i wrote a dissertation about ilm and rockism

in your face people who say uni is getting easier

http://www.stuorg.iastate.edu/pkt/Playground%2004/Curtis%20with%20unicycle%208.JPG

ihttp://www.soton.ac.uk/~knoblies/images/France2003/Tim%20rides%20unicycle.jpg

http://cinetext.philo.at/magazine/images/pota_statue.png

I skimmed it, the most interesting bits for me were about the structure of ilxor etc, it's illuminating reading someone who presumably hasn't seen these things evolve trying to work out how ILX works, why we have different boards, where conventions like C/D, T/S etc. come from.

I think the way to look at 'anti-rockism' and ILM tho is to try and work out what we used/use a-r for - in practical terms, mostly as a way of creating an identity for a (mostly) unmoderated self-policing community.

/New School

sorry some of you didnt appreciate it/and/or elements of it,

in terms of quoting as I'm far from a regular poster (more of a lurker at best) inevitably i don't have the intricated detail of those who have been involved in ILM and its discusion for a long period of time.

About the Adorno thing, I think the "rockist" would think "their music is confrontational" whether or not that is the case is a matter of debate which i think I know which side some of us would fall on

-- blackmail.is.my.life (blackmail.is.my.lif...), September 16th, 2005."

wtf?

Back-handed or not.....back-handed or not.......hmmm...

One of the prominent users Mathew Perpetua's who is responsible for the critically acclaimed Fluxblog, (http://www.fluxblog.org) response to the thread though light hearted does draw attention to the sense of community which ILM and the other forums offer.

A: Your grammar is atrocious
B: The above contains many falsehoods and distortions
C: Good luck in the rest of life's journeys!

I liked how you jumped from the coining of the phrase as a Pete Wylie scally throwaway wit right into current ILM, there is a lot of history in the debate, and I'm guessing you aren't aware of it, But you didn't miss much and it would have bogged the essay down with irrelevance (similarly the history of ILM conventions).

It did make me realise that rockism is not pretty much a US discussion (as far as I can tell the UK finished the debate some time ago) - ILM is pretty much a US-centric music (not the same as US music-centric) forum these days anyway.

Spot on about puncturing the popism conceit too.

Only real issue I had with it is that you didn't ever stop to consider if the anti-rockists are tilting at windmills, because you never really established if the critisism of people behaving rockist-ly are true and consistent. I say this as a rockist who has never agreed with an anti-rockist's description of my value systems or taste criteria. There was a recent anti-rockist Douglas Wolk piece which I thought just boiled down to insulting blather and professional contraryness.

By at least accepting the frame of the debate specified by the popist/anti-rockists you accepted some of their arguments which are very far from being proven.

Not to mention all those fools who would suggest that some uni.s are offering degrees in the most ludicrously esoteric subjects with little or no relevance or practical value.

haha you didn't read the piece AT ALL did you?

Stewart, you back? You all moved in to your new digs?

nice try though!

Haven't sold my place yet, staying at my gf's place until I've done so and we're able to buy something together. Half my stuff's still back in Reading and most of the rest (including my hifi and most of my CD's!) is in boxes cluttering the place up here.

Started my new job last week, so putting in a lot of time there with not much time for t'interweb during work hours (at least until I've got things sorted out and running properly there, which is going to take a few months) and PC's currently in the corner of the living room at home and it doesn't go down too well if I spend too much of the time I am at home on the net.

It's not about your precious inner life, it's about what actually comes out on the page for public consumption, and on that score, there's lotsa descriptions of the r-word that are accurate.

No, the "B" is silent, the "LAI" is actually pronounced "'K&N" and the "R" is pronounced like a "T"

It would be good actually to somehow collate all the most interesting posts on the topic (from both sides) - much easier than wading through all the individual threads. Maybe Kelvin has already done this?

thanks for the positive feedback Tim, inevitably the process of writing the essay was a bit reductive and thats reductive on my knowledge from the posts obvivously about the topic from searching, and aimed at someone marking it who probably was completely unfamilar with it rather than someone central to the debate itself.

In defence of the topic of the essay for a course about online culture a internet forum debating a cultural phenomena seemed fair game, whether the internet itself essay worthy is perhaps another kettle of fish.

-- Tom (freakytrigge...), September 16th, 2005.

I think you should do so Tom.

1. it wasn't anti-rockist -- Matos

Yes it was. Go on, prove me wrong by quoting where he discusses the positive aspects to pro-rockism.

2. it didn't insult anyone -- Matos

Fair point, it patronised and trivialised, sorry for not being specific enough.

3. there isn't a contrary sentence in the thing

But that's the whole point of the attack on orthodox rock-crit rockism.

nice try though!

Thanks, as for your attempt to refute my points...mmmm. not so good.

there's lotsa descriptions of the r-word that are accurate.-- Eppy

I don't know of any. Are any of them on the internets?

(Is "blair" pronounced "vuh-'jI-nuh"?) -- The Ghost of Black Elegance

No its not, sorry, what was your point?

No, the "B" is silent, the "LAI" is actually pronounced "'K&N" and the "R" is pronounced like a "T" -- Stewart Osborne

What sort of cunt calls someone a cunt because they don't agree with a specific interpretation of a debate on types of music criticism?

That was a rhetorical question Stuart, I know the answer already.

Yes I did. Go on, ask me a question about it. Apart from the bit about black feminists which was a bit confusing.

"And Daphne Brooks gave a fascinating talk at the EMP conference, "Guided by Voices: Some Thoughts About Raging Against Rockism," wondering what "a black feminist rock criticism" would be."

yes, very confusing!

1. it wasn't anti-rockist -- Matos

Yes it was. Go on, prove me wrong by quoting where he discusses the positive aspects to pro-rockism.

well if you'd actually understood the piece then you'd know it was an attempt to define the term "rockism" and not a kneejerk slam at it or its practitioners

2. it didn't insult anyone -- Matos

Fair point, it patronised and trivialised, sorry for not being specific enough.

so what precisely did it patronize or trivialize?

3. there isn't a contrary sentence in the thing

But that's the whole point of the attack on orthodox rock-crit rockism.

well, gee, here's what the piece actually says:

Is rockism a bad thing? Well, yeah, it is, and nobody's free of it; I'm sure not. But it's pernicious because it makes it harder to understand any other kind of music on its own terms, and it chains both artists and their audience to an ideal rooted in a particular moment of the past, in which a gifted lyricist is by default a "new Dylan" (not a new Charley Patton, not a new Bill Withers, and especially not herself), in which the songwriter and the singer and the main instrumentalist are all on the stage and preferably the same person, in which any instrumentation for performance other than guitar-bass-drums-vocals-and-maybe-keyboards is some kind of novelty, because that is what's normal. Writers don't think this way because "19th Nervous Breakdown" is our favorite song; we do it unconsciously because it's the language we all internalized as pop-magazine-obsessed kids. And it trickles down to everyone who reads what we write.

So how do we get around rockism, if it's already ingrained in the way people talk about music? Mostly just by being aware of it and careful about it. But one shortcut is for music critics to stage raids on other kinds of culture criticism: great writing about movies, about literature, about food. They've all got their own biases and received ideas, defined by their own past masters—but they're not ours, and adopting perspectives, black feminist or otherwise, that don't take the rock canon as their baseline for normalcy can relieve the choking staleness of the way we talk about whatever music we love. They might even offer something new to say about that canon.

attack! attack! attack! or not. (hint: not)

"...adopting perspectives, black feminist or otherwise, that don't take the rock canon as their baseline for normalcy..."

There is no reason why you can't get black feminist rockism and / or black feminist non-rockism and / or black feminist anti-rockism. I even suspect that many (but not all) black feminists would be rather rockist in their views as they have a specific value system which overlaps much of rockism (authenticity, ability to convey message, etc).

[long rambling aside about meeting Joan Armatrading deleted, if anyone's interested I'll put it in a thread that isn't full of people calling me names of female genitalia while trying to claim my support for rockism isnt compatible with feminism]

Actually Kelvin's essay had quite a thoughtful section about something similar when trying to decribe the anti-rockist attack on the very notion of value system. Im not sure about that (though Kelvin makes a good argument). It sure looks to me like anti-rockists want to replace one value system with another.

" Is rockism a bad thing? Well, yeah, it is.."

Is a value judgement and that it's saying, well, that he thinks it's a bad thing. Even if he then adds that he has some traces of it himself, hes not saying it for praise.

compare that to a staement I would make

" Is rockism a bad thing? Well, no.."

There is a difference. My antagonism to the techniques of anti-rockists and what I thought was good and positive in the academic distance in Kelvins essay, is that it reminds me so strongly of US right wing 'framing'. The techniques of setting the agenda and the basis for the debate to your own advantage. If they issue should be Bush's National Guard record, focus on the font used in a document Dan Rather uses.

That's true. The sometimes implicit equation of rockism with the white male perspective is much too narrow. There's plenty of hip-hop rockism, e.g. Talk about a genre hung up on authenticity.

But Sandy, can you clarify what you mean when you call yourself a "rockist"? Since the word is mostly used pejoratively, I'm not sure what it means when used affirmatively.

This is a bit (a lot) of a stretch: in a discussion about rockism surely rockism is the point? Why are you the person who gets to decide what the "issue" is in a debate about music? What are the issues that we're not letting you talk about?

Are you really just upset that everybody doesn't agree with you? (i.e Douglas is being biased unless he says, "actually, no, rockism is a bogus concept")

I suspect this sort of meta-complaint about the very terms of the debate is a tacit admission that the anti-anti-rockists have never really been able to bring it in these discussions... (not the same as saying they don't have a good point, just that with very few exceptions they've been lacklustre advocates of their own cause on ILX)

I don't see it as being all that confusing, though--he refers back to an example of a non-rock canon perspective that had been proffered earlier in the piece, based on something that had triggered his own thoughts on the matter.

There is no reason why you can't get black feminist rockism and / or black feminist non-rockism and / or black feminist anti-rockism. I even suspect that many (but not all) black feminists would be rather rockist in their views as they have a specific value system which overlaps much of rockism (authenticity, ability to convey message, etc).

sure, but again, I think you're reading too much into it. it's one example, and salient because D. Brooks was talking about it in terms not unlike Douglas's own. you can insert any number of things in "black feminist"'s place and the point remains the same.

Actually Kelvin's essay had quite a thoughtful section about something similar when trying to decribe the anti-rockist attack on the very notion of value system. Im not sure about that (though Kelvin makes a good argument). It sure looks to me like anti-rockists want to replace one value system with another.

that might be so (and I just read Kelvin's essay on a long train ride--dude, punctuation!--and agree with this to some degree) but I think that's normal enough--Douglas is a critic, after all, and if he's going to argue about value systems it's only going to be natural for him to suggest alterations to the one(s) we're (he's) used to. it's not as if he's arguing for abolishing values altogether, which you seem to find his piece closer to advocating (puzzlingly, I say).

" Is rockism a bad thing? Well, yeah, it is.."

Is a value judgement and that it's saying, well, that he thinks it's a bad thing. Even if he then adds that he has some traces of it himself, hes not saying it for praise.

sure, but there's a big big difference between finding something lacking and an attack. I took offense to your statements earlier because I found the piece more fair-minded than not--sure he's got a position, but he's given some serious thought to more than just his position.

My antagonism to the techniques of anti-rockists and what I thought was good and positive in the academic distance in Kelvins essay, is that it reminds me so strongly of US right wing 'framing'. The techniques of setting the agenda and the basis for the debate to your own advantage. If they issue should be Bush's National Guard record, focus on the font used in a document Dan Rather uses.

Well, sure, being the person who commissioned and edited the piece, I'm going to defend it. but I also think you're being overly paranoid here. For one thing, he pulls back from the fray and tries to give the reader (meaning the reader who knows or might not care that much about the whole debate) a long-eye view of the thing, then suggests why it matters. the way you're talking about it makes it seem like a screaming paranoiac rant, and it isn't at all.

Still, it's caused Sandy Blair to de-lurk, so something good has come out of it.

best parody thread EVAH

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

study music. you post on a messageboard called I Love Music, i think youll be able to find a way to make it work

― Dad Can Dance (LOLK), Tuesday, August 10, 2010

reminded me of this thread

"Bruadrillard"

― Gerard (Gerard), Thursday, September 15, 2005 10:48 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark