Tongue Biting

and, of ancient musics, are they interesting purely because of the modes and forms used, or because they tell us about the people oif the time?

Ptew, I've run into more than a good share of sub-academic academics
in all fields. What you're dealing with is a creature known as a snob.

Tell me more about ethnomusicology clarke.

...by virtue of not being objective, sub-academic.
Ptew, I've run into more than a good share of sub-academic academics
in all fields. What you're dealing with is a creature known as a snob.

come on now. you can pretend rock journalism isn't any more subjective than academic ethnomsclgy or music theory, but i think you'd be very wrong. if the word _subjectivity_ has meaning in this context, it refers to someone talking about how music x makes people feel, and the more one focuses on other things in rock journalism, the less subjective it is.

you can talk about the performer's lives, & how they go about song writing
you can talk about performance presentation
you can talk about the nuts and bolts of the music: chords, timbres, lyrics, dancing
you can help place the sound on the reference map: who they resemble
you can talk about why the group is at the popularity level they are - how corporate are they, how hard working they are, how much sex is being sold by the singer, etc.
you can do theory stuff - "sleater-kinney have sought a more easily digestible sound, and the lyrics are less confrontational as well - surprisingly, they resemble ani difranco more than any other indie performer of their caliber and renown. is the distance between difranco / sleater-kinney and corin tucker's former peer, kathleen hanna, indicative of a deep fissure in the spectrum of pop culture feminism?"

personally, i would love it if rock journalism minimized de subjectivisten for a while. subjectivism is either a tool of an artist, or a lazy response.

academics are more afraid to deal w.this than journalists, cz "desire for power over the future" = an uncool think to wish for (all the more since buffy became an academic tpoic of fascination)

i'm like

"good music writing?"

i mean what does she want, "peace on earth and goodwill towards man"?

the idea that the *language* and *ways of thinking* that are developed outside of the academy can inform it seems to be mainly what's missing.

which is to say refusal to see academic texts as interventionist discursive acts on the same social field they examine.

Right. The discursive framework is rarely examined, and is usually taken for granted if not assumed outright. And, of course, this has a direct bearing on the force and bite of what the discipline produces.

with footnotes!

It makes no sense -- none at all, it's actively anti-useful -- for most of the social sciences (including ethnomusicology) to hold themselves captive to a quantitative view of the world. Most of those fields really revolve around qualitative and fundamentally subjective areas of human experience. Not that there's no place for charts and graphs and chi whats-its, but those ought to be used to augment and inform a broader view of the fields. The thing that convinced me never to go to grad school was seeing the idiotic things a lot of my friends ended up researching just so they could have something to measure.