Debates of Artistic Value in Rock Music: A Case Study of the Band Weezer, 1994-2001

(haha -- at the board where i found this (velvetrope) someone posted a really fucking glowing reaction to the whole paper, then i suddenly remembered that it was from a name that rivers cuomo used to use. whadda sucker. anyone want his aim handle?)

It's all true!

Mainstream vs. Indie in a nutshell...

Sterling storms the baricades!

He accepts all his sources at face value even when they offer contradictory accounts and then just throws the theory at them without trying to make it engage. He misreades Bourdieu something terrible pulling that "he defines two categories but really everything is somewhere inbetween" crap.

Also, haha oops:

Following in the footsteps of the Rites of Spring and its successor Fugazi, the “emo” movement, short for “emotional,” aimed to combine the punk aesthetics with “deeply personal” lyrics.[237] A 90’s “indie” scene, emo developed on the periphery of the alternative rock as an underground genre mostly confined to college rock scenes. Brad Cawn, a music writer covering the underground music scene for the Chicago Tribune, argues that the mid-90’s emo scene had a particularly progressive and inaccessible sound, marked by “weird time signatures and odd tunings.”[238]

The emphasis on online forums seems *seriously* misplaced in therms of critical evaluation and perhaps a prop for not engaging with the text (album) itself to find the *internal* factors that could lead to an evaluation of the album. I.E. Finally, this thesis has revealed the canon to be the product of a contingent, agent-oriented process; to reference, perhaps usefully, a cliché: the cream does not necessarily rise to the top – some constellations of agents put it there. This study shows that collective memory within a discipline is not a naturally occurring phenomenon by which sociological factors that somehow “interfere” with the reading of the music fall by the wayside, canceling each other out. Rather an act’s legacy is ultimately the product of reputational entrepreneurs advocating either on behalf of or against the merits of a particular artist. In the case of Weezer, judgments of Pinkerton as a classic did not merely result from the passage of time but rather from a mobilized contingent of supporters whose views were ultimately codified by writers. Even this codification proved subject to contingency as writers seeking a good story found an incentive to write about Weezer. Thus, if the revisionist conception of Weezer ultimately holds, the band’s music is only partly responsible; successful lobbying by supporters and writers’ keenness to write stories on Weezer also will have played a significant role.

But *why* did supporters want to lobby, *why* did writers want to write stories? The investigation stops precisely where it should begin and instead we're left with the dead embellished notion that "people thought one thing. then lots began to change their minds and talk about it and people started to think another thing. this proves that people think different things at different times."

For our purposes, though, yeah -- the reasons why are the important bit. I'd hazard a guess that it has to do with age demographics -- that the new force of young listeners were distant enough not to have any concerns with the novelty/sell-out ideas of Weezer's original run, and were able to view them as just likeable guys who had a funny hit once upon a time. (People tend only to attack "novelties" in the present.) How this filtered through the critical mechanism is another matter, but I think it has something to do with the critical atmosphere of "a few years after Pinkerton" having shifted significantly, and a lot of people suddenly realizing that Weezer actually fit into this new "paradigm" as well -- if not better -- than they did in the alt-rock one.

As for Sterling’s oh-so-respectful criticisms:
1) I didn’t just take what people said at face value. For one, Azerrad’s quotes are not used to support my argument. Rather I use Azerrad and Harron as examples of rhetoric used to describe alternative music in the mid-90’s; you’re familiar with their arguments b/c they were fairly commonplace/well-accepted ideas about alternative rock at the time. Second, DeCurtis’ arguments aren’t cited as gospel; indeed, I specifically demarcate his quotes as exemplary of a particular school of thought. Second, I had a lot of empirical data which guided the theoretical aspects I chose to include. I had a survey of 150 critics, and certain items appeared multiple times in people’s responses.

2) “internal considerations” -- I think that’s answered above. Internal considerations are outside the scope of the study. “ *why* did supporters want to lobby, *why* did writers want to write stories?” are probably internal considerations though I touched on these a bit; perhaps I should have talked about these in more detail (in brief, for Weezer fans, the album was an important part of the people’s identity; they felt that those songs genuinely reflected their feelings and internal conflicts).

3) As for misreading Bourdieu, I wish you’d be more specific. If you’ve read The Market of Symbolic Goods, I think you’d agree with my account. Bourdieu’s account, though it contains insightful characterizations of various types of art activities, tends to caricaturize the two different kinds of markets. He spends a paragraph discussing intermediate activities, and I feel that rock music clearly falls into that category (it’s not just a convenient “here’s two extremes – rock is in between!”)

finally, what principles did I “rediscover.” I am not sure there’s a case study like mine out there with significant data to look at these trends.

Anyway yeah my gripe isn't with you really or your paper but the way academia works. I really don't think you proved much that wasn't immediately obvious and the difference is you do have nice data which backs it up and is useful in those places where an appeal to such data is necessary.

I don't really see how you used Bourdieu at all to be honest, after citing him. It seemed linke lots of extra legwork for little gain in integration of yr. argument. Which was my problem with yr. explanation -- things aren't inbetween so much as the product of the simultaneous pressures of two markets which are themselves deeply linked. The sell-out/purity dynamic is a central motor of rock precisely because of its self-consciousness (something you touch on but don't fully investigate, just noting that bands get crits and lauds both for being inept and polished) and ultimately you therefore miss that the key transition in the alterna-loution wasn't in the clash of critical ethos but the drowning of the old anterna ethos in a new stream. I'm all for arguing for the important role of critics but you give them way too much agency (probably coz the ones you interviewed all imagined they had that agency) and miss that they're even more subject to market pressures than bands are (there's a reason Meltzer's anthology is titled "A Whore Like The Rest"). As such, they're not a special intellectual class but rather elevated members of the general class they're tied to with a special role (something which you dealt with nicely at one point as i recall, but then didn't seem to carry through the paper)

As for Azerrad and Arnold you cite them not becuz of their rhetoric but becuz they make claims to the ethos of the scene which you take at face value. Jess wrote a nice piece on his book which I don't fully agree with but raises important points, and the ensuing discussion thread on ILM also got into this quite a bit: http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/azerrad.html

Finally, as for "internal considerations" the point is that without that you just have "society WAS that way and NOW its this way" in which case sorry yr. just an archivist. Like I think that Weezer as an example of how critics change their opinions is as much an ensconced social "story" of the current climate of music-crit (and fandom!) as parts of the alterna-loution story were back in the day, and is just as open to questioning and problematization. In large part because it reinforces the key tenents of fandom which are very protestant at heart ("here i stand i can do no other") and thus places too much emphasis on the agency of the fans. This is not to be a determinist here -- the agency exists, but it exists in the play of meaning and social change which necessarily means engaging with the album, the reasons for the transformation of the climate (both internal and external -- i.e. musical tensions and pressures *and* social change), etc.

Anyway, the real interesting coda to the story is how Rivers went back and pissed the fuck out of his fans by nearly disowning Pinkerton and how they responded to *that*. Coz the first part of the story is just about being young and the second is about growing up.

[oh and blount if you watched eXtreme dating you'd know that she's clever as fuck -- thinks on her feet, fast quips, etc.]

they make graphs of contentment vs. electoral participation using some non-heavy duty "applied math" (stolen from marketing research) and then act like they've replaced howard zinn and studs terkel.

I am starting to write for campus publications when I get back from spring break. how big a portfolio should i have before i pitch stuff? oh and how exactly do I pitch stuff?

I imagine campus-paper writing is a good way to start--I certainly know plenty of people who've begun that way--and then use those clips to move into more print publications. send out clips and pitch specific things (and your specific viewpoint on those things) to editors. work yr way up from there. good luck (and I printed out the thesis and will be reading tonight--102 pages, wow--and will try to post any thoughts/impressions tomorrow).

It occured to me this morning that "drowning" might better be replaced by "sublation".