the so-called "producer's medium" and where it falls on the pop/rockist divide

(1) Real Music Fans who tend to look down on what the lumpens like if it's not stylish enough can't seem to get through a five-minute conversation about Donna Summer without pointedly mentioning the Moroder involvement -- a strangely and backhandedly rockist move if you ask me.
-- jody (jod...), February 17th, 2004 10:12 PM.

Disco's gotten a severe critical makeover via the modern music geek -- dressing something that's symbolically and eternally "pop" up in rockist clothes, using words like "genius" and "influence" and downplaying the music's broader appeal to people who tend not to care about that stuff. It's win-win; the geeks get to be populist-by-association AND (by focusing on producers and arrangers rather than singers) obscurantist at the same time.

(2) What did prog fans think of disco? What did prog fans think of mainstream rock? Did mid/late '70s mainstream rock fans care about (read: "like") prog and how might they have differentiated it from the disco that they thought "sucked"?

to produers and arrangers i would add djs although a dj is an arranger of sorts.

what the dj plays has a direct effect on the evening so if you know what kind of night out you're looking for...

xpost

these are the kind of fuckers who are all 'but sadly the cliched bling bling excesses of ludacris are no match for timbaland's avant garde mouse on mars-influenced soundscapes...'
-- simon trife (45t43tfe4t...), August 26th, 2002.

Dunno about upward mobility, but I imagine there was a fear of two sides (gay/minority vs. straight/white) meeting in the middle; the most popular disco music by and large wasn't hard funk, it was lush Euro- and Euro-sounding stuff, but the high volume of black performers/producers/etc. coupled with the accessibility of the music meant that, as with the friendly face of Motown a decade prior, the imposition of black culture onto white America was inevitable. As for the gay thing... yeah, disco was pretty aggressively gay/hypermasculine/hyperfeminine/clearly-not-dealing-in-conventional-sexual-roles. No way around that.

"Aggressively" in a strictly visual and aural way, that is -- there wasn't too much public acknowledgment of gay lifestyles in disco until AIDS really started to hit home.

As for the gay thing... yeah, disco was pretty aggressively gay/hypermasculine/hyperfeminine/clearly-not-dealing-in-conventional-sexual-roles. No way around that.

I think "aggressively" overstates the case. A lot of this stuff was surely coded. It definitely didn't translate that way at all to much (if not most) of its non-club-going radio-listening audience-- which comprised a rather large portion of said audience. As someone just old enough to know what 'gay' meant in 1979, I honestly had no clue for instance that even the Village People were gay! And I know a few other people my age who've said more or less the same thing.

I just see "the studio" as the common ground for a lot of different types of artists, but it's also a source of deep distrust for a particular breed of Rock Fan who thinks anything too "produced" signifies either teen-pop garbage or pretentious art-wank. I wanna know whether the Rock Fan (as I described) is the odd man out and if so what other possible links are among the less (you could say) conservative forms of music.

I don't know that many people SAW Can't Stop the Music. And weren't the Village People off the radio by the time that movie (ha) came out? I could be wrong about that...

Also, I think the "disco sucks" movement (not incorrectly) gets branded as a reaction to race and sexual preference, but there's more to it than that, including (maybe even especially) rock fans (and rock DJs and industry folks) notions of authenticity. And in regards to disco seeming "threatening," it was, but I don't think disco artists or producers were aiming for anything like the overthrow of the social order...disco was more about acceptance of and by everyone. In his disco essay in the Rolling Stone collection, Tom Smucker has a great line about how disco achieved the notoriety that punk aimed for without even trying (or--and this may be my addition--necessarily wanting it). Or something to that effect. (Dont' know if this is relevant to anything here.)

I know... it took so long to make that by the time it came out they were irrelevant. I was just using that movie as one example.

In a way, Trife and I are making the same point re pop/prog (although I think I have a little more tolerance for "soundscapes" than he does).

Aside - On the song "Fear" by Easy Going, there seems to be a great link between Claudio Simonetti's being known for "scary music" with the idea of "fear" of coming out. Easy Going are really thinly "coded" about gay content - I'm tempted to say they don't even bother, but I won't (their first music came out in 1978, I think).

I probably count as a "prog fan" to some degree. I think I focus more on the songwriting and production credits than on who is singing, but I think it's because I'm more likely to enjoy something written by someone who has written other music I like than I am to enjoy something by someone who has sung something I like and is written by someone I don't know. I assume a disjunct between singer and writer / producer in disco, anyway. I also have to admit I'm wrong lots about what I'm going to like.

*(if anyone can tell me anything about why - especially with regard to Yes, I'd appreciate it! Is a curator-rock band championing them? I've heard more mentions of Yes in the past month or two than in the past ten years).

I'm guessing that it might involve those people you meet at record fairs who seem to feel that there were only ever about 20 "musical artists" and that music by anyone else is a ripoff or combination or "lesser Platonic degree than" that "of" those 20 (usually Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, etc). Would a "canonical tendency" involve a piece of music having a revered person's name attached to it?

Purely ephemereal - I'm referring to a certain (minority) view that pop can *only* be valued as a fleeting, contextless experience wherein such considerations as musical innovation are totally meaningless and irrelevant.

I'm sorry--I'm babbling and I'll get out of the way. (I love Tim Finney's--deliberate?--misspelling of "ephemereal," though; ephemeral + ethereal. Perfect!)

Yeah exactly - ephemerality has almost become a prescriptive idea about what pop should be, but it's impossible to hear something as purely ephemeral, there will always be resonances (canonical or otherwise). Maybe non-rockist thinking is like non-fascist thinking in this sense: a theoretical endpoint that probably can't be reached. That's why I'm always slightly suspicious of discussions of, say, chart-pop or disco which insist on the music's ultimate ephemerality, because I don't think any listener actually does experience music without a tinge of (for want of a better term) rockism as well.

To tie in with the consensus thread, maybe you could say that music is ephemeral when - at a social level - it seems profoundly idea-free, music that is somehow outside or beyond or beneath the realm of controversy. But I think in practice no music really fits this description, especially now that controversy is so democratic (it no longer takes a Christgau to decide which music merits discussion and dissent). Democratisation tends to encourage a convergence upon the middle-ground: the erosion of beyond-criticism canonism on the one hand and the absorption of previously ephemeral music into the realm of critical rehabilitation (ie. rockism).

- writing about producers is more informative and useful and is also 'easier' in that you have a pre-set frame of reference (how is this Arthur Russell rec. different from that Giorgio Moroder one - what is the link between these 3 Timbaland tunes, etc etc.) BUT as soon as you take this option you're limiting your audience to people who care about production, who care enough about music and understand the terms of music discourse well enough to know that who produces something is Important. By playing the auteur card you might help expand the music's audience though because you're 'validating' it or something.

- writing about the song/tune/track while ignoring (or not bothering to find out, more likely) who produced it is less useful and harder to do well - you're writing on the level of anyone else who hears the song and who actually needs that, they can just hear it themselves, etc. etc. The gamble you're taking is that you might connect more with non-initiates who don't think in terms of producers, but there's no evidence that any of them even read music writing let alone online. My gut feeling, though, is still that not framing things in terms of producers makes you more likely (or at least more willing) to capture the moment of hearing a song, or to say how a song affects you personally.

i.e. it's about accepting that (most of) the things we value in music - innovation, attitude, goodness, novelty, etc. - aren't inherent in the music, even less than 'emotion' is, but are functions of who is listening and when. Doing Popular has really brought this home to me in a practical sense - listening to 50s No.1s and trying to write about them makes me feel like a Martian sometimes.