it's a rainy day, ironic indie music fan girl

you get it "WRONG": you start new bands incorporating these sounds/styles. you write articles in the Popular Music Press. you allow people IN.

2 different things going on, I think:

- when the music in question was part of a subcultural scene, especially a credible or important but commercially underappreciated scene, then the music for the people who liked it then may have been so bound up in the context of the scene that it's difficult to accept it can be liked on its own, or in different ways or shorn of baggage. So new listeners with no interest in the scene get thought of as dilettantes or Johnny- (often Jane-, actually) Come-Latelies.

- when the music in question wasn't part of a subcultural scene and then has a new scene constructed around it, eg the lounge/exotica thing, it can be hard for outsiders to believe that the music has the energy or quality required to bind a scene together, particularly as it didn't 'first time around'. Mix this with the fact that you do relate to old music in a different, neccessarily detached (though not necc. insincere) way from new music and you get the suspicion of 'irony'.

you get it "WRONG": you start a band taking the most "obv" stylistic traits of a given sound/scene (motorik drumming, silt-on-the-sea-floor synths, "la la la" vocalese).

you get it "RIGHT": you start a band that has only the most tangential connection a given sound/scene except in a sort of process-sense. ("fushitsusha are the TRUE heirs of krautrock!")

b-but Jess, this isn't supposed to be an ironic thread? ;)

I'll stop emoticoning! I swear I got the idea from Ned Raggett! I never did it before he started winking at me all the time.

well I've never thought the wire as too academic (maybe to someone who reads NME and a lot of the reviews are just poor but academic: no). They do write abt music which you can't get at yr local HMV: so what?

as to the question: I don't like music ironically. I do it sometimes with pop over here and try to make jokes in the popist threads but I don't like things ironically.

right = collective rediscovery of moments of musical epiphany (I find it wonderful that lots of people across the globe are all interested in exploring the same period/genre of music)
wrong = wanting to be cool in an ego gratifying "look I made it to #3 on the NME-who's-cool chart!" sort of way (which is why I wish garage rock would die already)

did you go to niagara falls? no, CN tower? no, What did you do? I watched gigs. Oh yeah, like what? some rock gigs, some free jazz.

''What? that's like the worst kind of jazz, you can't possibly like it.''

I wanted to explain but I just laughed it off and I did have an appointment to go to so I kept quiet.

What josh started with reminded me of this.

hey I like journey ac/dc and it is 'out of character' but I like what I've heard and yes. I do like some of bryan adams' singles too. I like x and y for diff reasons becauz x and y are diff.

I think the way irony got lumped in the original question has thrown me sideways so i do agree with that bit you quotes (so i may like things 'ironically' but it could be unconcious. Because when i think abt it nowdays I don't like things in that way).

Tom, I think I've seen you say similar things before. I don't agree that I relate to old music in a "necessarily detached. . . way." Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but I don't find that I listen to old music with any more emotional detachment than I experience when I listen to newer music. Some of the emotional high-points of this past weekend for me were listening (yet again) to some Oum Kalthoum from the 1950's and Fairouz and Sun Ra from the 1960's.

alternatively, i'm wondering if you could make the case that the stylistic elements only reappear as mass culture when the 'fundamentals' have been digested by society after the 10/20 years it's taken for the meaning-makers to cut them into bite-size chunks and feed them back to us.. or, accepting the mark s non-r*kcist 'diffusion of ideas' thing, these ideas are constantly present, we revive them to meet the demands of new contexts..

The smirking indie kid who drinks martinis and listens to Dionne Warwick=WRONG

Jim O'Rourke being wowed by the arranging prowess of Bacharach & David=RIGHT

If loving Luther Ingram is wrong, I don't want to be right.

BTW in case I wasn't clear - my reasons for liking the idea of liking 'Wire' music were bad ones. But they led me to get into some good stuff as well as make some very duff purchases.

Give into the passion.

I heard "Living on a Prayer" on the radio and thought, "This is an a completely amazing song and I am in awe of it."

See, on this subject I will refuse to budge. Bon Jovi could get bloodily killed in an accident tomorrow and all I'll want to know is if they all suffered mightily before death. Which is hyperbolic, of course, but anyway.

Bullshitty cop-out answer: getting it "right" probably means just appreciating the music on your own terms, process and meaning behind the affinity be damned. It's the feeling attached to the music outside of the conjecture and theorizing and egos. If you're talking about the right in terms of the majority of people comprising the fanbase of said type of music, then you're talking about peer pressure and finding a slanted middle ground where you capitulate more to the fans' needs and wants more than your own (which is the sort of stuff most of, if not all of, you seem to be getting at).

That stuff about "your feelings outside of other people's influence" makes me think of the r0ckist / nu-ILM schism that formed back in the day when a certain handful of righteous-minded folk stormed the stage and denounced ILM for thinking too much and not just giving into emotion and feeling the music (and forgive me if I'm simplifying the problem too much). To a point, I can see that being a valid arguement EXCEPT that it's just swapping old boss for same boss while changing the color of the cubicle walls. In other words, it's still wrong.

However, I'm of a mind that thinks of musical appreciation / enjoyment more in terms of the individual rather than in a communal sense - that perception plays into what's being discussed here. (Or does it?)

I don't understand this. How is "tokenism" inescapable if its possible to dig into an obscure genre? That's the opposite of tokenism.