Britney Spears, Kogan is interested in exploring all of the above. And it never fails to be an illuminating and entertaining ride.

- Jim DeRogatis

Moron.

I was saying to a friend of mine at the weekend, while waving the book excitedly: "it just infects the way you think, you find yourself approaching everything in this Kogan manner."

I was flattering myself.

*drools, drools, drools despondently, despondently, exponentially so*

Anyway, I've got a couple of pedantic points:

(1) I disagree that I am never pompous, pedantic, or inscrutable (nor are such characteristics always flaws)(he says inscrutably).

(2) I don't see how Jim got the idea I've only got 2 rock-critic heroes (perhaps the copy desk shortened "two of Frank Kogan's rock-critic heroes"); the number is more like 200. Not to list them all (I don't come close to listing them all in the Acknowledgements), but note that I actually say on p. 341, "My first rock-critic hero was Ken Emerson." (Emerson's got a new book out about the Brill building; Christgau gave the book a rave.)

(You can do this even if you already own a copy of the book, hint hint. You can do this at every library where you have a library card.)

James, it may take the UGA Library a while to process a new book. I'll get in touch with UGA Press and tell them that the library still doesn't have the book. In the meantime, if the book is available at any of local stores, thumb through it and take a look at p. 43.

Speaking of that, Frank, the show he was on -- Soundcheck -- would be an ideal venue for publicizing RPDWB. Hopefully your publisher is on it but if you want contact info email my private add via ILXOR.

"Kogan has been writing about music for some 35 years—for his own blogs; for his zine, Why Music Sucks; as well as for Spin, Radio On and the Village Voice."

So, Frank, you have...blogs?

*checks*

No record yet. I could theoretically pretend it's a Reserves order but I'm not THAT flaky. I'll make a request and see if there's some traction.

The Publisher's Weekly reviewer probably just assumed that "Internet" meant "blog." But recently I've started listing my "blog" like so:

/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?thread.php?msgid=6585005

I've twice asked the Voice to pay me to post online on their site, first time back in 2002 in a long after-midnight email to Doug Simmons (excerpts from it became chapter 18 of Real Punks; can be summarized pithily as "So if you're listening, there's so much more to me you haven't seen"), then again a couple of months ago, on the heels of my pay cut, in a long email to Nick Catucci, wherein I asked for a weekly column. Catucci ended up quitting as online Voice boss shortly after that, so I don't know what he thought of the idea. I think they're insane not to take me up on it, since they can get me for about a third what they'd have to pay for equivalent-length pieces in the regular section, and one online link a week is hardly clogging up their Webspace, if it turns out I only get a specialty audience. I'd probably re-work the proposal a bit, since I feel that I'm clicking with pop music now in a way that I wasn't last October and I'd probably therefore bring it into the proposal.

I wouldn't want to be on Breihan's and Sylvester's beat - for one thing, they're amazing, churning out all that copy, and I think the Voice is exploiting them terribly, but also I couldn't do as well either at Breihan's straight-up reporting and real-time journo-musical analysis or at Sylvester's running wise-brat vaudeville act. There are some things that the young and hip do better than I. But I wish someone would pay me to do what I do better than anyone else in the world, which is to probe and to question and to ask the sociomusical "why," relentlessly but also as accessibly as I can. And dammit, I'll tell you why a lyric such as "So if you're listening, there's so much more to me you haven't seen" matters, better than anyone else'll tell you.

In Kogan's terms, being a rock critic is about broadening the idea of what counts as criticism. Not everything counts, but because everything potentially can, you need to risk being ridiculous and rigorous to figure out what is worth saying. Music – and all the other stuff it includes – is, most essentially 'an activity in which people participate': a social activity and therefore an intellectual activity. Which means: Kogan is a rock critic because he's interested in thinking, specifically in those forms of thinking called 'rock' and 'criticism'. So he treats the New York Dolls as his favourite philosophers and Ludwig Wittgenstein as his favourite band. (You just know he has 'meaning is use' written on his loose-leaf notebook in purple magic marker.) He writes as if he’s dancing, fighting, killing time and trying to change the world.
—Steven Stern

A friend of mine here in Denver tells me:

"my daughter who lives in Athens says your book is 'hot' amongst the in group"

(ps i will be buying a copy of the book ultimately i'm sure).

I first saw "meaning to read this history of Poptimism."

Is "banana-herald" a cross between The International Edition of the New York Herald Tribune and Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl"?

bridges burnt in this town o brother

The one humorous line on Kelly Clarkson's Breakaway is "It's not a light at the end of the tunnel tonight/Just a bridge that I gotta burn" (line courtesy of DioGuardi or Shanks).

(It's a great album though, even if it's lacking in yuk-yuks.)

I've been spending a lot of time lately with Frank Kogan's Real Punks Don't Wear Black, probably the best non-Lester Bangs collected-music-writing book I've ever read, even if he does include all these long-ass unreadable screeds he wrote when he was like twelve. Probably my favorite idea within the book is the Superword, which Kogan describes a lot better than I could:

"A Superword is a word like 'punk,' which is, among other things, a battleground, a weapon, a red cape, a prize, a flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag. To put this in the abstract, a Superword is a word or phrase that not only is used in flights but that is itself fought over. The fight is over who gets to wear the word proudly, who gets the word affixed to himself against his will, etc. So the use is fought over, and this - the fight over usage - is a big part of the word's use."

That's about the simplest Kogan ever puts it, and he devotes pages and pages to this thing. His favorite example is "punk," but virtually every genre of music becomes a Superword at some point or another; people start fighting over what exactly it is and what can and can't claim that status. My favorite Superword is a term I try to never use: hip-hop.

[Then a whole bunch of stuff about Christina Aguilera and Premier and the fight over "real hip-hop."]

So, anyway, what do you guys think of the concept Superword? We talked about it a whole lot on the Key to deconstructing C Eddy / S Reynolds thread, if you want to know more. I pulled whole hunks of stuff bodily from that thread and put them in my Superwords chapter, including long quotes from Sterling, Tom E., and Tracer. Here's how I elaborated on that concept in the thread:

A Superword is a controversy word, but not all controversy words are Superwords; for what makes a Superword really super is that some people use the word so that it will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment. Like, no one and nothing is good enough to bear the word "punk," and I wouldn't join a band that would have someone like me as a member anyway. (Supposedly, in the late '80s I once claimed that Michael Jackson and Axl Rose were the only two punks going at the time.) "Rock," "pop," "punk," and many other genre names sometimes act as Superwords. So "punk" (for instance) can be an ideal, and every single song that aspires to be punk can fall short in someone's ears. But for the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so that the music is always inadequate to the ideal, even if the music would have been adequate to yesterday's version of the ideal. And the music then chases after this ever-changing ideal. Words bounce on ahead, and the music comes tumbling after.

I once pitched the idea of an article entitled "Antirockism Is for Teacher's Pets." The title of course would be to get the attention of the antirockists and to dent their self-image, and I think the designation "teacher's pet" is psychologically and socially acute as well; but underlying the piece would be my assumption that the pets - who are people I sympathize with, basically - are trying to tell their own truth and that they probably have an interesting truth to tell, if they can find their way to it and not settle for comforting half-truths. The dynamic in antirockism is that the antirockist has put defeating people ahead of trying to understand them, so the antirockist projects his own ideas onto supposed "rockists" but in really stupid form, so he gains an easy victory over an imaginary foe.

A friend of mine, old enough to know better, once explained his dislike of the Backstreet Boys by complaining that the Backstree Boys don't even write their own songs. The thing is, my friend doesn't know why he dislikes the Backstreet Boys. "They don't write their own songs" is a placeholder, an "explanation" that gives him the excuse not to probe himself for the real reasons. Now, if we call this guy a "rockist," this means we aren't interested in why he dislikes the Backstreet Boys either.

But if my piece says no more than this, it hasn't accomplished much. The goal is to bring the antirockist back to the impulses, experiences, battles, and nascent ideas that were bubbling in and around him before he stepped sideways into the fake discussion about "rockism." In other words, I want the antirockist to reflect on who he is, what social groups he belongs to, what his gang affiliations are, and what the relationship is between his opinions and his social commitments. And even more, I want to ask what the world is that produces this guy - it's usually a guy - and that produces these opinions, this whole discussion.

If I had to I could come up with a pretty accurate description of something called "rockism": basically, a bunch of loosely related - and really irritating - habits and justifications for saying why what you like is more real than what someone else likes. But the reason I can't put myself at odds with the supposed "rockist" is that I don't think there's anything wrong in principle with saying something's more real than something else - I'm willing to call myself a real thinker, and say that person X is not a real thinker - and when you come down to it, I have exactly the same impulses the supposed "rockist" does in regard to "authenticity," even if I take my impulses to more interesting places. To explain it briefly: the "authenticity" issue is about one's relationship to authority and to social pressure. The Hero Story it draws on has the Performer in defiance of Authority. It isn't about who writes the song but about who seems to be groveling in front of whom and where one's own fandom puts one in relation to authority. The reason there's so much obfuscation in the discussion of "rockism" is that there's no way not to buy into the Hero Story, but there's no way to tell the story honestly without connecting yourself to the groveling. (Well, that's vague enough. I don't think I can explain my argument briefly. But my book explains it well enough and without resorting to the buzz word "rockism.")

The supposed problem with the Backstreet Boys isn't that they're not singing their own song but that they're singing the record company's and the audience's song. But then we have to pretend that the person singing to us isn't singing our song. But how is it possible not to sing the audience's song?

As much as I have discussed rockism/anti-rockism as much as anyone over the last six years or so, the debate is an irritating one because it always ends up returning to the same banal dead ends. Most of the really interesting brain gruntwork done on this topic has been that which perhaps inadvertently moves beyond the opposition, which struggles to go back and tenuously redefine itself as working in service of the cause of one side or the other... and perhaps therefore should just stop worrying and try to attach itself to - or better, create from scratch - a different kind of critical language.

I think Mitch once said that my relationship to Britney as a performer (specifically vis a vis "Born To Make You Happy") was post-rockist, and I wonder if (though he will likely disagree with me on this) Frank's critical appraisal of Ashlee Simpson is not similar. Which is to say that the relationship values a notion of authenticity which is not about external empirical validation but personal identification (Hero Story stuff, in Frank language). The issue is not whether we believe in and value a notion of "realness", but how honest we are about our differing notions of realness.

I still think it's worth thinking about the way that music fandom - and especially music criticism - functions by way of analogical imposition (in so far as we talk about different artists and different types of music and different impulses and logics within music by way of comparison to others) and how this serves to both define and limit the possibilities of what we can think about music. But the rockist/anti-rockist dichotomy can usually only approach this in an overly dramatised [x] or [y] manner.

Relevant here perhaps is the tension b/w the injunction to "value artists/styles on their own terms" (immanent judgment) versus intermingling these terms and using different artist/genre criteria to throw a different light on the music in question (as chuck might say, why shouldn't I ask whether this rock song is good or bad disco?).

I was thinking yesterday that it's a bit like those superhero universe-crossovers - Batman vs Superman, or Aliens vs Predator. "Would Batman best Superman in a fight?" Should we complain that it's unfair to pit Batman against Superman because Batman isn't actually superhuman and the whole point of the Batman universe is that of an ordinary man using skill, strategy and technology to punch above his weight? Or does this only serve to close down our thinking about what the "whole point" of Batman might be?

Actually (because I've mentioned her here before) Christgau is interesting on Ani DiFranco w/r/t this - here he's talking about a discussion he had with some teenage girls who like Ani:

"This is linguistic craft as a means to character--DiFranco's character. Pointing out that "When Doves Cry" (a formerly ritual show-closer that kicked out the jams at Roseland) is DiFranco's only cover, my otherwise sophisticated panel insisted on autobiographical verisimilitude: all right, maybe "Letter to a John" wasn't true, they didn't think she'd ever lap-danced, but if it came out that, for example, Ani-the-person wasn't really bisexual, it would be like Milli Vanilli or something. And they're right to care. Aesthetes are free to believe she's merely constructed this headstrong, mercurial, sensual, edgy, alert, pissed off, affectionate, waggish, empowered, needy, indomitable, fierce, leftwing, hyperemotional, supercompetent persona. But self-expression goes into it too, and you have to wonder whether she can keep it up."

Sorry that's probably all irrelevant, but I find this whole general topic totally fascinating.

I don't think that's necessarily so. I agree with the general premise - it's nice when people genuinely seek answers, don't merely make accusations and rely on buzzwords, etc. But your post seems to be telling me, "Don't use this word. It's a Stupor Word for teacher's pets."

If there is indeed a rockist perspective, then yes, you can talk about it and analyze the reasons behind it, but you still need a word to identify it. Not sure what's wrong with using the word "rockism" for this purpose (unless it's just too vague or something).

>"Rockism" is a stupor word for sure. The reason is that no one aspires to rockism, hence no one's trying to up the ante and make rockism better than anyone can be. <

Not sure I follow this. Do you mean this in the sense of saying that no one aspires to sexism or racism either? (And if so what does that have to do with the value of the word?)

btw, love your baseball analogy james - obv. in that scenario ILM would be Fire Joe Morgan.

I agree with this entirely, I think. I guess Frank's ideal is that we start a conversation with this guy which leaves him having a better idea of why he dislikes the Backstreet Boys, us having a better idea of why he dislikes the Backstreet Boys, and maybe also us having an idea of why we were tempted to call him a rockist. This is a great idea of what criticism could be or even ought to be, although it makes Frank, as he admits, someone in search of an ideal, and possibly a lonely guy, given that so much writing and reading about music is going to be as much a form of defence -- rather than an opening to a conversation -- as this guy's reason for disliking Backstreet Boys are.

I think in Paul Morley's hands, say, anti-rockism is totally a defence (i.e. off himself from difficult questions), but his excuse might be that he is trying to provoke rather than understand. This can be ok in places but without trying to understand as well it turns into a cliche, and then becomes a bore. At the end of Rip It Up Simon Reynolds tries to map the whole field in terms of his rockism vs. Morley's popism, but in doing so he squeezes out any room for what Frank -- and others -- want to do, i.e. ask about what's real but without having fixed criteria (i.e. social relevance or some version of it, which seems to be SR's). If social relevance means anything it must mean relevance to real people, not some abstract historical machine (these trends are progressive, these are not).

But the reason I can't put myself at odds with the supposed "rockist" is that I don't think there's anything wrong in principle with saying something's more real than something else I think what I like most about Frank's book (today, I like something different about it best whenever I think about it) is this insistence on making these kind of judgements -- as well as analysing why and how these are being made.

I think these things are important, and the trouble I have with the idea of poptimism is that it often seems to tend away from the personal and individual investments people make in music which seems real to them towards looking at big abstract collective machines (i.e. what's in the charts) and I think in doing so betrays a kind of nostalgia for the type of broad-brush socio-historical criticism which ties hit records to the mood of the nation or whatever, as if we could say something about an era on the basis of a couple of bands.

Of course this means facing up to my blindspot -- why in hell do people 'really' like post-Coldplay adult-oriented misery rock (keane, editors, snow patrol)? (I can at least see why young kids would follow Pete Doherty around, even if I think they're wrong.) The anti-rockist line is effectively to accuse them of some kind of false-consciousness -- either: they don't really like it, they only think they do; or, they like it, but for the wrong reasons. Both of which are just really bad arguments!

I don't have any issues with (or, ultimately, any deep interest in) what some average person [x] thinks about a piece of music because I'm not being subjected to their opinion on the matter - so the idea of caring whether this person really enjoys Coldplay or whatever seems a bit foreign to me. On the other hand, if I think that average music critic [x] has talked about an artist or song in a manner that is hackish and doesn't reflect anything interesting or real about their appreciation of the music, that's gonna annoy me.

I think this is bcz it's never applied universally as a principle--only used as an attack on a certain type of performer. Yesterday someone in my office said it in regards to Take That but they like all the Motown that comes on the radio (and it's ironic bcz Take That could write their own stuff.) But it doesn't really bother me when someone I work with says stuff like this--it fucking infuriates me when I have to read someone saying it in The Guardian or Q or NME or where-ever though.

Brief aside about assumptions: I was in a record shop and a couple, not trendy but not untrendy either, spotted the CD single of the song "Hero" from the Spiderman movie. Oh I love that said one. It's really emotional said the other. I was gonna chime in with a snarky comment of my own but then realised that they weren't being ironic or sneery. I felt a bit of a prick, even though it is a shit song.

but you may not be wrong: try again

that's better enrique

(it's not the position that is at issue)

(having said that, the criticism still seems odd: assuming that in another world the Backstreet Boys wrote e.g. "Shape Of My Heart", is it possible that the listener who doesn't like the song in this world would think that they had lived it? I assume not, if the criticism is based on the lack of "soul" rather than a generalised objection to performing material written by others. So maybe the better statement from the hater's position is: this song in its present form is so soulless it couldn't possibly have been written by the performer. It would be interesting though to know if this lack of soul was something quite distinct from the lack of soul the hater might discern in a pop song - say, one by Gary Barlow - which was written by its performer but the listener also finds loathsome)

Maybe we're learning that the real guilty pleasure in 2006 is gluttony.

Two quick thoughts:

1) In an era (in America) where there's already been rumblings about 'fat being the new tobacco' (check the recent story about Disney pulling out of Happy Meal promotions with McDonald's as a current sign), this is a v. interesting conceit for him to use.

2) There's a difference (which I've no question Jody recognizes) between 'OMG everything is here and I must have it all NOW!' and 'OMG everything is here!...and the buffet's always open so I'll take it easy and indulge as I do'

I suspect that for most people who dislike the backstreet boys' songs, it would be irrelevant to their dislike to find this out - "who cares if they write their own songs when the result still sounds manufactured or soulless?"

one of the reasons why i like pop more then i like the others is a notion of acceptance of transence, or ephemability or something that surrounds two albums, and a greatest hits comp and yr out of there.

jagger and dylan keep playing to the critics, textually and muscially, with 8 minute epics and historic referents (ie the Master and Margerita or St Augustine) while ashlee and britney keep playing to the crowd, their referents being to hunger and appettites that can be handled in a few minutes, aches and pains that come and go, not tidally, but like a magpie...

madonna is the one that is really interesting here, b/c she lasted almost three decades as someone who kept reinventing, kept being brilliant, kept getting passed two albums, her comp was the beginning of being interesting, and when she tries to be serious (ie american life) she fails--that is why hung up is such an intense and brilliant single, because it is a diamond to abbas coal... (possible exception: papa dont preach)

its also i think why (aside from the mutablity of sex and gender) why franks beloved ny dolls are pop, and why the sex pistols were a boy band, (the presence of an impresiario, the belief in short things done well, the lack of a long term career)--the difference is of course that they were cas in the self destructive mod of rock and roll--that weas thej disservice, forgetting mclaren---its also why bow wow wow is more important and in the end more realvent then the sec pistols now (other possible reasons: post colonialism, the belief in home taping, the seductive use of 15 yr olds,etc)

as for superwords, i think that they float, and the intangiblity, ubiquity, and epehermal presence of popular culture means that writing about it tends towards being so much about time and place, so explicitly away from something harder, which is why using the formal muscalogical terms (ie "the minor fall and the major lift") fails in pop...

i keep thinking about race in this mix, mostly b/c i am in the middle of a long essay about the mag fields and dont havea strict handle about whay i am going to write about them, and because of the recent taste vs race, queer vs black, ironic high camp vs authentic low seriousness, miscommuniation/clusterfuck that is going on with him, (ie sf/j, the slate article, jessa hood, simon renoylds, aunt b, etc)

is queer a superword, are white, black, gender, woman, artist, teen...is merritt adroitly abusing the idenifying superwords or does he just hate hip-hop?

and how does zippie do dah work as a pop song?

Most of these debates are issues of style propped up w/ inappropriate appeals to grandiose concepts (e.g. authenticity, populism). I like Slayer, Joanna Newsom, Boogie Down Productions. I don't like Steely Dan, Ashlee Simpson, Eminem. What does that mean? Critical frameworks are often dashed against what actually occurs in music listeners' lives.

Superword just sounds like a manufactured buzzword - what is it bringing to the table that the word "genre" isn't? Most of the issues brought up w/r/t the superword concept seem to be issues of genre, a problematic construct in and of itself (e.g. ye olde "is there such a thing as a genre" debate). Is there a superword that isn't a genre?

How much formal music theory about pop have you read?

Blount, I think rockism lives on in the non-music crit world. There are still young kids who snear at Ashlee Simpson as being less authentic than their fave myspace.com band, and there are numerous folks of all ages posting comments at Slate and other sites offering similar rockism-based views.

what's wrong with running for that matter?

"Does it rock?" = question of musical content, i.e. mechanics of rhythm

"Is it rock?" = question of musical form, i.e. content, style, methods combining into the expression of a recognizable shape or ideal

"Jenny Holzer is so punk rock" = statement of comparison regarding content; Jenny Holzer's art possesses similarities to extraneous non-musical content or methods of a music movement

"Rancid is a punk rock band" = statement about form

Labeling them superwords seems to confuse the discourse, rather than shed light on it. The buzzword gets in the way. Am I missing something?

ROCKISM IS AS GOOD AS DEAD. all of these people are old enough that they're dead in 20 (25 tops) years and the way the 'music journalism' market is trending they're out of work in 15 (and i'm being VERY generous with that estimate). now here's my question for frank and whoever else: explain to me why this is a bad thing? when rockism's gone what will we have lost?
-- j blount (jamesbloun...), May 10th, 2006 1:23 PM.

Read some reviews of Destroyer's Your Blues, which was either dismissed or downgraded because it was a MIDI-based album. Then Dan Bejar records a "real" rock record (Rubies) and what say the critics: instant masterpiece! So I'd say rockism is alive and well among the under-30 set. Even if publications start giving lip-service to hip-hop/teenpop/whatever, you're still dealing with those underlying attitudes.

The rockist label doesn't help anybody though, it just draws unnecessary battlelines which people start entrenching themselves on either side of. Rockist, popist, who cares? You're both wrong anyway. Time is the only worthwhile critic of music.

pie is neither a genre nor a superword (thought what a great superword it would be) and people fight over the meaning of that too.

punk is a genre and a superword, but nobody fights over the meaning of it (only what its meaning applies to), i think?

huh?

Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh no?

(which I believe wound up dealing more with her possible punkitude than her possible emotude.)

yes, but as curmudgeon already remarked in an oblique way, all these kids with MySpace profiles might grow up to be rock critics, and we have to slay the dragon one more time.

Speaking of the Jody Rosen column, that John Cafferty reference was one of the few false notes. I don't know a SOUL who's hummed a Cafferty tune since 1985 (I couldn't even hum a tune anymore).

(Not so sure I agree punk has much to do with "breaking with old patterns, not repeating old patterns," either; I can definitely think of plenty of punk that wouldn't fit that definition at all: music that I'd call punk, music commonly thought of as punk, all of it. I'm not positive that was ever a real trait of punk in the first place.)xp
-- xhuxk (xedd...), November 10th, 2005.

But Ashlee's "I Am Me" [is/is not] punk in the same way that the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" and Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Good Thing" and "Kicks" and the Shadows of Night's "Gloria" and Question Mark & the Mysterians' "96 Tears" and the Troggs "Wild Thing" and virtually every other garage-rock classic [are/are not] punk. Which is to say it's music by squares who didn't quite "get" the freak thing but who were copying the look along with a range of popular sounds (and some may have "meant" the music heart and soul and others may not, and damned if I can tell) that included what retrospectively came to be called "punk rock."
-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), November 10th, 2005.

it seems like guys who identify a little too closely with spiderman and whatever gene simmons is supposed to be in makeup vainly trying to convince themselves t they're using their superbrain powers to fight over "superwords". dudes, no offense, but they're just regular old words.

i guess my question is: what do we gain by adding "superword" to the lexicon? does it make anything clearer? from here, it looks like a humongous waste of thought.

"Hi, we're Charlie Parker and the Charlie Parkers, reminding you kids out there that Language Is Fundamental."

"A Superword is a controversy word, but not all controversy words are Superwords; for what makes a Superword really super is that some people use the word so that it will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment. Like, no one and nothing is good enough to bear the word "punk," and I wouldn't join a band that would have someone like me as a member anyway. (Supposedly, in the late '80s I once claimed that Michael Jackson and Axl Rose were the only two punks going at the time.) "Rock," "pop," "punk," and many other genre names sometimes act as Superwords. So "punk" (for instance) can be an ideal, and every single song that aspires to be punk can fall short in someone's ears. But for the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so that the music is always inadequate to the ideal, even if the music would have been adequate to yesterday's version of the ideal. And the music then chases after this ever-changing ideal. Words bounce on ahead, and the music comes tumbling after."

Surely you agree that most words don't fit this rather stringent set of requirements?

my favorite band tries to sound like the second half of an eyebrow twitch (the wry kind, not the seductive one)

the "stringent" definition is (at its most concise) "for the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so that the music is always inadequate to the ideal".

again i ask, what is earth-shaking about saying that ideals are unattainable, and
people argue about and redefine them continually? what is news here? that words are malleable, and mean different things at different times? that ideas aren't super enough to hold in art, and that art isn't super enough to live up to words? it's not even an idea

surely you agree that ALL words about ideals fit this generic and loose set of requirements?

besides the meaningless of it all, there's something really sad about a music writer calling ideals "superwords". i'd feel the same way about a carpenter talked about his superhammer and supernails.

Pretty sure hammer and nails came up already via Wittgenstein in this thread. Worth reading, it was bumped earlier today.

That seems to me the most interesting part of the definition, SuperCharlie, the part that explains the social use of a Superword.

oh, break me a fucking give.

It wasn't so much that reviews of the guitar-bass-drum-centric Rubies celebrated its rockness, but moreso that reviews of the MIDI-based Your Blues were so dumbstruck that he would use synthesizers to make an album, reviewers acted as if he'd recorded it with a ball of twine and monkeyguts. There was a lot of "he must be joking" or "what a put-on," as if an album can't be taken seriously if it's recorded using MIDI. Perhaps it was just a confounding of expectations (since his previously 5 albums were glam/indie rock/singer-songwriter stuff) but it seemed like indie reviewers were bringing a lot of rock baggage to the table.

Also, I'd guess that though most superwords might be genres (unless they're not), certainly not all genres are superwords, right? (Only the ones that people fight over the meanings of, as I understand it.)
-- xhuxk (xedd...), May 10th, 2006 5:02 PM.

rocking is a superword, or was, maybe, but rock is not? classical is a genre but not a superword, and even if ppl. fight over the meaning of classical (which they do with all genres) it isn't. "mystery novel" is a genre but not a superword, but did patricia highsmith write mystery novels? (we can fight)
pie is neither a genre nor a superword (thought what a great superword it would be) and people fight over the meaning of that too.

punk is a genre and a superword, but nobody fights over the meaning of it (only what its meaning applies to), i think?

-- Sterling Clover (s.clove...), May 10th, 2006 6:20 PM.

This is the problem at the base of genre definitions. Genres are by nature slippery. Since they are defined by individual artistic works' relation to each other, they are always argued about, their definitions get shifted about by time and taste. If you think people aren't violently debating whether something is or isn't part of a particular genre, you're just not moving in the right circles. The more Frank says about a superword, the more he defines the problems inherent to genre. Genres are always battled about; some art theory says there is no such thing as a genre, just random (and always incorrect) associations of individual works, associations that cloud judgment rather than sharpening it.

As far as debating whether a specific genre expression falls short of a perfect ideal, Plato came up with that one 2,000 years ago and plenty of people have rolled that ball of wax around; the world of ideas vs. the real world, material things as the imperfect expressions of perfect intangible forms.

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html

Nothing earth-shattering aside from the fact that it's clearly written.

some theorists have argued that there are also many genres (and sub-genres) for which we have no names

Obviously these theorists don't read ILM! We've named so many we invent ones that don't exist.

But I suspect superwords aren't defined by some inherent potential so much as the fact of their social usage. "Punk" as a genre term is undeniably more contested than "ska" - it's not merely that words' meanings change and their usage is slippery (this is indeed true of all words) but that even people who've never thought about linguistics or literary theory immediately and intuitively recognise that something is up for grabs in the usage of the word, and feel the need to obsessively redefine it in the service of their own cause. Of course this could happen for "ska" (and probably has in a very limited, micro So-Cal sense) or even "table", but it hasn't, not to the overwhelmingly obvious sense that it has for "punk".

Hi folks!

To clarify two or three things (and some of you guys have been trying to make the same clarifications and others haven't been noticing):

In saying (1) that "rockist" isn't a Superword, and (2) that "rockist" is a lousy concept and we should get rid of it, I'm making two unrelated statements.

"An ideal that has the potential to keep shifting so as to defeat all attempts at embodiment" is actually a pretty good thumbnail definition of "Superword."

It's not written into the concept "ideal" that it keep changing, even if the ideals designated by a word often do change. In fact, you can use the word "ideal" to designate what doesn't change. I'm not up on my Plato, but I think he'd think of "ideal" (or whatever word he was using) and "Superword" as antithetical notions.

Not all words that get fought over are Superwords.

I do think that all genre names can get used as Superwords. But nonetheless, the word "genre" doesn't contain within it the idea that it represents an ideal that keeps changing. Hence, the value in a word such as "Superword."

Also, obviously, most words that get used as Superwords are also frequently not used as Superwords, sometimes within the same sentence. E.g., "punk isn't punk anymore."

I was actually wrong in calling "rockist" a stupor word - it's just a bad word - since what I mean by "stupor word" is something else. The word "immediate" for example: in most instances, it's neither a Superword or a stupor word. But you can find someone who aspires to "immediate" or "direct" experience but keeps upping the ante so that he's never satisfied that what he's got is truly immediate enough. Philosophy tends to do this. So in that sense, the guy is using "immediate" as a Superword. But "immediate" can shift over to being a stupor word when someone doesn't aspire to immediacy but rather aspires to go around saying, "Everything is mediated." When the discourse reaches this point, it's just spinning its wheels. (I realize that this explanation of "stupor word" is inadequate, but to go further takes me further away from what most of you guys are concerned with here.)

My beef against the word "rockist" is not that it's vague or that we disagree on what it means, but that it doesn't describe real human beings or real arguments - or, anyway, I can't differentiate these human beings and real arguments from myself. (And I got into bashing antirockism in the first place because Sinker seemed to think at one point - and perhaps still does - that I'm the epitome of the antirockist.) For example, it bugged me when Michael Roberts called Ricky Martin "watered down" in comparison to (supposedly) real Latin music, but I can easily myself criticize someone for making a watered down version of my "real" argument. So I don't see where Michael Roberts and I are different in kind. He's just wrong in that particular instance. So I don't think rockism exists or ever existed, though I realize that I'm not going to convince people to stop using the word.

Carry on, I enjoy this.

and im actually not name dropping--im being genuine about bow wow wow

Frank the problem is that yr. identifying the term "rockist" with the FORM of an argument as though it were a category of logical fallacy. But it's the character and intent of valuation that's what's really at stake. My def. of rockism currently would be more about being afraid to put yourself (not "the listener" or "the audience" but YOU YOURSELF) ahead of the music (and equal to the artist).

If someone made a watered down version of your "real" argument by saying, "Frank says..." and then presenting it, then yeah it would be be watered down. If they were to say it without the prefix, then it would just be a different argument. Also there's a difference between "Frank's argument" which, assuming we can agree on who frank is, is a rather specifiable thing, and "latin music" which assuming we can agree on which latin we're talking about is still a much less specifiable thing except maybe it couldn't have been played before people started to speak latin?

Yeah, and, I'm sorry, but this isn't ... like ... obvious? Frank, I apologize if I am wrong here, but I suspect that your argument is game-playing. I suspect that you don't like the word "rockism" because it is a scholastic word; "people don't talk about rockism in the hallway, but only in the classroom," etc.

Again, I am sorry if I am wrong.

One of the issues at stake in rockism/antirockism is perhaps not whether something can be real/fake, but how the notions and categories of realness/fakeness are constructed and used in discussion. Writers who strike me as being "rockist" tend to talk a great deal about realness, but then don't seem to be able to talk about what realness actually is in a way that I can meaningfully connect to the music that is being discussed... nor do they consistently establish why the categories of realness/fakeness are central to the issue of judgment. Maybe this is a failure of imagination rather than judgment - this would fit with my belief that the problem with rockism is not "bad" listening (or ideological listening, as per Jody Rosen) but lazy writing.

As Sterling notes, a fake version of Frank Kogan's argument can be objectionable in its fakeness only insofar as it holds itself out to be (or is perceived by others to be) a real version of Frank's argument; otherwise it's just a bad argument (albeit one which might resemble Frank's better version). If there is no stated link b/w the bad argument and Frank's argument, why is the real/fake dichotomy even being invoked? What does the difference between real and fake even mean in that context?

And this links into my point about lyric-authorship: it should only matter that someone doesn't write their own lyrics if you think you would like their music if they did (or said they did) - because then the category of real/fake self-expression can be meaningfully invoked. Otherwise decrying the fakeness of the non-lyric-writer seems mostly irrelevant to the process of judgment, a mock-trial put on for show when the guilty party's verdict was already decided in advance.

One of the things that what-we-tend-to-call-rockism does is to obsessively install the issue realness/fakeness as a (or even the) central category of judgment, to always make it appear to be the ultimate thing at stake. It may well be a relevant consideration - hence the Christgau thing on Ani which I posted upthread - but a lot of the time it's a distraction, an impediment to discussion about what is really going on in a person's (lack of) enjoyment of a particular piece of music. Mostly what bugs is the failure to allow this issue to rise and fall in importance on a case by case basis, and to make the case for its prominence when you think it's relevant.

And even then, its heavy presence wouldn't be so cloying if it wasn't applied so unknowingly and unimaginatively.

(Anthony, soz for spelling jokes, it was just goofing rather than a dig.)

OTM like a thousand fire alarms on fire. and to take it to the next step (following the ambrose bierce formula of "good writing = clear thinking"), lazy writing is lazy thinking. of course not all lazy thinking is rockism -- rockism is a subset of lazy thinking, or a caricature of that subset or whatever. but as a subset that directly protrudes 'pon the fields of criticism, it is no surprise that it attracts ire therefrom.

The danger of course is that you just end up substituting one set of lazy buzzwords for another set. So you may not be able to dismiss a band as being "manufactured" any more, but if you're pressed for time, you can still get away with dismissing them for being "rockist" - and no one will really be any the wiser, though you'll be more in tune with the zeitgeist.

You've hit at the roots of the "authenticity" issue for me. An audience that requires performers to be authentic sets up a system with inherent flaws. Musicians who act out joy/desire/rage/fear are expected to be "real" in ways that aren't expected of, say, actors.

Above all else, an audience wants actors to be convincing. It's what an audience should want of musicians, too, but somehow this requirement gets expressed in terms of realness/authenticity. This transforms the desire into one that can never truly be met. The illusion that it has been met can be created/maintained, however, "I'm buying into the dream so I can believe it's real" is always gonna break yr heart - and when it does, the results can be ugly.

A recent reminder was Scorsese's Dylan doc, which portrays him as sort of an empty vessel, a man-boy trying on different masks and appropriating aesthetic poses. Both his audience and his fellow folk musicians got hung up on issues of authenticity and we ended up with JUDAS! (the cry of the heartbroken dreamer waking) Which is ironic, since Dylan is a rockist totem nowadays.

Just goes to show this desire for authenticity isn't inherent to rock. It's been around in folk, country, jazz, who knows what else. John Jacob Niles (also in No Direction Home) was snubbed for years because of his crimes against authenticity - even though he was the most striking folk performer of the many shown in the doc.

Frank, if I get time I'll follow up on the Plato stuff. Would you mind if I call you Superfrank?

It's interesting that recent trends in popular hip-hop have kind of turned this dichotomy upside down. If you make a song because you want to be rich, but then you go ahead and sing about (or rap about) the fact that you want to be rich, can you be accused of inauthenticity any more? If you wear your motivations on your sleeve, how can you be accused of being fake? Now it's the people who are singing "I love you, I love you" who seem to be faking it, and those who are singing about their expensive cars and homes who are being real.

The more attractive a genre is to artists, audiences, critics, or industry, the more it will be hotly debated. No one fights over what doo-wop is, but if we suddenly have a doo-wop revival and there are artists redefining its borders, audiences reacting, critics spilling ink, and industry counting the till, there will be debate. What does it mean that Ashlee Simpson has recorded a doo-wop album? Is it authentic?

I guess what I'm saying is that ANY genre has this potential. It's inherent to genres. When one is hotly debated, all you're commenting on is its vitality. Punk is debated because it had legs. It created an industry of labels, magazines, distributors, clubs. It resonated with subsequent generations, and countless hardcore, goth, indie, alternative, grunge, and emo bands have lived in its shadow.

Are there inherent qualities to a genre that increase the likelihood of debate? Probably. When a musical genre stands in for social ideas/ideals that's bound to happen, whether it's folk, disco, punk, or freedom rock.

I suppose we can say D MOB's "We Call It Acieed" (mainly instrumental, IIRC all-electronic except for the banshee cry of ACIIIIID) is fake because (as Simon Reynolds puts it in Generation Ecstasy) it sounds like a crass techno cash-in record, because it tries to ape the conventions of a new genre, but does so poorly. But if I say it's fake or unconvincing when Celine Dion sings "My Heart Will Go On" in Vegas for the umpteenth time, I think it's understood that I means she's singing about or enacting or performing emotions she doesn't feel, doesn't feel any longer, has never felt or could never feel. It seems like two different things are happening here...right?

What constitutes "performance" in a predominately electronic recording is an interesting topic for discussion, but I don't think it changes the terms of what we're talking about here. It's still an artist making decisions / taking specific actions to realize a piece of music.

Can a band (or someone's music) be rockist? Or is this primarily a pejorative to fling at critics/fans (or at musicians speaking outside their role as musicians, e.g. in interviews).

"In most principle respects, this album is straight, rockist Brit-pop."

"Hammond and Rhodes organs, guitars, and drums kick out the jams trio-style (keyboards at the front), and their muscular output sounds about as authentically rockist as possible in 2003..."

"Lenola take a decidedly rockist approach to their influences..."

"...the Pin-Ups represent the absolute bottom of music's barrel-- they're burned-out studio hags so entrenched in rockist dogma that they lose all frame of reference."

Hm. What about something like one of Glenn Gould's piano recordings, which uses a lot of splices to create an "ideal" version of a Bach prelude, or a track from one of Miles Davis' '70's albums, where bits and pieces of in-studio jams were stitched together to create an entirely new piece of music.* In these cases, the recordings aren't a snapshot of a performance. If a recording is a recording of someone playing the guitar, but sped up ten times as fast, then it's not even a recording of something that's theoretically performable. So the Glenn Gould, the Miles and the superfast guitar recordings aren't snapshots of performances. Unless, of course, the studio work involved is the performance. But...hmm...we don't call On the Corner a Teo Macero album so much as a Miles Davis album...uh, right?

Is "snapshot" redundant? "A recording is a snapshot of a performance" = "A recording is a recording of a performance."

*These may be mischaracterizations, sadly.

Thinking a little more about the D MOB / Dion point. Instrumental dance music operates under same strictures that all instrumental music does - it needs to communicate to/elicit in the listener a set of emotions and ideas non-verbally. Every choice of chords/instruments/effects has an impact on a musician's ability to convince you that they have created a valid musical statement (or even a valid genre entry) - just as a singer's/actor's choice of words or tone has an impact on their ability to convince you that their performance has aesthetic value.

I'd say that splices are aesthetic musical decisions, and "stitching together" becomes another method of composition. Whether Miles chooses not to play a particular run, or Macero or Davis decides to remove one he's played on tape, both are examples of aesthetic decisions (and deciding not to do something can be as important as doing it). You bring up another point, which is the trouble of authorship in collaborative arts (e.g. is the director really the "author" of a film? it's usually assumed so but generally not the case), another factor complicating the defense of authenticity.

In a way, they are, but it's the performance of Macero/Davis on the studio-as-instrument at a given point-in-time. If you were provided the same set of musicians and tools, trying to recreate In A Quiet Way would be just as difficult for you as recreating Birth of the Cool (perhaps even more difficult). An ex-girlfriend of mine was dumbstruck when she tried to learn the guitar solo from "Comfortably Numb" - how did Gilmour play it? His fingers seemed to have the ability to be in two places at once on the fretboard! She learned years later they had spliced together the best bits from several different solos. Can't remember where I heard this (Dylan doc again?) but there was some folk guitarist marveling at someone else's playing ability on a certain recording, only to find out later the tape had been sped up, even the guy he was admiring couldn't play it that fast!

Another way to look at it is - a director shapes an actor's performance by editing longer pieces of film. Is the actor no longer performing?

"In most principle respects, this album is straight, rockist Brit-pop."

This doesn't tell me much, aside from the prejudices of the reviewer.

"Hammond and Rhodes organs, guitars, and drums kick out the jams trio-style (keyboards at the front), and their muscular output sounds about as authentically rockist as possible in 2003..."

This is slightly more defensible, one could argue the reviewer is speaking to the music's perception-by-others rather than any inherent properties, i.e. this music will be acceptable to rockists, though again that's not saying much at all.

"Lenola take a decidedly rockist approach to their influences..."

Understandable, since it addresses the musicians as listeners, but who knows what tosh came after the ellipses.

"...the Pin-Ups represent the absolute bottom of music's barrel-- they're burned-out studio hags so entrenched in rockist dogma that they lose all frame of reference."

See # 1.

For years, Queen printed "No synthesizers" on their album covers (untill, of course, they started using them). Rockist?

I guess one could argue that the "No synthesizers" label was rockist, because it seems to be a claim for a type of authenticity that rockists would value. In this case "synthesizers" are like some kind of synthetic food additive (think MSG) that might make the food taste better for a moment, but is bound to give you headaches and dizzy spells afterwards. A synthesizer tuned to sound like a guitar might be a way for bands who lack real chops to fake the sound of a real band.

Projecting onto an artist's intention = can of worms + can opener. Or building yr house on sand. Or setting yourself up for a broken heart (see my Dylan comments above).

I'd also think rockists would adjudge Negativland to be a load of crap, since they do not rock. Rock on U2!

(Anybody see the MTV interview where Kurt Loder asked a squirming U2 if they had cleared all the copyrights for the clips they projected behind them on the Zoo TV tour? Classic. He should have gone for the gold and brought up Negativland, though.)

Supposedly Queen did it because so many people assumed they had to be using synthesizers to get the sounds they were getting. Then again, what's the difference between using a synthesizer and laying down 20 vocal tracks running through 10 rack processors? Both smoke and mirrors anyway.

My favorite no-machines-used-and-proud-of-it band, as I've said many times, was Tesla, who always named their albums after mechanical stuff and who were named after the guy who discovered alternating current (or something).

It's not written into the concept "ideal" that it keep changing, even if the ideals designated by a word often do change. In fact, you can use the word "ideal" to designate what doesn't change. I'm not up on my Plato, but I think he'd think of "ideal" (or whatever word he was using) and "Superword" as antithetical notions.

I'm no expert in Greek philosophy and y'all are probably better off reading Plato entries in wikipedia, but here goes: Plato divides the world into two realms: the world of things and the world of ideas. The world of things is populated by objects: horses, tables, poems. We recognize these various horses, tables, or poems as being alike because they are expressions of an idea, the abstract conceptualization of a horse, table, or poem. The relationship between the two are kind of like the cookie and the cookie cutter. The cookie cutter is the idea, with straight lines and perfect curves. The cookies are the real things, bumpy edges, broken corners. In Platonic terms the words idea and ideal become interchangeable.

Plato took this to a metaphysical/spriritual level - he believed there is actually a World Of Ideas, kind of a heaven of forms, where these perfect things (the Universals) live. Human endeavors are attempts to recreate that World Of Ideas on our own plane. If you make a table or a poem, you're trying to make the perfect table or poem, but you never do. A thing in the physical world is an imperfect expression or instance of a perfect form or idea. We're separated from the World Of Ideas, but are painfully aware of it - a perfection we can't ever attain.

It's a powerful concept, and it's had broad applications in everything from art theory to physics to manufacturing to programming (object oriented programming borrows a lot from this - forms, instances, objects). People use it and aren't even aware of it. A lot of genre theory is bound up in these terms.

So when I hear "there's a perfect ideal and each expression of it falls short of someone's expectations, causing debate and further attempts at expression," I think Plato (minus the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo).

I do think that all genre names can get used as Superwords. But nonetheless, the word "genre" doesn't contain within it the idea that it represents an ideal that keeps changing.

I'd say the modern concept of genre contains exactly that idea. Some theorists think that every instance of a genre modifies the genre's definition in some way. Check out that Chandler link above, if you get a chance.

ROCKIST

And since when do rockists care about whether music rocks?
-- xhuxk (xedd...), May 12th, 2006 4:56 PM.

So true. Like Dylan rocks, gimme a break.

"For example, it bugged me when Michael Roberts called Ricky Martin 'watered down' in comparison to (supposedly) real Latin music, but I can easily myself criticize antirockists for a distorted, domesticated, watered-down version of Meltzer-Bangs-Kogan-Eddy style criticism. So I don't see where Michael Roberts and I are different in kind. He's just wrong in that particular instance. So I don't think rockism exists or ever existed, though I realize that I'm not going to convince people to stop using the word."

And don't distract yourself with wondering whether Meltzer-Bangs-Kogan-Eddy can really constitute a genre, or how much the antirockists took from people like us (and from Xgau and Frith and Emerson etc. etc. etc.). This is just an example. But it's a good example, given that Kogan et al. probe themselves and their culture, while the antirockist plays a game of pretend where it's the other guy who's hung up on authenticity and the antirockist pretends not to be. "Rockist" is not a viable concept, and this is because it can't distinguish the rockist from the nonrockist.

But anyway, how about this:

"So now so many musicians conform to the idea of truth that says that truth is raw, ugly, and primitive that this primitiveness is a cliché, it's a new brand of deodorant, punk-hardcore deodorant; ultimately, it's nothing. Punk isn't punk anymore, it's a bunch of musical/clothing signs that symbolize punk. It's closer to literature or advertising than to music."
—Frank Kogan, 1985

And now, let's rewrite it: "So now so many musicians conform to the idea of 'Latin' that says that Latin music is energetic that this energy is a cliché, it's a new brand of deodorant, Latino-energy-brand deodorant; ultimately, it's nothing. Latin music isn't Latin anymore, it's a bunch of musical/clothing signs that symbolize 'Latin.' It's closer to literature or advertising than to music."

So, again, how is Michael Roberts different in kind from me? How is rockism different in kind from any other criticism that sees something of valued being cheapened? I'm guessing Roberts thought Ricky Martin was watering the music down to appeal to an audience that can't tell crap from the good stuff. I thought punk was dumbing itself down to appeal to the punks. "yr. identifying the term 'rockist' with the FORM of an argument." So? It seems to me I'm identifying the content as well. The only difference is that Roberts is walking an old trail in saying that the ethnic thing is more real than something that takes on Anglo characteristics, whereas my attack is somewhat more novel. But not all that much. Maybe I think Iggy is more real than something that now meets audience expectations. The content - not just the form - feels similar here. Both "Latin" and "Iggy" get to play the "other." And lauding Meltzer-Bangs-Kogan-Eddy: maybe that's because we're the other, the ones you've never seen before...

maybe the point of talking about "rockism" is to talk about this pejorative idea of things being cheapened. there's a fear of corruption of some kind there, whether it's platonic or not.

xpost: i'm a little unclear on this superwords thing, but i'm guessing "democracy" qualifies in spades.

* Not being an expert on Latin music, I don't know the extent to which that criticism of Ricky Martin was valid. (I happen to like "Livin' la Vida Loca.") I thought the guy I overheard in the record store whom I mentioned above seemed biased in what are commonly considered rockist ways: valuing instrumental chops over technology, valuing a standard rock-based notion of lyrical "relevance," etc.

"They don't write their own songs" is a placeholder, an "explanation" that gives him the excuse not to probe himself for the real reasons ≠ it makes no difference who writes the songs

(I.e., I'm not a "music" purist who thinks music can be reduced to sound and that all other considerations can be ignored.)

But Enrique, notice your own screwy assumption (that the UGA Press's primay interest is in making a buck, whereas my primary interest is in expressing my ideas, and that the two interests are in conflict). Why assume that Martin & Rami are interested in making a buck, whereas Timberlake and crew would be interested in expressing themselves if they only were allowed to? Or, for that matter, why assume that they're not expressing themselves?

Also, that I want to get rid of the word "rockist" doesn't mean that the word is meaningless in its present usage (doesn't mean I can't more-or-less guess what kind of argument or attitude will get called "rockist"). Buzz words aren't meaningless; the problem is that they're used to produce a buzz in oneself rather than to probe.

Alex, my Superwords paper in college used "freedom" as one of its examples; "church of Christ" was my paradigm example, though I forget if it was in the paper. In fact, I forget if "Superword" was in the paper. (The paper is sitting in a box in my closet, so I can find out, in case I'm feeling energetic.)

I'm sure there is a Superword aspect to a lot of what Plato did. But the point I was making was that "Superword" itself isn't a Platonic concept, and it's one he would find abhorrent, probably. I was responding to the attempts above to say that "Superword" simply regurgitates old concepts, so who needs the term?

I'd say Plato's big Superword was "Reality," and that subsequent philosophy followed him in this. (His use of "idea" didn't really catch on, did it?) They had to destroy the village to save it. They had to make reality inaccessible to save it from being mere appearance. And eventually "reality" crosses over from super to stupor, if you buy into an either/or between "flux" and "antecedent being" - Plato did buy into that dichotomy, did he not? (But he wouldn't have used the term "antecedent being," which is a term that Dewey used to critique that notion of "reality.") (Again, I'm not up on my Plato.)

Wait, are you saying there are people who believe this?

--> this comment led me to reviews of the book found on complete-review.com, which in turn led me to Luc Sante's review, which in turn led me to Mark Twain's "King Leopold's Soliloquy", which in turn has inspired me to begin working on "King Dubya's Soliloquy" in a similar spirit

"We firmly believe that the pre-construction planning phase to a project is the 'Heart of Darkness' to a project's success."

--> and not its "Paths of Glory" or "Full Metal Jacket"?? ;)

"...I'll feel more comfortable deploying Koganian language..."

how do you differentiate between the various concepts of Koganian, Koganesque, and Koganistic? And which of these, do you think, is most likely to become a Superword?

this is kind of interesting, primitive garage scuzz take on a more nihilistic modern lovers vibe

https://zachphillips.bandcamp.com/album/stars-vomit-coffee-shop-osr72

I didn't know this thread existed. I feel a little self-conscious if I post a link here to a Zoomcast or to something I've written--Frank was posting whole reviews of his book!

I downloaded that Stars Vomit Coffee Shop cassette a while back--seems to have gone on Bandcamp in 2016.

Didn't know that 'til I read it here; thanks for the tip.
I asked Frank about it after seeing this thread, and he says:

Zach’s a guy who had his own label, OSR, in Brooklyn* for a while and decided to do a reissue of Stars Vomit Coffee Shop. I’m sure it cost him far more than he made from it, though we actually put it together out here: I’d already done a transfer to digital and I guess what they call a remaster several years prior, and my friend Nathan at Denver Disc duplicated the discs for Zach at a discount.

I put up the old liner notes and a few new comments when the reissue came out:

https://koganbot.livejournal.com/362896.html

And, unrelated to Zach, I’d done a digital transfer of England’s Newest Hit Makers at the same time as SVCS, and as luck would have it a Leslie Singer fan by the name of Hal McGee decided in 2018 or so to stream Leslie’s early music and videos online, with Leslie’s help and permission. He’s created a very handsome site, with notes and archival photos and posters. Anyhow, here’s the link to Your Mom Too’s England’s Newest Hit Makers. I recommend you listen to the individual songs since those use my (relatively) higher-quality digital transfer, rather than the stream of the cassette at the top of the site, the cassette being a duping generation or two down in fidelity.

http://www.haltapes.com/your-mom-too.html

Also, I did the camera work and gave advice and encouragement on a couple of Leslie’s videos, Hot Rox and Smokie: Portrait of a Glitter Babe, which you can find if you scroll down here. They’re quite brilliant:

http://www.haltapes.com/gof-videos.html

And you should check out the other of her vids too, obviously.

The general site that links the rest of her tapes is here. Girls On Fire was the name Leslie used on much of her music.

http://www.haltapes.com/girls-on-fire.html

In any event, I don’t think anyone else has ever made music that sounds quite like Your Mom Too, especially the great “My Couch.”

*But I see that Zach moved to Brussels last year!
Still got all the above music on tapes: good fun stuff, not quite (at *least* quite)like anything else.