Sasha Frere-Jones I Kiss You

JT: "There's always so much emphasis on how much control artists have. Even with these new artists who've come up, like Avril Lavigne--I don't want to seem like I'm talking about people, but from what I've seen, it's like, "Well, is this real?" There's always that question. But all I can do is just do what I do, and people can judge it any way that they want.

It was so funny to me because on one hand, when I read the reviews of "Justified," they were like, "Wow, the Neptunes have never sounded like this. Timbaland has never sounded like this." Then, when the actual statements come forward when they want to review what Justin Timberlake's record was about, it's, "Well, he had the Neptunes and he had Timbaland pulling all the strings." Aren't these the same people who just said that these producers never sounded this good, or they never sounded like this before? I went through this whole thing of, like, "Well, didn't I have something to do with that? Doesn't me contributing the lyrics and the melodies have something to do with that?"

Finally, I was just like, "Screw it! People can say whatever they want to say." I don't make these records for the critics. I make them for people who want to listen to them, and I make them for myself."

* Five of Hornby's TNY columns, incidentally, are being republished in the forthcoming paperback edition of Songbook--not the Radiohead one, interestingly, but the one on the Billboard top ten. phear!

Kim OTM. it was much more than irritating and this is like shooting fish in a barrel so I don't see the big deal here.

I sorta wish this line (or rather sentiment) wasn't buried so deeply. My own problem with the article is that while I see the battleground SFJ is working on and with, meaning he has to turn on the hyperbole, he ends up creating two particular cartoons -- boring 'chin-strokers' and unabashed but also apparently uncritical pop-lurvers, both of whom are apparently locked down into their own particular canons (in some cases dependent on age) and not stepping out from them. Not very nuanced, and the effect of the extended Madonna/Timberlake comparison -- or in contrast, the more subtle Beatles/Radiohead one -- is to imply (not directly claim but still imply) that to lurve one is to lurve the other. For all that there's a period of her career I'm not thrilled by, Madonna remains pretty great for me -- my feelings on Timberlake are clear enough at this point. Ultimately I'd think, 'great general point, pity about the specific example.'

Isn't the point that Justified shouldn't need defending (on whatever bases, for whatever reasons) but rather celebrating because it's a fucking good record?

On another point, how much suspicion is there of people like Madonna and Timberlake because they seem so in control (of their careers and themselves) that we (I'm not sure who this we is) become jealous and almost fearful because we don't feel as in control of our lives? And why doesn't Bowie suffer from the same syndrome?

Also, how much has the idea of figureheads got in opposition to the idea of the creative auteur? ie; Justin or whoever is confident enough to push themselves forward in order to present their music but the twin ideas of the svengali and the figurehead mean we become automatically suspicious, because like body + soul we like to think fo the two as seperate when really this division is totaly arbitrary, and possibly false anyway?

I'm totally distracted by Whistle Down The Wind so I'm sorry if this is rubbery.

No offense, but this sounds like exactly what too many people have said about the Beatles and all le standards du rockism. No arguing, no defending, no discourse -- and while the whole point of initial musical engagement IS to be so overwhelmed one way or another, I agree, eventually you end up dealing with people who might not feel the same way as you, after all.

"This is great! Don't let's get into it, it's so wonderful!"
"But I think..."
"No, don't. You can't and shouldn't, it's great! Who could disagree?"
"Well, but I..."
"You just hate rock/pop/dance/fun/life, don't you?"
"No I don't, jeez!"

Etc. etc.

As a primer on the issue, SFJ seems pretty OTM to me. I just think the issue is a big mislead.

He's not writing about music. He's writing about music criticism. He's pointing out a problem with music criticism, and SO AM I.

You seemed to recognize the difference upthread.

What I am saying is that writing about music should probably be at least in part about music. I have ceased caring about critical in-fights that focus more on critics than music. In fact, I suggest that ILM be renamed to "I Love Hating on Other People Who Write About Music," and then I can just stop fucking reading it.

x-post, I'm guessing.

?!?!

a) I'm suspicious of reading politics into aesthetics in general. It's not that I think art is totally apolitical, but I think it can rarely if ever be boiled down to a neat political position.

b) Nevertheless, if we were to read a political position into, say, 80s UK indie, I personally am not very convinced of the effectiveness of that political position, because (at least as we have been discussing it) it defined itself in reaction to a nexus of aesthetics and politics that I don't see as intrinsically connected, or universally evil. (Perhaps this makes me yuppie scum.)

Put it this way: if the real meaning of Morrissey was as a symbol of anti-Thatcherism (which, while not being the most knowledgeable person about the Smiths, I have real doubts about--his xenophobia, for instance, would seem to align rather neatly with Thatcherite values), then I think he would have done much better to sing about privatisation rather than not getting laid. And if he'd sung about privatisation in some kind of sexy, life-affirming fashion, maybe I would have been into the Smiths ;o)

OK: (a) in those days (when I was indie) we really believed that taking that particular aesthetic stand was a political position. Not a neat political position but an oppositional one. It's not that you could boil the art down to that position (I can't see why you'd want to) but that a particular attitutde towards the dominant culture was tied up with that aesthetic approach. At least, we felt it was.

(b) It felt to us at the time (and when I say us I can really only speak for me and my paltry handful of mates) that a lot of the overground pop of the 80s was a kind of cultural expression of Thatcherism and that one of the ways of opposing Thatcherism was to oppose its aesthetics. This still makes a degree of sense to me now, because remember it doesn't exclude more overtly political action.

(c) Morissey singing about privatisation = worst mental image of the day by miles and I think pop can be potent symbolically where in terms of detailed economic or political arguments it is not especially useful. Oppositional pop is always contradictory at its heart but that doesn't mean the opposition is always pointless.

The Smiths were ROCK anyway.

Our publisher was interested in highlighting things like Gary Glitter's childporn bust, but honestly the vast majority of the book is just music history - trying to track down who actually played and sang on the records. Also interested in the weirdness that happens when rock music for children is sold as cartoon pop right at the height of the counterculture.

Rockism (as I understand it): presumes the music is better because it is more authentic and reflects personal/poetic values. That the music created by autonomous rock bands (i.e., bands which write their own material and play it on their records) is superior for all the auteurist reasons. Rockism also presumes that pop music which is created and marketed primarily as product-to-be-sold is inferior, pap, or merely manipulative.

The fundamental problems I have with Rockism: obscures the fact that rock music is marketed just as thoroughly as pop (i.e., it doesn't exist free of market pressures); autonomous production guarantees nothing about quality (cf., Kansas); conveniently overlooks the huge strain of pop production methods within canonical rock masterpieces; has a puritanical bias against music-as-pleasure; it presumes a kind of folkie (I think it's more of a folk than jazz bias, but they're similar in their resentment of commercial success) purity which is historically false (thinking mostly of Nick Tosches book about Country which reveals that much of folk music was and always has been influenced by the pop music of its time).

But is that what "pop" is now, anyway? Is Justin Timberlake an expression of Bushism? Hardly.

They did?

that was a very mediocre post.

Sure. The folkies hated pop (which at that time included rock) because it wasn't folk. The rockists hate pop because it isn't rock.

I realise that this has moved on a bit to the "rockism and popism - a false dychotomy?" teritorry, but I'm still baffled to the growing use of term "pop-ism" as it still doesn't have a fixed meaning at all!

As Mitch said on some other thread, rockism is amazingly widespread (anyone who thinks it's only a property of rockcrits and babyboomer casualties should go out more)... and it's easy to identify: "that's not real music played on real instruments", "tell me who will listen to this disposable shit in ten years time" etc etc y'all know the deal. Rockism ain't no make-believe meme, it's REAL and deeply rooted. (Even often among casual pop fans, ie "I like this Beyonce single, but it just can't be compared to Sting, a really serious and deep artist who will stand the test of time")

On the other hand, can't see anyone agreeing on what the proposed term "pop-ism" would actually mean. As Mark S pointed out, some seem to use it as a synonim for pro-pop, which renders it useless. From all this debate, I can't see it meaning anything other than a set of critical tools used to battle rockism (which != an ideology in itself), and the accusations that it's just rockism in reverse don't make sense. The problems with rockist isn't that they think rock is superior (it's their prerogative after all), but bringing pop to court and demolish it using unfair criteria and a load of biases and prejudices. Aside form occasional kneejerk comment and popjustice.com, I don't see these alleged "pop-ists" doing the same to rock.

(BTW, anyone see further Reynolds' ripostes to this thing on Blissblog? More strawmen action, but also some rather interesting point too. I'll just note concerning - "although to be more charitable there's perhaps also a genuine yearning to leave behind the game of hip altogether" - FUCK YES! I don't even know what "hip" means anymore - of people I know who are closest to what'd be considered "hipsters", half of them love White Stripes and half of 'em hate their guts, me included. And that thing about Paul Morley, Tight Fit and Led Zep mentioned in a few blogs almost simultaneously - that it caused such a furore once seems silly from my perspective! Which I'd say is a sign of progress...)

Sounds pretty much like the rockist critique of the soulless pop machine to me.

It may be a relatively rare phenomenon, but as you acknowledged, it does exist in places.

nate- doesn't pop include rock now?

You want my opinion? It's a matter of usage. In a sense, you could say that all rock is a form of pop. You could also argue that some rock is pop and some isn't.

Sounds pretty much like the rockist critique of the soulless pop machine to me.

I don't know about that. I think the folkies really hated Dylan going rock because they knew that it meant he was abandoning their little club. I don't think they were against the idea of being popular or selling records - a lot of those folk records did very well during the folk craze in the 60s. To them, going pop meant abandoning a liberal humanist cause that they felt themselves to be part of. There's not the same sense of being part of a cause in rockist circles today.

Pete Seeger attacked the power generator with an ax when Dylan played Newport. People in the audience called him a sell-out. Sure, folkies felt like Dylan was betraying them personally, but more importantly they also felt like he was betraying their values.

I think that the recording industry was pretty far down on the list of folkie bugbears - coming after such items as racial injustice, war, the political establishment, etc. I don't think the folkies were really opposed to pop so much as they looked down on it for being politically unaware. Rockism today has pretty much lost the political element. Calling the folkie ideal of purism "rockism" is ahistorical and anachronistic.

"Rockism" is defined by its fear of pop much more than its privileging of the putative values of the genre it's connected to at any given time. Thus the difference between folk and rock is irrelevant, b/c the unity is provided through fear of Dylan, Britney etc. Just as folkists and rockists listened to different music, your popists were at one stage defending Dylan but now Britney. It is this relationship of fear and defence which comprises the rockist/popist (or, rather, rockist/anti-rockist divide).

So yeah, to that extent "rockist" is a mislabel (could easily be folkist or jazzist etc.) but "popist" is even more inacurrate b/c it is not just chart-pop that needs to be defended against rockism. Eg. what about dance music? It's easy to talk about a rockist/anti-rockist tussle in dance but v. difficult to talk about a rockist/popist tussle, for example are people who like Chemical Bros but no other dance music rockists or popists in re dance music?

Also I could easily say: "If anything, I would say that today's rockists have more similarities to the folkies than the popists do. There is a similar sense of being part of a cause, of suffering injustice, of being anti-capitalist, and of embracing "the people" (b/c the question for rockists, folkists and popists would have to be "which people?" And "which cause"? "which injustice"?)

The book I am reading at the moment, about ABBA, is militantly pro-pop in quite an obnoxious way but is rockist at the same time.

SR in his blog has a good point about stripping away external reasons to like/dislike music - the pro-pop agenda can easily end up in an "I like it because I like it" black hole. I think "what happens to music writing when it goes there?" is an interesting question though.

fair enough: so do you still feel that it was the right thing to do or that you had no choice and had to do it?

I suppose you could take that to an extreme by attending company week (yes, improv events) (maybe...).

C'mon, Tom, you've gotta go back and read about Mike Batt living in a Wombles suit for a week before he wrote wombling tunes. (Wombles = UK Banana Splits, except with eco-bent and Green England hobbittyness.)

sashay bare cajones, amirite??

huh? Explain por favor.

aww never mind.

sfj is sort of a dunderhead for rap.

he needs to stop pretending hyphy doesn't exist

he needs to stop pretending hyphy doesn't exist

lol

even as probably the biggest hyphy booster on ilm, LOL WAHT?

classic wrinklepaws imo

oh, right. I didn't take note of the poster.

Is anyone gonna send SFJ a question at his New Yorker blog?

February 3
Do you have anything you’d like to ask me? About Beyoncé? About anything at all? Please do.

Posted by Sasha Frere-Jones
In
Sasha Frere-Jones

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones/

Dear Sasha Frere-Jones, who is the best black ever?

Ha.