Artists With A Syllabus - is this or is it no longer A Thing?

This was a term that Suzy used to use, that I really liked, to describe those bands that came complete with their own set of wider cultural references, not just musical "influences", but books, literature, authors, visual artists, films, philosophy, politics etc.

Obviously this was especially common with 80s art-rock groups (Bauhaus, Echo & the Bunnymen, Julian Cope, etc) but in the 90s it seemed to reach a kind of peak, that many of the hugely successful or at least critically acclaimed/fan canonised indierock bands (Manic Street Preachers, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, Stereolab) were bands that were highly literate and referenced and namedropped a wide variety of other artforms , not just music. And also that fans would pick up and investigate these references, that it was almost considered part of the canon, if you liked a band, to read the authors they mentioned.

Now this question is kind of inspired by two things - firstly, Let England Shake and the discussion of whether this was "sixth form" or "a PhD disguised as an album." Secondly, attempted discussion with a new generation of Radiohead fans who actually seem faintly embarrassed by concept albums and reading lists and actively resist engaging with the band's non-musical reference points as being something with the whiff of "sad fanboyism" bordering on what reads to me as anti-intellectualism.

And then I started to try and think of what artists, recently, had done this. And I rather drew a blank. Maybe I'm drawing a blank because I'm LOLold and not in touch with what The Kids are into today? Maybe it's just because I no longer engage much with obsessive fan culture of new bands? Is it the death of long-format music criticism, that journalists no longer have 10,000 word pieces to burn a few thousand words asking musicians what their favourite authors are? Do artists no longer do it, because it's seen as naff and 90s and concept-album-y? Or am I just looking in the wrong places?

This can also function as an "Artists with a Syllabus: Search and Destroy" - tho I'm not really interested in "Classic or Dud" because obviously I think this is a wonderful and good thing.

But then again, I was the kind of teenager that read Camus and Gormenghast because they were referenced in Cure lyrics, and watched Derek Jarman films because the Smiths talked about them so I'm just predisposed to think of it as a Good Thing.

I just wonder if something has been lost - that there was something quite special about a time when you were not considered A Proper Blur Fan unless you'd read Martin Amis - or if I'm being a curmudgeon about how now obsessive fandom means having a tumblr full of animated gifs.

lcd soundsystem got me into lcd soundsystem

Or is more just that, have all of the good references been taken? And when someone like Klaxons start going on about Pynchon and the Illuminatus trilogy, they don't seem cool and original, they just seem like they're ripping off the KLF in a really inept way?

I also wonder about how it can backfire - that a lot of people projected a lot of stuff onto LDR because of her reference points (Hollywood Babylon, faded glamour, etc.) - that turned out not to have any substance to it? I don't want to bring the LDR clusterfuck in here too much, but I do wonder if that was part of the disappointment of the backlash, that people were expecting World-Building, and instead it turned out to be a Vogue Fashion Spread in homage to an era, instead?

Saturday afternoon is probably the worst of all times to have started a thread like this, but I've been thinking about this.

I think what you're talking about is mostly to do with that sort of teenage fandom that seeks to absorb everything. I would rather now see into an artist's heritage and discover what his ancestors were reading.

I think maybe it's a consequence of bands forming in the Internet age. Instead of 'here are my influences: books I've read in the library or stuff I've been exposed to through art college' it's 'here are my influences: little snippets of stuff from all over the Internet', which is harder to put into a definitive reading list.

So you think it's the Information Stream, which has atomised people's exposure to culture?

I don't know that I agree with that, but obviously I am of the "books I've read in the library" generation rather than a Stream generation. It seems like people still have obsessions and focuses, people still have single-subject tumblrs? It's easier to assemble information more quickly when you can read the wiki and google up a hundred links in an afternoon. But does that mean people still don't get as deeply into the subjects that capture their attention?

Too Much Joy was one of these bands. I read Catcher In The Rye because of them and if I remember their liner notes correctly, they were pretty explicit about which of their songs were inspired by which texts, when that was the case. Since they've been deleted, they're the only CDs I still actually own, but they're currently at the bottom of a well-stuffed closet. I'll have to see about digging them out later to confirm.

What about Metallica: Hemingway, Dalton Trumbo, Lovecraft? Or is that more just "writing songs inspired by books" than actually "having a syllabus".

The piecemeal acquisition of information is in the foreground. It's how I approach a subject first, even if later I go and read a specific book about it. Maybe it's always been like that, getting exposed to things through bite-sized pieces and then tracking down the source later. It's just that with the Internet people can say "oh I was surfing", but before it was "oh I was reading a newspaper article/caught a bit of a TV show/overheard a conversation on the bus". These other things still happen, but surfing is a clearly definable action.

xp there's a disctinction here between 'having a syllabus but not talking about it' and 'having a syllabus and telling everyone about it as much as possible'. Are the pre 'Who's Next' Who any less intellectual because they didn't talk about their syllabus? Is Iggy? There's a guy who's well read, and it must influence his songwriting, but he doesn't make a point of mentioning it.

Thrice's Illusion of Safety is certainly one such album. I haven't been musically satisfied enough by anything else they've put out since to examine the lyrics closely enough, but I heard they did a Pynchon album. But a song heavily inspired by Poe, an e.e. cummings re-working, refs to various philosophers, the Bible...

actively resist engaging with the band's non-musical reference points as being something with the whiff of "sad fanboyism" bordering on what reads to me as anti-intellectualism.

Maybe there's a distrust of being openly intellectual nowadays, because anyone can superficially come across as an 'expert' on any topic by searching for it on Wikipedia?
Also we've been burnt by bands saying one thing and doing another, the big example being the Manic's socialism/communism stance contradicted by having their own personal toilet at Glastonbury.

naive reading of the Manics and of socialism i think.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/The_Masses_Against_The_Classes.jpg
That's the cover of 'The Masses Against The Classes' (which I got by searching Wikipedia #instantexpert)

0w3n and j0hn to thread, i suppose

And my objection is not on political or faux-intellectualism grounds, it's the same feeling I got when Brett Anderson remarked that he was a bisexual who'd never had a homosexual experience: "yeah right", IOW the recognisation that something is probably just an attempt by the artist to get attention by being 'outrageous' or in some way controversial.

The Who were HUGELY a syllabus band! Almost from their beginnings, they're pretty much the first band I'd think of as an example of "art school band." Even if they didn't talk about (did they? I don't know.) other people certainly talked about it with regards to them, be that discussing Auto Destructive Art or whatever.

And maybe Iggy doesn't talk about it, but it's certainly obvious - and not even just from the Berlin period stuff. Like, it's obvious that the Stooges were a band with their cultural obsessions (not just sayin' that coz I watched Wreck Detectives and Time Team with Ron.)

I'm just trying to think about who does it these days - like, that whole thing about Vampire Weekend being so collegiate and literate because they knew what a mansard roof was? Like, that's become notable now?

I dunno, Manics attitudes towards "Socialism" seemed to go a bit deeper than wanting your own personal toilet at Glasto because, let's face it, the toilets at festivals are revolting. I can understand that urge.

Like, the idea of Nicky Manic still living and paying local taxes in an end of row terrace house in the neighbourhood where he grew up vs Billy Bragg and his "I'll use the communal toilet in Glasto, but move to a rock star beach house in Dorset" (or wherever he lives now, rather than staying true to the Essex roots or whatever he talks about? But mainly I just think Billy Bragg shout STFU for many reasons)

the most recent uk version i can come up with is the libertines. but they're also the most recent band to be successful enough in the white-boy-with-guitar phylum (public school genus) to be culturally unavoidable enough that people would notice. american examples seem without number.

I had to google it, but my question is: did they want everybody else to know what a mansard roof was or did they just want to say "mansard roof"? Betting on the latter.

when artists tell you about the art they absorb themselves, there's a bunch of ways of doing it. a name-dropped list can look very shallow, but at some points in your life - especially adolescence i guess - it doesn't matter if it's shallow because you're just looking for reference points on the map of the world that you can go and explore for yourself.

i prefer artists who show you what makes up their experience-world, thru cover art or references or oblique conversations. as an adult i don't need reference points so much, but i'm interested in the ways that artists influence other artists - i want to see the trails.

when we talk to other people about our interests we're always exposing ourselves, especially to the hateful glare of "taste". i've said before how negative a trait i think good taste is. it makes people wary of discussing things they like in case their peers can sneer at their gaucheness or whatever. which isn't to say i'm above the odd sneer myself - i doubt any of us is. but i'd like to think that mostly what i sneer at is a kind of unreflectingness, an assumption that certain ideas or modes or things are inherently cool or correct or above analysis. i hate that shit.

some artists now i'm sure are still signposting and discussing art they love. maybe it happens less than it used to do because there's a deeper obsession with "good taste" in some genres? a lot of music fandom outside of the popular mainstream can degenerate into a game of cooler-than-thou that makes savvy practitioners keep their cards closer to their chests. and there's a streak of deliberate boorishness (occasionally funny and necessary but often just easy) thruout the history of music crit/fandom. but also maybe increasingly music practitioners take most of their experience-world from other music in a way that reduces their points of reference?

ramble ramble

i suspect this is actually a very small part of the larger story about how there are still smart and earnest kids at american universities, whereas every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

In the "flippin' lousy" TV interview (from around the time of 'Sell Out'), Townshend does mention that the band are "a relatively simple form of pop art", but he doesn't go into it much more than that. And during the rest of the interview he seems to be actively deflecting any questions that hint at the possibility of intellectulism in their music. Even around the release of 'Tommy', there's a German TV interview where the interviewer is asking all kinds of complications about the metaphysical themes etc. of the album, and PT is giving more or less monosyllabic 'yes/no' answers.

every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

this seems harsh and yet

in response to your earlier post i wanted to say something dismissive about how music fans as a group were the least well read people in the universe but i'm not sure if i agree with myself

I think how it basically breaks down is that something can be intellectual while seeming totally dunderheaded (Stooges), and also something can be labelled 'intellectual' while actually being just a bunch of random quotes cribbed from somewhere.
Alarm bells go off for me when a band makes a big show of their influences. It reminds me of Will Self's rant about 'you don't somehow know all about Italian cuisine because you've eaten a chiabatta'.

i want to say that the young people today are the least well read people in the universe but i'm trying to ease my curmudgeonly middle-aged man persona in gently

x-posts, wow, fast moving thread for a Saturday!

Well, I was thinking about Radiohead because, well, that's where my thoughtworm obsession is at, at the moment. And how they went from being the kind of literate band that would namedrop Coupland or Chomsky in interviews when asked what their influences were (I always found that endearing rather than pretentious, tho I know many disagree.) To being the kind of band that had a whole blog dedicated to what they were reading, not even in a namedroppy this is what we're influenced kind of way, but in more a OMG THIS BOOK IS AMAZING YOU SHOULD ALL READ IT TOO!!! kind of way. But then again, RH seem like the kind of band that if they weren't rock stars, they would be either college professors or the kind of marketing creatives who spend their lives telling other people what they should be consuming (or some odd mixture thereof.)

I dunno, though, Noodle, because sometimes I find the way that you sneer at "good taste" to be almost as hateful as the whole cult of "good taste." I kinda get what you're on at, in that "worrying about how other people will perceive your taste" is gross and worrying about being sneered at for the stuff you love is just so awful. But at the same time, that whole thing of refusing to contemplate or examine or engage with the stuff you put in your brain - that's even grosser (and that was when I really started shouting at the RH fans.) Maybe that's what you're saying, and I'm misreading you?

snoball i feel like you're having an entirely parallel discussion with yourself

nv i think the boat sailed on that one

wcc are you familiar with tom fleming and his band 'the wild beats'

xp

oh i think you shd grapple with yr own aesthetic, no doubt. it's unreflectiveness that i hate, but i feel like "taste" as a public quality is very much about unreflectiveness, like it's an acquired set of rules that save people from having to think when confronted with something that doesn't engage them.

every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

lol u old

sneering is generally unattractive, obviously. it's a reflex reaction like sneezing or like fighting back when you feel attacked.

i suspect this is actually a very small part of the larger story about how there are still smart and earnest kids at american universities, whereas every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

I disagree with this SO HARD, mostly because the people I most often encounter this reflexive anti-intellectualism from are Americans?

And also because, I dunno. I remember (OK this is 4 or 5 years ago now) meeting a bunch of teenage LOTP fans and thinking, oh god, these ppl are gonna be terrible NME-reading, mindless cool-eating people who listen to Horrors albums, ugh - and then I met them and they so WEREN'T - they were far more engaged and curious and interested in following up cultural references and exploring concepts. Like, a generation of kids who had grown up with videogames, but were prepared to dissect videogames as art and reference them to Japanese literature and the explosion in 19th century photography technology and just WAU, like, these kids, these fans, are so much smarter and more articulate than the bands they're consuming or the press who are talking down to them, like, what gives?

I guess there's a difference between "I'm namedropping this influence because I think it will look cool" (even though bands like Bauhaus could make that work, somehow?) and "OMG, everyone should read this book because it's amazing, it inspired me so much, you might like it, too!"

But it's hard from the outside to sometimes tell the difference? Especially, yeah, when wikipedia makes every experts in 30 seconds, but sometimes digesting something and getting it wrong will have interesting results? (wasn't that one of the origins of the Bunnymen/Cope beef?)

lotp?

Late of the pier?

also i figured the way i formulated that was recognisably deliberately over the top, but oh well - i do think the ways in which 'smart' indie has survived in the states are more or less directly correlated to the different cultural/economic status of the universities there, and to city cultures more amenable to spending your early 20s doing something unproductive with your life

e. you're at u of sussex right? i submit that that university is an anomaly

Yup. They kinda seemed like they might have had a syllabus, or developed that kind of phenomenon had they gone and, but I think they might just have been a bunch of weirdos. heh.

Yup meaning LOTP = Late Of The Pier, sorry, x-post

I suppose the corollary question is really, when did naked enthusiasm become viewed as *so* ~uncool~? (Though I suppose the word "cool" itself implies a lack of heat or visible enthusiasm.) It seems deeply tied up with the whole hipster (cringe, I know) aesthetic, that one must never be seen to be *bothered* or concerned about anything.

And being a fan - sad fan or otherwise - is very tied up in notions of being a fanatic, of being enthusiastic to an almost unhealthy ideal, that being a hipster and being a fan are mutually impossible positions, which makes engaging with pop culture rather a dilemma?

(a side note that amuses me.)

a lot of Swift's earlier writing, and that of his like-minded peers, is fiercely dismissive of "Indexes" and "Keys" and the like - early encyclopaedias, basically - because they were convinced it allowed a shallow acquisition of learning that shd only legitimately have been acquired thru years of reading latin and greek etc.

so whilst it's true that tools have transformative social consquences, wiki is still just a tool and it doesn't in itself destroy the possibility of "deep" understanding. i'd argue a counter-possibility that it allows for much more rapid connection forming or mapping. i'm wary of shallow/deep dialectics of thought and feeling, and i'd argue they're both important surfaces for experience.

and yet i also feel like the "general culture" is moving towards more shallowness, and simple lists are a real manifestation of that?

i'm eternally gratefully to the sixth form english teacher who, on the first day of A-level class, dictated us a list of stuff we might like to read that wd be interesting or mind-expanding tho completely unrelated to the syllabus. and the list started with Blood and Guts in High School and in 1985 that was revelatory. but lists can be dangerously close to shopping lists and serve as a guide to consumption of culture. and one of culture's uses has always been as a commodity, to signify taste and therefore class and therefore bad things that culture is also always trying to absorb and melt.

and to wind back to the point of the thread - that's also a thing that syllabus artists wind up doing: "here are the products you should consume if you want to be One of Us". the positive, liberating, bridge-building urge is always lying right up against the negative, exclusionary ownership urge.

in 1985 that was revelatory

i was just thinking (before i saw yr two posts) that one difference over the past decade or two is the extent to which the publishing industry, the academic industry, and the general movie industry have attempted to capitalise on older ideas of 'cult' work. like it used to be a lot easier to present a set of Things Outside The Mainstream that had influenced you -- because they weren't as easy to find in the first place, admittedly -- like, try running through every author mark e smith ever made use of and thinking about whether they were in print at the time or whether there'd been a movie version of them the same decade

ha, this is an expost with your more recent post

xpost, rather. also, i was born in 1985, i'd like to just mention that here.

try running through every author mark e smith ever made use of

yeah i remember finding The Dice Man in a bookshop and getting v. excited

and the death of secondhand bookshops is maybe another issue here

see, i first saw that in a branch of hammick's in the luton town centre in a publisher's display of 'cult books!'

i guess i noticed the de-cultification of "cult" when the BBC started showing old Simpsons eps or something on a "cult" strand on BBC2? you're quite right, a word that at one time signified stuff that was hard to get hold of and difficult for an audience to form a relationship with has now become A.N. Other genre

actively resist engaging with the band's non-musical reference points as being something with the whiff of "sad fanboyism" bordering on what reads to me as anti-intellectualism.

I see where you're coming from but I have the opposite feeling about this (tho I've no idea what non-musical reference points any artists I know of even have). Anything book/film/non-musical I have an interest in occupies a completely different place in my head from music. Definitely don't consider myself anti-intellectual, just music and non-music don't occupy much shared space for me

actually just realized you in the original post it says 'band' - i don't really like any bands, which does make something of a difference I think?

do you like mainly music with words in it or music that mainly doesn't have words in it

without

and the switch from "cult" to "Cult" might account for a perceived absence of syllabus artists: the market's become saturated with syllabi, every magazine is chocka with lists of things YOU need to experience, every W.H. Smith's is chocka with books telling you what to see, listen to, experience. artists going down this road now run the risk of being just another reshuffled deck of the canon

When Richard & Judy are pushing a syllabus via their book club, having a syllabus can seem like a fake thing to do.

When i read something it definitely throws up other things to read - and music leads to other music, but like if i buy a damon lamar 12" off ebay can't imagine that connecting to any book I might read

But then i dunno I guess listenign to like jean ritchie then connected into reading more about west virginia, mining, politics etc so maybe i guess it depends on the type of music

On my iPhone so this has to be short but I meant artist, as in thread title, not necessarily band. Like, Dopplereffekt and Drexciya - techno artists I'd think of as coming w a "syllabus."

Also I dunno, in world creating, doesn't an interest in Detroit techno and Ruin Porn / industrial desolation photography often go hand in hand? That stuff counts.

Also I dunno, in world creating, doesn't an interest in Detroit techno and Ruin Porn / industrial desolation photography often go hand in hand? That stuff counts.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Saturday

Its a good question, thats an interesting example. I think a lot of the legwork in joining the dots between those things has been done by journalists (often british) to the point those two things are often linked but I don't really get why

i think certain detroit artists definitely knew how to play british journalists looking for an angle!

this year i've been tenuously writing lyrics, something i haven't done in a long time. and partly because of constraints i want to set myself or things i want to avoid, i've been using a lot of visual motifs to guide my work. visual art used to be important to me in the past but now i feel like my interest in the written word is largely down to relationships with the visual. but to be fair i'm a lot less interested in music as visual metaphor or vice versa. for me music has been tied down to that relationship in ways that writing hasn't been enough

Because I am a posh kid that went to a fee-paying school, we had teachers every year who would give us a reading list over the summer of a couple hundred non-syllabus books and you were expected to have read at least 5 by the time you came back to school in the autumn. So I dunno, I like reading lists in that sense, in a "you might like this, go and explore yourself!" way even while I really reject those shopping-list Canons of "1000 albums you should have heard" which really make me want to throw albums I know and love into the bin when they turn up on them.

It's a hard line to tread. Though I don't have any problem with Richard&Judy or Oprah book clubs - I'm an anti-snob when it comes to that. yeah, I know book clubs are totally fucking middlebrow but I'm *such* a bibliophile that I don't really care how people come to books, so long as they get there.

The "death of the second hand bookshop" thing might be getting at something. Though, like record shops, I don't think this is about the death of the thing itself, so much as the idea of "curated collection with knowledgeable staff." That Amazon, no matter how it refines its algorithms, is still really shit at making recommendations. (though it depends on the baseline with all of those matching programs - that if it tells me "I see you've been looking at Radiohead records, would you like to buy something by Muse?" I want to go FUCK OFF but when, say, Spodify says "I see you've been listening to Laurel Halo, would you like to listen to something by Stellar Om Source or Julianna Barwick?" I say hmm, yes, actually, you're right, I would!" That it's not the algorithm, it's what you put into it.)

I would have thought that either Mark E Smith or Thom E Yorke would be a lot better as a reading guide than an Amazon shopping algorithm (though neither is as good as the bloke with a quiff at my favourite charity bookshop in Streatham.)

But it's almost like the stuff that used to just be cult has now become a new Canon, which goes back to that thing of what I was saying of, what, really, is there left to intellectually namedrop, which hasn't already been claimed, by someone better than you, 20 years ago?

a lot of Swift's earlier writing, and that of his like-minded peers, is fiercely dismissive of "Indexes" and "Keys" and the like - early encyclopaedias, basically - because they were convinced it allowed a shallow acquisition of learning that shd only legitimately have been acquired thru years of reading latin and greek

they're also hard defenders of taste vs book-learning - like when they mock eg Richard Bentley they're backing the taste values – lived knowledge, cultivated judgement, a kind of sprezzatura - against deep & well-reasoned scholarship. it's one of the enduring zones of cultural tension - aesthete's 'natural taste' (=coming from large amount of cultural capital - Distinction by Bourdieu very good on this iirc) vs worked-at acquisition of culture.

Maybe syllabus bands can offer focus and direction for the latter, & can transform it into a something that can go on the offensive against received culture, ie 'taste' is a weapon if allied to genuinely creative energy (which is what the best of the eighteenth century types were doing anyway - Swift & Pope liminals-to-outsiders, despite classical educations). 'Good taste's' unpleasant elite-forming tendencies can be useful as a support & map in youth.

The age of information abundance does make a big diff tho': opaque Mark E Smith references (Chorazina n. - said to be negative jerusalem)so much easier to track down now, but these are just the old arguments about the relationship between how hard things are to find and how much you value them.

(The emergence of 'cult' as bookshop category - I must have first seen it mid-90s, maybe - sometime between Trainspotting the novel and Trainspotting the film.)

Though, like record shops, I don't think this is about the death of the thing itself, so much as the idea of "curated collection with knowledgeable staff."

can also be a physical environment that opens up things in youth - other customers, people like you, potential crushes, sense of possible lives.

i remember cult becoming normal with the opening of borders in philly and also barnes & noble. every bukowski book and kathy acker book and jim thompson book, etc, available all the time. this happened in even crappy video stores too. the cult and midnight movie sections got bigger and bigger. probably inevitable. and now with the internet...man, it's endless now. i don't think its bad or anything. i don't feel the need to glorify how long it took me to find things when i was a kid. the case is often made that it made it more special when you found something weird or off the beaten track. i suppose that's possible. i still feel that way about records to this very day.

but maybe now people don't look to artists themselves for tips/guides to living/culture. they get tips everywhere they look.

one thing Amazon and online stores in general can't do very well is the pure randomness of browsing along shelves - algorithms are okay if you know the area you want to look thru but the sheer randomness of a none-too-carefully stocked secondhand bookshop is its own pool of new signposts and unthought of interests and connections

yeah scott i don't think hard to find-ness was a good thing in itself. but when everything cult becomes just another shelf in the shop then i feel like it commodifies and tames the books - puts them in their own neat box when really cult shd be an anti-genre. once something becomes a genre with rules then you'll get more people just clomping thru the rules and transgression becomes harder somehow? everything becomes recouped by Capital etc

I've never thought of 'cult' as anything other than genre (I also don't see the problem with the idea of genre, or of 'cult' being one)

what defines "cult" as a genre then?

tho could make argument that disco was something not initially a genre (was it harmed by becoming formalized as to what 'it' was?)

what defines "cult" as a genre then?

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Saturday,

those books on the shelf you just mentioned!

genre in itself is fine, especially if its a formal definition. problem with cult is that the act of giving it a formal definition seems to drain the possibilities from it

xp

no dice, that definition won't fly :D

if it's a genre, you shd be able to give a description of its properties rather than just listing its members

one of the many critical impasses reached in an undergrad class on popular fiction i took at a university in the midlands was when we discussed what separated the poppy z. brite novel we'd read as an example of 'cult' fiction from exemplars of 'horror' fiction

re: randomness: the new temporary expansion of the bodleian library has tens of thousands of books from the last few decades sorted by size and acquisition date, which i enjoy

(The emergence of 'cult' as bookshop category - I must have first seen it mid-90s, maybe - sometime between Trainspotting the novel and Trainspotting the film.)

alternative: between the founding of 'rebel inc.' & it being bought by canongate

i like the notion of strip-mall bookstore giants being a thing here. & scott's conclusion.

i think there's some interesting differences between how j0hn's and 0wen's projects do & have done this sort of thing, & how, say, the hold steady and titus andronicus do so, and how the cure or the fall did

i don't feel the need to glorify how long it took me to find things when i was a kid. the case is often made that it made it more special when you found something weird or off the beaten track. i suppose that's possible. i still feel that way about records to this very day.

Yeah this is something that bears repeating. Sure, I kinda miss the small burst of joy when you finally find something you've been searching for a long time, but nothing beats the even bigger burst of joy when you realise you have 50 years of music to enjoy at your fucken fingertips, man, whenever you want it. I'm willing to sacrifice that small bit of cultural cache for the ease and speed of hearing stuff I really love instantly.

xp

Do not know about them, but there's def a gap between syllabus artists who seem to use their reading-list refs more explicitly, talking about it in interviews etc, and a more oblique & evasive approach where you've got to dig to find the pointers. Like even when Mark E Smith is explicitly shouting 'C Wilson wrote Ritual in the Dark there', it's hard to make it out.

(and yes, feel the same as others - the age of abundance is amazing, and I'm ok to have lost the pleasures of the hunt in exchange for it)

I'm trying to get a sense of what you guys mean by "Cult" as a literary genre - is it that whole thing of 20th century post-beatnik white dudes who write about their drug experiences? Do you mean that thing?

that does seem to be a big part of it.

my argument is that it shdn't be a thing, that cult isn't a particular set of interests or styles, but used to mean stuff that sat outside of the canons or had small devoted fanbases, usually coming from their own agenda. like the way john waters has written about gay audiences creating a cult around "bad" movies thru camp. but now Cult as a product and a label is a bunch of stuff nailed into a box that's much how you describe it.

so what are some things which are cult but not Cult? Are you saying there are no things that have small fanbases that are somewhere other than the Cult shelf?

Oneohtrix Point Never seems to have a syllabus, but maybe not a literary one. Lots of young artists seem to be including the Internet as part of their syllabus.

"so what are some things which are cult but not Cult?"

noise tapes. ebm night at the goth club. cockfights. dog racing.

Mills and Boon novels i'm thinking

UFC, in the UK at least

jai alai. contradancing.

is it that whole thing of 20th century post-beatnik white dudes who write about their drug experiences?

yes, as I remember it, that's the heart of it, but you can have violence or low life or transgressive sex or alcoholism instead of/on top of drugs, & I don't think it's just white dudes, though they'd predominate. I'm not really sure any more though - I haven't seen one in a first-hand bookshop in ages (bye borders), and 2nd-hand 'cult' sections are often a bit odder.

"so what are some things which are cult but not Cult?"

The novels of Elizabeth Taylor.

I feel so out of touch because when you all started saying "Cult" I was thinking the section of the bookshop that has, like, all 3 volumes of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger and the complete works of Aleister Crowley?

too fey

wilson certainly counts to what i'd think of w/r/t 'cult', god help us/him/it

"The novels of Elizabeth Taylor."

i am a member of this cult! still searching for ones i don't have. so, that's like the old days, i guess. if i lived in the u.k. i'm guessing i could complete my collection in a day.

ha, I'm not yet, but a copy of Angel that I ordered on a whim the other day arrived this morning, so she's on my mind.

"ordered on a whim" = couldn't do this in the old days.

but when everything cult becomes just another shelf in the shop then i feel like it commodifies and tames the books

well from the last few posts it looks like this doesn't actually happen

Yeah so we started with Let England Shake and ended with Liz Taylor, I feel like my work is done here... ;-)

What exactly is rockism?

have you ever read elizabeth taylor? one of my favorite fiction writers. not well known in the states. though there was a movie version of one of her books not long ago that might have helped to sell a few copies of her books here.

x-post

x-post I don't think this is a rockism thing, pop bands can have Syllabi - in fact, holy shit, the first band I encountered with a full-on Syllabus was Duran Duran.

No, I was being facetious about the actor of the same name, I wasn't being serious at all.

I hate to bring up the dreaded C word on ILM but here's an interview that kind of dances around some of the ideas we've discussed her.

Melvyn Bragg insisting that there is not such thing as Class any more, there's only Culture (but since when has capital-T Taste been anything *but* an expression of one's Class and Culture?)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/feb/12/melvyn-bragg-interview-class-system-culture

(And kind of pwning himself by trying to say that class is dead because Prince William wears jeans in a nightclub, despite the fact that all his former schoolmates are now investment bankers and lawyers but KMT, realy.)

But this idea of one's Taste as a badge of belonging to a certain in-group (whether that ingroup is a Fandom or a Class) is certainly the kind of thing I think we've been talking about. (God I should never have read Weblen, it destroyed me.)

'Weblen'?

Is that like reading Veblen online?

So I can't always spell, I guess that invalidates every other question I've asked on this thread. Silly me.

No mention of the Mekons, who regularly included reading lists in their liner notes?

Wait, what the fuck is this thread about?

It can be about the Mekons on their reading lists, that sounds really interesting, please tell me some more about it?

The thread is mostly about talking about bands that used to do that kind of thing, and wondering why it seems to no longer be such a *thing* or if we're all just too LOL old and bitter to be in contact with artists that still do it.

Don't mind me re the Veblen -

Only Mekons list I remember was the oneon Honky-Tonkin' -Adorno, Wittgenstein, Leaving the 20th century...... Laid out as footnotes after the lyrics on the inner sleeve IIRC

And kind of pwning himself by trying to say that class is dead because Prince William wears jeans in a nightclub, despite the fact that all his former schoolmates are now investment bankers and lawyers but KMT, realy.

also jeans are diverse enough to be able to signify yr group through brand & detail I believe. Guessing Prince W's weren't from top man.

& further to Duran Duran - Scritti Politti & Frankie/ZTT would also offer non-rock syllabuses. Are KLF a syllabus band? Is there much theorised pop now?

xp: so that would be the primary influence for Too Much Joy's lists:

If I Was A Mekon

If I was a Mekon
I’d drink pints of beer
If I was a Mekon
And talk about Adorno
If I was a Mekon
I’d have a lot of friends
If I was a Mekon
Everything would be ok
I’d have a lot to say
No one would look at me that way

And a Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing to be

Let me be a Mekon
If I was a Mekon
I would be from Leeds
If I was a Mekon
Maybe I could sleep with Sally
If I was a Mekon
Or Tommy one night in Chicago
If I was a Mekon
We’d smile a lot the next day
We’d never talk about it again
But we’d be that much closer friends

And a Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing
A Mekon is a really good thing to be

Permettez moi d’etre un Mekon

Sadly, I never took their cue to listen to Mekons records or read Adorno.

Want to say books have made numerous appearances in Mekons sleeves. But I guess it's been a while since I read them. The sleeves, that is.

The KLF were in some ways the apotheosis of Syllabus Band. And not just bcuz of their references, but bcuz they themselves (thru The Manual etc.) became part of a Syllabus for later bands.

IIRC wasn't Bill Drummond driving much of the Syllabus type stuff in Echo/Teardrop when he was managing them? Or have I misremembered all that urban legend?

Thinking about the Mekons thing a little more...

The difference between then -early/ mid '80s - and now, in a British and Irish context is not just the internet etc, but also the huge growth in 3rd level education: then, I think it was around 10% of the 18-21 age cohort went to college in both, now it's upwards of 50%.

Bands like the Mekons and Go4 were widely known as 'student' bands, precisely because it was still a weighted distinction - the vast majority of musicians/ people in bands here would leave school at 16/18 and that would be it. There would have been almost no prospect of further ed for the likes of Mark E. Smith and Joy Div. and even an obvious 'intellectual' like Green was an early school leaver.

Taken together, I think there were two effects of this: one; whereas now, a large number of young people think they know something because a lecturer mentioned Foucault to them once, and thus, conversely, don't feel excluded from some precious knowledge, so they don't think they need clues from bands to educate them, and two, there isn't the same need to educate yourself felt by intelligent musicians.

I did go to college in the late '70s, but in a very staid and tweedy English dept. so I was dead impressed and a little intimidated by the fancy names that I was only hearing about at the time from the likes of Scritti and the Mekons and in the NME. Even a little later (early 80s), reading about the Monitor lot in Oxford, and hearing about stuff in other Universities, that gap had probably shrunk.

a large number of young people think they know something because a lecturer mentioned Foucault to them once

):

xpost But weren't the Mekons/Gang of 4/a host of other punk bands art school students? I make the distinction because, not knowing the ins and outs of the British higher education system, I was under the impression it was a lot easier to get into art school back then, which is why so many musicians ended up incubating there. They couldn't get into Oxford, so it was an alternative to hitting the work force at age 16 or 18.

What was the Duran Duran syllabus? Not being snarky, just I guess it's been eroded by time, so a few years after their peak I never realised they had one.

I thought I remembered some early These New Puritans interviews where (iirc) they were quite "we aren't going to talk about music, but here are some books you must read and some ideas you must think through before we wish to engage with you puny sheeple" but now I am looking at their webpage and a few recent interviews and it is all music music music, so either I'm mistaken or someone told them to stop that bcz it didn't sell enough records.

(yeah, ok, in the 90s I liked Stereolab because they referenced non-musical things I didn't know about and I felt clever because they nicked lyrics from Baudelaire and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and now I am threatened by some skinny tight-jeaned band appearing to have read more books than me)

don't consider myself anti-intellectual, just music and non-music don't occupy much shared space for me

― post, Saturday, February 11, 2012

I've realized maybe for the most part I am anti-intellectual (at least when it comes to music)

These reading lists that appear, it seems like they reference fav authors...does it usually mean fiction?

to this day if you want to sell a really obscure record on ebay you just type *NWW LIST* in your description and voila people know what you mean. pretty cool if you ask me. that list is very very old.

That actually is an interesting point, Sonofstan and not something I'd really considered from my bubble. That these bands had a *syllabus* because that was the only way that many of their listeners were going to get that education. (See also the whole "libraries gave us power" philosophy.) While in a culture where most people do end up going to tertiary education of some kind, it stops being an education and starts being a marketing tool, a fashion thing of wearing the right kind of trousers.

Oh god I am creaky on the Duran syllabus so I'm not the best person to ask (where has Dee the Lurker got to these days?) but it was mostly Nick Rhodes, not just going on about Warhol but Ellen von Unsworth and also a lot of art and critical theory - I might have heard Nick Rhodes namedrop Marshall Macluhan for the first time but I might be wrong? Oh and Simon LeBon quoting poetry and authors in bits and bobs. I have forgotten but it was definitely there.

And post, no, it's not just novels. Many of the people that these bands were referencing were theorists of one sort of another. Unless Adorno write a whole slew of racy chick lit I'm not aware of?

scott duz it work with stuff that isn't actually on the nww list

well then you just type *NWW CURRENT 93 DEATH IN JUNE MININMAL SYNTH RARE OOP PRIVATE PSYCH FOLK LONER*

no matter what it is.

yeah it works, scott buys it

it's one of the great losses of the information age, I think - the way that something like the NWW list isn't really necessary - when that list was new, the process of learning what went into something was necessarily a longer process; I think people now generally get the quick-read on influences/sources via Google ("oh, ok, the chorus a verbatim line from Morte D'Artur, gotcha, something about medieval something is the vibe then") instead of digging and engaging. Although in the past, I think there wasn't so much actual digging-and-engaging, just a more difficult version of seek-out-and-get-the-general-sense-of-what-they're-talking-about: not everybody's going to do a lot of research just to find out who the fuck the French writer in the Christian Death booklet is.

this isn't a "pick which way is better" q btw, people always seem to think if a "great loss" is identified that that's the same as saying "it would have been better if that loss hadn't occurred" - which isn't the case. the tradeoff -- access to good things -- is worthwhile, but there's a loss involved, which I think here is "more active participation by the listener in constructing what an artist is 'about.'"

(Stupid question, maybe, but what is the NWW list?)

OK, I just googled, never mind.

i'm shocked you did not know that!

I think Nico Muhly might be a decent example, judging by his blog anyways.

well then you just type *NWW CURRENT 93 DEATH IN JUNE MININMAL SYNTH RARE OOP PRIVATE PSYCH FOLK LONER*

no matter what it is.

lollllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

a few years ago you put Isis/Sunn o)))/Boris in there too

loll

Panda Bear's on Person Pitch
http://static.rateyourmusic.com/lk/f/s/df72b9b18155d6fe9e0fffc2dfdb23a8/208037.jpg

that panda bear list (if its serious) I just don't get. is it a desire to be on that kind of list? or to choose a place in the pantheon who they want to sit next to? for me It sorta detracts from their own stuff (nb ive never heard panda bear - is not a judgement on their music)

Also i find that kind of list pretty joyless, i like some of those artists but seeing them altogether like that is kind of ossifying for me

the Nurse With Wound list is my Bible. would totally fall for scott's ebay trick.

the Panda Bear list is a list of artists Panda Bear thinks are awesome, obviously. for the most part he seems to be otm.

*ENYA JONI MITCHELL DATF PUNK RARE OOP PRIVATE PBLIST*

I think part of the problem (for me) with that list is also its a list of artists not records, I don't really engage with music in that way

I don't know that a list of (musical) artists or records is really what I think of as a syllabus? That just seems more like a "list of influences" though I get more of a name-droopy feel from Panda Bear than from NWW. (maybe because NWW from a brief glance at Wiki list seem to straddle art/music way more than PB)

Panda list is pretty rad, but yeah it also feels like when you fill out your favorite music list on fb or whatever and type out a bunch of names and then drag Jay Z next to Syd Barrett and Metallica next to Wu Tang Clan to emphasize your eclectic tastes.

Problem is, nowadays everyone has eclectic tastes.

xp to Josh: I think Mekons Go4 were all -or most - at Leeds University - i.e. not art school, though I'm open to correction. The art school thing was a peculiarly 60s 70s British thing and an *easier* in certain respects route to a higher education than uni but was already in decline by the time punk came along, even before the full on Thatcher assault on free and grant-aided tertiary ed.

Name droppy not droopy stupid iPhone.

type out a bunch of names and then drag Jay Z next to Syd Barrett and Metallica next to Wu Tang Clan to emphasize your eclectic tastes.

hahaha

name-droopy

haha idk whether this is a typo but it conveys excellently the underwhelming, sigh-inducing weariness such a list elicits in me

xp!

It works in the context of PB & MySpace bands, yeah.

Most of these lists seem to be an act of ego and a nice way of showing off your cultural capital and def how eclectic or obscure your tastes are.

I think that list is kind of a great thing, even if it comes off as "name-droppy." Most of the people my age who listen to Panda Bear have no clue who Jonathan Richman or Sam Cooke are & they're better off at least having those names in their head if nothing else.

granted going off that list they are probably just as likely to think there's an old blues guitarist named "Black Dice Sam"

they will just check out those acts just like those who say its namedroppy did when they were their age with their bands

has always driven me nuts that if your tastes have a wide range (excuse me, are "eclectic") ppl say you're trying to demonstrate that your tastes have a wide range. although that is a key difference between the NWW list & Panda Bear's deal: he's listing stuff he thinks is rad, I'd say, and sort of taking as given that there's a unifying thread of some kind - that it's sufficient for the list to be coming from a single person, that there's some inherent unity. whereas the Tibet list, I'd argue, comes from a meticulously self-curated taste: that there's a very, very self-conscious aesthetic at work there, that if there are outliers or odd-men-out they're there very much by design. This idea of forging identity from one's tastes and gatekeeping one's own taste isn't, I think, in favor now; I think one's taste is more often viewed as self-expression, as an outer sign of one's (formed, indwelling) identity. Which may be a subtle difference (or probably could be argued not to be a difference at all), but I think it's why artists with a syllabus aren't a thing so much - it's a different understanding of what that syllabus would mean, what it would represent.

rawr otm

def something smug about it - i can see why teenagers do these lists, i did the same thing, but there's no excuse once you're past a certain age.

none of the artists or bands i've ever been really really into have been "syllabus" type acts, and for that i am thankful. (although as with anything, if you're obsessed enough or obsessed in a certain way, you could definitely track down all the books and writers that they mentioned in interviews and construct your own syllabus quite easily; but i've never encountered the whole "to be a true fan you must have read author y and be familiar with philosopher z, etc" thing)

aerosmith OTM

lex not even with tori or pj?

I don't know that a list of (musical) artists or records is really what I think of as a syllabus?

agree - syllabus definitely implies non-music stuff. i find the influences thing less bemusing than the syllabus thing but still a turn off (why do these lists always have to be so long! may as well just say "i like the world")

there are plenty of excuses for namedropping all sorts of music you think is awesome & cool at any age & sharing the fun vibes you get when you listen to that music

i also think the panda bear list is extremely obvious & dull & lacks any surprise value whatsoever (even if i like a lot of the acts on it)

but gareth some people like the idea of fans checking out music they think is great that the fans might not know of

lex it may be obvious to you or most of ilm but i bet it isn't to some people who bought that record

most Panda Bear fans probably *SHOULD* be listening to The Free Design but they probably don't know about them unless they've read this list - it's not "extremely obvious"

lex not even with tori or pj?

no! i definitely recall tori talking about various books and authors that influenced her - oh actually i might have read alice walker because of her? though iirc my english teacher was recommending walker at the same time. but anyway i didn't really feel like i had to read them and a lot of them looked like terrible new age bullshit.

i have no memory of what, if any, literature pj harvey recommended in the '90s.

I don't think the list is obvious per se, nor is there anything wrong with an obvious list anyway (other than the fact lists are awful joyless things) - but do think its kinda weird for Panda Bear themselves to make such a list (even if its a benefit to some of their fans

But but *I* knew who The Free Design were because of ~Stereolab~ (same as PB, I bet) therefore I win at life!

j/k in case that's not obvious.

crut i have a great deal of faith in young people who want to hear music by people they haven't heard of being able to find it in the age of the internet without a terrible musician acting like a school teacher towards them

Also kind of agree that lists are awful joyless things which is why I'd prefer to listen to a Stereolab song *about* The Free Design (or a Bunnymen song about John Webster) than read someone's liner notes. But that's just me.

personally i like the fact that artists will recommend stuff that's not mainstreamy and well known. I got into a lot of great music because of kurt cobains lists, then other similar things, copes krautrock fandom (and other stuff he raved about) and the NWW list. I am glad people still do it for the kids today like was done in my day and in the previous generation by NWW

I lost faith in young people finding out about music when I found out people don't know who David Byrne is

And I *like* the fact that PJ wrote a song about Gallipoli instead of putting a let of books about WWI in her liner notes. It just shows more creativity and artistry.

Also kind of agree that lists are awful joyless things which is why I'd prefer to listen to a Stereolab song *about* The Free Design

oh yeah - now i remember, tori amos said that alice walker's possessing the secret of joy was the direct inspiration behind "cornflake girl" - it wasn't just a random recommendation & certainly wasn't in a list. ironically "cornflake girl" has never actually been a tori amos song i particularly cared about. it was a good book though.

flip this the other way round and I definitely wouldn't take any music recommendations from the last 3 authors i read

or maybe i would actually who even knows

i enjoy seeing bret easton ellis tweet about films and books but noooo way would i go to him for a recommendation

though i was at the cinema last night and we were debating what to see, and we decided against mary martha whatsit on the v spurious basis that tracey thorn tweeted "mary martha meh" a few days ago

It depends on the author but I'd be open to it!

but anyway i think recommendations, ie things that people mention in passing cuz it's natural to do so, are different from lists or syllabi

i nearly typed "syllabubs" :( i need to finish this article and then sleep

But perhaps more in the sense of, if an author I really liked said they listened to one piece of music on repeat while writing mh favourite novel, I would totally seek that music out?

MY fave novel Christ I hate iPhones but I've used my whole data allowance on the laptop for the month on Spodify. ;_;

yep recommendations was totally wrong word, is diff to a syllabus idea, not overarching

actually the worst person for following up xyz - if something new comes out by someone i've already bought a record by and like I often don't check it out - don't really like knowing what something is before hearing it!

i do think that the long wayward approach to finding (and finding out about) the links between artists (of any medium) your favorite musicians loved helped my own tastes grow in a way that was (oddly) more personal than they have felt in the immediate access/able to preview context of the last ten years.

on the other hand, i wasted countless dollars and hours tracking down and absorbing stuff that ultimately turned out to be garbage (or "not for me" if we want to be charitable), which i do not miss in the slightest.

you know...thanks, sonic youth, for turning me onto (say) denis johnson. but also fuck you sonic youth for all those fourth-tier free jazz albums i eventually unloaded for 1/4th of what i paid, and that hour i spent one time trying to watch a richard kern film.

I guess that's the difference between "syllabus" and "reading list" to me.

Reading list = read Jane Austen, Bronte Sisters

Syllabus = read JA & B Sisters, compare and contrast ideas of class, gender, romance and the marriage market in Regency vs Victorian Britain

One is just a list of ~cool stuff~ the other attempts to synthesise it into a context

<i>flip this the other way round and I definitely wouldn't take any music recommendations from the last 3 authors i read</i>

Good point - when I was younger, I definitely took cultural pointers from musicians seriously, but never the other way around: I always just assume writers/actors/ film directors/ painters have shit taste in music.

if you judge it by the soap stars they dig out for specials on the big pop acts then yeah. Does anyone care what a barmaid in coronation street thinks about disco or abba or the beatles made before she was even born? ITV sure thinks so.

I lost faith in young people finding out about music when I found out people don't know who David Byrne is

but that just means people get to find out who david byrne is! awesome day for someone.

Syllabus = read JA & B Sisters, compare and contrast ideas of class, gender, romance and the marriage market in Regency vs Victorian Britain

agree with this and i totally approach books this way! but where it falls down for me is if I buy a record...I don't see that path

i don't get why people object to things like the panda bear list posted upthread. finding it rather dull is one thing, but scoffing at the very idea seems strange. fans constantly press celebrities (including pop stars and even indie fuxx) for info on what they like & think. lists are an efficient way to speak to interested fans about who you are and what yr into. and i'm sure lots of fans appreciate the pointers, esp if they've never listened to arthur russell or erik b. & rakim, or w/e.

also, i suspect that a lot of info of this sort is communicated nowadays on facebook & twitter, not through syllabi included with albums or even in published in interviews.

It would probably be more apparent a path to you if you listened to more music with lyrics where the songwriter said "this track was inspired by reading this author and relating that story to current events... blah blah blah..." but it seems like no one does that any more except PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke.

Except on the very rare occasion that instrumental music comes with a back story.

ilx is just like the real world out there, where as ilxors get older they get more jaded and cynical. Despite enjoying these things in their youth. They've turned into their parents generation.
This happens with every generation.

xp

X-post to post natch

I think this might be to an extent a bi-product of the private school-ification of rock music? That working class bands or even middle class art school type bands would be more likely to wear their intellectual chops proudly whereas yr fully fledged posh boys like The Vaccines would already be super-sensitive about anything drawing attention to it. Or maybe they're just a bit dumb, who knows.

Struggling to think of many latter day artists that this applies to though. Maybe some undie rappers here and there, I guess there are emo bands that maybe do this a bit? Across the board the sort of bands that get the most attention don't seem to be as interested in differentiating their aesthetic as they did 15 years ago.

That working class bands or even middle class art school type bands would be more likely to wear their intellectual chops proudly whereas yr fully fledged posh boys like The Vaccines would already be super-sensitive about anything drawing attention to it.

It's weird because Liam Gallagher proudly proclaimed he didn't read books (in a dig at noel who did) yet noel very obviously did talk about these things, but people only ever spoke about what Liam said and all the bands that followed took liams lead, and if they were literate they hid it.
But yeah the public school posh boys really dont want to draw attention to how posh they are. But that wouldn't matter to post people if they were making good music and not utter shite.

it never harmed working class peoples love of the clash for instance

There's a fairly popular group who name their albums after books by dudes like William Vollmann, Chinua Achebe and Malcolm Gladwell.

And their name is...?

crut i have a great deal of faith in young people who want to hear music by people they haven't heard of being able to find it in the age of the internet without a terrible musician acting like a school teacher towards them

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), Sunday, February 12, 2012 9:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How will they hear music by bands they've never heard of? When in this process will they hear of the bands in question? Will it be entirely spontaneous, or is it likelier that someone, somewhere, along the line, might tell them about these previously-unheard of bands? And that someone might also mention some other bands?

thought this was going to be about musicians who literally have syllabi because they are academics too

oops

the most "hey look at me academic ref." title I can think of is John Maus' use of a Badiou phrase from the "15 Theses on Contemporary Art" as an album title- that's really hitting folks over the head. Fine by me.

I guess there's also a continuum from spiel to gimmick to angle to marketing message to gestalt to concept to "syllabus", though the latter sounds multiple and referential, while the others sound like variants on something more unified and singular.

I guess one example that comes readily to mind was the sleeve for The Style Council's "Our favorite shop" http://image.lyricspond.com/image/t/artist-the-style-council/album-our-favourite-shop/cd-cover.jpg
which wants you to linger and decode the little references- this is too small but I think the back of it had things like a Tom of Finland book kind of peeking out. The liner notes to Coil's "Scatology" LP are probably the best example of a genuine syllabus in which you are expected to seek out and read Lautreamont and rare gay S&M porn mags in order to "get" each song. I love that stuff, personally. Syllabi uber alles . . .

and rare gay S&M porn mags in order to "get" each song. I love that stuff, personally.

haha no surprise there!

did you follow the teachings of The Cappuccino Kid?

nope- I guess it was those ever changing moods acting up again.

or was it "ever changing pseuds"?

didn't paulo hewitt claim it wasn't him and weller denied he was behind it? so who was it?

colin wilson on the bed for the win.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Dfd0P6f9SnA/Tr2_JOOahjI/AAAAAAAAG4U/oliMnsPPdEc/s1600/wide-boy-awake-chicken-outlaw.jpg

is that guy taking a dump in the bath?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0f/Belle_And_Sebastian_-_If_You%27re_Feeling_Sinister.jpg
just yknow reading kafka here, thinking about things

http://static.boomkat.com/images/272645/333.jpg
i fall asleep reading foucault all the time. don't you?

http://www.collabor.at/schwestern_bruell/cremebruelleemons/kathleenhanna/image_data
it really makes you think

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/reverb/up-matmos2_001.jpg
when we stole this idea we at least stuck a cute naked boy into the frame

http://i44.tinypic.com/16glteo.jpg

i taw a twee!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XsFuCz4wVTk/Tk0196jLT-I/AAAAAAAABCg/aSUe-NmntPA/s1600/GrahamNash-WildTales-Front.jpg

There's a fairly popular group who name their albums after books by dudes like William Vollmann, Chinua Achebe and Malcolm Gladwell.
― President Keyes, Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And their name is...?
― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Roots. Though I've never listened to their records. Tried googling for musicians with GoodReads profiles but came up nil. That kind of appeals to me more than a curated list..

The album's iconic cover, photographed by Daniel Kramer, features Sally Grossman (wife of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman) lounging in the background. There are also artifacts scattered around the room, including LPs by The Impressions (Keep on Pushing), Robert Johnson (King of the Delta Blues Singers), Ravi Shankar (India's Master Musician), Lotte Lenya (Sings Berlin Theatre Songs by Kurt Weill) and Eric Von Schmidt (The Folk Blues of Eric Von Schmidt). Dylan had "met" Schmidt "one day in the green pastures of Harvard University" and would later mimic his album cover pose (tipping his hat) for his own Nashville Skyline four years later. A further record, Françoise Hardy's EP J'suis D'accord was on the floor near Dylan's feet but can only be seen in other shots from the same photo session.

Visible behind Grossman is the top of Dylan's head from the cover of Another Side of Bob Dylan; under her right arm is the magazine Time with President Lyndon B. Johnson on the cover of the January 1, 1965 issue. There is a harmonica resting on a table with a fallout shelter (capacity 80) sign leaning against it. Above the fireplace on the mantle directly to the left of the painting is the Lord Buckley album The Best of Lord Buckley. Next to Lord Buckley is a copy of GNAOUA, a magazine devoted to exorcism and Beat Generation poetry edited by poet Ira Cohen.

Dylan sits forward holding a cat and has an opened magazine featuring an advertisement on Jean Harlow's Life Story by the columnist Louella Parsons resting on his crossed leg. The cufflinks Dylan wore in the picture were a gift from Joan Baez, as she later referenced in her 1976 hit "Diamonds & Rust".

The black and white pamphlet lying across Time magazine with President Johnson on the cover is a publication of the Earth Society, then located on East 12th Street in the East Village. The Earth Society saw its mission as protecting earth from collisions with comets and planets. Their pamphlet interprets Immanuel Velikovsky’s notion that life on earth was so deeply affected by near-collisions of Venus with Jupiter and Mars that the impressions and interpretations of observers found their way into myths and semi-historical documents of peoples of many cultures. The pamphlet also claims that the Ark of the Covenant is a representation of a comet, which is what the white shape in the center of the pamphlet cover is intended to represent.

http://www.montevidayo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/bringing-it-all-back-home.jpg

Yes yes, we see all that stuff, but LOOK AT THE FLUFFLY KITTEN.

Morrissey was kind of the king of this back in the day, Oscar Wilde's sales in the 80s and early 90s probably reached previously unheard-of heights thanks to his championing. In metal during the tape-trading days (and in punk, too, on the sleeves of 7"s) offering a list of working bands was a good way to tell people "you may not know what bands to give a chance if you happen to see their name on a flyer" and in the absence of other information that could be completely invaluable for kids living far from active scenes - I feel like Big Black had a list that just started BANDS on one of their records, and when I met mrs. aero who grew up in a pretty remote area of Iowa (not remote for Iowa necessarily but pretty remote compared to places less than 4 hours from a major city), I realized that lists like that were a lifeline prior to the internet. They told you what to tell your one local record store, if you had one that was receptive, to put on the shelves.

I feel overwhelmed in that I wanted to say things, but the thread has gone elsewhere.

To address cult: I think that the video section of chain stores, for instance, have a "Cult Classics" that don't necessarily designate "cult" as a genre but do the following: cherry-pick the commercial or critical successes out of disparate genres; include the outliers of a genre that did poorly in the box office but have a dedicated following in home release; represent the work of so-called 'cult' figures with the few commercially available works they're able to have in stock. More examples possible, I guess.

The first thing that came to mind that is so obvious yet dumb is musicians who sample influences -- I'm kind of embarrassed it came to mind first, but Trent Reznor having clips of Midnight Express and THX-1138 probably made at least a few kids seek those out.

The syllabus idea was kind of extended by third-party fandom at some points, but I think this now lives mostly on the web. I picked up re/search's industrial culture handbook at a used bookstore a few years ago and it's such a great instance of interaction with musicians that ties multiple people, ideas, and influences together and presents them in a tidy package. Nowadays, that'd probably be a website, right?

also pretty sad that the Wu Tang Clan have only been mentioned in reference to the Panda Bear list, because oh man, do those guys have a syllabus

good call, the Wu are deep in associated mythos / lore / extended labyrinths of context and allusion; the infamous NWW list is also worth mentioning here as an actual list of titles, albeit musical

Sonic Youth were really big on this kind of references both in their music and surrounding artwork.

But perhaps more in the sense of, if an author I really liked said they listened to one piece of music on repeat while writing mh favourite novel, I would totally seek that music out?

Largehearted Boy - Book Notes

to clarify from yday i don't 'object' to things like the panda bear list - and to, say, a 13 year old fan in Winston-Salem that would be amazing! The only thing I find weird about the list is its sort of totality, and Panda Bears seeming desire to present this to the world like a badge (surely their records do this!). Their desire to tell the world about The Beatles and Bob Marley is sort of endearing (no sarcasm intended if it seems that way), but the longer a list is, the more of a manifesto it can seem, which is great if you like that kind of thing

do i think its bad that artists do these lists? no, of course not! turning people on to other music, books, ideas, politics, of course this isn't a bad thing! But do I wish more people did it? No, because I personally don't engage with music in this way (and its not how 'obvious' or 'obscure' any given list is, its that its a list) - and the orig question seemed to be asking more "do you personally like this",

HAS THAT KITTEN BEEN THERE ALL THIS TIME???

Ahem, anyway...

I dunno, back when the Echoes and bun were a thing, it was easier to count the bands that had no 'literary' references than the ones that did. Having said that, I usually got singularly put off by overly overt 'references' to books in songs. To the point where I would suspect that they were vaguely cheating at songwriting and say "Make up your own scenarios! Stop Copying!!"

I got a copy of "Anarchists in Love" possibly because I saw someone from a NWONW band reading a copy while on the bog (faked pic, usual way, you know..), and I thought it looked intersting (approved spelling there), and it was.

I still think "On the road" is boring tosh, and if you 'really really' like the lifestyle, go for it, no problem. Just don't do it vicariously, yawn...

I'm gonna have to turn pictures off on ILX because I've already shot through my data allowance for the month and it's actually costing me dialup money to continue this discussion, boo hoo hoo.

Hey, if anyone feels like expanding on the Wu Tang syllabus, go right ahead! I am not being prescriptive or rockist on this thread - it's just because my own personal knowledge is slightly better in pop and dance music than in hip-hop or rap (hence why I brought up Duran or Dopplereffekt (god I cannot spell that correctly ever) having syllabi)

I've been thinking about this more, what I like, what I don't like, and why. Sometimes it boils down to the culture as shopping list idea. Culture as something you can consume just by owning the right records or reading the right books. When I think culture is something kinda deeper than that, it's not just reading the right book, it's engaging with the ideas in that book. It's not just listening to that record, it's entering into and engaging with the worldview portrayed in that record.

(This is kind of going to tie in with something I'm about to say on the feminism thread, that it's not enough to just learn the lingo, it's about actually understanding what it means and the ideas *why* behind them. That it's not enough to learn a few words in a foreign language and think you speak it, you have to learn how to *think* in that language.)

So now I get into the entirely subjective bit, because I prefer when an artist doesn't spell it all out for you, when they make a bit of a *puzzle* for you, because I like puzzles, I like filling in the blanks myself and doing the research and finding it out for myself.

For example, compare and contrast two songs. Antonin Artaud by Bauhaus - that song is not a reading list. That song makes no fucking sense at all until you start to read about Artaud's life and his work and his death and once you've done all that research the song makes sense, but you've also learned a lot about surrealism and the theatre of cruelty and all these other ideas along the way. It was set up as a puzzle, that you can choose to untangle - or you can just go "hunh hunh, he said wank."

Then you compare that with Le Tigre singing "What's your take on Cassavetes, what's your take on Cassavetes - genius? Misogynist?" and it's like - all the work's been done for you, the conclusions drawn, the options presented. There's no puzzle, it's a straight Classic or Dud, taking sides. And that's so frustrating to me, because, obviously I think that the ideas that Le Tigre are trying to get across are amazingly good, and the world needs to be exposed to them, but treating feminism like it's a bunch of slogans that can be got across in a cheerleading chant makes me uncomfortable, and I'd rather it was presented as a puzzle to be unpicked.

Which is a shame, because I'm generally in favour of Le Tigre's politics, and recognise that Bauhaus were often incredibly clumsy and dire.

But that is me, and my prejudices as someone who is a child of the intelligentsia class (my lack of spelling ability is a rejection of my family values! - I'm someone who talked about Veblen at the dinner table as a teenager, but doesn't have a clue how to spell him) and I know for a fact that there were many, many 15 year old girls who did not have my Privilege, for whom Le Tigre's cheerleading WAS life-changing, even if I sneer at it as a shopping list. Toe-MAY-to, toe-MAH-to.

I think the difference between, say, the Panda Bear one and more traditional list is there's not much of a sense of personal curation. Seems to be mostly canon stuff, which reads to me as boring. That is to say: it is wide, but not very deep.

yeah but as crut says - whether its deep* or not depends on your perspective, many many people wouldn't know most of those artists (there's def more than a few on there I've never heard)

*actually whether its wide or not also depends on your perspective

Wait, what is Gormenghast and how is it referenced by The Cure?

it's a big fat-faced clown, and it's a big fat-faced clown

Gormenghast is a novel (well part of a surreal? fantasy? experimental? trilogy) by Mervyn Peake (sp?)

Robert Smith pretty much lifted whole paragraphs from it for definitely The Drowning Man on Faith but my housemate found another one on Pornography I think?

(Charlotte Sometimes was also based on a novel but it's more obvious and admitted, I remember the Gormenghast thing taking one of my friends by surprise when she first encountered it and making us all read it)

whether its deep* or not depends on your perspective

"deep" meaning "people with a passing familiarity of the genre may not have heard of the artist, let alone head them." With a handful of exceptions (The Free Design being a decent one), the list is all either contemporaries, artists that have been in the top 40 in the last 15ish years, or canon picks. The only real exploration venue is the house/techno interest, but some of those artists have been commissioned to remix Panda Bear!

Thanks, WCC. I love The Drowning Man, but I'd never heard about the novel(s).

Ha! On authors referencing music, Elizabeth Wurtzel just deliberately described something as "gigantic, a big, big love" in this terrible book and I did as much of a lol in my mouth as when I read the lyrics Robert Smith would lift for Drowning Man in Gormenghast so I guess influence-dropping can go both ways.

Frank Zappa's syllabus in Freak Out! was so off-putting that it gave me a dim view of artists' syllabi in general. In retrospect, I think the notes on the songs were more smug and obnoxious than the list of names.

forgot i started this thread. a little obscure, but a decent list:

what are your five favorite things/people listed on the back of the sufi choir album from 1973?

I suppose Sgt Pepper cover has a place here too.

yeah that's the big one. did all four of them actually pick all that stuff, though? i don't remember.

Not sure Ringo picked any.

Holy effing shit I've just thought of a recent one - and an artist I've listened to - and discussed on ILX loads recently as well!

Grimes writing a whole album around the universe of Dune. Maybe that's a concept album more than a syllabus but she certainly seems like she weaves references and allusions through her work in that non reading list way that I like.

But I guess she's more in the same vein as Owen P than the Bunnymen the way she does it, but still. Recent, relevant example that it may still be A Thing in some corners.

i had more of a sense of pop, arts and literary culture overlapping and intermixing in the 80s and 90s than i do today. at the time, i was reading art periodicals, the village voice, various mags and fanzines large and small, and listening to a TON of "underground" (lol) rock music. it seemed to me that there was a shared conversation going on between these things. greil marcus would talk about sonic youth in artforum, and sonic youth would put artforum-y artists on the covers of their albums. scenes were defined not just by musicians, but by filmmakers and photographers. everyone seemed to be obsessed with "sampling" (lol), and this allowed people to connect the dots between public enemy, basquiat, kathy acker and considerations of things like techno-dystopianism and the fragmentation of perspective in urban environments, or w/e. names like "harry crews" and "j.g. ballard" kept cropping up in different places. in forced exposure, byron coley not only drew a big circle around a bunch of punk, noise and artmusic bands, he made constant reference to his free jazz heroes and to writers like phil dick. the bands coley liked often namechecked the same folks (i.e., sonic youth, again).

as i saw it, certain artists and writers were instrumental in creating this intermixed arts culture: the RE/search crew, coley, kim & thurston, greil marcus, the folks at the voice and film threat, among others. there seemed to be something similar going on in providence, RI over the last decade, with a lot of cross-pollination between musicians and graphic artists, but that seemed more insular, less connected to an overarching narrative that took in other subcultures, art forms, and historical precedents.

Well, this is what we have in our pop stars today: "Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph ... I am a proud non-reader of books." --Kanye

Pic of Ital mentioned on the hipster house thread.

http://pitchfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/content/ital3.jpg

my syllabus these days pretty much the same as always. abel ferrara, christina stead, bruce willis. the usual.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JqTiKAqxR9c/Ty0wIwc9jiI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/XhTrKeatakA/s1600/skotrekerds%2B006.JPG

I've always loved this approach and definitely indulge in it myself

The Rawkus/Def Jux/backpack genre alternated between multiculturalist and sci-fi canons. Perfect for a late-90s early-00s humanities major.

Phillip K. Dick, Toni Morrison, Hawking, Cornel West come to mind first.

^ yeah, that's a v good point. was gonna mention DJ spooky as a late 90s/early 00s musician who definitely came w a syllabus, but forgot.

http://991.com/newGallery/Harry-Crews-Naked-In-Garden-H-519036.jpg

lol, yeah, for example

i'm pretty sure sonic youth got me into harry crews. before the kim/lydia album. from an interview or something. i lied to kim once when that album came out and told her i liked it. i was drunk. just trying to make small talk.

yeah, HC was definitely a "thing" in hipster rock circles before the formation of that band

Thinking about this now, with hindsight I didn't have 2 years ago, I do actually think (and it was the mention of Grimes upthread that put it in my head) that the rise of Tumblr may have had an effect on Syllabus bands, if used to its advantage?

Mark S just casually dropped a reference for something I had completely forgotten, but here it is, Ground Zero for Syllabus Rock: Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer:

http://www.listal.com/list/portrait-artist-consumer