EMP 2006 Pop Conference: 4/27-30

anthony, i thought your proposal was a shoo-in since it was so awesome. you should totally hold the anti-emp conference at your house the same weekend. you still have that keg, right?

(if I feel its worth the slap to my bank account)

Seriously, can anyone offer helpful tips to a conference rookie. Seriously.

http://www.coldproducts.com/ezglide.php

allows you to install an ice rink anywhere!

Unless they actually decided that my proposal involved an audience for whom the pleasure bore absolutely zero guilt (even though it probably should), which would be a reasonable reason although the neato form letter didn't get into specifics.

Yes, I'm a bitter bitch.

There is precedent that if you write a song with this title and release it that it will wind up on the Dean's List.

I say, go for it, man!

*and a quart of whisky

Ah fuckit. It was me trying to be funny. I mean, I called myself a bitter bitch.

xp - I thought it was about "guilty pleasures," which isn't the exact same thing because I maintain that there are *cool* guilty pleasures and vastly uncool ones as well. Maybe that's another thread. Or a winning proposal...

Oh, I got reee-jected too. Great, I just went gay and now I've been rejected. I'm like a character from a bad gay indie movie. I hope this doesn't mean that my dad's going to show up and announce he's found Jesus and I'm going to have to tell him that he DOESN'T UNDERSTAND.

I won't be going unless I can get my day job to pay for my plane ticket to SXSW. Which isn't terribly likely.

i kinda wish SFJ would defend himself w/o this kinda sulkiness

Because my whole point is that you can't judge individuals based on tiny bits of data. I understand that, and that's why I say Merritt is taking this hit by proxy, as a stand-in for something else, something faceless. This is a dynamic we should recognize from other spheres, from other accusations of bias. Imagine you have a board of 100 college admissions officers, and they're all meant to interview two people -- one male, one female -- and recommend one for admission. Now imagine that 90 of them recommend the male candidate. There will never be evidence that any one of them let gender affect his decision; it will always be unfair to accuse any one of them of having done something wrong. And yet, and yet: something is off! Something went wrong that nobody can be blamed for! And I say that because I think that's the dynamic that's motivating SFJ and Hopper here: the frustration of feeling that there's something off (they clearly feel this) but not having targets, and thus leaping onto Merritt as someone who's said just enough that he can be singled out as one. I'm not saying they're right -- I'm describing the kind of frustrating dynamic that leads to this.

It doesn't matter who determines the parameters of what constitutes "off" -- the point is just that SFJ and Hopper seem to have made a conclusion about that. And not a completely unreasonable one: it's not particularly radical to conclude that certain tastes are somewhat dominant in the field of what we consider "high-level" or "serious" music criticism, dominant out of proportion to the general public's tastes and relationship with music. (I have my own personal opinions about how much that's true and why, but I'll leave that for another post or discussion.)

As for Merritt, I don't think he's supposed to just "accept" SFJ's declaration that he's aligned with a particular culture: I think he's said it himself, he knows it himself, and he's fine with it. You talk as if it's a fearsome allegation. But why? Why are we concerned that a middle-class white person might have tastes that align with middle-class white idioms? Why is this any different than pointing out that Jay-Z grew up in a Brooklyn project and has tastes that come from a particular hip-hop idiom and culture?

I mean, to put it bluntly, I feel like white people often try to make themselves neutral, to kind of run down their own particular experience and culture as non-experience and non-culture -- often (maybe) out of fear that admitting they have a culture means further dominating everyone else's, further oppressing everyone else's. They want to step out of the game and act as neutral parties observing everyone else's culture. But that's even worse, but it puts them in an even more dominant position, and a patronizing and untruthful one, too. The trick here can be for people like Merritt (and even non-white people like me) to admit to being aligned with a particular conception of art and taste that we're identifying as a white idiom (at least as much and as accurately as you want to call hip-hop a "black" idiom -- neither description is very good, obviously). It's possible to own this experience and get the fuck over the fact that it's not, in this country, "special." And it's possible to have a certain self-awareness about where that experience is useful and where it isn't (which is what this country expects of everyone who isn't white).

Not that that'll solve SFJ and Hopper's problem -- they'll surely still feel like those spotlight music circles still have bias, still trend toward a certain way of thinking.

I do understand that sometime discrimination is alleged via disparate impact, as opposed to a more obvious and openly expressed dismcriminatory intent. But as Don has argued, and I agree with, one needs to prove that case before throwing around the term 'racist.' You need to make the case why 90 of the 100 officers in your example reached the result they reached.

It's not simple.

As I said on the other thread, I think Merritt by authoring his top 20th century list, and by penning pretentious criticism has set himself up to have his views questioned, and I wish he would widen his musical parameters, but I do not think that makes him a racist (or anyone else who boastfully states they like Aretha and gospel but not rap) no matter what methodology you employ to determine it.

In our insular little music crit world, as I noted above, I think it is important for editors at alt-weeklies and dailies and non-genre-specific publications and websites to go beyond their own cultural wordview by seeking to employ writers and to cover subjects that provide a multicultural, multi-class perspective. That is the best way to confront the disparate impact problem.

-- nabisco (--...), May 11th, 2006. (later)

in other words, "I WAS OTM"

"A few years ago, in the heyday of indie crossover, he met with the staff of one major label, where an employee boasted that artists retained full control over album art. Ever the skeptic, Merritt asked, 'So it would be OK if I put child porn on the cover of my record?' Needless to say, the label passed."

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/9948,tannenbaum,10576,1.html

but books are kinda sold this way...

but yo check it out:
r&b came BEFORE rock;
what's this "church" genre?

Maybe what I'm trying to say is that this matter sort of hinges on an elusive form of critical transparency, one that for the most part does not seem possible to me.

That statement's actually more accurate the further you go back in time, I think. There are ways in which it's on, but dissecting what's off about it is actually a pretty good way of sorting out the distinctions we make between black and white idioms. Blues and folk, for instance, can be inseparable, but in the end Muddy Waters is not the same as Peter, Paul, and Mary (for whom we use those words, respectively) -- and we can point to specific concrete things they do differently that place them in different idioms, even historically. (E.g., "white" folk employs a lot of European classical-tradition choral harmonies.)

xpost
"Cracker" is (a) a word, not a phrase, (b) employed heavily by the Nabisco Corporation in our effort to provide the world with crisp healthy snacks, and (c) surely not something that hurts white people's feelings so very much.

It doesn't matter if "cracker" doesn't hurt most white people's feelings, and that is totally debatable. I do believe many rural white folks would not appreciate being called cracker. However, the word does seem to possess enough derisive weight that SFJ saw fit to toss it a white person he thinks is a racist.

It's racist...hmmmm...word. No doubt about it.

WFMU, Friday, May 12, noon-3pm

Tune in tomorrow from noon-3pm as guest DJ Stephin Merritt joins Monica Lynch for a celebration of the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” My, oh my, it’ll be a wonderful day.

I don't care if it's black-to-white, white-to-black, black-to-yellow, yellow-to-black etc, etc, etc. Redneck, honky, cracker, nigger, porch monkey, kike, jigaboo, chink, slant, gook, and on, on, and on. It's all hateful speech based on color/culture.

And if this SFJ character didn't were interested in more than just spitting venom and wanted real understanding from this Magnetic Fields dude then the word "cracker" wouldn't have been used.

"Black Or White
And We All Know It's Wrong
And We're Gonna Fight To Make It Right
And Mighty, Mighty Spade And Whitey
Your Black And White Power
Is Gonna Be A Crumbling Tower"

And yes, I'm a bit crazy.

"It's all hateful speech based on color/culture."

But, keep trying, buddy.

don't you think maybe
there was something similar
in the "cracker" crack?

oh forget it dude
yes you're right and righteous and
far above us all

don't you think maybe
there was something similar
in the "cracker" crack?

If you are saying that SFJ's use of the word "cracker" is somehow similar to my use of all those others words then the answer is no. I wanted to show graphically how racial slurs used in a spiteful way against whites are the same as racial slurs used against any other race by listing them all together.

Does believing in that make me better than anybody else? I would hope not. I don't feel better than anybody else. BUT as an outside spectator, this whole episode bummed me out a little because all these two characters had to do is approach the Magnetic dude earnestly and with open minds. But that doesn't seem to have been the case. And when a word like "cracker" or any other racial slur is used in a context of cheap exhibitionism and adversary then it's racist. Definitely. That's my take.

And as Nabisco (who is perpetually OTM) implied, a term like "cracker" (to say nothing of "redneck" and "honky") is NOWHERE NEAR as offensive as any of the other names you dropped. And you certainly don't need to get up on your high horse about one white man calling another white man that name.

This is a non-issue. Move on, please, thanks.

Leave alone when it's a white person slinging it at another white person as part of the whole weird "nervousness and/or embarrassment about being part of middle-class white culture" issue that white people seem to have going on. (Your list of directions you don't approve of didn't include white-on-white: you know SFJ is white, right?)

I do want to drop an anecdote: I'm from upstate New York, and I went to school in southwestern michigan. I was dating a smalltown Michigan girl, and I went to her house on a farm for Thanksgiving. I made a joke about rednecks in the woods in front of her dad and 2 uncles. I almost got the shit beat out of me. And they gave me a talking about an east coast person coming to their town and talking about rednecks. Now mind you, these were decent people not KKK freaks. I was simply referring to the cliche image of a redneck. From that day on I realized that those terms are very, very hurtful to certain people.

Good talkin'!

Grindloch -- fair enough
Haikunym -- fair enoughx2. I'm just a dramatic man who gets on the high horse.

I do want to drop an anecdote: I'm from upstate New York, and I went to school in southwestern michigan. I was dating a smalltown Michigan girl, and I went to her house on a farm for Thanksgiving. I made a joke about rednecks in the woods in front of her dad and 2 uncles. I almost got the shit beat out of me. And they gave me a talking about an east coast person coming to their town and talking about rednecks. Now mind you, these were decent people not KKK freaks. I was simply referring to the cliche image of a redneck. From that day on I realized that those terms are very, very hurtful to certain people.

Good talkin'!

- you play the east-coast city boy (of the type who RUNS STUFF)
- they play the rural working class (of the type who fix cars and get picked on by the people who RUN STUFF)

Try to think of words they could have called you in response that would have gotten that heated reaction out of you. What word could they have pushed at you that would really have hurt you down deep on the level of your identity?

But to play along -- In all honesty, I don't know. Maybe if they called me a "dude who likes to have sex with inflatable dolls" then that would have made me super pissed because way, way back then I was still hiding the secret that when I was 13, I tried having sex with an inflatable doll. But nowadays, I've come to terms.

My sincerest apologies to anyone who thought I totally hijacked this thread for a few hours; the caffeine is now wearing off.

You're trying to be funny, but it looks like you can't come up with anything that can hit at your group identity the right way. I think the only time that white Americans even get close to experiencing this is when they go to western Europe and someone starts yelling at them about how Americans are all fat war-hungry idiots. Because the thing is that these things aren't just insults, they're messages -- backed by a history of force -- that certain types of people just Don't Matter or Don't Belong Here.

You're trying to be funny

Kinda...sorta...I'm of Italian and Puerto Rican descent (first generation). But I've never been called a racial name; my father was a lot. (But then, he is a racist fucker himself.) I have had some odd comments thrown at me from a tour guide woman in Memphis (relating to North-South bullshit) and one of those uncles kept saying I-talian (with a long "I") after I corrected him. Ha! In total honesty, the most hurtful thing they could have said would have been something referring that rubber doll. But you are right, I have no idea what it feels like be an African-American who has been called something shitty.

Having said that, are minorities allowed to call whites racial names because it somehow rights some historial wrong? I have never been able to determine how I feel about this (even though I might act like it at times).

Where'd you go?

Haha OMG me too -- I remember they were playing a Steve Reich record in the store, and I was 18 and was all, "Ahem, is from that new box set that came out?" just to show that I knew what was what.

(I went to K College.)

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/9907/xwfeaturesufjanstevens8dd.jpg