Class, Indie, Materialism, and Intelligence

(a) The sort of "intellectual" values you're talking about are basically those flighty modernist "high art" and "difficult" impulses. And these impulses are, when it comes down to it, basically narcissism-of-small-differences attacks at the middle class -- that is, the vision of the middle-class as comfortable, consumeristic, and dulled, educated only for practical purposes. In this sense they speak directly to, well, the elements of the middle class that feel that critique most strongly, which is why we see those impulses in the youth-culture music of the middle and upper classes: indie.

(b) They're also weirdly aspirational impulses, except not economically. The modernist paradigm seemed to be "bourgeoisie = awful" and then not "artistocracy = great" but rather "artist = great," which is the animating spirit of "intellectual" art in the sense that you're framing it, right? The idea with this stuff is, on some level, to escape the lumpen middle-class via art.

(b) In order for that critique to work, though, there still has to be some semblance of a "comfortable, consumeristic, and dulled" middle-class, which is the sense in which I'm not sure how much the narrative can be overall "true" -- there needs to be a soporific non-"intellectual" middle class to hold that place. I have a slight suspicion you might find the same "intellectual" slant to middle-class MOR listening as opposed to e.g. working-class MOR listening but I'd have to think about it a lot more before I could say anything. By and large I don't think the "intellectual" split is realistic at all -- I think it points to something that's maybe unique to the middle class but not at all a majority characteristic of it. (More of a defining minority.)

(c) The narrative's self-reinforcing, of course: it creates a set of values that are available for a middle-class youth to define him or herself, a set of values into which that person will likely be somewhat prodded. (The wigga joke = one example of a way to tell that person he or she shouldn't even bother trying out a different set of cultural values.)

I also think that it's growing very rapidly -- all the kids of the middle class assigning themselves roles as outsiders within it -- and I wonder what happens if that goes further overboard: I wonder what sorts of tensions it will create when the vast majority of middle-class kids envision themselves as outside or above or opposed to the middle class. It offers a massive opportunity for rupture and cultural change, but what's scary in this instance is that there doesn't seem to be any coherent real-world focus to it.

I think this is a potentially fascinating topic, but I want to be sure you're not setting up a tautology of "Middle-class people like music that appeals to middle-class people."

Very interesting Nabisco.

Can I check this? You're saying 'Indie' is a comfortable way for a minority of middle class people to rebel against other, possibly slightly different, middle class people. Right?

I imagine it'll be a bit like when Bart goes for a little of his patented spitting off the overpass, and discovers the whole town's doing it already. No cultural change there, just a lot of spitting.

Haha and wasn't it lumpen-uk-punk which really picked up the "your shallow middle class lives" mantra? Or was it just the clash who did that?

jay: i'm talking all on the consumption end here, except it happens all these different ways. some ppl. argue for "intellectual" values (i.e. all about real transcendent emotion and feeling and etc, via complexity or even locating this stuff in things via their simplicity) and others attack them as middle class. others more directly see their own values as middle-class values, or at least associate a crassness directly with lower-classes, or at least those lacking education, etc. So I was being sorta vague -- the association is there obviously but in various ways, and how and why it's there are almost sorta the same question.

Mei: Well, I'm sort of just rambling here and could be talking out of my ass, but yeah, sort of. There's been this idea since the late 19th century (at least) of the bourgeoisie as, you know, boring, brainless, contented, etc. Modernist art situated itself as an attack on that, partly in the form of lots of difficult and experimental "high art" -- a lot of which was meant to sort of offend the comfy sensibilities of the bourgeoisie in its subject or in its form. And yeah, I think indie offers sort of the same thing. I don't mean it's the only way for them to step outside of their ideas of the middle class as boring and sucky -- listening to street hip-hop would probably offer a much more substantive step out -- but it is one way, and a way that manages to damn the middle class but also speak to a lot of middle-class values.

And the thing about UK punk is that sure, it had the same anti-bourgeois impulse, but I think it set about it in a way that was slightly different from the middle-class "modernist" way of attacking it: Wire did it the "modernist" high-art way, the Pistols did it in something more like the working-class fashion, though it'd take a better man than I to figure out how the working-class equivalent impulse works.

i agree to an extent, but is it also possible that "conscious rap" was in part a movement from within the urban/ hip hop/ african american community against socially undesirable elements in their own community? and haven't urban communities always been aligned with political radicalism. So…while conscious rap may share some of the values of the limousine liberal set, i think that it's doing a disservice to radicalism to suggest that all of the movement's privileged values originated in the suburbs.

To me, it also seems a bit unfair to label anyone speaking against the ills of the drug trade and for a more socialistic political value set as having a middle class origin and being intellectually condescending. I can understand the attack on certain attitudes within the listener, but not as much the artist, unless they are directly pandering to those attitudes.

Cultural being the operative word here! Gosh it freaks me out when people confuse race and race-identified culture. as if hip-hop was inscribed in the genetic code of all blacks, or country in whites!

The next post was even better. That was basically my experience of college, the plurality of "rebels" (who were all friends and didnt realize that they were all in opposition). My guess is that a) we have already gotten quite close, if we haven't already arrived, to this idea of a majority of "rebels" hating the minority of the "mainstream". b) there are a number of factors like: hasn't rebellion been psychologized now? isn't it just a phase? isnt it sort of accepted (acceptance being the great thing to avoid). also, i wish i could find a way to prove empirically that rebellion has been privatized: it seems to mirror the suburbs from whence it comes. if the role of "society" has been reduced in those landscapes, and family is all that counts, and really, just the nuclear family, then rebellion is limited in the same way, and perhaps that is why it lasts until people get jobs and move out (instead of developing into a more complete personal critique to be sustained and enacted through public service)?

also, as an aside, i really think drugs are a big unifier. my punk friends used to diss hippies, but then would go smoke weed with them and have a great time!

i think some of this hits upon why i stopped listening to indie. i started to have this weird conspiracy theory that went something like this: malkmus invents lyrics that have no meaning ---> fans listen to music, and pretend it has meaning for the sole purpose of excluding others. i was probably overreacting but god at the time it felt like a racist and classist conspiracy to me, which is funny due to the fact that indie kidz are usually on the left side of the political spectrum.

Middle-class criticism of bourgeoisie: "They don't think"
Working-class criticism of bourgeoisie: "They don't do"

??

(I should also say that I'm just messing around trying to assemble a model to think of this stuff. I don't want to sound like I'm falling into that trap where you set up your model so rigidly that you can't see all of the exceptions to it: I know none of this is as simple as I'm describing it. Just, you know, mentally toying with the question.)

O. Nate: I don't think it suffices to posit indie rockers who came from less-than-privileged backgrounds as a means of severing the link between indie music and the middle class. I don't want to take the easy po-mo route and suggest that middle class is "just" an idea -- I guess it's best to say that it's a series of cultural attitudes that remain fixed to a set of social and economic circumstances but not exclusive to same.

On a personal note I find that no matter how "populist" my airs, I often have to retreat into the past to find unapologetic popular art I can celebrate unequivocally. That seems very reactionary to me -- like if I celebrated Nashville music I would be implicated in that verboten boring culture that Nabisco mentions as being essential in the negative. What's oddest of all is that intellectually I know how indefinsible this position is, and struggle to break it down -- but my reactions against certain musics and films are more visceral than intellectual, even though they have their origins in this supposedly mentalist opposition.

*** Horrid cross-post (sorry) but I'll post this and consider the redundancies in a moment. ***

But there are so many greys. They seem stable enough, but they are hardly suburban middle-managers -- they're artists. But they're also business owners. They are happily married, but childless. They are long-time residents of... an apartment. Does any of that say "middle-class" in any conventional way?

[insert mainstream values here]

Well, that's the trouble, inn'it? Rebelling? Against what, exactly?

Why is it that we spend SO much time defining terms around here?

Agreed that it's difficult to surmise the extent to which a particular music is "intellectual" and whether a particular class is more or less likely to enjoy that music.

But I'm guessing that middle-class folks may be more apt to use intellectual values as a justification for their enjoyment. A middle-class person and a non-middle-class person could equally enjoy and be attracted to IDM, for instance. But the middle-class person might be more likely to say that the reason it's good is because it's "more intelligent" than typical club beats. Which is not to say that it is or isn't "more intelligent" -- we could debate that to death -- but merely that that value is more central to the middle-class person's approach to music.

But can we enumerate them? And then can we explain at all why this value-system is associated with this class? Like what values do, say, radiohead, have that are more middle-class than lower-class? And conversely, what values do, say, Alan Jackson or Crazytown have that's more lower-class than middle class?

And is this a totally illusory split? I.e. does the "middle class" actually listen to as much Alan Jackson and Crazytown as Radiohead, if not more? Which then leaves only the self-consciously middle class listening to Radiohead as a statement of their class?

Velben to thread.

-education as rite of passage not as means to economic transcendence
-possibility of world travel but with other countries appreciated as sites of tourism (of various kinds)

maybe?

(this is hard)

[the indie kid who rages (often with humor) against perceived middle-class values vs the post-indie kid who recognizes accepts his/her complicity in said values without fundamentally altering his/her relationship (i.e. condescension) to other members of his/her class a.k.a. knowledge is not power]

I mean, I feel like when we talk about the middle class in discussions like these we immediately do this thing where we imagine the middle class as educated and economically aspiring -- Yuppie types, really. And that's a completely unreal revision of the middle class, which is just as much a bourgeoisie, probably even mostly bourgeois. And beyond that, we seem to focus on the end of the middle class that borders on the upper class, whereas in truth there's a much longer border between the middle and the lower classes.

This is why I think the sort of art we're talking about here isn't so much something built from "middle-class values" but rather built from a particular tension within a more heterogenous middle class.

And I think we can all agree with O. Nate that these aren't hard and fast rules -- and as I said, I think the sort of stuff we're talking about applies to a minority of the middle class. All I'm really claiming is that it seems to be a situation that's sort of unique to the middle class, and thus worth talking about in those terms. (Though I think there are similar tensions with similar results in a lot of other places as well.)

2. Why does it matter what the middle class thinks of itself? Which critique of the middle class is more valid, not thinking or not doing? The most middle classest mother fuckers I know just want to look smart all the time.

3. What is the dominant image of the middle class? The sheepish going-along-with-what's-easy herd or the piano-lessons-taking modernist type? I was raised mostly working-class, but I think of the latter as the stereotype.

4. Isn't pretty much all art in America middle class? It's the dominant class, population considered. If a record is popular, hasn't it likely sold a lot to the middle class?

i feel it's more based on how much education and what kind of education you had. and wealthier classes tend to have more resources available for education... and opportunities to be exposed. fundamentally it's all about exposure.

but it's completely possible to be poor and know a shitload about music and want more intelligent music.

also counter to the idea... it's completely possible to be well-educated and even intellectual and prefer simple pop music. rough, rugged, and raw. simply emotional. it's easy to hold those as ideals above something in an unusual time scale or whatever...

a narrative exists because there are examples of it out there.... stereo typical. "typical girls! [left speaker] typical! [right speaker] typical!"

m.

A) Is this narrative actually true?

only in the fantasy realm of rock journalism and academia... which is about as middle class as you can get if you want to "go there". speaking of, most of the genres mentioned (IDM!!!?!?!?!!??!) have zero appeal to anyone but the middle class.

B) If so, why? If not, why does the narrative exist?

a blight of print-worthy stories/publishable theses/hypothetical pontifications, but more often than not, a deep self-hatred... lose yourself.

[oh no! here comes rome plows... cal state... no fun... here comes YANK CRIME]

Despite being from a working-class background in most practical ways, I was very indie because I was looking for something more 'artistic'/'referenced' than the music and aesthetic choices of most of the people around me (Minneapolis PUNX were not often rich but always did well in school; I started meeting them at 16). I didn't start seeing indie as something middle-class until I got to college, where people from all backgrounds liked music (either hip-hop or indie) which was 'about' more than chart music was. I think we have to remove the class aspect of it somewhat, repositioning to say something like 'undergraduate' because the chart whores I knew at school all got into it once they went to university, and slipped out of being into it the moment they left.

(tentatively raises hand, runs into closet)

I like Toby Keith's materialism in the "Who's Your Daddy?" video. BUt perhaps that fits the received view in that country music fans are suppossed blue-collar. Anyway Keith and someone like J-Lo are so much more honest than Shania Twain's "Ka-Ching!" pose. I mean, how can I take your lectures on materialism seriosuly? YOU WEAR A BLING BRA

Velben to thread.

I wrote about the Leisure Class. Not the Middle Class. Very different.

The totems of the Leisure Class reflect all the spare person-hours the Leisure Class is able to devote to accumulating and applying cultural knowledge as a result of stealing person-hours from the proletariat. Think conspicuous consumption. As a result, the Leisure Class do not purchase or listen to Radiohead CDs but in their plentiful leisure hours attend live symphonic orchestra pieces and opera because such entertainments really are quite wasteful and involve further exploitation of the proletariat.

But this is such a loaded question, it's near impossible to answer correctl

I'm interested in subjective impressions, though. For instance, take The Clash (a band I never really investigated very closely). When I heard The Clash I used to think I was listening to a direct expression of a working class political worldview, learned the hard way ('on the streets'). Only when Joe Strummer died and I read the obituaries did I realise just how 'high class' he'd been -- son of a diplomat. My dad was in the diplomatic service, but only as a language teacher for the British Council, so Strummer's background trumped mine! My impression of The Clash changed. Instead of 'the voice of the streets' I began hearing a certain kind of idealistic progressive bourgeois liberalism. The Clash were 'Guardian readers', not a 'prole art threat'!

Now, what if we ask Sterling's question about complexity of newspapers:

Do you know people who associate "complexity" or "intelligence" with class? Why do you think they do?

I think just about everybody would agree that the 'broadsheets' present a more complex and intelligent view of the world than the 'tabloids'. So just about everybody would associate complexity and intelligence in journalism with class. Why? Because intelligence and status are closely correlated in our societies.

Music, though, is a grey area. Musicians tend to be class-slippery. The successful ones are wealthy. They have very unsual class mobility patterns, and there's a lot of cross-class identification going on. But -- and this is important -- I don't think the general pattern (complexity connotes class status) is completely refuted by these complicating factors.

Another, more relevant, complicating factor is the 'azza factor'. This is a development of pomo and identity politics. Increasingly we have 'temporary identities' which can be invoked by the texts with which we're interacting at any given time. I watch a Hollywood 'azza' (as a) Hollywood film consumer, I read a UK tabloid 'azza' working class Briton, I read a scholarly essay 'azza' scholar. I have a number of 'hats' I can change at will. I am also 'constituted' by the texts I consume and my IQ / complexity is, for the duration of reading, as they pitch and peg it. Even my politics is, for the duration of my 'submission' to the requirements of the text, as they construe it: listening to The Clash I am a socialist, listening to a Bush speech I am a neo-con.

So who am I really, what do I really believe? To some extent, that's a constant negotiation. I may have no fixed core self, or I may work on keeping a particular outlook by filtering the discourses I'm exposed to. I personally would never listen to, for instance, BBC Radio 1, not so much because I'd hate it per se, as that I'd hate for its 'text' to 'constitute me' on a regular basis. I would hate to become more like Radio 1's 'ideal listener'. Azza chameleon, I have to choose very carefully where I sit!

Compare and contrast someone like Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, a lower middle class 'upwardly aspirational'. Instead of Pavement's 'copied from The Fall' scratchy biro sleeves, Hannon's records are likely to feature a photo of himself in a cravat on a gondola. You can tell he's not preppy because he wants so much to project a preppy image, just as Bryan Ferry (coal miner's son) had to pose in a white tux by a swimming pool to make up for a perceived 'lack of status'.

(Kate Boom to thread, to talk about the preppy appeal of The Strokes!)

But this is such a loaded question, it's near impossible to answer correctly"

On a bit of a tangent here, I wonder if this is one of the reasons I, and many others, listen to a lot of music from countries other than the UK and US. I don't mean 'world' music - although I do listen to a lot of that - I mean 'indie'/whatever from other places, particularly Japan. It's not that this music is 'classless' in any sense, and I know it comes from countries that have class structures to rival the British in weirdness, it's just that I'm not so caught up in them. I can't hear the bands' backgrounds/am not qualified to draw conclusions about them.

Of course, this liking for foreign stuff is very middle class. And indie.

Sorry to interject with such an ill-thought out 'personal' point - this discussion is a mighty and intelligent one. I just have one question though: is anyone here in a band, and has noticed/thought about the class structures within that band itself? I know a lot of bands are made up of people from very similar background; however I do know of some in which people have come together from very disparate sources. Sometimes this has led to some very weird tensions and interesting situations in which you can actually see at first hand the power that music has to unify people, plus the limits to this power, ie the times when 'class' issues take over and rise to the surface. In my experience it's led to some amazing music and some amazing fights also...

'I like Japanese music. The Japanese are classless. The important thing about them is that they're Japanese. No, actually the Japanese are all middle class. Therefore, I like middle class music. I'm just too embarrassed to like it if it's from my own country.'

Class structures within bands? They're make or break. I was in a band. Ronnie the drummer was lower middle class (he used to talk in interviews about wanting a Ferrari; later he became a landlord). Paul the guitarist was suburban lower middle class (he became an eternal Open University student), Davy the bassist was a burglar from an inner city housing scheme (later he became a medical video editor), and Neill the keyboard player was an intellectual (now he lectures at a university).

The band split up partly because Davy and Neill hated each other. It was very largely a class conflict. Davy had a low social status but high personal status (because he'd been in a famous band). Neill had a higher social status and was able to inveigle himself with me because he was intelligent, but as a Johnny-come-lately he wasn't well-accepted in the band's social structure. They resented the fact that he could write music, etc. This gave him power to criticize their playing.

We also split up because I wanted to finish my university degree, ie conform to the achievement standards of my class.

His father's a fucking Bishop! How is that lower-middle class?

Sure. No-one's motives for liking ANYTHING are 'pure' ie completely sound-based. But that's not to say I don't actively, physically, musically ENJOY the music I enjoy. I guess what we are addressing is where the enjoyment comes from, and what are the thousands of parts and strands that go together to form it.

Maybe the same 'fig leaf' applies to liking music from the past (which, again, is a very middle class thing to do): the chronological distance perhaps distances you from addressing the class thing.

Of course, I'm being a bit reductionist and hard on myself, anyway. I just like to sometimes ask myself why I like the music I like. There are many, many reasons, and maybe about 10% of them are to do with issues of class and nationality. And history. OK, for me maybe history is a little more than 10%, but I'm not sure, I haven't worked this one out mathematically yet.

Thank you for the breakdown of your band's class structure, that was very interesting. It kind of reflects the class relationships in a band that I was in.

(Oh and ¡hola! to Jim, who I'll forgive for odd Britpop comments I only just saw - I've never been 'friends' enough with my editor to want to drag her out on the tiles with, for instance, me and the Wener. ::SHUDDER:: The very thought).

Good call, bad example, mea maxima culpa.

I was just thinking about the 'Momus's Mum = OTM' comment while I was bicycling about Berlin (gorgeous sunshine today). There's a problem with my mum's position (brief recap: 'If you made shit music that sold loads, Nick, you could have all the good taste you liked in your private life'.) The problem is that if everybody made mass market mcgubbins, accumulated a pile of money, and went out to try and spend it on quality wares, they'd find that all the quality wares would have been replaced by mass market mcgubbins. If every recording artist became Elton John, in other words, you would have the choice of Elton John or Elton John. Where then would Elton John find good music to relax with at home? How would he spend his money?

Somebody, somewhere, has to make risky niche products that might not sell, otherwise capitalism will lack all diversity and lose some of its moral legitimacy. Somebody has to be operating with a mindset in which ideas like 'honour' or 'art' or 'cool' or 'quality' over-ride ideas like 'money'. Ironically, it's those who operate with the least capitalist mindset who do capitalism the greatest honour.

REM, The White Stripes, Fragma, Boards of Canada, Air, Mos Def, 50 Cent, The Streets, Sting, So Solid Crew, Coldplay, Sugababes, S Club 7 and of course Pulp circa Different Class.

I'm really not convinced it does.

I don't know if Malkmus is preppy - from what I've read, he's from Stockton, California, not exactly a ritzy town. But speaking of Fitzgerald, he wrote during a period in American history (the 1920s) when social inequality was at one of its periodic high points - this was an age of gilded mansions serviced by scores of servants. During the Great Depression, the New Deal, and WWII, these trends began to reverse. In the years following WWII, the middle class grew by leaps and bounds and the distance between the upper class and the higher reaches of the middle class contracted and effectively disappeared. The 1950s and 60s were periods of unprecedented social equality. In more recent decades, the 1980s and 90s, we have seen this trend begin to reverse again, with widening disparities in income and wealth again on the rise. So perhaps Americans will soon begin to think in terms of class again, but that sort of thinking has been out of fashion for the past 50 years or so.

Kannberg and Malkmus both grew up in a semi-swank rural suburb called Morada, between Stockton and Lodi in Northern California's Central Valley.

I'm not sure if "semi-swank" qualifies as "preppy".

as per o.nate's comment, i read somewhere that recent research shows there is now LESS social mobility in the USA than in Europe

isn't one of the great foundational things about Pop (in the Sixties onwards sense) the myth or ideal of classlessness - with (in the UK) art schools being the place where upwardly-mobile/nonconformist W/C youth mingle with downwardly-mobile/nonconformist M/C youth -- this carried on in rave culture, this academic Sarah Thornton did a Bourdieu-influenced book called Club Cultures, in fact i think it was she who coined the term 'subcultural capital'a twist on his 'cultural capital' -- but she made an interesting observation : in the social spaces of clubs and rave, off their heads on all kinds of substances, people from different social backgrounds fraternise and converse -- but she noticed that the one question that was absolutely taboo was "what do you do for a living?" -- the whole point of being inside that space was to deny or evade the classed social reality outside

Also I would have to say that Blur were never upper anything, just plain old middle despite Mr. and Mrs. Albarn's theatre/arts/teaching background (they got a lot out of going to art college), which only makes Hairclub a 'faculty brat' anyway. Justine is/was UMC, but that's different (and her dad arrived from Hungary with 2p in his pocket anyway).

*Mutual friend of mine and Jim's, a writer who looks like a proper '20s flapper.

Is a mingling of classes in pop the same as 'classlessness', though? I know that when it happened in my band it wasn't the eradication of class, so much as a very self-conscious co-operation. (And in how many bands are the rhythm section w/c and the keyboardist and vocalist m/c? In other words, the band just repeats the class structure of the wider society.)

Similarly, isn't Sarah Thornton's point with 'subcultural capital' (and I believe Angela McRobbie used the term too) that people are now accumulating cool in subculture in the same ways that they used to accumulate status in traditional culture? In a society where leisure and consumption increasingly define you more than your production activities, surely 'What do you do for a living?' is a less important class litmus test than 'What was the last reggae record you bought?', a conversation that would not be off limits in a rave, in fact would be almost compulsory.

Going back to what my mother advised me, 'make money in public with 'low class' products which you can then spend in private on 'high class' products', one thing which depresses me about this logic is that it suggests you can't have an authentic life as a producer, only as a consumer. But surely, as gay activists have long contended, it's not enough to be allowed to be 'particular' in private. Your particularity must be accepted in public. That is, your particularity must be able to be expressed in the realm of production.

For people who achieve that, 'What do you do for a living?' would become a much less reductive and threatening question, one you could ask in a club without bringing anyone bumping uncomfortably back down to earth.

"When a genre starts to think of itself as 'intelligent,' this is usually a warning sign that it's on the verge of losing its edge, or at least its sense of fun. Usually, this progressivist discourse marks a class-based or generational struggle to seize control of a music's direction; look at the schism between prog rock and heavy metal, between the post-punk vanguard and Oi!, between bohemian art-rap and gangsta, between intelligent techno and 'ardkore. The 'maturity' and 'intelligence' often reside less in the music itself than in the way it's used (for reverent, sedentary consumption as opposed to sweaty, boisterous physicality)."

How does this reconcile with the idea of a rave as a classless space? I'm not trying to be snarky here, but actually put two convincing but overtly contradictory arguments together.

A) Is this narrative actually true?
B) If so, why? If not, why does the narrative exist?

Am I the only one who first read the phrase 'as music becomes more "middle class"' to mean a movement "downward" from the elite to the mainstream? I guess I was thinking of the historical movement (centuries ago) from a patronage model (the court musician as bird in a gilded cage) to a wandering minstrel/guild/musician-as-capitalist model.

To return to Sterling's questions, A: yes, and B: to rationalize bourgeois guilt or as a panacea to substitute for true social or political upheaval (a la Walter Benjamin?).

Music can be a relatively transparent and safe space in which to work out the intellectual angst of those who are reasonably socially and economically comfortable. I don't know specifically which music is posited here as being pre- or proto-middle-class, but I would imagine that where music is in fact the tool for changing the economic situtation of those that make it, perhaps that music can only succeed when it is honest with its audience about those ends. Don't player-hate, etc.

Music, like all culture, is to some degree a luxury and I suppose the pretense that this process is not going on, or the ability to make or listen to music without commenting on the process, or commenting in only the obliquest of ways, are cultural luxuries as well.

are you talking from personal experience Jim E-T?!?

wotcha Nick -- well that's why i said 'myth and ideal' of classlessness because obviously no one ever fully escapes their class identity, but it's a nice idea and something to perhaps hope and strive for -- a lot of the cross-class and cross-race etc projections and aspirations in pop culture, are like attempts to heal the wounds of class, race etc

Oasis was sort of a faint, contentless echo of the Beatles-as-class-transcending one-thing-we-all-share -- seems also that in the UK football has taken the place of pop as the locus for that (oasis gigs with singalong aspect being midway between pop and a football match?), football t's like the only thing that holds the country together, right? (beckham bigger than any pop star, even cultivating the gay audience) a few years ago on a visit to london staying wiht friends, i noticed the husband, who'd never expressed the slightest interest in football, worked in the media, tv, commercials etc, had joined West Ham's supporters club, had all the programmes and paraphernalia -- my guess being like it had reached critical mass where he'd be socially excluded from conversations in his circles if he didn't know about football -- it was like a fascinating inversion of the upwardly mobile executive who starts going to the opera -- that in turns seems to relate to the survey they did where 75 percent of British people describe themselves as working class (whereas in America it's like 85 percent call themselves middle class)

>In a society where leisure and consumption increasingly define you >more than your production activities, surely 'What do you do for a >living?' is a less important class litmus test than 'What was the >last reggae record you bought?',

isn't that false consciousness though, if people believe that? because it's very easy to be socially mobile in either direction in your cultural choices, and thus 'escape' your class -- but the workplace (where people spend what 40, 50 percent? of their waking lives after all) you're right there back in the back old days of social hierarchy. which then gives a special poignancy to clubbers and ravers attempts to disavow or transcend their everyday classed existences.

well i think it's perfectly possible for a scene to believe two contradictory ideas simultaneously (even highly likely given that we all live out contradictions, that's Marx 101 isn't it?). so ravers adhere both to the official rave ideology (unity, all welcome here etc) and use terms that if not overtly working-classist are at least tropes for it -- "hardcore", "underground", "street", "real", etc -- then you get the crypto-classist language of idm etc, 'intelligent', 'deep' etc

actually where they come together is i the idea of populism which connotes class-transcending unity but also positions itself against elites, aristocracy, etc

for instance on the jungle scene MCs would often say things 'no matter your class colour creed you're welcome in the house of jungle' while the dancefloor reality was, if not hostility, a certain wary suspicion of people who didn't quite fit the normal social profile of scene members.

i have a lot of problems with that Thornton book because the idea of subcultural capital ignores the interesting question of why people are drawn to specific sounds, there's a such a surfeit of options musically that peple can express their impulse to mark out superiority/difference/rank -- but what makes one person do it through lo-fi indie, another through detroit techno, another through japanese noise, another through West London broken beats, and so forth?

still her comment re. people never talkign about their jobs was one thing that did strike me as true, from my own experience of clubs and raves the question of one's occupation just never came up -- possibly too prosaic and mundane for the E-haze vibe

incidentally joe carducci's rock and the pop narcotic -- if you can get past the anglophobia, bohemianphobia, drum machine-phobia, and borderline-homophobia-- is the Bible or Das Kapital of any discussions of class in music. which is doubly amazing because he is far from a Marxist, actually an anarcho-libertarian capitalist.

(there must be more)

what kind of process was this - a kind of 'belittling'? (hezza's case)or a welcoming by the working-class through the transforming power of their perceived/fedback vernacular for certain ppl, even if politicians, perceived as 'plain-speaking' or 'down to earth'

maybe this thread needs an oxbridge-educated middle-class sun journo to explain their particular slant on the mission to inform

are we positing that certain music artists might be the same kind of animal?

sterling -
A - yes it is broadly true, i think
B - lots of reasons: class loading of certain types of cultural knowledge/experience - either as a matter of preferential self-definition or historical precedent or social structuring - when even the nature & quality of the education which nurtures and directs your 'intelligence' is capable of being skewed by your socio-economic group at birth, it is difficult to discount a correlation between class-group and 'intelligence'

btw momus - this looks odd:

I think just about everybody would agree that the 'broadsheets' present a more complex and intelligent view of the world than the 'tabloids'. So just about everybody would associate complexity and intelligence in journalism with class. Why? Because intelligence and status are closely correlated in our societies.

is the extent to which you seem willing to correlate the two there an indicator of the extent to which you don't believe that 'class' operates as a load of historical/situational/cultural gunk that actually *interferes* with some 'ideal' meritocratic process by which intelligence => status ?
(seems obvious to me it certainly does do that - eg parental wealth skewing education +vly for those whose parents have done the work for them, or inherited wealth allowing them to gain from the labour/luck of their relatives and thus move in more expensive spheres)

I think this is the reason why I am so recalcitrant towards the idea posited in this thread. Associating class with music is automatically making it exclusionary and I just don't buy into exclusion from that perspective.

In the same issue of Index where Momus' DAT Politics interview occurs, there is an interview with a very famous reggae artist whose name escapes me at the moment. In it she talks about the power of music to heal the wounds of world and free the oppressed which unsurprisingly those in the upper echelons of class find extremely frightening (enough to tear gas a concert).

The idea that music only has the power to transcend and not change classed existences is cynical and sad.

is the extent to which you seem willing to correlate the two there an indicator of the extent to which you don't believe that 'class' operates as a load of historical/situational/cultural gunk that actually *interferes* with some 'ideal' meritocratic process by which intelligence => status ?

That's complex syntax, but the answer is yes. I believe that class, as represented by the streaming of newspapers into broadsheet and tabloid, is not only legitimate (ie I'd rather be ruled by the people who read the broadsheets rather than the tabloids, wouldn't you?) but, even if it weren't, would quickly become so, because the greater complexity of the broadsheets would actually constitute a class ready to govern by creating a more intellectually supple readership. In other words, the decision to read the tabloids is a decision to make yourself fit to be led, and the decision to read the broadsheets is a decision to make yourself fit to lead. Those, however, are only potentials. Knowledge is not, in itself, power. It depends how you apply it, and whether you want to.

As I also said, though, I think journalism is very different from music, in which power is less Nietzschean, and more Christian. In other words, in music there's an element of 'every loser wins', of reparation, of inversion, of compensation, of the championing of the weak, etc, which leads to some very weird status positions and mobility options (ie why I am, well-educated as I am, not at the very top of my profession, damn it?)

Maybe it was just the word 'post-modernism' that did it. It does tend to make people's eyes roll into the backs of their heads.

A) I don't know whether this is true in any objective sense, although I would agree that our perception of class is inter-penetrated with a perception of intellectual values, as elaborated in my next answer.

B) In our culture, there is a hierarchy that places physical labor at the bottom and intellectual labor at the top. There are exceptions, but in general, as you ascend the class hierarchy in terms of vocations, you find that the higher you go, the less emphasis you find on exertions of the body and the more emphasis you find on exertions of the mind. I say in "our culture", but this anti-physical prejudice seems to be quite historically ancient and globally widespread, i.e., it's typical of many traditional cultures to have the top social level occupied by a priestly class who are generally concerned with "spiritual" matters. In Europe since the Enlightenment, that priestly class has been gradually replaced by an intellectual/technocrat class, but the anti-physical prejudice has survived, perhaps drawing more sustenance from Platonic philosophy as the religious influence wanes. On a practical level, this prejudice can be seen as an expression of a power dynamic: ie., the top level issues orders (mental work) and the lower level carries them out (physical work). Over time, the power dynamic has remained fairly constant while the cultural, religious, and philosophical underpinnings of it have shifted.

I think post-pomo will be a return to modernism, that there is a cyclical relationship between modernism and pomo, meaning and non-meaning, extension and intension.

(this coming from someone who's just beginning to get his head around Derrida)

It seems like the world at large is just now starting to come to terms with post-modernism which fits in perfectly with the intelligenstia and the rest of the art world moving on.

I think Reynolds (when he talks about Oasis and footy) gestures towards something important, namely that class in the UK ain't what it used to be. Major economic differences and divides exist, yes - no-one will seek to deny that. But the cultural coding of it all has altered significantly in the last 15 years. The old UK Middle Class (and the idea of the UK Working Class) of my childhood is much less evident now than what feels like a new Young Professional Generation. I associate this generation with affluence, comfort, 'classlessness', demotics, mobile telephones, electronic mail, digital pictures, screen savers, Robbie Williams, bright colours, vague ideas, dark noisy bars, bottled lagers and Sky Sports. If I wanted to theorize the way Britain is today it would centre on such a cluster.

There seems to be a big cultural distinction between the intellectual / professional wing of the middle class (doctors, lawyers, academics), and the business wing of the middle class (which isn't all that intellectual).

i can't speak about doctors and academics, but lawyers aren't "intellectuals" but skilled tradespersons with pretensions of being intellectuals. AFAIC, the only difference between Devry Tech (or any other "trade" school) and Harvard Law (or any other law school) is the "prestige" that society attaches to a degree from the latter. being slumped over a contract or pouring through income tax code isn't really that much more "intellectual" than programming code or routing a network server -- shit, it's probably less intellectually stimulating.

back to our regularly scheduled thread topic!

I'm surprised nobody picked up on Momus' comment about being unable to tell the race or affiliation of that man on the train purely from his voice, because I get the impression that Momus assumed, returning to the UK, that he would automatically be able to deduct such things.

oh, and welcome back, everybody.

http://216.36.193.92/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WhatLowAndHighRoadMayHaveInCommon

Just some notes from reading through:

A lot of people here seem to be positing a mostly opposition view of music-consumption identities, ie identities based more on what the music is not or its reaction against other music consumption identities. Is this the primary model for music listening? Maybe among the young and hip, but I'd bet for the masses it's more based on confirming things they already like.

If the change has been toward an "adventurous class" of music listeners, what would this predict in terms of the types of music that become dominant? It's interesting to look at the shift towards "popism" in this context, at least in indie stalking horses like Pitchfork, where it seems that instead of rethinking fundamental assumptions inside cherished genres, the movement has instead been exogenic toward pop music which has its own set of biases (which are largely compatible with mainstream materialism).

There was an interesting discussion upthread on whether there actually has been an alternative plurality which has truly supplanted "mainstream pop," and in a large way that seems to be true, at least with rock radio. I'm not going to be so bold as to say "regarding white afluent listeners," though I'm tempted, simply because that's the market for hip hop and mainstream pop (so far as I know).

And finally, though this may be a separate thought, it comes out of the essay that Momus linked to— has irony, exemplified at the extreme by Vice magazine, made sincere attempts to change the world through music untennable? Were those goals ever really attainable in the first place?

I'm willing to bet that if I wade around long enough, there's a thread on each of these things, but I figured I might revive this one since I enjoyed reading it so much.