pop music / pop art correlatives?

The passing years have turned the disposable/ultramodern thing into another pick'n'mix popcrit idea, as useful or useless as the timelessness-matters idea it has at various times kicked against. As is probably pretty obvious I find it more gut-level attractive than a 'rockist' reading of music but that doesn't mean I agree with it: it annoys me almost as much when somebody praises pop for its manufactured disposability as it does when someone dismisses it for that. I think the whole question is irrelevant to my listening to the records.

My personal problem is that I hear a record and I like it, and then if I want to describe that I have to try and work out why, at least a little bit. Sometimes I find myself drifting towards the disposability-ethic when that record is by Britney or someone, more out of laziness than belief. That's not why I like her, though.

As for the whole pop-art thing, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's a stance: I think it's a good thing for musicians to have ideas about what they're doing, even if those ideas are old- fashioned ones.

this is a scary question.

I think lots of Pop Art is nice to look at, like Vespas or Imacs. Like the Monkees are nice to listen to. Some of it is disposable. Some of it is very good. Since its inception in the 50s, we have not disposed of it: instead it has become an aesthetic paradigm, which in a way contradicts its central tenet of disposability. (oh oh, infinite regress approaching) So in my opinion the idea of the cool Warholian with dark glasses making ultra consumable art that also says something about society's vacant heart by disappearing or dying young is old fashioned and kind of embarassing.

But seeing as some of my fave bands implicitly had that idea about their music (e.g. velvets, magazine, josef k to name but a tiny number) where in blue blazes does that leave me? Am I no different from the pig buying Robbie Williams records in HMV? Is my delight at finding a rare Aztec Camera single in a charity shop merely a fetishized aspect of my robotic need to consume?

Nah, for my money we aint living in no post modernist dystopia. People make records. Lots can influence how they sound. In a mysterious but brilliant way, some are better than others. The best ones are far, far from being disposable. Britney is disposable. Let's dispose of her and talk about Felt, Sam Prekop, Clientele etc etc etc. Oh hang on, we are.

David, perhaps you like the bands you do because they tried to be "ultra consumable" and failed so miserably. We all know the utopian Dave McCullough 1980s dream where every 15 year old kid would groove to Felt and Orange Juice. Life - and Pop - was not going to go the way the neat Popist idea had proscribed. Too bad for life. And for pop.

Maybe your new wave faves achieved greatness by accident while trying to be mass market disposables? Somehow I don't think this would comfort Lawrence "lend us a fiver" Hayward much, though.

Tom: what is a "rockist" reading of pop culture? I have a sneaking feeling it involves nuremberg rallies and the launch of V2 rockets/

Somebody mentioned Josef K!! After so few replies to the Josef K 'classic or dud ', I thought I'd finally found a weak spot in the Freaky Trigger posse pop knowledge base. :)

I knew I shouldn't have used that word, it's very vague. (We had a whole thread on it somewhere). I used it here to mean:

i) a critical bias in favour of rock music over other pop forms ii) a preoccupation with a pure form of rock - the 'spirit of rock and roll' etc. iii) a preference for certain means of production - artists writing own songs, a distrust of overproduction and studio technology, a preference for live over studio performance iv) a belief that pop music history is best understood in terms of which bands have 'lasted' - in critical rather than popular terms - and a belief that speculation about whether a current record will last is relevant to that record's quality. v) the annexation of certain other vague descriptive terms - 'soulful', 'emotional', 'raw' for example - to describe a set of playing or singing styles.

Now note that there's nothing wrong at all with i), ii) and iii), I just don't share them much. iv) I disagree with. v) is more a symptom than anything else and again not bad. And note that you could adapt all five to soul, or hip-hop, or techno. They're all only bad inasmuch as they become entrenched, as critical attitudes, and you end up spending more of your time dismantling these assumtpions than talking about the music.

The interesting question being asked is - have the 'popist' attitudes become equally entrenched?

now wait just a cotton pickin' minute here. I have to disagree with the Pop Art characterisation implicit in this argument right from the word (ready steady) go.

I don't think anyone involved with Pop Art meant their stuff to be instantly disposable. They were on the contrary elevating disposable items into the status of high art / fetish. These originally mass produced items and images were now made iconic and singular a la Duchamp. This is totally, totally different to the democratising effect of pressing loads of identical records. Yet both have been seen as a Pop Art statement. A greater mind than mine will have to clarify that one.

Pop music was intially seen as disposable, at least by cultural commentators. Maybe Townshend wanted to start the same process of elevation. Maybe the argument can be split between those who feel describing a set of guitar chords as "pop art" is valid and meaningful and them what don't. Maybe pop art is intrinisically contradictory. Maybe we should heed the post modernist who wrote to the Times chastising them for the claim that post modernism espoused singular truths or narratives. This description, he felt, was too much of a narrative or attempt at a singular truth.

David, your own email address didn't work, so can you tell me here whether you are *the* David Stubbs of Melody Maker / Uncut etc. fame?