Popism

"Michael Jackson is made of pop material: his great music, his great dancing, his minimal life. In our times he carries the same weight of popism as Marilyn or Elvis or Elizabeth Taylor. Next to him Madonna seems like a mere theoretician."

(please work)

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drf800/f866/f86637hbo58.jpg

differences:

http://www.thecityreview.com/s02sco2h.gif

Also, it is friiiiday night and therefore I think no more.

whoever wrote that is OTfuckinM!

although maybe it's just becuase he's more reclusive and i'm buying into a sense of mystery about him that's developed as a result....uh, yeah and i'm pretty sure i'm saying this badly so if anyone else has any thought and is a better writer i'd love to hear it.

but that might just be the problem with having an articulate pop hero. michael j can't possibly be so damn smug like that because he's basically inarticulate when he's not singing. (which perhaps makes him a purer artist in some weird way.)

(what any of that has to do with what gil and veloso are saying, i'm not sure!)

(but i sense that's at least part of what they're getting at: the mystery and the allure of michael vs. the transparent calculation of madonna.)

(but to me, transparent calculation IS pop.)

(sort of.)

But then the Unionists are the ultimate rockists, aren't they really?

I think this is incorrect - so much of the critical praise for Nirvana or The Beatles or Wilco or Outkast or whoever (praise which we might consider to be rockist) similarly values "the whole package" - the fact that Wilco's record company wouldn't release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and yet they soldiered on, for example, is considered to say something about their values and integrity - neither of which are likely to be readily evident from the music in isolation, and yet are somehow considered to be an important component in appreciating the music.

In his or her defence the rockist might say, "yes, but this story relates to the quality and nature of the music and artistry, whereas the pop star's video clips and fashion sense do not." But surely such a story as Wilco's and what a pop star wears might both conceivably to say something about the "values and integrity" of the artist? And anyway, it's not like rock bands' innovative video clip or anti-fashion (see Nirvana) aren't equally a large part of their appeal.

What we see here then is not a conflict between valuing the whole package and valuing the music in isolation, but rather an allegation as to how "the package" works in the separate cases of rock and pop. Supposedly for pop music the package has a big effect on whether we enjoy the music, whereas as for rock it is a inevitable expression of the artistry of the music. This is why some people have a hard time accepting that many "honest" rock and indie groups are just as ruthlessly target-marketed as pop stars: we hold on to this distinction between stylisation which is deliberate and cynical and stylisation which is organic and authentic.

At any rate, I'd question whether valuing the package is a central tenant to popism anyway - many people accused of popism on ILM get a lot of exposure to pop through filesharing, without the accompanying baggage of video clips etc. I'm not saying there aren't heaps of people who do place an emphasis on video clips, magazine articles etc, but I do think it would be wrong to assume that this was a prerequisite for a strong enjoyment of pop music.

I would say that in almost every instance a choice as to the type of package a listener prefers precedes an evalutation of its authenticity. The evaluation is just used to subsequently justify the initial choice. If Britney was initially on an indie label, wrote her own material and generally speaking was not deliberately moulded, would people who complain about manufactured pop suddenly like her? I strongly doubt it. An example here might be Daniel Bedingfield, who satisfies all those qualities but is not suddenly embraced by the anti-pop crowd - because you'd have to investigate his back story to ever get beyond the assumption that he was manufactured pop. The assumption derives from the style which he performs in, not some psychic ability to determine the integrity of a performer.

The consternation over whether or not Avril is authentic likewise stems not from some initial sense that she may or may not be, but rather the fact that the stylistic affectations she incorporates (punk & rock on one hand, chart pop on the other) create conflicting assumptions.

i'm not so sure there is, though. all music and all image is deliberate. wilco didn't leave their label, publicize their woes, and find a new label organically. they made a specific choice every step of the way. same with nirvana (read any interview with kurt; he couldn't have been clearer about just how deliberate he was). same with madonna.

there may, however, be a difference, between how that deliberation is presented -- how organic it appears vs. how deliberate it appears.

At any rate, I'd question whether valuing the package is a central tenant to popism anyway - many people accused of popism on ILM get a lot of exposure to pop through filesharing,

i think that completely depends on the artist, and i don't think it necessarily separates rock(ism) and pop(ism). i fell in love with madonna on the radio; virtually everything she's done to package herself has made me like her less. i fell in love with nirvana on cd long before i knew much of anything about them, and i'm reasonably sure the way they packaged themselves made me love them more.

I think this is precisely the key to all this. Of course in rock (even in its most organic) "The whole package" matters a lot, but the rockist attitude is that it shouldn't matter to the artist. Like a rock artist shouldn't be thinking "what am I going to wear to look cool?" or "will people like such and such". He should be thinking "I'm just going to do my own thing and if people don't like it, well f**k it!".

In fact I think sometimes things other than the music matter even more for the rockist than the popist, like the fact that an artist should have creative control over his/her output and present him/herself in an honest way, because another really important issue in rockism is legitimacy. I wonder what would happen if we found out that in fact U@ do not write their own songs.