These may not always have been my opinions.
― Tom, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
I reckon that's because, as i say, liking something ironically is not the same as liking it per se. You condescend to it, you display it with a wink, you quote it with a disclaimer, you don't actually like it. It's really a way of avoiding the whole "liking" problem. Hey - it's a substitute for liking, and one that doesn't really get anyone anywhere, but does stop bands from sounding like Simple Minds.
― Mork, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
irony was best in Augustan literature, when it tended to be directed towards something unsaid, some humourous circumstance or detail that transformed the vignette's meaning in a playful, skillful way. Irony today has become degraded by repetition.
Apart from Blur I don't know much about irony and pop music (as opposed to pop fans) so I better shut the f*ck up.
― Patrick, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
If I think of rugger players doing YMCA I think yes there is a problem. It's the knowing perversion of the camp sensibility; the intention to mock, like medical student drag.
It's the simulation of a weaker groups' sensibility ends up being, well, offensive. Generally in pop criticism the tastes that are satirised are black, gay and working class tastes and the people doing the ironic liking are the usual white male suspects...
The great tragedy is that much of the music that is liked ironically is good, not ironically good, just good.
However a grouip like Phoenix ironically liking 80s frat rock (Journey, Hall & Oates) has a whole different politics and seems far more acceptable. I think ironically liking Limp Biscuit is ok for example - their fans could do with being patronised which is what ironic liking does after all.
― Guy, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
It occurs to me that when irony is concentrated to an unusual degree, as in the 80s art work of Jeff Koons (who blankly fetishizes Jacko, Disney, Hardcore Porn, gauche cuddly toys and other "low" or "kitsch" culture) it becomes somewhat nightmarish/disturbing/threatening to the viewer, and a long way away from Albarn style smart-arseness. I wonder why this is?
I'd say because Jeff Koons isn't letting you into the joke, the way Damon does. In order to laugh along with what Koons is saying, the viewer needs to accept the mindless crap he is looking at in the context of art, a la Duchamp. When it's an explicit picture of him screwing his wife, or a nauseatingly pink cuddly pig there is an element of replusion as well as attraction.
Damon's irony is slick and emasculated in comparison, obvious targets, a joke all indie kids will get, a club everyone can be in.
That's my tuppence worth
― Pete Dyson, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Irony to me has always been about marking a distance between yourself and the thing you're considering or citing. That distance can protect you from all sorts of poisons in the original material. Irony empowers the consumer by allowing him to consume cultural products without swallowing the often shoddy and exploitative meanings encoded in them. It allows the consumer to create new meanings, to wrest the original away from its narrow demographic, to salvage valuable little bits and throw the rest away.
Irony has a lot in common with DJing and sampling, and Brecht's Alienation Techique was a kind and cunning anticipation of its importance in our times. Here was an artist saying 'Think about my work in your own way, take from it what you like, don't get too involved.'
On the question of the difference between Koons and Albarn's strains of irony, I agree with the last two points here. There's affectionate irony, or embarrassed irony, which are very English and involve marking the air with invisible quote marks as a kind of insurance, just in case your words offend anyone. Albarn's irony is close to that. Then there's the heavy duty irony of Koons and Barney, which is all about pushing familiar memes into realms of extra-terrestrial strangeness.
That kind of irony is disorienting and challenging in the same way as walking around Tokyo for the first time is for a Westerner. Everything's familiar, but it all fits together in a new way. That's a really wonderful feeling which freshens our lives and releases us from stereotypes, rather than simply playing with them, as Albarn does.
― Momus, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
What I do object to, like Tom, is the idea that if you like a record that's in the Top 20 you are inherently liking it in a cheesy, kitschy sense (the phenomenon of students whose music collections barely extend beyond the Stone Roses / Coldplay having Kylie / Britney posters, etc.). I suppose there is a sense of taking chartpop away from the associations of tacky Ritzy clubs, TOTP roadshows, Saturday afternoons being intimidated by the townies in Our Price, etc., and in that sense it's far, far closer to the Jeff Koons thing and your comments about "consuming cultural products without swallowing the often shoddy and exploitative meanings in them" than it is to that NME / student union thing. However I would endorse entirely Tom's statement at the end of the "Ms. Jackson" piece, which is quite heart-on-the-sleeve for him, but exactly how I feel when I hear that song (and "Say My Name", and "Survivor").
*If you visit Maconie's house, he will look baffled and disturbed if you show him a copy of the NME where he gave 9 to "Don't Stop The Night", mutter that he doesn't know what he was thinking, and then put on a 7" of Brotherhood of Man's "Angelo". Fact.
― Robin Carmody, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― sundar subramanian, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
I'm young, and people my age absolutely do not understand why I like the music I like. Thus, they assume it's ironic that I like Prince. It all comes from the human nature "fear what you don't understand" deal. "That's the queer guy who showed his ass on MTV. He's 80's. How could you listen to him?"
Irony, they say, is for the narrow. I love it.
― Keiko, Thursday, 12 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Momus, Friday, 13 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
If irony is going to be, as Rorty says, recognition of the contingency of one's values, and the ironist is someone who has radical and ongoing doubts about the final descriptions she uses ... then, then, i'm guessing that most of us non-Christian non-Platonists are ironists "pretty far down," or "as far down as you feel like going"!
Once you realize how easy it is to go from saying "this is the best band in the universe" to "this band is crap" to "this is a band who makes music", you kinda get the feeling that perhaps there wasn't so much inherent truth in those pronouncements you kept making.
And while you used to say that Radiohead and Super Furry Animals penetrated to the core nature of, respectively, modern life's technological alienation and its absurdity, now you look at EVERY other band out there as capable of creating an equally interesting perspective on WHATEVER.
Because, after all, my god is love.
― Nick Bramble, Saturday, 14 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
My problem with this is that, although my values and opinions may be contingent sociologically, they're not contingent to *me*, so I don't see why I should adopt this self-mocking tone, or claim that all opinions are futile. Does Rorty talk about the second type of irony anywhere, irony as provocative estrangement and recontextualisation? That is, creative, not defensive, irony?
― Momus, Saturday, 14 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Josh, Saturday, 14 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Nick, Saturday, 14 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Needn't be ironic, needn't be a lie, might not be objective — this technology doesn't help clear that up.
― mark s, Saturday, 14 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
Conclusion: irony is a scary hall of mirrors which pretty soon sends us all screaming back to love.
I don't know, irony seems to be kind of a given, and we don't perceive it in love only because we're ignoring it for a few moments. Not that I don't ignore it.
― Geordie Racer, Tuesday, 17 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
I think there's a great danger in completely rejecting irony, because to put it clumsily, you throw out the twin babies, humour and free expression along with the bathwater. True, Damon Albarn is an utterly smug, tiresome bastard, but I worry about the number of groups / commentators who are vocally anti-irony and concerned with "keeping it real", or constructing "a new classicism" .. what next, mein freunde, torchlit parades? Irony is like a swinging door, we need it to freshen our lives, and senses of humour, but we also need moments of "real feeling" (even if only predicated on a misrecognisation of "self", or a naive misrecognition of the ideology we're buying into). We shouldn't demonise either thing.
Rant over
― Pete, Tuesday, 17 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― sundar subramanian, Tuesday, 17 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Robin Carmody, Tuesday, 17 April 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
I had something to say on one of Britain's greatest fallacies - "Americans lack a sense of irony" but as we all know it's just an unkind generalisation...intellectual superiority....etc... Right?
― K-reg, Monday, 21 May 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
But in the margins of US culture and the avant garde, irony has the strength of paint stripper and could vaporise our knobbly limey knees in five seconds flat.
How related is irony to cynicism? Momus sees it as an enabler of freedom. Mork sees it as cynicism incarnate. America is probably more cynical than Britain. Now that was a staggeringly crude generalisation. Note my ironic disclaimer.
― "Pete", Monday, 21 May 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link
― Jim Robinson (Original Miscreant), Monday, 1 March 2004 00:24 (twenty years ago) link
1) Making art 'ironically' or with 'irony'.2) Liking art 'ironically'
I'm sure we're agreed that irony in the first sense is pretty essential, so how's about we look at the second meaning?
― Jim Robinson (Original Miscreant), Monday, 1 March 2004 00:27 (twenty years ago) link
But I think 'irony' opens up so much and you can like things ironically and 'properly' at the same time - in fact I'd argue it's impossible not to.
But more than this - and it's taken years to realise it - but I'm not ashamed of liking things 'ironically', in the pure, 'huh, funny, kitsch' way. I mean, why should I be?
― Jim Robinson (Original Miscreant), Monday, 1 March 2004 00:32 (twenty years ago) link
― Francis Watlington (Francis Watlington), Monday, 1 March 2004 00:55 (twenty years ago) link