TS: Dilettantism vs. Fanaticism ... Or can ILM have a good discussion?

But I also like having a special relationship to a particular music. Because I dance to salsa, I sometimes feel a more intimate connection to it than to most other music. And I find it has to make up a certain percentage of my listening, or I start to lose some of that connection. I don't really want it to be just another type of music I listen: oh, I listen to world music, a little salsa, a little Fela Kuti, a little Oum Kalthoum. I want to claim some sort of connection to salsa (and to Arabic music) that has some depth to it, because at times I've felt that.

The trick must be to find a way to shift gears between different types of listening.

I choose instead the Bucky Fuller juxtaposition of:

"Specialism" vs. "Comprehensivism".

So there you go.

i'm a dilettante and i don't care. i like too many different kinds of music to be anything else. as much as i love garage rap (and i do...it's the only genre i'm particularly passionate about right now), i'm also just as interested in things that (to me) are super entertaining one-offs (like the lightning bolt album. to someone deeply invested in this nu-pigfucker/noise/hardcore underground the lb album is as much of "scenius" rhizome as any of simon's beloved garage anti-auteurs. it's just that by and large i don't care about the rest of the bands in this scene.) i think that's one of the main problems with simon's basic argument re. "devotion": his tunnel vision comes from having his head wrecked by uk rave culture and the fanatical devotion he saw it inspire in others and himself. but he's only ever partially honest about this. being "devoted" in his eyes means being devoted to the uk rave continuum (whether he talks up marc acardipane or timbaland or whomever), and the underlying pointed finger that taints his argument is that if YOU aren't down with THIS scene, then you're WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. there's a bit of a blinder there that prevents him - i think - from seeing that many people view nu-pigfuck or neo-garage rock or microhouse or whatever as the bleeding edge to be followed to the (almost) exclusion of all else. it doesn't devalue his argument (personally i think he's right re. ukg, but that's just me) but it does color it funny a bit.

"A NAUGHTY BIT OF CRAP

“We’re all dilletantes now.” – Tom Ewing, ‘Download This’.

"She's like [xXx] but without all the bad qualities." - Indie fan, about dilletante xXx.

I think what I like about garage is its refusal to let me not be a dilettante. I’ve been extremely wary to the point of inaction about even starting listening to garage because there is so much of it and I don’t have any idea of where to enter and I’d have no chance of catching up, keeping up. Then I realised that this was me approaching it from a rock mindset (I hesitate to use the word “rockist” because I see it increasingly used and I’m not exactly sure what it means; some form of conservatism, completism, and centralism, I think) which means that I approached it wanting my appreciation of and collection of to be complete, my appreciation of and collection of to have a center to revolve around (a canon?) and a comprehensiveness that I don’t associate with garage 'thinking'.

I suppose such a shift in mindsets was occasioned by the emergence of dance (note: a genre of dance is Album Dance) but that has completely passed me by as of yet. Coming from indie leanings one of the main values it covets is integrity: integrity of soul / spirit / attitude, integrity of your worldview and integrity of your collection (to mean purity and comprehensivity). So what’s so enthralling about garage (and I have Matthew Ingram to thank for ‘getting me started’) is that it forces me to be a dilettante: it is built into the very music. The way it is distributed, the white-label culture, its London-centricity, the keeping up with ‘the pirates’, everything, means that ‘integrity’ collapses as a tenable value. And it’s exciting.

(Side note: you might ask why hasn’t pop-centrism forced such a shift to dilettantism. Well in a way it has in that it’s meant I have dabbled a lot more but there is no necessity [physical or otherwise] built in.)"

For now, I would say this -- I think there's room for other approaches than the binary being outlined. As I've muttered more than once in recent threads and posts and all, I seem to be moving towards a curious stage of being increasingly disconnected from any sort of desire to be In the Thick of Things, Musically. I don't see this as either being a dilettante on the one hand (I am not coasting through every last recommendation immediately or scrounging what is out there to find what is there -- my odd little notes on the "I Love You" thread about me not yet listening to the song even though I actually have the mp3 on my computer and have done for a couple of months is perversely symptomatic of something, even if only forgetfulness) or being a fanatic on the other (there seems to be a vision of me that insists all I'm doing is listening to MBV with healthy doses of the Cure and Smashing Pumpkins -- I was tickled if surprised by Jess's surprise over the fact I had heard the More Fire Crew album, f'r instance). The binary dialectic may be Simon R.'s point, to set up extremes for the rhetoric, but it disallows a position like mine where I'm either content with maybe something familiar, maybe something new, but often *nothing at all* -- a desire for silence which initially surprised and scared me a bit but now seems quite natural.

That said, my only other comment right now is on this line:

The open-to-everything stance flattens the landscape-- turning a cultural battleground into a harvest festival.

I guess I don't see this as a bad thing at all. The point he's making about belief in *something* -- even if it's to chase down the perfect sound -- is excellent. But is the battleground metaphor accurate in all senses when it comes to how one defines oneself? If an artist creates and a listener listens (of course artists are listeners too), why does the listener also have to fight like an artist might? A ridiculous oversimplification of the situation described on my part, I know, but seems to me that if the world is there to be enjoyed -- a globalization that doesn't involve ecological disruption or political instability or oppression -- then allow for this small pleasure in this mess that is 2003.

I mentioned this a few days back on a revived Moby thread but I understand exactly what Aaron means about feeling early musical fanaticism to be naive. I get that feeling sometimes reading old rockcrit. Just picked up the Clinton Heylin Da Capo Book of Rock Writing, reissued by Da Capo in paperback so it's no longer the Penguin book, for like $6 off the remainder table at St. Mark's Books, and boy if I thought that book's scorched-earth rock-or-nothing tone was naive before it seems almost impossibly dumb now. That said, I do think there's an inherent frustration involved with rewriting the rulebook. One thing that being a critic has involved for me is learning what my own responses mean--when they're a momentary thrill or something with a little more staying power (and there's nothing wrong with wanting this at all), and even more to the point when the former is more desirable than the latter, which is plenty of the time, and more to the point than that, when the former becomes the latter.

I am now out to attempt to find the new Mover CD!

I do allow myself the possibility that I'll be listening to completely diff types of music next year. but i do like to concentrate.

I could never concentrate on one thing for ever but just for a while. I have a colleague from drone on that kinda does this. he buys loads of recs from a 'genre' and once he is ready to move on he does and he will look at the best recs and keep these and sell the remainder.

so he's gone from indie to jap noise to bossa nova.

It's the old disillusionment syndrome. No scene can sustain you for that long--it all turns into sad old rockers with their Eddie Cochran records eventually. Plus a dilettante is someone who makes art but isn't serious about it, right? A dabbler? Anyone who is serious about listening to music is going to want to listen to everything, since that's the only way to gain perspective and to be analytical about it. Musicians sometimes listen to a lot of different things but my experience with most rock/pop musicians is the opposite--they don't read, first of all, so they miss out on that aspect of the history of the "art," and they tend to have this romantic notion that analyzing their "art" kills it, which I think is true for certain people, like Brian Wilson, who once he started thinking about what he was doing became a parody of himself (I love everything he's done, almost, so I think his innate talent carried him through), but untrue for people who lack that basic, ineffable talent. There is a knack that some people have for doing what appears to be a simple thing and which is impossible for others to get. But most musicians would benefit from being more analytical, which mainly means "does it sound good" or "do these things work together" and figuring out how you did it--making it repeatable. All of which is the very opposite of being a dilettante. And if you want to write about music it helps to know and like everything. The problem that jess above talks about is the problem of having to choose a scene for reasons having to do with music on the one hand and how you dress, etc., on the other, which again is the very opposite of being a dilettante since being part of a scene with the right attitude and the right clothes is very hard work--unless you're Brian Wilson and you create a scene through sheer talent. Being fanatical about a scene or a style is really, in the larger view, being a dilettante since you become so narrow in your interests you lose perspective. Being a professional at anything entails getting to know everything you can conceivably learn about what you're doing and this includes local lore as well as the bigger picture. So I see what Reynolds is trying to say, I guess, but it just seems silly to me to put it into these terms. Moving around freely in your field is not being a dilettante, that's being an informed person who realizes that all professions are limited and that being a complete person is a lot more important than adhering to some silly-assed idea of the right "scene." Unless you're a fucking genius, of course, then all rules go out the window.

GO FOR SERIALISM!!!!! ;-)

I think there may be something deeper to what Simon is saying in that they're are different ways of thinking. Completely separate. Madness and reason. And thus maybe this point doesn't really hold for the dilettante. (Or the geezer, as I understand what they're saying over there on ILe). Doesn't hold because it's laying the critical matrix of the Fanatic over that of the Dilettante. (I mean I'm still not sure that that is the proper dichotomy, I prefer my Dilettantism/Integrity divide but.)

The negation of the negation for me isn't a return to "this is the only music that matters" but a recognition of the sociality of music and its collective ability to matter on a level beyond the individual, but ultimately only manifest in the individual act of listening.

music-crit like music can only be "resolved" beyond its boundaries.

I need to stop reading motherfucking hegel.

OK, to put it another way: George Jones > Momus

i think matos' response is OTM, but it also depends on the idea of being a critic, because it's useful for a critic to have very open ears. the more music they are aware of, the more vocabulary they have to draw on when they go to write about it. a critic who only knows one genre is often not a very interesting or useful critic, because they're too invested in the minutiae of a genre to communicate what's great about a record in a larger sense (see jazz critics since *forever*).

I do find something really great and meaningful about genres with deep shared histories -- genres that have that evangelistic quality Reynolds loved about hardcore and jungle, that near-political sense of "this is where it is at right now." But the paradox is that being able to say that in any actually valid way necessarily involves dilettantism -- not on the level of the album, the level of constantly taking stock of good/bad releases in each genre, but on the level of taking a full view of the field and still throwing one's lot in with a given sector of it as The One that Matters. (This is where the binary starts to dissolve.)

D to me means a flitting between several different things frenetically. Not necessarily being active at all times but always looking outwith what you have in front of you. Fanaticism can be built into this. So they're definitely not mutually exclusive. Whereas 'integrity' implies a comprehensiveness, an austerity of purpose perhaps (but I don't want to propose a false binary of serious = comprehensive, fun = dilletante). It has a purpose: to maintain integrity. Whereas, dilletantism perhaps doesn't have an end. It's an endless means. I may just be misunderstanding.

I think that's a great point, Amateurist. Talking to "civilians" reminds me of this, as it should most of the specialists around here.

I should've put "dilettante" and "fanatic" in quotation marks up at the start of this thread... they definitely are fairly arbitrary terms Reynolds is setting up, which was a bit of my point but I wasn't consistent.

(this is a great discussion btw... I'm proud... keep it up... etc.)

Like when I start to examine plenty of "areas" of music enuf I find they inevitably have far less of an organizing principle than I started off thinking. Enter hegel -- how to resolve the organizing principle of genre as simultaneously real (socially) and not real (er, genetically I guess)?

However, to make this observation in this fashion, critics like Neil Rosenberg and Bob Cantwell had to be schooled in a wider variety of music--had to be open do it--than Bill Monroe ever was. On the other hand, Rosenberg and Cantwell fall somewhere closer to "specialist" than "dilettante" on the continuum, and that's what allows them to place Bill Monroe's music in the context of the other kinds of country music that was being made in the 1940s.

So I guess the terms of this "debate" shift greatly if you see yourself as a listener or an artist.

i agree with jess and matos, basically: i read reynolds for his taste, which i usually agree with/am thankful for (without him putting so much effort into chronicling the quote-unquote hardcore continuuum, how many tunes would we never have known about), but find the ideology behind it (the-cutting-edge-is-the-only-thing-that-matters-social-scenes/movements-are-all) pretty tiresome at this point, after so many years of hearing it over and over again.

at the same time, i always take the "stuff really does mean something/there is truth!/there are values" line against tom in the canon arguments, so i can't really get down with the language games position entirely.... tho i am definitely a dilettante, not a warrior at this point in life... which leaves me somewhere in the middle, not sure where exactly...

this is important and true. in the last 6 months or thereabouts my active engagement with dance stuff has been somewhat half-hearted but the throngs of vibe-feelers that joined me in going nuts to "la la land" last december didn't have to know that and, at the time, neither did i.

Huh?

Anyway, my experience of getting into music in a way that would lead me to end up at a place like this came precisely as a result of suddenly being exposed to several unknown and intriguing musical worlds all at once (punk/post-punk, etc., reggae, avant-garde/experimental, progressive, electronic music--as the term was used in the early 80's, free jazz, various traditional types of international music) by way of one particular college radio station.

(I don't really belong here ayway since I'm not obsessive enough about what's happening this very moment in music.)

Are you saying I am Robert Christgau without knowing it?)

Great post, Nipper. Elegant use of analogies, graceful.

Everyone be nice to our guest. Simon R: welcome aboard.

Slsk?

Tom E still hasn't addressed his claims about technology/modes of listening. Take your time.

Naturellement. I can redeliver the radical subjectivist rant again if desired.

My induction into liking music was the Smiths, obviously. But they couldn't be a Grand Passion cos I discovered they'd broken up about a month before I got into them. Also a few months later I heard Public Enemy and they seemed to go against everything I'd just 'learned' from Moz & co. at the same time as being against everything I'd rejected via Moz, too. So maybe it's that cognitive dissonance - two contradictory things going off at once - that I got addicted to.

>Huh?

whether or not you use the first person singular, a piece of critical writing is really just an elaborate validation of your particular taste, which means that it's ultimately a validation of your self, with its limits and biases and blindspots. if you go beyond that into second-guessing the feelings/motivations of other people, or groups of people, then you've moved into sociology -- amateur sociology (because nobody's actually going out doing field-research), which of course i'm rather prone to.

i'm suggesting there's no higher ground you can get to where you're beyond 'universalizing your own subjectivity'. although trying to get there, to that non-existent place, might be a worthwhile struggle.

i thought of a more glamorous romantic/sexual analogy for the dilettante: Big Pimpin' a la Jay-Z 'girls girls girls' or ludacris 'i've got hos in different area codes'. the stance is 'i love women' plural (c.f. I Love Music) rather than singular.

there's also a less glamorous way of looking at fanaticism in this light -- as a marriage. where at best it's a deep abiding attachment, the play of familiarity and surprise. but at frequent worst, the genre-ist who plights his troth is like the unhappily married bloke. like house-heads forever complaining about how the genre's not coming up with the goods, or the way a lot of hip hop headz are constantly going about it was better in the good old days. it's really like they've got trapped in a for better or worse deal.

Or maybe (to step outside the herosexual framework)being a dilettante in the age of mp3's is more like cruising...

It's my life... and it's my wife.

i'm suggesting there's no higher ground you can get to where you're beyond 'universalizing your own subjectivity'. although trying to get there, to that non-existent place, might be a worthwhile struggle.

I guess I understood you in some sense, but the comment about you universalizing your experience came up after you made assumptions about what the typical biography of a music enthusiast (if that's not too weak a word) would look like, based on the pattern that you yourself followed.

To give another example: there's a William Gass essays about how readers visualize characters while reading fiction. I was especially interested in it, since I am a virtual non-visualizer and have often been fascinated by the way other people decribe hearing vivid visual mental imagery. Gass mentions some things that are commonly said about it, and disputes them based on his own experience. But then he makes the mistake of assuming that his experience is in fact the way readers in general picture characters in fiction. This is just a silly methodology for making generalizations. I guess you could call it sociology to consider that other people's experiences might be different, but it seems pretty basic (albeit, I know that, speaking only for myself of course, other people periodically surprise me by just how different they can be).

How about polygamy? I feel that I have about three or four musical wives who I genuinely love, plus a number of mistresses, on and off flings, and one-night-stands. (In my love life, when it's at all active, I'm more inclined to monogamy.)

(The broader issue of values is another matter, and it's harder to see what stable thing there is outside of yourself to appeal to, in order to make up your aesthetic (or other) value judgments.)

where it falls down for example is that reynolds gives his last name to the fast lane -- fanatacism is like the opposite of settling down.

topos seems a more productive metaphor (precisely becuz it goes beyond the bounds of metaphor of critical method and approaches the actual metaphor/relationality underlying critical method) -- the sonic space of the rave vs. the sonic space of the pub vs. the sonic space of the festival vs. for me probably the sonic space of the car.

anyway, i can't claim to have read this whole thread < /kogan>, and i do wish ilx would learn to pair down its ideas (diarrehea of the keyboard must be a midwestern vice), so shoot me down if this has already been flogged but it seems to me that the unspoken fear of almost all music criticism is a paralyzing fear of being wrong, to look back on your "lifes work" and realize that you had backed the wrong horse all along, as if the whole affair wasn't just a cottage industry of personal obsession in the first place, that by being "right" you're on the Side of History, while neglecting the other side of the rockcrit idea(l), that it's all houses built on sand from the outset and History (and its litany of important people/places/events) shifts with perspective not only from year to year and generation to generation but from listener/reader to listener/reader. (which is how in 2003 you still have people venerating the lester bangs horse and why in 2023 you'll still have people backing the simon reynolds horse.) and this whole notion is so antithetical to my listening pleasure that the dilettants have the sanity advantage from the outset. the loyalists, on the other hand, are the ones who (despite evidence to the contrary) draw up the distinct canons in the first place (not the niggling, endlessly refined dead horses of VH1 list culture but the ones who say "maginalized music A/B/C is IMPORTANT, if not MORE IMPORTANT that dominant paradigm A/B/C") which assures them their place of importance/respect, much like i respect people who work with the mentally ill or terminally ill sacrificing their own sanity/pleasure in the name of helping others. then again, like tom, i'm not convinced that mp3 culture really means we HAVE "marginalized music" anymore, so they might be on their way out. (anxiety of obsolescence?)

As always with Hitchens's work, one gets the strongest possible sense of how much it matters to prove that one is and always has been right: right about which side to be on, right that there are sides and one has to be on one of them; right about which way the world (in the rather narrow, political journalist's sense of that term) is going, right about which policies will work and which regimes are wicked; right about the accuracy of one's facts and one's stories; and right when so many others, especially well-regarded or well-placed others, are demonstrably wrong. There is a palpably macho tone to all of this, as of alpha males competing for dominance and display.

And it's this kind of attitude one occasionally runs into on ILM...

It's protestantism, that's what it is.

My plans to read Simon Reynolds are now scotched. This is a lousy excuse for lazy criticism (that's what it is, isn't it?).

Sorry for the glibness of my last few posts, by the way.

Another way of putting it: I think taste is but one parameter by which to appreciate/understand music.

And actually, if you look back at the orig. quote he's acknowledged quite strongly that he goes far beyond simple crit in this regard, and further the more "elaborate" the validation of taste, the more I'd argue that it has to go beyond enumeration of taste into the social -- heck I'd even argue that much academic work be it in sociology or lit-crit or even history is driven by something that might be v. v. loosely termed "validation of taste" (which in no way invalidates their scientific and ultimately objective character).

One final point: drawing a distinction between "appreciation" of music and "taste" seems somewhat odd to me, since by my estimates taste IS the appreciation of music. Similarly to jess, I have a hard time differentiating "taste and perception" from music.

Hopefully I'll have the intellectual fortitude tomorrow to talk about taste vs. appreciation.

Also, re: Simon's linking of Tim F's new post, and his ending, which seems to mock some of the more simpleminded aspects of this discussion (i.e. probably mine). I hope I'm not beating an old horse here, but I think that "dilettante" means "nonideological" as much as "noncommitted." I'll try to think of some concrete examples but does this seem redundant?

I think Jess should breed a microhorse of his own.

Plurality, presumably, like many things, is in the beholder's ear. Some people's version of pluralized passion might be the one described above. But maybe everyone is plural, or singular, according to how you take them. I like Cole Porter, George Jones, Hendrix and MBV - does that get me into the pluralized gang? Who gets to define plurality?

extra syllables are so much more punk than abbreviations.

(Dan Perry to thread with a "but I wanted to put it somewhere" joke.)

On Tim Mosley: In that interview, he resisted talk of influences SUPER hard, obviously understanding what it would look like in print. He ended up saying he liked Dre and Premier but never actually admitted to learning anything from anyone. Which leads one to think, inevitably, that he's studied everyone obsessively (which is what it seemed like when he started in about Jerkins). But that was 5? 6? years ago now. 4 years?

http://www.good.is/?p=12364

Music is just another way for people to express their obsessive-compulsive disorders.

People like being in clubs not so much to share the music as to refuse others entry at the door.