Ask Frank Kogan

: )

Is holding one's chin in a photo a universal 'don't' or are there exceptions?

Anthony

I'd say that in Britain and Europe by 1991 techno was playing a role much like rock had in late '60s-early '70s Anglo-America, which is to say that it was a ubiquitous all-sorts-of-everything music with vaguely "progressive" tendencies, and was being grasped by the squares as well as the hip and by the mainstream college crowd who 20 years earlier would have been blasting Grateful Dead and Blood Sweat & Tears out their dorm windows, but being ubiquitous and all sorts of everything would also have its mellow contingents and its metal contingents (like the kids into Grand Funk and Uriah Heep and Deep Purple)(and remembering that metal was only accidentally crude back then, since its purveyors and perpetrators considered it fine musicianship)... um, basically I'm talking up my butt here, since I back in the old USA was hearing almost none of the music and was sitting around bemoaning the "techno" influence on Europop and Hi-NRG, which I thought was making Europop/Hi-NRG tougher and uglier and dumber. Don't ask me to cite any actual performers or records to back up this contention.

anyhoo, while in denver, i flipped through some radio stations, and i heard (part of) a song that sounded like a florida-style freestyle tune, but the way the vocals (both male and female i thinnk) were recorded made me think it had been produced within the past few years. my dad (i was with my dad) hated it immediately so i turned it, and never knew what it was. but i thought to myself "hey i bet frank kogan is listening to this."

were you?

One of the purposes of the WMS blindfold tests in the mid '90s was to force myself to write about Europop and girlie disco and Boney M. But last year when I was culling from my '90s pieces and choosing what was to go in my book, I ended up selecting the stuff on Sophie B. Hawkins and Skid Row, and passing over the Boney M and Laissez Faire.

Tim's and Scott's followup questions just underline my contention that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to techno.

I liked Prodigy, by the way: Liked their techno move, liked their subsequent "rock" move.

Although wait, here's a question. Has the putative romanticism of gothic melodrama in pop music grown more florid with time, or simply more overt?

I mean, no one and nothing gets more florid and melodromatic than Johnny Ray back in the '50s and Gene Pitney in the early '60s, but neither of them was gothic - unless you consider them covertly gothic.

A lot of death, dark, and doom metal aspires to floridity, but most of it seems to lack the fundamentally fluidly florid frontman to pull it off. I.e., most of those dudes don't sing very well. Which leaves it up to the chicks: Evanescence and the Gathering, say, neither of whose melodrama is intense enough for me. But I know as little about contemporary metal as I know about techno. There was a great two-disk dark-metal anthology several years back; called Blessed Is the Night. I haven't listened recently, but my impression was that it was pretty in its darkness rather than going as deeply moodily over-the-top as I suspect your words "gothic melodrama" and "florid" are meant to apply.

Ask Chuck.

(can you tell i like house and techno more than jungle and trance?)

I remember when people would claim that disco simplified the beat (and I remember before that when people would claim that the Velvet Underground simplified the beat), and I would counter by saying, "Well, that's only if you listen to the simple beat and ignore all the other beats that are also there." Is that analogous to what you're saying about techno?

Listening to grime, I get the sense that the counterrhythms are deliberately unnatural sounding, which reminds me of some New York no wave back in the day (some of which was inspired by Miles's On the Corner).

Heehee

I LOVE to Polka!

Jeanne, do you like banda? Cumbia? Ska?

Yup! Except where disco wants to intoxicate you, techno wants to drive you mad.

Lukas, keep going.

No way man, this is your thread.

Well, I can't speak for Jeanne, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if she liked banda, cumbia, and ska, given all the similarities between their rhythms and polka.

(And the similarity is no coincidence, at least for banda, given that there were worldwide polka crazes in the 19th century that hit the New World incl. the Caribbean, and polka was carried to Texas by ethnic middle Europeans in the late 19th century, where it spread to Mexico and was adopted/adapted into the genetic structure of Mexican rural music. And I assume that Mexican urban music of the 19th century wouldn't have been untouched by the previously mentioned worldwide polka phenomenon.)

I am just too too.

When you lived in San Francisco, were you a part of some post-punk accordion scene along with Angel Corpus Christi?

who has worse taste in music: you or chuck?

Well, I guess it does bring about a question. What would you recommend for one relatively new & still a little fearful of the accordion, listening-wise.

(oh, and have to add that I totally agree about the shin guards, but must include steel-toed boots, also. While we were observing the extra action marching band the other night, I thought the guy "dancing" next to me was gonna break my foot. It wasn't Tim. He was on the other side, standing stock-still.)

Dear Frank,

Did you ever get to listening to those children's songs, sung in a foreignese, that I once sent you?
Did you like any?

Yours estonished,

Tiit

Is the lack of success for the Scissor Sisters in the US in part due to the homophobia of the audience/radio programmers?

Billy

The major difference between us right now is that I use the memory program on my CD player, whereas he's never programmed a CD player in his life; so for me, all albums except Horse of a Different Color become EPs within several days, and three real good songs make a real good album, no matter what else is happening on the record. So this is how Celine Dion albums occasionally sneak into my Top Ten, and why I like David Banner's MTA2 more than Chuck does: He has to listen to the whole thing, or tracks on random shuffle.

(Oh, another difference is that I still use the word "record," since I don't believe in the ontological difference between vinyl, cassette, CD, and download (though I doubt that Chuck believes in it either, actually.)

One alb where I've changed my mind and Chuck hasn't, though, is Annie's Anniemal. We both, independently, thought it wasn't much at first. I don't know his reasons, but mine were that Annie's voice was too recessive and that she was using "light disco" not just as a style but as an ideology, as if "this is what light disco MUST be - super light - and we allow no deviations." I was comparing Anniemal to Stacey Q's Hard Machine; for Annie the lightness was a commandment, whereas for Stacey it was just a starting point from which she could journey to all sorts of intensity and sadness and anger and joy and delirium, while still keeping it light. I realized, though, while making this argument five or six times, and listening to Anniemal another five or six (or seven or eight or twelve or fourteen) times, that the Annie album couldn't be that bad if I was continually comparing it to what was perhaps THE GREATEST DISCO/POSTDISCO ALBUM EVER and that within its severe limits it in fact was attaining intensity, spookiness, and a whiff of sadness, even if its poppiness and delirium never got beyond the hypothetical. In fact, it quietly attains a voluptuousness of sound that I'm not getting from The Hold Steady's Separation Sunday, which is Chuck's album of the year so far. I was the first person that I know of to compare Craig Finn to Bruce Springsteen, but on this album Craig's Springsteenian sentimentality has sapped the music of some of its force, and he's put aside the great game of dodgeball that his voice always used to play with the guitar notes. When I'd first compared Lifter Puller to Springsteen, Chuck told me he'd heard more of the Fall in them. Well, the Fall must have been there, because on Separation Sunday I'm not hearing enough of the Fall, and I miss it.

Anyway, here's a Top Three:

(1) "Linda's Wave, a Wipeout," Village Voice April 14, 1980, reprinted in L.A. Is the Capital of Kansas. Among other things, this is the best discussion of "genre" anywhere (except maybe for Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" thing in his discussion of the word "game"), as if to say, "I hate this for reasons similar to why I hate that; therefore they constitute a genre."

(2) Book review of Das Energi by Paul Williams, Fusion No. 92, Dec. 1973: He just demolishes it, the book, the guy - one of the great character assassinations ever. I have no idea if it's fair to Williams, but (unlike Meltzer's sniping at Christgau and Marcus) it's got a point, not only calls out the fatuousness of hippy-dippy bullshit - which was rather an easy target, even back then - but really nails something, the torrents of hate that could mask themselves inside of peace-and-love rhetoric.

(3) "The Doors Are Dependable Guys": I don't know where this comes from originally, but it's in the Jon Eisen edited anthology Twenty Minute Fandangos. I wrote about this when I reviewed Whore in the Voice (though it's not in Whore). It's got his recipe for vomit à la vitamin pill.

Of course there's a slew of other stuff, too. His Lawrence Welk piece in Whore is, among other things, a great piece of reporting, though Meltzer'd probably cringe at that particular compliment.

(I'm sure the story is more complicated than that.)

As far as I know, polka has remained an element in Mexican music ever since (and an unrecognized element in U.S. c&w), so it's not had to undergo the process of rediscovery, re-appreciation, re-evaluation, rejustification there that it's had to undergo in order to be revived in the U.S. and in Europe. Of course, the old forms are having trouble with the Latino young'uns, who are flocking to hip-hop and reggaeton; but it's got its young performers, e.g., Yolanda Perez, who's got a great song ("Juran y Juran" on last year's Aqui Me Tienes) that mixes quasi-rap talking into its accordion style.

(Question: How much has accordion been used on hip-hop/r&b records? We all remember the harpsichord fad from the late '90s and early '00s.)

http://www.honkytonks.org/showpages/accordion.htm

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/benson/border2/raices.html

And Texas polka:

http://www.houstonculture.org/cr/polka.html

http://www.houstonculture.org/cr/germans.html

La Sinora Dinamita "Ritmo de Tambo": A Colombian cumbia track from the early '60s; I taped it off a friend's cumbia anthology whose title I don't recall. It isn't dominated by the accordion, which enters with a solo two-thirds of the way in. It's a gorgeous song, in its easygoing way. Lovely Caribbean horns, too.

Yolanda Perez f. Sporty Loco "Juran y Juran," which I wrote about above.

Os Tchutchucos "Chapa Quente": On Essay Records' Rio Baile Funk: Favela Booty Beats. Accordions play a role in Brazil, too, apparently. The album's an Austrian import, but I'll bet it's not hard to find, or the track hard to get online. This feels like new and old scotch-taped together, funk-carioca yammering rappyhood with accordion spliced in.

Although (or course) I have no idea, I wouldn't necessarily assume that polka didn't merge into 19th-century Caribbean music, maybe reinforcing other tendencies that were also there. (Irish jigs, for instance? I wouldn't know if jigs were there, either, though I once read somewhere that Irish were brought as slaves into the British Caribbean colonies.)

I love it that the "Ask Frank Kogan" thread has emphasized topics about which I'm almost totally ignorant.

I think it's one of the main instruments in forró (which I know nothing about).

(xpost)

What is the album/song/genre that you are most surprised about loving unconditionally?

Matt "mine would be Pizzicato Five's Happy End of the World" Cibula

A form of the Samba called the Carioca (meaning: from Rio de Janeiro) was revived in U.K. in 1934. It was popularised by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in their first film together: 'Flying Down to Rio' (Shipman, 1979, 23). The Carioca spread to the U.S.A. in 1938 (Raffe, 1964,438). In 1941, its popularity was boosted by performances by Carmen Miranda (Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha) in her films, particularly 'That Night in Rio' (Cawkwell, 1972, 189).

http://www.crosssound.com/CS00/CS00Instruments/CSTHEACCORDION/accordionENG.html

oh, and i looked it up. the french got their jamz from italian immigrants. so from italy to france to new orleans...

So, what was most interesting about the Estonian one was the variety of the arrangements and instrumentation. On the first track, the melody reminded me vaguely of Toby Keith's "I Love This Bar," while the singer reminded me of Julie Andrews.

Although homophobia is rampant, nothing packs the crowds in like sexual controversy, so I wouldn't expect that it was homophobia that dulled the commercial response. Franz Ferdinand did well with the gay-friendly "Michael." Maybe it's that glitter (unlike metal and indie) doesn't have a long-term, entrenched fanbase and that the Scissors Sisters didn't register as indie dance or electroclash or anything else that would help sell them. I don't really know, not knowing tastes of the young and the senstive. "Rock" as a radio format is having trouble holding on, even though some rock albums still debut large on the Billboard 200.

(To comment on another thread's topic, I'm sad that Franz Ferdinand didn't entitle their second album William McKinley.)

...and Kimmo Pohjonen, amen. And Evelyn Petrova.

Josh - Too few Stars Vomits left to part with, and right now neither of my cassette recorders has a working recording mechanism. Tim Ellison (who hasn't heard any of it, as far as I know) and Andrew and Charlotte and I had a brief email exchange about the desirability of a Red Dark Sweet compilation, but I don't think anything came of it. (It'd be up to Andrew and Charlotte, since they're the ones with the tapes and the ones who were in the band all through.) Your mind wouldn't be blown. It's sort of like the Fall and Springsteen the Velvets, though sunnier than either.

As for Annie, yeah, her CD's unvarying thinness (which too often reminds me more of, say, Portishead than of Stacey Q) and the way her "poppiness and delirium never got beyond the hypothetical" (as Frank sez) are pretty much what's holding it back before me. I almost put "Greatest Tits" (by far the most untheoretically poppy song on the album) on my Pazz & Jop singles ballot three or four years ago (I'd heard it on some "Telle" compilation), but near as I can tell, no other tracks on the album come close. Maybe it will grow on me, though, who knows? It is in my trusty CD changer at home as we speak. (And I do *like* the album, just not enough to consider Top 10ing it.)

But I stand by "Greatest Tits" (which is what that song has already sounded like to me, even if Annie's are small and humble like Shakira's, which I'm guessing they are despite never having measured them.)

Um, anyway.

Dear Frank,

Allowing for the fact that 'American music' is a series of overlapping hybrids and therefore there is no one such thing as 'American music,' is there a clear quality that defines 21st century American pop music so far, or not?

Yours
Ned

you've said that you think the rolling stones are the most important rock band ever, particularly for the way they divided their early audiences. a while back you said this:

sonically and emotionally, anywhere in music that "hard" is an issue - hard beats, hardcore - you're haunted by the Stones, like it or not, and what you're haunted by isn't just the impulse to be hard and bad, which long preceded the Stones, but the Stones' twisting this impulse into impossibility and sadness, running a critique of it at the same time they were doing it, and running a critique of a critique, eventually turning the pencil around and writing with an eraser

i assume by "writing with an eraser" you mean that the stones eventually started to erase some of their own impact, which seems right enough to me, but as for the rest -- is it really true? i'm a stones fan, but i don't think they came out of nowhere. didn't elvis divide his first audiences even more than the stones did? for that matter, didn't little richard? isn't there an "impossibility and sadness" in howlin' wolf's "moanin' at midnight" (or carl perkins's "sure to fall") that equals that in "paint it black"? and if the stones do "haunt" any contemporary artist who tries to act "hard and bad," couldn't you just as easily say bob dylan "haunts" anyone who writes lyrics? i wonder if you don't overestimate their impact on rock because you love them so much, much as you said greil marcus did with the sex pistols.

looking forward to your book,
justyn

I never really answered Mark's question ("_______ I'd have most liked to write about but never quite could"). Boney M and Midi, Maxi & Efti are great but ain't close to "most" in the like-to-write-about category. Thoughts about them don't bubble daily within me. No Boney-Efti try to burst out.

I'll give my real answer in the next few days; I'll also attempt the Ned, Justyn, and Cozen questions.

(Briefly on Boney: They're like motel-wall art or a wedding band, which means that though Boney records might be playing somewhere in the vicinity when people act out their boy-girl, me-you stories, the Boneys aren't acting out such stories themselves. Boney M songs feel like found objects, not created ones.) (I don't know if there's anywhere further to take that insight, however.)

Officially available "Frank Kogan" song (albeit performed by someone else): Last week Alan Korn sent me the new reissue of The (ex) Catheads' Our Frisco, which contains their cover of my song "Waterfall." The reissue is put out by the Cannanes; write to Lamingtone Records, PO Box 219, Newtown NSW, Australia 2042.

(Ex) Catheads: good musicians, good songwriters, no one willing to be frontman. Best song: Alan's "There She Goes."

(Red Dark Sweet: Everyone willing to be frontman.)

Back to accordions, for a second: Yesterday I went to launch.yahoo.com to compare the remix of Shakira's "La Tortura" to the original, trying to figure out why the rhythm of the remix is supposed to be more reggaeton. Don't know how much it is, actually; the beat's more on the one, where it's big and floppy rather than round and bouncy (or small and humble), but the percussion clickety-clack in the chorus seems pretty much the same (though perhaps one of you with better-educated ears than mine would be willing to expound on this topic). The big difference, however, is the instrumentation: Accordion and guitar have been replaced by synths (which bring us that big and floppy bass sound, and electrify the clickety clack). Accordion probably registers as dad music among young Latinos. Perhaps guitar does as well.

Interestingly, taking out the bouncing bass takes the track farther from clave, and taking out the guitar takes it farther from reggae!

I have heard some Boney M, a lion's share of Aqua, and no M2M as we have established. Would you apply your found object model to Aqua or do you think of them differently? I like the notion of Boney as a wedding band, but thinking these acts as groups or, more often, as pairs, precludes my considering them found, a concept I evidently reserve for individuals.

Yours in curiosity,

Dr. Jones's biggest fan Scott

(What makes Boney M even better is that side one of Ten Thousand Lightyears completely evades my previous description, as it's a disco suite with a serious theme of leaving our despoiled planet, which theme is not dissimilar to Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship project. And then side two is "Barbarella Fortuneteller" and Tommy Roe's "Dizzy" and "Living Like a Moviestar" and whatever the fuck else happens to be lying around.)

I dont know much about you, but I think i have seen you refer in the past to genres spanning reggaeton, baile funk, grime, hiphop, dancehall and a bunch of rock stuff i dont know anything about. I havent heard you comment on another facet of ILXobsession, the kompakt german house axis. Do you dig modern dance music? do you prefer the minimalism of perlon or the maximalism of the "electro house" set? or should the whole lot be heaved into a rubbish bin? Could you briefly sum up what you think of this strain of house/techno?

many thanks

ambrose

I know appallingly little of anything techno or house, really, except for the Sleazy D Phuture Bam-Bam era of Acid Trax. I know that in '80s Germany there was a great little fake techno band in called Off that put out some catchy and sometimes hilarious tracks (my favorites being "Electrica Salsa" and "JR is Dancing Pogo"). A couple of the Off guys went on to form Snap, while the other Offian Sven Väth went on to do ambitious techno-prog-trance or something - I never heard it, though it earned the venemous contempt of Simon Reynolds. I did hear a couple LPs Väth put out c. 2000; they weren't particularly prog or trance, did have some poppy songs (in the title track to "Pathfinder," it sounded as if he was saying "Assfinder"), though not enough, and the when he's not poppy, he's dry.

I own - and like - some Maurizio/Basic Channel stuff, which is techno played in a dub canyon, if you know what I mean. (I call the genre "I Found Dub on a Lonely Highway.")

By the way, those Rough Guide threads made me realize how little I know about music. I gulped when I saw those lists.

Are Boney M songs like found objects because they are so perfect and ego-less and archetypal that it's like they could not have been created by humans?

That is, finding a calendar in a thrift store, and deciding that it would look good over the couch, doesn't imply that the calendar is perfect or archetypal or not created by humans; and presumably a sociologist or an anthropologist, or an archaelogist of the future, when presented with a photo showing the calendar as it hangs above the couch, could learn something both about the people who hung the calendar there and the people who made the calendar, and the society from which they come, just as they could learn things from listening to a recording of Bob Dylan's "It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding."

But the word "ego-less" may be key: The ego and the social characteristics of the calendar maker will be of no issue when I decide to hang the calendar over the couch (which isn't to say that my ego isn't at issue).

So, let's say with Boney M's version of "Love for Sale" (which, far from being perfect, isn't as good as, say, Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians' version from 1930), the song is a found object for them - more than for Fred Waring, I'd bet - because the song's being a long-time standard makes neither its social implications or its composer much at issue. And also it doesn't put Boney M much at issue, either (since in flimsy Eurodisco/Europop you're allowed to record any old thing that's got a tune and a beat).

None of this really explains why I like Boney M so much. They sound good, in an unhibited way that has nothing to do with trying to be uninhibited. Not that I care about Boney M as much as I'd once cared about the Beatles, for instance. (Hard to care too much for found objects.) But they are as good as the Beatles, and in the aftermath of my marriage breaking up in the early '90s, they were a balm in the way that Beatles, Guns N' Roses, and the like weren't.

Quick answer would be "us," meaning the intellectualized quasi-bohemia that includes Kogan, Meltzer, Eddy, Sinker, Ewing, ILX, Pitchfork, the Hold Steady, music blogs, etc. etc. etc. etc. What's going on in this world, what's its process, the rules of its game? Of course, I have written about this, a lot: It's what my zine was about, really, and my "Death Rock 2000" essay, and maybe it's one of the things that ILX is about, too. But I want to really get the party moving, break it out of its paralysis. In general, I'm trying to create a conversation. I'm on a desperate search for colleagues and for an audience and a way to pay for the thing, since right now my life is simply not working (for three of the last four months I had to borrow money to pay my bills). "Dear Frank - I really like your writing. Would you like to review records for us?" Notice that none of the ideas below are for record reviews.

Not that I shouldn't be forced to review a couple of records a month in addition to doing the stuff I'm good at. But reviewing records does not come naturally to me; it never has (though I'd like to snap my fingers and suddenly discover the words that would convey how the sample works in Rich Boy/Pitbull "Get to Poppin'"). ("Dear Frank - Why is hip-hop so dull nowadays?" Hip-hop is not dull nowadays. "Dear Frank - Don't you think Timbaland has lost it?" No, Timbaland has not lost it.) But, um, wouldn't someone like to pay me for doing WHAT I DO BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD?

I would most like to write:

1. "The Department of Dilettante Research"
2. "How Do We Finance This Thing?"
3. "PBS Reevaluated"
4. "Meltzer 1: I Would Write Like Bo Diddley Rather than About Him"
5. "Meltzer 2: Profound Contradictions Are Left Unexamined"
6. "Kuhn 1: "You're Either on the Bus or off the Bus" [alternate title: "How Did My Thread Experiment Go?"]
7. "Poststructuralism: What the Fuck?" [alternate title: "Sad Sacks Insist on Staying Sad"]
8. "Relativism: Who Cares?"
9. "Antirockism Is for Teacher's Pets" [alternate title: "Antirockism Is the PBS of ILX"]
10. "Hero Story"
11. "How to Write a Cover Song"
12. "I Am Not My Hair: What Shakira's Sound Looks Like"
13. "Singer Teeny Songwriter"
14. "Meltzer and Rorty: A Tale of Two Retards"
15. "Kuhn 2: Why Theories of Meaning Suck"
16. "The Sex Pistols Broke the Story of Rock 'n' Roll in Half"
17. "Destiny's Destiny"
18. "Precision in Rock Criticism: What Would this Be?"

Dear Frank - What is the _______ you would most like someone else to write about but they haven't yet?

19. "Death Jazz '40"
20. "Not to Die But to Be Reborn: Gospel Goes Sane"
21. "Hip-Hop-A-Lula" [alternate title: "Crazy Man Crazy"]
22. "Crunk's Harmonic Affinities to the Romantic-Symphonic Music of Central and Eastern Europe"
23. "Structured Around Conflict"
24. "How the Audience for Rock Criticism Got Too Big for Its Own Good"
25. "So I Won't Bother Saying Goodbye to His Corpse; I Will Say Goodbye to You: Did Lester Have Any Ideas? If So, Why Can't You Guys Bring Yourselves to Write About Them?"

Some of these may speak to Ned's and Justyn's questions: "Destiny's Destiny" would be about where music has taken the innovations circa 1999 that I'd analyzed (using Destiny's Child's "Bills Bills Bills" and the Ruff Ryders' f. Eve and Nokio "What Ya Want" as my examples) back in "Death Rock 2000." "Death Jazz" and "Gospel Goes Sane" would be about precursors to the Stones, "Hip-Hop-A-Lula" about whether hip-hop has made it to Stonesland - that is, do its fans use the music to participate in their own rejection? (This paragraph is written in code, I realize. Notice that in 19 through 23 I'm wanting someone else to test my ideas. In fact, 1 through 18 (and 24 and 25, of course) also need the participation of other people and should be threads as well as articles.)

Many of these are the same piece, an idea approached from one direction, then from another, or ideas that intertwine in various ways. Maybe over the next month or so I'll post short sketches of some or all of these ideas.

In February 1987, in the first Why Music Sucks, I wrote WE are doing something to kill music." And a paragraph later I said, "We take people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Schoolly D and through the process of appreciating them turn them into nothing." The contention here was that we need to understand our own behavior as an audience, and to change it. A few paragraphs on, I wrote, "I refuse to palm off all the blame for the present suckiness on capitalism, commercialism, the exchange of commodities, corporate oligopolies, society, mainstream culture, etc. (Analyses of these things and their relation to music - rather than scapegoating them - would be useful: talking about our place within culture, rather than referring to culture as 'them.')" And the implication here is that we need to understand the value and usefulness of our habits, understand their strength, even where we want to alter them.

One of my goals these days is to make sense of what I've called variously "the Filibuster" and "the ILX Fadeout," which of course extends way way beyond ILX and is generally worse elsewhere (and only appears on some topics and on some threads). The Fadeout/Filibuster occurs when people who are obviously quite capable of thinking through ideas and who obviously are discussing something they feel deeply about nonetheless flee the conversation right when their ideas scream for elaboration, or rather than fleeing, hide behind a screen of buzz words and fake issues. Often enough, people here refuse to even state ideas, hoping that a summary or an allusion will somehow carry the day. An obvious explanation for this is that the reason ideas aren't being stated is that they don't exist, which may be right but needs explaining itself: Why are you afraid to give birth to ideas? My hypothesis is that the breakdown occurs at the point where you have to start questioning your own attitudes rather than the other guy's, right where you need to talk about where you are within culture rather than treating culture as "them." I've paid little attention to the discussion of "rockism" as it's proliferated here over the last year, but in the past, antirockism has been almost a pure example of the Fadeout/Filibuster.

In my book, about midway through, I say, "Among other things, I'm arguing that (i) presentation of self - creating, maintaining, or modifying one's hairstyle, as it were - is a way of thinking, but (ii) given a choice between maintaining one's hairstyle and thinking about it, my profession as a whole will choose hairstyle over thought. And the reader/editor/colleague will crack down on my thought, too, if it threatens his hairstyle (at least, he'll crack down collectively, institutionally, on behalf of the collective/institutional hairstyle, even if he'd rather not). In effect, to freeze one's hairstyle is to freeze a part of one's brain." I would apply this to antirockism by observing that the antirockist is so overly concerned with maintaining a role that he puts this ahead of understanding his role, hence the retreat to filibuster.

I'll end this post now, though the last three paragraphs scream for elaboration.

Notice that in 19 through 23 I'm wanting someone else to test my ideas. In fact, 1 through 18 (and 24 and 25, of course) also need the participation of other people and should be threads as well as articles.)

(Yes, these two fragments are out of order.) Doesn't presenting #19-23 somewhat unelaborated mark you as guilty of the accusation of quote #1, though? OK, they're not allusions (or maybe they're allusions to things understood by others but not me), and if they're summaries, I can't map out their relations to a larger subject. I don't see how they state anything -- even the mentions that these idea relate to the Stones in some way leave me puzzled. (Or is this refusal to state an idea only troublesome in the context of an already-existing argument?)

I recoil a little at #24 (which means I think I understand what it could saying): saying an audience is too big for rock criticism (or stamp-collecting or bird-watching or whatever) seems to suggest that maybe the audience, if properly whittled down shouldn't include the likes of me, and I'm too much of an egomaniac to accept that.

Since Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones never existed, why was it necessary for us to invent them?

Sincerely, Matt Cibula.

do i owe you some coke for getting me nicey nice into the nashville poll? also what does it mean that the most exciting sexually and aesthtically potent work ive heard in years is the sound track to a medicore summer pop corn flick.

also can we snuggle
ase

From personal experience, this is borne out of a need to be brief but still communicate something under time strictures (people post a lot from work). Things could be elaborated later with the fullness required, of course, but by that time thread's moved on to a thousand other different directions by which time an elaboration of your idea a hundred posts ago will seem...quaint. Maybe self-indulgent.

How do you make a living?

Sincerely,
Michael

can you point to an example of the Filibuster on ILX? Or make one up?

And how is antirockism the PBS of ILX?

Thanks,
Patrick

Obviously (as do #1-18 and 24-25; after all, the pieces aren't written yet).

(p.s. you can't talk about how yr. kuhn thread experiment went till its finished which means replying to me on kuhn's idea of "normal science")

Also, Frank, why is complaining about theories of meaning more useful than concocting theories of meaning? Why don't we just stop both (and lead by example)?

Hm. Was I being completely irony-impaired for even bringing the issue up? (Don't answer that.)

Well, yesterday on the reggaeton thread Steve K linked to we use so many snares, which links to a frequent reggaeton rhythm (called "3+3+2," apparently (or maybe that's just what the snare part is called, while the kick drum goes boomp boomp), though I don't understand why those numbers are said to depict that rhythm, which is basically "ONE and two AND THREE and FOUR and" played as "BASS and two SNARE BASS and SNARE and," which is a variation on the first measure of the clave (ONE and two AND three and FOUR and))("BASS" = bass drum = kick drum). So, on "La Tortura"'s original mix the rhythm of the verse doesn't hit the three so is actually closer to that first measure of clave (giving it more of an island feel than the remix) while the chorus seems kind of compatible with the rhythm I linked to. ("Compatible with" is my all-purpose fudge factor in describing rhythms; means either that I can abstract the rhythm from the beats by arbitrarily choosing which beats to focus on OR that I can tap out the rhythm along with the track without the beats sounding haywire.) The remix does emphasize the three a bit more in the verse (and the chorus, which already had it), so the beat is a bit closer to the "frequent reggaeton rhythm." ("Does emphasize the three a bit more" = ongoing fudge factor.) For what it's worth, emphasizing the three makes the rhythm more disco-friendly, since if you go boomp on the one and the three, you're basically going boomp boomp boomp boomp boomp boomp boomp boomp etc.(we're Tigra and Bunny and we like the boomp) (though it's not always the kick-drum that's hitting the three on this particular track). So the rhythm mixes complexity and simplicity, for dancers of all ages.

(Sorry if most of that was unintelligible. I'm relying on your remembering back to grammar school when Mrs. Duff would count "one and two and three and four and" to give you the beats of the measure.)(I recommend you click the links.)

as you note, that's the same as the first half of the clave, and though they tap into similar afro-caribbean wellsprings, i think it's a bit much to argue that everything comes from clave. despite it's enormous influence on the music of the caribbean and the world, the clave is just one expression of an old approach to rhythm that recognizes the sublime dynamism in juxtaposing groups of 3s and groups of 2s.

plus it is a weird, convoluted story to think that someone heard the clave and decided to just repeat the first half of it; it is much more plausible that some cuban (and brazilian) musicians decided to extend the ostinato a bit longer and play further with the alternation between onbeats and offbeats (as with the bell pattern in many of the west african traditions that inform modern afro-caribbean music).

hope that that clears things up. i can see how my terminology might confuse some types of musicians, though i was hoping for a way of communicating these relationships to a much broader audience. i added some similar explanation to the comments at my blog:
http://wayneandwax.blogspot.com/2005/08/we-use-so-many-snares.html

"definitive of dancehall reggae and reggaeton" seems a bit strong (as opposed to "frequent"), esp. since reggaeton is evolving to match up with a new U.S. radio format, where "has a rap in Spanish" will surely be the obvious defining element, even if it just means "one verse in Spanish added to remix of 'Hate It Or Love It.'"

a kick drum on each beat, with an underlying 3+3+2 created by snares (though often, but not always, removing the initial snare on the downbeat), is definitely typical for reggaeton. and i would still say "definitive"--which is why i can hear "english-language reggaeton" on the radio now.

though you may be right that the "musical" definition of reggaeton could shift as it becomes more mainstream--and it is clear that not ALL reggaeton songs employ this rhythm, since some tend toward more of a hip-hop/R&B beat--i think that it's worthwhile to keep a picture of this dominant rhythm in mind as it connects reggaeton to its reggae forebears. although one certainly can't police these sorts of things, i think it would be a mistake to label anything with "rap in Spanish" as reggaeton, though the mass media undoubtedly will simplify it so.

in terms of whether these kicks "straighten out" the beat though, i'm not sure. even when all that is there is a 3+3+2 (as in a lot of 90s dancehall), one still senses an underlying pulse on each beat. depends on your ears, though, which is why i'm always happy for people to "lend me" theirs.

best,
w&w

Sincerely,
Michael

In light of recent threads (particularly Village Voice writers' pay cut while music editor is on vacation), I'm afraid this question now sounds potentially hostile, though that wasn't my intention.

Starting in 1999, almost all my earnings have come from writing record reviews for the Village Voice. I live cheap, but earn less than what I spend. I'd built up savings back in the '90s, so I drew money from my account to make up the difference. When the account ran down, I sold my investments, which are now all gone except for a small bit of stock I've got stashed in an IRA. I borrowed money from my brother and parents, but I didn't want to keep doing that, so I went into credit-card debt, and when I maxed out the credit card, I went into the overdraft that was allowed on my checking account (8% APR when I started, now up to 16%). And when I reached the limit on that, I borrowed from my parents again. And that's where I am. I told my mom a couple months ago that if she kept lending money to me she'd be enabling me, and I had to figure out some other way of doing things; but I asked for and got another loan nonetheless.

So how did I get into this predicament? A simplistic explanation is that record reviews don't come naturally to me (nor do artist profiles or trend pieces), which is why I'm not busy hawking myself to other publications, even though couple that have been nice enough to invite me. I emotionally can't get myself to write more reviews than I do. (Can't?) And the stuff that does come naturally - I could easily add 1,000 or 2,000 words to one of the decline-of-melody thread before breakfast - isn't much wanted in "music journalism." It's quite possibly not wanted by readers, either, though I don't think this hypothesis has been fairly tested. Editors sometimes allow me to break format, but they take a risk when they do so.

The real reasons go way deeper, of course. At some point I seem to have decided that to put myself forward must lead to conflict and that either I will destroy or be destroyed. Actually, since what I fundamentally do is to question and probe, putting myself forward ought to lead to conflict, needs to lead to conflict - but I've got this "destroy or be destroyed" model back somewhere in my brain that says conflict can't be creative, will only be destructive.

In any event, I've long known what my calling is, which is to agitate and ask questions about the rules of the game and to inspire my intellectual quasi-bohemia to tell its story. What I've yet to learn is how to create a space for that calling in the world of business. Neither journalism nor academia are ready to change format on my behalf; so I've either got to create my own business or talk someone else into transforming his business into a home for my ideas. But I always assume that walking into business is walking onto a battlefield.

A classic ILX fadeout was pulled by Momus on the "I'm Afraid Of Americans" thread. He's at the point where you'd expect him to meet Mark's challenge and say why it's more rational for laymen to take paleontology on faith than to take the Bible on faith. Instead he throws jargon at us: "It's ironic that you're using the methodology of rationality (skepticism) to undermine its real value, which is its ability to provide good, sound, corroborated explanations for natural phenomena. Your rationality (like that of the Intelligent Design people Crews talks about, or deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida) undermines itself quite quickly, leaving us at the mercy of Billy Graham and the X Files, with nothing to refute them." And then he walks off into the sunset, while Mark's still there pointing out what his own ideas actually are and I'm pointing out that "skepticism" can mean more than one thing and that simply writing down the name "Derrida" doesn't in itself communicate Derrida's intellectual strategy. As I said, a classic fadeout, one that was especially frustrating to me because I, not knowing a lot of Derrida's work, am actually interested in whether Derrida considered himself a skeptic (he shouldn't have, but that doesn't mean he didn't) and whether he (wrongheadedly) tried to use his ideas in a critique of science.

(The thread is also interesting for the assurance with which I misstate one of Darwin's ideas.)

The next day, Tom Ewing started a Derrida thread, which was vastly more frustrating - though also more fascinating - for the ingenuity with which people avoided stating or discussing Derrida's ideas while managing to convince themselves otherwise. It was impressive to see people continually fall just short of explaining themselves - or, to describe this more accurately, to see them fall just short of where it would be apparent even to themselves that the ideas they were reaching for or explicating didn't yet exist. We had a beautiful series of Imitation Idea Cheese Products, one following upon the other.

(I'll exempt the Pinefox from this characterization; he was fascinating in a different way: he kept insisting that he didn't want to discuss Derrida's ideas, but he was unable to pull himself away from the discussion. And I'll add that I myself was genuinely exploring ideas but that those ideas may not have had all that much to do with our man Jacques.)

A filibuster, from Alex T:

the problem would be that the natural sciences (from a Derrida perspective)... simply assume a great deal about the nature of science, the relationship between science and reality etc., the teleological progression of knowledge - rather than submitting these things to the kind of demystification process that takes place when you say 'this is no longer what it appears to be, an apple, but is in fact all sorts of things at once, and not as distinct from - say - a pear, when you get down to certain basic levels of analysis. So the distinction between an apple and a pear is not natural but relative to a context, and therefore subject to revision. The fact that plants or animals do occasionally get reclassified suggests that something like this process can be at work.

I tear away at this pretty thoroughly over here, a tearing which I won't now repeat. I'll just point out that Alex's passage doesn't yet present an idea, and for it to actually do so, he would have to at least tell us (1) why something's being all sorts of things at once prevents it from being what it appears to be, (2) why an apple's being all sorts of things at once prevents it from being an apple, among other things, (3) in what way an apple is all sorts of things at once, (4) to whom the apple appears like an apple but not like anything else, (5) to whom the apple seems more distinct from a pear than it actually is, (6) how distinct these people actually think the apple is from a pear, and how we know this is what they think, (7) why it's actually less distinct than these people think it is, (8) why the apple's being less distinct than it appears means that the distinction is not natural, (9) why something's being relative to a context makes it less distinct than it appears to be, (10) why something's being relative to a context makes it not natural, (11) why something's being relative to a context makes it subject to revision, and (12) how pointing out this stuff amounts to demystification. Unless Alex explains himself, every contention in the passage seems arbitrary. (E.g., I can think of all sorts of contexts that prevent things from being revised or put constraints on how much they get revised. For instance, Earth's gravity and current atmosphere put limits on how large a flying creature's wingspan can be and how large the creature can actually get.)

Neither intellectual laziness nor lack of time are adequate to explain Alex's unwillingness or inability to explain himself, since I doubt that he's intellectually lazy, and on the Derrida thread he found the time to hop around to a whole bunch of other ideas that he also presented inadequately. And even if he were lacking in both time and intellect, this wouldn't explain why entire message boards, not to mention thousands of intellectuals in and out of academia, have the same mental block. And compare the Derrida thread to various Aaliyah and Buffy threads, where the block is generally absent and people will attempt, e.g., to communicate what a particular voice sounds like and to ponder why it's effective or why a particular role resonates with an audience - topics which are way harder than philosophical ideas to figure out and explicate.

So what's going on here? Laziness ends when you resolve to do the work, but to end a mental block requires self-understanding. Without such understanding, the mental block will sabotage all your efforts no matter how hard you work, and the work will amount to a filibuster.

I hypothesize that the reason that Alex - or Mark, Sterling, et al. in similar situations - can't get himself to state his ideas is that the ideas don't matter, at least not to him. In Alex's passage, the only words that really count are "demystification process" and "subject to revision." Together, they form the outline of a short epic poem in which the hero (who/which can be a person or be a methodology such as "deconstruction") takes out his demystifying raygun and burns a hole through some system, exposing the system's contingency and potentially bringing about revision and reclassification. The actual details of the "demystification" are of no account, since for the purposes of writing a poem no such process actually need take place. The "therefore" in "is therefore subject to revision" is misleading; "subject to revision" isn't a conclusion but rather a premise. The analysis that "precedes" it is conjured up only to produce a predetermined "result," which is that things be subject to revision. Beyond that, the analysis has no purpose. Any mumbo jumbo will do. "Sir, I get a reading of 17 from the reclassification sector!" "Ah! As I suspected. Things are not what they appear to be. Time to engage the Derrida circuits in the bi-quantum demystifier." "Aye, Captain." Well, actually, not any mumbo jumbo will do; it has to be mumbo jumbo that Alex himself believes significant and important. Fact is, though, that Alex doesn't know what he means by "natural" and "subject to revision," he's jumbling together several different meanings, and by keeping his prose vague he conceals the jumble from himself and preserves its air of importance.

Whether you actually can derive "subject to revision" from Derrida's ideas is irrelevant to an understanding of why Alex says it, since the urge to say "subject to revision" is already out there in the culture, without Derrida's having to put it there.

People have urges, experiences, issues, insights, hopes, fears, and dreams. We're constantly weaving these together into our own stories. To start the filibuster, people jump sideways into philosophy or lit theory or something like it, mistakenly believing that philosophy will address their issues and speak to their experience. So this is a filibuster from the get-go, your doing philosophy as a substitute for creating your own story - which doesn't necessarily mean that philosophy isn't worth doing for its own sake. And philosophy doesn't have to function as a filibuster, provided that you understand the difference between dealing with the philosophical issues and dealing with your own. But on ILX it's pretty much all filibuster.

But then, as we've seen, many people, once they've retreated to philosophy, don't actually state or discuss the philosophy, but throw up a curtain of words instead, as if to protect their conclusions ("the distinction is therefore subject to revision") from the philosophy on which those conclusions are supposedly based.

An obvious - but poor - model for understanding what's vaguely referred to as "poststructuralism" would be that certain Celebrated Thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, et al.) have Poststructuralist Ideas, which Ideas are generally bruited about by other intellectuals in summarized form. Such summaries can be accurate or inaccurate, adequate or inadequate, depending on the summarizer. The summaries provoke arguments, sometimes straight up, as if the summaries were the Ideas themselves, and sometimes in regard to whether this or that summary actually is adequate to the Idea that's being summarized. But Poststructuralism in general is the Ideas of the Celebrated Thinkers, whereas the popular discussion of those Ideas is at best a hazy approximation of them and at worst a bunch of misapprehensions and noises that are put in place of the Real Thing.

I would replace that model with this one: The popular discussion is the real poststructuralism, even if its relation to Derrida et al. is tenuous. Phrases such as "subject to revision" are the real story, and don't summarize - or need to summarize - anything. Rather, they serve a whole bunch of social functions: as maxims, slogans, conversation pieces, provocations, affirmations, hairstyle, bogeymen, red herrings, camouflage, self-expression. People write "distinctions are therefore subject to revision" to cheer themselves up and cheer themselves on, just as other people affix "God is love" to their walls and New Hampshire prints "Live Free or Die" on its license plates.

Notice these statements on the "post structalism and the sublime" thread:

[poststructuralism] didn't do away with binaries; rather it set them in infinite motion

post-structuralism is the people that didn't believe in structure, or in "things," but did believe in some sort of history (namely that of philosophy)

"poststructuralism" (however we end up defining it here), to the extent that its "neti... neti" pulls the cliff out from under our words, leaving them hanging, legs fully a-pump, like Wile E. Coyote yet again (the effect is not unlike what we imagined in physics classes as it dawned on us intellectually but not physically that all matter really is composed primarily of empty space), is in fact a discourse of the sublime (e.g., the vertiginous/dizzying/beyond comprehension)

Again, I'd say that such passages, and not the ideas from which they supposedly derive, are poststructuralism. Words like "Derrida," "Deleuze," "deconstruction" and "poststructuralism" function mostly as incantations. The "underlying" ideas thus invoked don't need to be stated or thought through - don't even need to be ideas - to perform their function, which is simply to give oneself permission to utter phrases such as "set them in infinite motion," "don't believe in things," and "pulls the cliff out from under our words." Of course, why we need these phrases - what they do for our lives - is left unexamined as long as we link them to the Celebrated Thinkers rather than take responsibility for them ourselves.

So the filibuster is three-fold: (1) the leap from one's urges, insights, dreams, etc. to philosophy, (2) the refusal to actually state or explore the philosophical ideas one supposedly draws on, and (3) the unwillingness to take responsibility for one's buzz words, and a corresponding unwillingness to ponder how one is actually putting those words and phrases to use in one's life.

But this isn't a mere filibuster, given that you do put the buzz words and phrases to use, and those buzz words are expressive, tell us something about your hopes, fears, and dreams (e.g., you want to run words off a cliff, and you hope that certain social practices will follow, hence be subject to revision). The filibuster prevents you from telling your story well, but that doesn't mean there's no story to tell. The story starts with your initial prephilosophic urges, experiences, issues, insights, hopes, fears, and dreams; and if you told your story well a key element would be an appraisal of the social and institutional environments where your urges, experiences, etc. had to be set aside in favor of the filibuster.

My own concern here, by the way, is to understand why my people (the intellectualized quasi-bohemia incl. Kogan, Sinker, ILX, etc. that I identified upthread) are floundering/foundering, why they now have such trouble telling their story. And this relates to my desperate search for colleagues and for an audience and for a way to finance my endeavors.

Do you or do you not think that Deana Carter's The Story of My Life can be read as a lesbian coming-out story?

Your fan/friend,

Matt Sourpuss

As the author of the Wile E. Coyote quote above, I feel unfairly misrepresenterated. I also think that while it's fair to file whatever you care to under "Structuralism, Post," the notion doesn't make much sense when divorced from any consideration of structuralism. Half the time, "what's vaguely referred to as 'poststructuralism'" is just good old structuralism anyway (e.g. OMG the arbitrariness of signifiers).

fwiw, the "difficulty" of Derrida's prose is significantly increased by translation. There's often a lot going on at once (pun/allusion/whatnot) and his translators tend to try to get it all out there, which ends up shifting the focus a bit as well as creating the occasional linguistic infelicity.

(and, what isn't?)

Keep up the good work regardless.

I'm not sure I follow you- does your argument looks (roughly) like this?

Premise 1. bad summary of X is nonsense

S(X) = N

AND . . .

Premise 2. X is the same thing as a bad summary of X

S(X) = X

therefore . . . .

Conclusion 3. X itself is nonsense

X = N, where X designates "post-structuralism", and nonsense could mean "incantation", "filibuster", etc.

It follows from your premises, but . . . why should we agree with Premise 2? You seem to leave some space out there for people to actually pursue philosophy- do you think any philosopher, living, dead, or undead, would agree that "my ideas are whatever the off the cuff summaries posted online about them say they are"? If people regard certain thinkers as more portable than they are, and apply them badly in casual ways that you find pretentious or wooly or unsatisfying, fair enough- but I fail to see how this proves anything in particular about the source. I don't see people with an unshakeable faith in the Western scientific method walking me through primary texts by Boyle or Harvey or Newton in a carefully nuanced and textually sensitive manner in casual conversation either, nor would I expect them to; but if someone were to do it in a sloppy or haphazad way would I be justified in triumphantly proclaiming that "AHA! Western science is just rubbish" or "Western science is the art of badly describing experimental methods, and it is usually done through emails or sketches on cocktail napkins"? Or am I missing something?

1. a kind of style in the manner of "abstract expressionism" in painting or "roccoco" in architecture and design- in which case one can be critical of that style or not, can find it ugly or beautiful, progressive or regressive, compelling or dull, etc.

2. a loose name referring to five decades of thinking and writing by a broad cast of characters in linguistics, philosophy, literary study, anthropology, and psychoanalysis who are at each other's throats and who disagree with each other about nearly everything, in which case it is hard to imagine that one could be "for" or "against" the entirety of "post-structuralism", precisely because that's akin to being "for the 1970s" or "against metallurgy", i.e. the term becomes meaninglessly general as soon as it gets reduced enough that one is flagwaving for it *or* denouncing it. Once it is an "it" at all, you're not at a level of speciificity at which you're saying something worth saying.

If you don't care about this sort of thing, and have written it off in terms based upon a level 1 definition, you're going to endlessly bump heads with people who have a level 2 definition of it- and those people don't think about being "for" or "against" it, because caring enough about these issues to learn about them in a meaningful way means worrying about stuff in a far more "micro" manner.

To risk what just looks like name-dropping, you can have a real discussion about whether you prefer Eric Santner's reading of Heidegger's reading of Rilke or Giorgio Agamben's reading of Heidegger's reading of Rilke- but in order to do that you need to read Rilke, and read Heidegger, and read Agamben, and read Santner. And then you can take part in a discussion about them, and their different views, and the conflicting things that they say, which do involve weird neologistic phrases and Heideggerese such as "poverty in world", "the open" and "Dasein". If you read all of this stuff, and get a feeling for what these phrases do and don't designate, then you can understand the claims being made, and their significance- they are meaningful to people who've read in the tradition that they are building upon. But you have to learn to speak this language, and it presumes a great deal of familiarity with the history of philosophy and with the resonances and specifics of multiple languages. You can't expect somebody to sum up in a few sentences "what's the point of all this theory stuff?". It's like asking "what's the point of speaking Chinese?" "Theory" (post-structuralist or otherwise) is a loose phrase designating, in addition to the definitions above, a set of terms and a grammar for using them- and you can always use terms to say interesting, intelligent, contextualized and carefully argued things or stupid, pretentious, cornball things. And like any language, these terms are contested, their definitions are changing over time, they *are* buzzwords precisely because they're being frequently used and with their use their meaning is changing over time. Meaningful words get changed into cliches and dead metaphors all the time- consider the fate of words like "nice" and "buxom", which meant rather different things in the middle ages. I think "interactive" used to mean something and now it's starting to become meaningless; I bring this up because people can have a theoretically specific use of a word in mind and it can, through popularity, gradually get worn away into trendoid meaninglessness (witness the fate of the word "peformativity", which has launched a thousand bad essays, or the difference between Kristeva's sense of the word "abjection" and its watered down sense).

I think "interactive" used to mean something

It used to mean "CD-ROM by Voyager"

Well, Frank, if this is what you want to be doing, you're certainly very good at it. Your pummelling of my attempts to explain Derrida drove me off the boards for about a year because I realised that I couldn't make the kind of presentation of what I thought that you were demanding. (I'm still not sure I can, and I haven't looked at the Derrida thread since, and I haven't read what you've quoted me as saying upthread, and I don't particularly want to restart that conversation.) This wasn't just lack of confidence on my part (though it was partly that), and I wonder if some of it was a disjunction between how I felt I was supposed to appear (teacher, authoritative, knows things) and how I felt (how do I explain this? Why do I think this? how do I get you to see?). Anyway looking BACK, I can see that your criticisms added onto a whole heap of doubts, which I'm still working through.

I think your hunch / theory has some truth to it. (i.e. that 'theory' is effectively a language game in which knowing the rules, and participating in the conversation is central, and the actual names / terms in circulation could be switched for something else -- e.g. football / soccer without much changing, except that 'theory' talkers maybe share some kind of sense that what they're talking about is 'important' in a different way from the way football talk is 'important' [left unexplained here: important TO someone; important to the future of the universe; etc. different conversations will have different answers, clearly, which is why people take part in them, maybe, and could we explore the differences starting from this question?]) I don't think it's the whole truth, but I would have to think a bit before I could put my finger on what my reserveations are...

But my STORY does back up your suspicion, I think, which is why your challenge cut quite deeply. Having written a thesis on Derrida's work, I had had to learn the game -- the promise of doing a PhD I guess being that a) it will get you a job; b) it is somehow a more valuable use of your time than watching TV or whatever. a) is clearly wrong; b) is doubtful, but I guess I might defend it if you pushed me -- but that's another story. What you haven't factored in is the extent to which there is no unified 'theory talk', but that it is very factionalised, e.g. so the Derrida circle have one language, which they use to defend themselves from /set themselves off against Foucault fans (and everyone sets themselves off from those who use terms like post-structuralism (and yet often continue to *teach* those terms to students, a double standard which really angers me)). I realised when I found myself downloading the entire Derrida thread on Boxing Day morning and preparing to spend a lot of time reading through it and replying, that my investment in Derrida was more than an intellectual interest, which is why I couldn't talk about his work in transparent terms -- or be relaxed about it. (My (Not?) very grown-up response: drop it and walk away) I also realised that to undo the (emotional / intellectual) programming I had put myself through (and be able to do what you ask, i.e. explain what I felt was interesting about Derrida to anyone outside the magic circle) would take quite some time. I'm getting there I think -- although it is possibly taking me outside the circle. (e.g. recently having tried to set out my position, I was told it was sounding more like Aristotle than Derrida.)

Funnily enough I then started having to teach 'theory' to literature students, and realised that I was actually rather disenchanted with the whole idea -- which has only increased. I was being expected to push a particular set of beliefs / ideas to the students (and arriving in the dept I had been welcomed in by the group who prided themselves on sharing these beliefs). Not in itself bad, but these beliefs claimed to be 'critical' or 'radical' when they were just another set of ways of looking at the world. And FWIW, in a course on literary theory, I'd much rather discuss Frye than Foucault, but this was not popular with the 'theory' group... So I think I sympathise even more with your criticisms now, and I'm working on finding ways to teach which can bridge some of these gaps.

Anyway, the book I've just finished (mark's read it, he might be able to estimate whether it would pass the kogan challenge) is partly an attempt to come to terms with these things, and actually EXPLAIN why I think (in this case) Adorno is worth reading, or has something to say. (Actually mark's criticism is probably correct: that I am still writing as if I were explaining Adorno [i.e. I already 'know' and tell you what I know] whereas perhaps there are other ways of approaching the task which can acknowledge the way the explainer / reader roles are overdetermined by all sorts of other issues e.g. authority, not least of course when the patrician TONE of Adorno's work is what leads to the accusations of elitism which do not hold up when you process WHAT he writes) I had lined up another book contract which would allow me to go back over the whole 'theory' thing and work out what I felt about it, but since hiring committees aren't looking favourably on books which try to communicate to the outside world, and not the circuits, it's on hold for the moment.

Which I guess is by way of thanks, and an apology for not being able to explain all this to you before... But I also wish I wasn't going to figure as your example every time you want to slam bad writing / thinking / explaining on ilx.

[I was going to post this, then thought I'd email it, but actually my reservations about posting this in public kind of back up your points, so posting it in the open seems a more appreciative response in a way]

2) How'd your folks like the penguin movie?

My parents enjoyed the penguin movie, but we actually ended up conversing about the IMAX Nile movie (lunatics rafted/kayaked down the Blue Nile/Nile from source to Alexandria), which was not as skillfully done but was more conversation-worthy because it was about lunatics rather than penguins.

Drew is misreading me, which means I will clarify at some point. But I'm not down with either Premise 1 or Premise 2, and I don't come to Conclusion 3. My assumption is that the summaries (bad and good), buzz words, phrases, popular convo, etc. are meaningful and are possibly of more importance than the philosophical works of the Celebrated Thinkers (which is not to dismiss those philosophical works but to question their relevance). The point of calling something a "filibuster" is to ask what the filibuster is standing in place of.

I have no idea if Deana Carter is a lesbian and don't assume that she is, so therefore her album is not a coming-out story. To come out you have to, like, come out, not just drop code words or hints. That said, one can read certain lines in her album as code words or hints, and I noticed them too, but that doesn't mean she put them there. I feel uncomfortable saying any more about it, since whatever her sexuality she's the one who should decide whether to declare it, and I don't want to start rumors that would put her in bad with her prime audience, esp. since she made a great album, she's been relegated to an indie, and isn't getting much airplay. But since you've broached the subject on two threads now, I don't suppose what I say will make any difference. I'll reserve further thoughts for the rolling country thread.

I'm the guy who coined the phrase "96 Theses," but that doesn't ensure that I'll be the one to promulgate them.

Did I inspire Alex to tell his story? Or did I do just the opposite?

Susan, I just listened to L'Trimm's "Heaven Sent" and, unfortunately, determined that they were not referring to me.

Finish your book and stop getting distracted by us Internet losers. Also, damn, I was just asking you a question, sheesh. Do you really think an ILM thread will cause country fans to turn on Deana C. like a snarling pack of wolves?

Your friend, Matt.

P.S. Don't answer this, you have more impt. things to do.

M.V., what I hope Derrida said about "uncertainty" and "incompleteness" is that those are local judgments made within particular conversations and that philosophy has nothing general to say about them, and that we're misreading him badly if we consider him some kind of skeptic who's telling us that all interpretations are necessarily incomplete and that one can never be sure that one's interpretation is correct.

The basic argument from, say Wittgenstein and Kuhn and, I assume, the posties as well is that any phenomenon (event, object, statement, calculation, instruction, etc.) can be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways (note that the word "can" does not mean "will") and that philosophy can't come up with a sure-fire procedure or rule to compel everyone to come up with the "correct" interpretation, since any rule itself can also be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways, therefore requiring a second rule to tell you how to apply the first, a third rule to tell you how to apply the second, ad infinitum. Wittgenstein:

A rule stands there like a sign-post.—Does the sign-post leave no doubt open about the way I have to go? Does it shew which direction I am to take when I have passed it; whether along the road or the footpath or cross-country? But where is it said which way I am to follow it; whether in the direction of its finger or (e.g.) in the opposite one?—And if there were, not a single sign-post, but a chain of adjacent ones or of chalk marks on the ground—is there only one way of interpreting them? —So I can say, the sign-post does after all leave no room for doubt. Or rather: it sometimes leaves room for doubt and sometimes not. And now this is no longer a philosophical proposition, but an empirical one.

Pay attention to those last three sentences. This passage is not a philosophical statement, but an attack upon philosophy. Wittgenstein is saying that though you can always invent some hypothetical doubt, such hypothetical doubts have no bearing whatsoever on whether a rule is complete or not or on whether there's one good interpretation or many, or on whether you doubt or fail to doubt. Again: the lack of an "ultimate" rule that grounds all other rules has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a rule is sufficient or not. A rule is sufficient if it does its job, and insufficient if it doesn't. Somehow, this insight gets fudged or reversed altogether when it makes its way to English departments, which is why Wittgenstein, who's very clear on this point, is not much read by lit theorists. I don't know how complicit Derrida and the continental crew are in the fudging.

To use rogermexico's metaphor: Wittgenstein et al. have nothing to say about whether the ground is shifting under us. We can conclude no more than that the ground beneath a particular signpost - whether steady or unsteady - is not philosophical, and never has been. And, as with rules, so with explanations and interpretations:

Suppose I give this explanation: "I take 'Moses' to mean the man, if there was such a man, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, whatever he was called then and whatever he may or may not have done besides."—But similar doubts to those about "Moses" are possible about the words of this explanation (what are you calling "Egypt," whom the "Israelites" etc.?). Nor would these questions come to an end when we get down to words like "red," "dark," "sweet."—"But then how does an explanation help me to understand, if after all it is not the final one? In that case the explanation is never completed; so I still don't understand what he means and never shall!"—As though an explanation as it were hung in the air unless supported by another one. Whereas an explanation may indeed rest on another one that has been given, but none stands in need of another—unless we require it to prevent a misunderstanding. One might say: an explanation serves to remove or to avert a misunderstanding—one, that is, that would occur but for the explanation; not every one that I can imagine.

It may easily look as if every doubt merely revealed an existing gap in the foundations; so that secure understanding is only possible if we first doubt everything that can be doubted, and then remove all these doubts.

The sign-post is in order—if, under normal circumstances, it fulfils its purpose.

Of course, there's no law that says that you have to find Wittgenstein's attitude satisfying. But if you don't, you ought to ask yourself what causes your dissatisfaction, since Wittgenstein certainly isn't telling you to retain rules that you feel need to be revised, or to submit to "normal circumstances" that you find oppressive. He's just refusing to give you philosophical support either for retaining or modifying them. "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking."

A function of the filibuster is to shield you from asking yourself what causes your dissatisfaction.

*this* thread came up:

Introduce Yourselves!
I also like Wittgenstein, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Pynchon, ... lil-flip,
nas, tupac, deana carter, garth brooks, outkast, kumbia kings, frankie j, ...
ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=1075296 - 502k

(no, it seems, penguin or lesbian there, tho)

And how is antirockism the PBS of ILX?

although i suspect i already know the answer.

"Wittgenstein is saying that though you can always invent some hypothetical doubt, such hypothetical doubts have no bearing whatsoever on whether a rule is complete or not or on whether there's one good interpretation or many, or on whether you doubt or fail to doubt. Again: the lack of an "ultimate" rule that grounds all other rules has nothing whatsoever to do with whether a rule is sufficient or not."

Do you think that such rules can be sufficient when talking about music?

By studying the first five Rolling Stones albums (in U.S. would be England's Newest Hitmakers through December's Children).

Question confuses me, since I don't know what "such rules" refers to. Which rules? Sufficient for what purposes?

Sorry Frank I wasn't being very clear was I. I guess what I'm asking is how you consider the idea of "the sufficiency of a rule" to work when you're thinking about music - by which I don't mean "are specific rules sufficient" so much as "do you think we should also approach music empirically and anti-philosophically (i.e. the basis upon which we should accept a rule is whether it works, not on whether it can be ultimately grounded).

I expect you'll say "yes". But I'm interested in asking anyway because the problem of the sufficiency of rules seems much closer to the surface in something like music criticism than it does in many other areas of everyday life. There's little practical purpose to me introducing a hypothetical doubt as to the existence of the kettle in your kitchen. On the other hand, if we could agree on which rules were "sufficient" in thinking about music, the business of music criticism would seem somewhat superfluous.

(I can't specify the rule(s) in question here - but I guess rules as to how the music works, why it works etc. The purpose of the rules would be understanding these very things)

Perhaps music criticism is only possible on the basis of a constitutive insufficiency of any rule? Perhaps the purpose of music criticism is to present a rule as being sufficient (and, further, to engage passionately in music criticism you have to believe and act as if your rules are sufficient) despite the fact that it's probably not?

This would place sufficiency within the category of the "impossible but necessary" - on the one hand, the sufficiency of a rule cannot be achieved without closing down the possibility of music criticism; but on the other hand, the need to establish sufficiency can't be abandoned for fear of the same thing happening.

This probably doesn't make sense.

Do you think there is any value in attempting to transfer terminology and paradigms drawn from big-name brand philosophers like Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and Wittengenstein to the discussion of music?

Have you ever considered copyediting? I think you'd be good at it. I imagine you leaving 1000 word corrections in Quark notes.

Don, yeah, there are jobs in the world, grading tests or proofing manuscripts or washing dishes, but that's not the point. People like me have to find a way to create a market for our ideas, or we won't accomplish a fraction intellectually of what we're capable of. And I for one don't feel that I can do it alone.

Do you think this National Review article on the "50 greatest conservative rock songs" (and its follow-up) (and this critique) laughable or disturbing?

--Mike

P.S. I finally got Real Punks in what was probably my last-ever purchase at the Greenwich Village Tower Records, huzzah.

What else besides mucho teenpop have you recently listened to and enjoyed?

t''t

Does making any kind of demand on music inevitably PBSify it?

Isn't "seeking ulterior justification in PBS terms" largely identical/similar/the same as "rock criticism" whether we like it or not?

A quick stab at your questions, and if I have a chance to post later maybe I'll do a not-so-quick followup.

(1) I can think of a whole lot of demands that won't lead to PBSification. E.g., I don't think demanding that a singer be "legitimate" (in the way that Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand and Beverly Sills and Cecilia Bartoli are "legitimate singers") leads to "PBS" as I've been using the term.* Nor would the demand that pop music be "escapist." Nor would the demand that gospel music speak to and for God. What these demands lead to might end up just as constricting in their own way, but it won't be PBS.

(2) Rock criticism is hardly a monolith, but I'll say that much of what I like in music is the sort of stuff that can set music on the PBS path. Just read what I say in praise of Ashlee Simpson. Among the things I like about her is that she's intellectually restless and that she's promised to search for "what this shit means." These are good impulses. They enrich her music and they enrich the world. Also, I don't believe it's inevitable that such impulses lead to PBS, but quite often they do. (What I'm afraid is going to happen with Ashlee is that she'll get shunted aside and ignored, so she/we will never find out where her impulses lead or what this shit means.)

*"PBS as I've been using the term." I meant a couple of things by it, which was part of the confusion:

(i) A metaphor. I was saying that the indie-alternative-fanzine network is playing a role in popular music and youth culture similar to the one that the Public Broadcasting Service plays in the broader culture. (Sinker once told me the BBC analog to PBS, but I don't remember it. This is how PBS describes itself: "A trusted community resource, PBS uses the power of noncommercial television, the Internet and other media to enrich the lives of all Americans through quality programs and education services that inform, inspire and delight... It features television's best children's, cultural, educational, history, nature, news, public affairs, science and skills programming.") Not that Flipper and GG Allin (for instance) would have been welcome on the real PBS, but that they were our PBS. "I mean a certain PBS head (attitude), which can include a cult taste for shitty horror movies, pro wrestling, African pop, comic books, Hasil Adkins. All this pseudofun is a covering for a mind set that's ruled by PBS. We're making horror movies safe for PBS. We have met PBS, and it is us. I mean an imaginary PBS of the future, with pro wrestling, splatter films, and leftist analyses of the Capitalist Entertainment Industry (scored by a reformed Gang of 4). All rendered lame in the context of our appreciation."

(ii) A process - "PBSification" - that's culture-wide rather than restricted to indie-alternative. Basically (and vaguely) I was thinking of it as a work-ethic impulse that could be anything from Social Improvement to Subversion to an aesthete's Sophisticated Appreciation Of Trash. None of which I have anything against in principle, but I was seeing that when these things become if-you're-not-part-of-the-solution-you're-part-of-the-problem requirements, then the symbol comes to stand in for the event, at the expense of their being an interesting event. "People learn from experience that a lot of medicine tastes bad, and they come to think that 'tasting bad' is the active ingredient in medicine. So, when their medicine isn't working, they think that by subtracting the sweet stuff they're making it more medicinal." So the problem isn't that the "wrong" stuff gets added to pop, but that good stuff gets eliminated.

http://paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=450