"PoMo" a NoNo?

Turn-on of course! Bring on Deleuze, Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, etc. If done well (Penman) or freely (Eshun) it makes music journalism the best non-fiction (or should that be fiction -period-) around. Tends to work better when talking about dance music though, don't you think?

In the context of pop, I say post modernism can make for funny and interesting debate. I think the Robbie furore elsewhere is a good example of this.

you could also ask - how much "retro" pop - eg apples in stereo, tahiti 80, beachwood sparks, - is really "retro", and how much is it a "take" on retro? Does "retro" have any meaning in a mix and match culture? Of course, as with anything, it depends on the skill of the writer. But especially so with Po mo. The most famous post structuralists wrote with an amazing economy of style - not so perhaps every kid who wants to regurgitate their college notes with an extra garnish of showy REVOLUTIONARY CAPITALS.

and another thing, think about the classically post-modernist - and now very widespread - idea that everything is within the realm of culture and therefore open and liable to be considered for its aesthetics. Isn't this implicit in FT's baffling interest in Britney, Destiny's Child et al? ;-)

I dunno - I'm not sure how much spark you can create these days by rubbing up critical theory against pop. I'm surprised there wasn't a thread on postmodernism on "I love the 1980s" recently - somewhere between the Rubik cube and Roland Rat; it seems to have become every bit a part of theme park history as existentialism and post-war Parisian cafes. Of course there are some great examples of brainiac pop fun - Ian Penman's long- lost book on Bryan Ferry, Simon Reynolds on Throwing Muses etc, but these guys were great writers first, semiotext(e) subscribers somewhere around sixth. There's a cultural history to be written about the symbiosis between theory victim and style victim, and at some point (it was actually midway through an Andy Darling pop column for Blitz in 1989) dropping a Virilio reference into a pop review became the equivalent of sporting a particularly daft Gaultier jacket. It's a substitute for thinking rather than a way of sparking a reaction.

Critical theory is something I know very little about, so at the simplest level I have a rather kneejerk dislike of it being over-used in music writing as it tends to render the writing very difficult for me to get a handle on. Saying that, I'm fairly sure if I actually got off my arse and bothered to do a bit of reading I might get quite a lot out of this approach. I certainly enjoyed reading my flatmates copy of Barthes's Mythologies.

Charlotte - I'm not sure it is. I mean, people were writing about pop aesthetics in the early 60s popmags etc. a good few years before they wrote seriously about rock aesthetics. It's only from that rock perspective that the popchart stuff isn't 'open' for discussion anyway. And from the perspective of a Roger Scruton, say, considering the aesthetics of *any* remotely 'pop' music is a fool's errand and a relativist infection. So Britney or no Britney we're all on the same side ;)

Alex and I kept wanting to write an article about all this but I doubt we ever will now. It was going to be called "Get Up I Feel Like Being A Desiring Machine".

Baffling? FT's interest in Destiny's Child is BAFFLING? Freaky Trigger is an intelligent pop site and DC just happen to be one of the best pop acts around at the moment. Why wouldn't they be interested?

> Isn't this implicit in FT's baffling interest in Britney, > Destiny's Child et al? ;-)

Nah, Charlotte. I think the point is we actually like some of their records, no matter how much people try to elicit drunken confessions that it's all a pose.

Writing 'we' sounds really creepy there. I almost wrote 'they' as I don't have half as much interest in them as Tom and some of the other people.

The big post-structuralists had an economy of style? Which ones? I found most of them - Barthes and Eco excepted - deeply turgid, and I have a media/sociology MA from Goldsmiths, so I've had more exposure to this stuff than most. Anyway, I think you should only drag this kind of stuff into discussion of pop if it genuinely shines light on the situation (rare), or your just being gleefully snide and snobbish. In the particular Robbie/sampling discussion, the term 'pomo' is unhelpful because the whole pastiche/originality argument was overdone in the death of modernism debate. Consider the Wasteland, a monument of modernism if there was one, and a patchwork of allusion and quotation. Songs have always been built from other songs - think "variations' in classical music, early blues or just Julian Cope admitting he often starts by nicking a riff... Even the pre-'ironic' Bono used to weave snatches of other songs into his own: nowt

It's a substitute for thinking rather than a way of sparking a reaction.

A lot of post modernist citations went the way of DEF 2. However, the thought and theory penetrated culture, and a lot of it has become a given. I maintain pop writing could benefit from occasional forays into the economy of style and originality and elegance of thought in say, Barthe's Lover's Discourse.

Since I'm apparently incapable of respecting thread-coherence anyway — oh i'm so pomo — I'll just jump in here from o'er there and suggest that Charlotte's second posting HERE is kinda just what I was talking about back THERE. That the word "post-modern", seemingly used to explain/describe something, is actually a way of protecting yourself from having to think about something: in this case the reasons for a mysterious enthusiasm. It turns from genuine enquiry towards panicky (and usually bad) sociology. It uses an abstract schema, borrowed from books by people who couldn't distinguish between Tom Jones and Tim Buckley , to posit some "real" non-distinction between Britney and DC (for example) which the fans CAN'T hear (even tho they listen all the time) but the academics CAN (even tho they NEVER do).

I love Penman and Kodwo, but I love them because they start with the phenom and use it to punch holes in their theory (not vice versa). My old sparring partner Simon Reynolds, well, this is a different kettle de différances, je croix.

oh, oh the big guns are out! :-)

. Songs have always been built from other songs - think "variations' in classical music, early blues or just Julian Cope admitting he often starts by nicking a riff..

yes yes yes, clearly this is true, But since when did they nick 2/3 of the song, the entire orchestration and arrangement, half the lyrics? By your rationale if I tracked down every copy of "supreme" or whatever the loathsome thing's called, took out an edding 800 and wrote "Charlotte Parker" over Robbie's name, then the release would be mine, not his anymore. Hooray! Talent borrows, genius steals!

Tom, you're right: it's a rockist attitude that pop isn't worthy of sophisto aesthetic analysis. Mark, I don't see how exercising your brain is vilely smug and snobbish?

And, yes, I really am baffled, and I really did think it was a bit of an ironic stance you lot liking Britney and co. I wish to speak to the manager. ;-)

Charlotte

-----

Ian Penman's long-lost book on Bryan Ferry

-----

Stevie, long-lost as in couldn't be arsed to finish it or just out-of- print? Sounds like a must-have.

Exercising brain good. Using phrase "post-modern" bad. Corollary: I think this term stopped being part of thought and became part of kneejerk round abt 35 seconds after the first (pop-uninformed) lecturer read the blurb on the back of _The Logic of Late Capitalism_, and decided he had a jump, after all, on all the Depeche Mode fans sitting wide-open-faced before him. (At last his fiendish plan was COMPLETE...)

The Robbie record IS yours, as soon as you buy it (that's what "buy" means); thereafter all meaning and value is yours to generate, in furious debate with all the others who bought it. Except of course you don't have to buy it, just to pipe up. Nor do ytou don't need to write yr name anywhere (tho this is a brilliant brilliant project and I hope you carry it thru). Meaning in pop isn't just something poured in by the mighty artist and left to set, before consumption, it's what occurs when the phosphorus that is the performer is tossed into the water that is the audience.

I was the manager. Eat y'self fitter. ;)

Anyway, pop and me/us and irony (it's a tangent): I don't like the word "ironic" not cause it doesn't hide a grain of truth but because it's really big and clumsy and shoves too much else in as well as the truth. I nowadays do, absolutely, love pop music. A while ago - a few years maybe - my relationship with it was a bit more complicated. It was something - this is also too crude - I felt I ought to like rather than something I really did like. This is how I'd got into most of the music I now love, mind you.

I felt I ought to like it cause I felt a bit sorry for it. It was always getting beat on by other people, and really it wasn't that bad and it could do with a mate. And I did enjoy it even if deep down I enjoyed other things more.

And then one evening I drunkenly posted somewhere that "Baby One More Time" was the best single of the year. And I got up in the morning and realised that a) there were loads of people telling me to fuck off and not be so ironic and b) I meant every word. And that was it really. It was like that bit in romantic films when leading lady gets dissed or is about to board a train to faraway or takes her glasses off and suddenly densely 'friendly' leading man thinks, blam!

Except pop doesn't love me back. Ah well. That's probably why I listen to Belle And Sebastian.

Meaning in pop isn't just something poured in by the mighty artist and left to set, before consumption, it's what occurs when the phosphorus that is the performer is tossed into the water that is the audience

cool, then I must say Robbie's just invented a great new sound, maybe we should call it disco!

of course sometimes the phosphorus misses the Waters of Pop and skitters off beyond reach under the great Fridge of Obsolescence , where it turns dull and inert next to Gary Barlow.

and some yellowing copies of the melody maker. ;-)

Charlotte, in fact, seems to be the one keeping those ancient high/low distinctions alive and well: failing to understand how it is possible to love, say, both the Subway Sect and Destiny's Child with all your heart, just like you can love Raiders of The Lost Ark and Luis Bunuel films. There isn't anything the least ironic - or 'ironic' - about it. ..

If I put my fridge on top my yellowing copies of melody maker, I'd have to borrow my upstairs neighbour's key whenever I wanted a yoghurt (and I don't even HAVE an upstairs neighbour). (= science)

If I put my fridge on top my yellowing copies of melody maker, I'd have to borrow my upstairs neighbour's key whenever I wanted a yoghurt (and I don't even LIKE yoghurt). (= irony)

I hate both those Robbie records, incidentally, but the problem with pop criticism is the need to find ideological reasons - he's a tea leaf! - to explain liking, or not liking something. Hear'say, for example, are not more or less morally bankrupt than the Monkees - I just don't think their songs, so far, are much cop........

At least Hear'Say sing on their own records (he said, switching sides completely and plainly angling for a mangling).

guys, i have to say despite the baiting going on, this is one of the most interesting threads I have read for a long time.

The consensus so far seems to be : Post Modernism is dull and dated, and can obscure a healthy view of music by pandering to saddo academic doctrine.

Can I posit the idea that post modernist theory comes from a more politically committed and subversive history than anyone has so far admitted? Derrida himself explained that his philosophies were intended as an act of violence against restrictive western metaphysics. And it's true, they've destroyed western metaphysics! The fact that this hasn't made any difference is a bit depressing, but anyway.... Is this a bit tooo Greil Marcus?

No matter how many dull academics are earning a living off a rudimentary/innacurate knowledge of dubious sociology etc.. do post modernist metaphysics really need to be reactionary, obscuring and against the "kids" as Mark S suggests?

Also - and i ask this seriously-, what is so offensive about the idea of high and low culture? If you can make qualitative judgements between bands, why not genres, art forms etc.? It's not my personal view at all, but it's interesting because it does lead into another branch of lit crit - Harold Bloom's Western Canon.

If you think this is baity, wait till the "Derrida: propomo or nopomo" debate begins. (Cuz JD is not now and never has been a post- modernist, see, and anyone who sez different is a neo-platonist phallogocentric pie-face).

Funnily enough, I like Derrida almost more than I like Barthes and Bloom (tho Bloom is better when he's talking about angels and Freud than canons). (First off, I wrote, "Ironically, I like Derrida..." but that seemed somewhat likely to give rise to misunderstanding, and I couldn't BEAR that.)

Re: Mork - we're getting further and further from pop here, but one of the problems I always had with post structuralism was that it was politically futile. You can talk about symbolic resistance, language games and metaphysics all you want, and you won't feed or house a single person. There is some politically useful stuff to be dredged out of Foucault, though none I could ever find in Derrida or Baudrillard. I'm not saying ideology doesn't matter, but no state was ever propped up by a metanarrative alone. Enough, anyway....

Help! I appear to have turned over two pages at once - one minute we're discussing beards, the next critical theory! What happened? Can't we get back to discussing whether the new Destiny's Child single is good or not? :)

what is so offensive about the idea of high and low culture? If you can make qualitative judgements between bands, why not genres, art forms etc.?

Mork,

I don't think that follows at all. A band's work (uneven as it might be - OK let's say an individual song instead) can be judged against another fairly straightforwardly (if not authoritatively). But a genre covers far too wide a set of artistic endeavours to be sensibly classable as 'good' or 'bad'. That's why people appeal to class structures to make sense of the establishment assumptions about what genres are worthwhile.

well, the problem there, dg, is that that particular discussion begins and ends with one word: CLASSIC. so it's critical theory, marketing campaigns and derrida for you. ;)

Gosh it seems so long ago. Post-Modernist aesthetics stem from Charles Jencks’ architectural criticism in the late 1960s and 1970s. He more or less invented the label and collected the thinkers together in a way that made sense in art colleges at that time. It was as influenced by pop art as it was by French post-structuralist thinkers. As far as I can remember Bryan Ferry’s ‘These Foolish Things’ was a key musical text. In the end just another modernist –ism… Are people still interested in it?

I'd rather just find out if a record/ concert/ book was enjoyed by the reviewr, and then go from there. Post-modernism is so old now, can't we have something new?...

Speaking as I can from the home of the 'best critical theory grad department in the US' -- so says _US News and World Report_, at least -- where Derrida comes and lectures every spring, I just have to say:

Death to theory.

Anyway, those interested can check out Monsieur D's current reading list for his lecture here -- I oughta know, I'm the one who actually processed it and keeps an eye on it for the library:

http://antpac .lib.uci.edu/search/p?SEARCH=derrida

In sum, death, death, the death penalty and death. See, death to theory! I wasn't kidding!

PoMo Good: Opened up pop cult. to critical examination. PoMo Bad: Spits on pop cult. PoMo Good: tries to be political. PoMo Bad: fails at being political and concludes there is only despair and "cultural resistance in the subaltern and margins". PoMo Good: Rediscovers Benjamin. PoMo Bad: Misreads and destroys progressive qualities of Benjamin. PoMo = marginalization and destruction of meaningful political discourse. Don't blame the messengers, though, that's just the superstructure. Blame the base. Cf. Lukacs on "History and Class Consciousness". Best stuff vs. PoMo I've read? Terry Eagleton. The man is an inspiration.

Terry Eagleton: the Paul Weller of Fake Marxism.

My cat's breath smells like cat food.

That's why I choo-choo-choose you, Dan.

...and it has a picture of a train!

And where, pray tell, Mark, might I find the Bob Dylan of real Marxism? Or, er, Eric Clapton or Robert Johnson or whoever the fuck your opposite "authenticity" figure would be? Eagleton understands Plekhanov, which is more than I can say for most of the academic world.

If this thread goes on for long enough I won't even need to research for my critical theory essay. If someone could work hermeneutics into this I'd be really chuffed.

The problem with pomo writing on pop is, as I think Mark may have pointed out earlier, that the writers use it to confirm their own prejudices, eg. why Britney is good or why Britney is bad. Which means it all comes down to how closely your taste matches the writer. If it's close than their theorising sounds sensible, if not it sounds absurd. The relative worth of a Foucault or a Lyotard is not particularly endangered by this process.

Sterling, why wd you want to LOOK for such a ridiculous thing? Like someone said elsewhere, "niminy-piminy intelligence-free pop-culture envy": Eagleton far worse than Jameson here, and you — well, you're better than both, obviously. If I want to understand Plekhanov, I'll read him myself. This is basic.

Reread, "better than both, obviously" looks sarcastic: it wasn't. Eagleton's material contribution to the discussion of Cheap Trick (say) would be zero, obviously. Tho if hired to comment (by the London Review of Books, say) on the ILM phenom, say, he wd certainly affect a haughty I-see-infinitely-more-than-them (i.e. "us") overview.

The thing is for all the correctness and strongly felt aspects of your argument, I have to admit I would probably enjoy reading Eagleton's imaginary essay a lot... Just because his attitude would be smugly superior doesn't mean it wouldn't be entertaining or intellectually elegant.

Once again, we return to the if the writer is good, the theory don't matter crossroads. Often may we return there in future. Without Robbie Williams dragging his pampered knuckles behind us.

What about "if the writer is good" the politics don't matter", excepting of course, horrible racist stuff. I've laughed a helluva lot more over PJ O'Rourke, even while hating his theories

Another interesting point is the paranoia manifest in calling Robbie's hits "morally bankrupt" "po-mo" "cocaine inspired" etc. I think people remember the kind of twats at university who wanted to write for the Modern Review, and would have shouted “blank irony post modernism!” as some thing that was good about Robbie Williams, a reason to buy his records even. In my day they were going into theoretical raptures over Take That, and in some way it stuck to me, and I had to burn through about ten listens of Marquee Moon to shake it off....

I am extremely wary of 'post-modernism' and 'critical theory' full stop, although both terms have such diffuse meanings, it's hard to know where to start. (And hell, I have a degree in one of them.)

There do seem to be two separate issues we ought to discriminate between here. [1] Does 'theory' have anything to usefully say to us as pop music fans? [2] Is 'theory' anything other than names-dropping in music journalism?

My answer to [1] has to be yes. This is a personal response. My whole way of seeing the world is so deeply bound up with the material on which I am working, that I am unable to distinguish my 'pre-theory' responses from my 'post-theory' ones. That's just the way I am. (For example, everytime I throw up, I think of Julie Kristeva...) Now, this does not entail either [A] bringing up Lyotard at the dinner table for the sake of it or [B] having to discuss my love of Destiny's Child, or the Go-Betweens, in terms of a particular theoretical position. It's perfectly possible to talk about all this stuff in everyday terms, but from a point of view which is informed by some crazy old French bloke -- just as everyone's views are formed and reformed by the world around them, the books they like and so on. Anyone who really knows what they're talking about should be able to explain what they mean without attaching the name of a particular writer or 'school of thought' to it. But they may wish to do so, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it, if they're not showing off -- ie they're being modest ('this isn't my idea'), they think you might be interested ('check out what Laplanche has to say about this'), or you're their history tutor ('fuck you I've read de Certeau').

My answer to [2] follows from the answer to [1]. Music journalism is always addressed to an audience, and the writer has to consider that audience. I can think of very few sets of circumstances in which referencing theory is going to be anything other than being a ponce. But there probably are some. How about: I want to start a revolution and you all need to read Negri to understand how and why (unlikely, but conceivable); this band have based their album around the work of Deleuze and Guattari (OK, Mille Plateaux records, come on down!); this song is called 'Michel Foucault was a bald bastard' or 'I was a Paris baker's van driver' (but a bit tenuous). Generally however i prefer music journalists to stick to what they're being paid to do (know about music) and leave the theorizing to people who are being paid to do that. It's a Union thing ;-)

Now somewhere like Freaky Trigger, I expect to see people having a go at making the kind of links that an NME journalist would look a prick for trying. But the pop music / theory connection doesn't seem to me to be best served by *applying* theory to pop. Once we question the possibility of meta-language, pop becomes its own theorization, but this is an argument for another day, and another project in fact.

Other comments. Sterling: Terry Eagleton is a wanker. I don't think you can credit po-mo with rediscovering Benjamin. Or for that matter with the mis-reading of Benjamin. Our mutual acquaintance Walter starts that process himself in his own later work. From Ned's reading list post: if anyone wants to know what Derrida's talking about rather than what he's reading, try the interview at

http://www.celf.fr/mdderrid.htm

(reprinted in the livres de poche edition of 'Foi et Savoir' cf. also second essay in 1999 Galilee reprint of _Donner la Mort_). Mark: post- structuralism may not feed or house a single person, but then given the division of labour, neither will most academic disciplines. I have found more politically useful stuff in Derrida than Foucauly or Baudrillard, so it may just be a question of where you look or whether you presume to know what you're looking for before you look. Mork: one of the surprising things about Derrida's work seems to me the extent to which he wants people to read and re-read Western metaphysics, even if to read it in new and unheard-of ways, not to destroy 'it.' (Since W.M. not a unitary concept) Does anyone really expect philosophers to change the world these days? Charlotte and Mark: Chuck Eddy seems to me to be bang on about the sampling / stealing / recycling thing in whichever chapter of _The Accidental Evolution_ discusses it.

Been more than two decades sinced I wished I was in a band, but when I read the (unrealised) song-title 'I Was a Paris Baker's Van-Driver", I wished I was in a band, to have someone to write this song for. From the great lost second prag veC LP — or a Red Dark Sweet tape, ordered through Sound Choices, which got lost (better: damaged) in the post.

Eagleton isn't a household name on this side of the pond, and I've had limited exposure to him. but I truly enjoyed his early book on marxism and lit.crit, although it told me nothing that new, especially given the atmosphere of academia here. I mean, he pisses off the right people. His attacks on postmodernism are delightful to read, sharp, clever, and spot-on. As he said reviewing Spivak, somebody ought to do it, and I'm glad such an engaging writer took up the task. At the same point, he never delves deep enough to really engage. Which is not necessary to dismiss that crud, but is necessary to salvage whatever useful things have been discussed in the process, and is also necessary to really understand exactly why this stuff is cluttering up our critical landscape.

Also, while Eagleton does well in pure theory, he tends to apply it in a spotty fashion to things, and he tends to stick to the high-culture realm while smirking at all those who venerate high-cult. So what would he think of DC? He'd probably overintellectualize them, but he wouldn't dismiss them. His review of Becks' Book, for example goes through great contortions to come out on the right side of the equation, i.e. the side which can enjoy life. Unable to simply embrace pop, he is forced to elevate particular artifacts to a different realm in order to appreciate them. So, yeah. Culture for him remains pure, despite his best efforts, remains a realm where pleasure must be derived from things themselves rather than the process of critical engagement.

I have no objection to "theory" (which is a more inclusive and better term in this thread) in pop-crit, per. se, although I object to nearly every theoretical edifice applied to pop-crit. In a not-so-recent argument with a friend of mine who is a comp-lit grad student doing (shiver) Lacan, he compared theory to a toolbox he used to apply to any particular problem. I explained that his eclecticism was more like a crowbar, so that he could jimmy the window open if he was ever backed into a corner where someone demanded he mean something.

The problem with all avant-ist theories is that art on top of society is sort of like an hourglass, you can turn it over all you want, but the sand keeps flowing. At the same time, each iteration does bring with it an attendant cultural turbulence which is to be welcomed (while I despise pomo theorists, I enjoy writers who explicitly borrow, such as Federman) and each iteration brings a refinement of sorts, a progress of art-on-art's-terms which generally moves forward. The stagnation of society, far from destroying artistic progress, in fact creates an enviornment where art is constantly driven all-the- more forward by the desperation which people cling and attribute meaning to it.

I can appreciate the gestural significance of Baudrillard denying the Gulf War the same way I can appreciate Madonna's made-to-be-banned video.

I find music-crit which goes out of it's way to eschew all theory (even theory in the Chuck Eddy or "Pop Narcotic" sense) to be exceptionally drab, as with Cristageu. Pop culture might be its own critical apparatus, but the academic bigshots are all wanna-be rockstars anyway, eh? The distinctions between critical object and critical theory, between high-cult and low-cult, between et cet. and etc. aren't hard and fast, but are in fact themselves mere, as a wise man in the field of Rhetoric once described genre, psychosocial ascription categories.

As for Benjamin (oh yes, and Bahktin was "rediscovered" largely thanks to the PoMo folks too -- and they did an even worse number on him. Don't even get me started on this, except to say that Medvedev and Vygotsky are essential touchstones.) he did anything but set the stage for his misreading. "Theses on History" are so overtly and elegantly clear that it takes a total jerkoff ahistorical lightmindedness to interpret them in the usual fashion.

Back to music -- in fact, I would argue that some sort of theoretical edifice is the necessary precondition for breathing a word about culture. The only question is, how conscious is the author of the framework which they are operating within? So I don't care if the theory makes its way into the criticism, but I do care that the author examined these questions in the first place. Josh, for example, is great at noticing parallels between music-crit and various philosophers -- plus he's well aware of the problems of the intentional fallacy and spots them everywhere.

As far as I'm concerned, where theory really needs to be in pop-crit is if there's some goal of actually transfering not just "information" to the readers, but actually transforming or challenging at the least their own theoretical preconceptions. I mean, Bangs did this all the time -- not just describing the actual content of an album ("Astral Weeks" or the Chicago Live box set) but also seeking to codify and understand his relation to it, and thus inevitably theorizing about his own general relationship to art and culture.

Oh, and yes. Eagleton, whatever he may be, isn't, at least in a limited theoretical realm, a "fake" marxist, but a fairly orthodox one. Straying from there he gets increasingly whack. Which is why I asked if there were any "real" marxist critics out there by your standards, mark. Because by labeling someone as "fake" you automatically pull the authenticity switcharoo -- implying there is something both "authentic" and by that virtue "better". I was just trying to disentangle that mess.

I love Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Roland Barthes, for 'personal', 'autobiographical' reasons - 'aesthetic' reasons, perhaps, I suppose, a bit like the reasons I love George Orwell, Bob Dylan and Greenwich Park. None of them are 'postmodernists' (and maybe no-one's saying that any of them are - I have in many ways been impressed by the breadth of reading revealed on this thread), and none will neccessarily help us to understand pop records. If reading them helps someone to *like* a pop record a bit more, then maybe that's no bad thing. (Needless to say, all kinds of things might help someone to like a pop record more. It depends on the things, the person, the record, the time, the place.)

This thread has been interesting and frequently well-informed, but I am struck by how since I last looked at ILM, two weeks ago or so, a tendency has developed for threads to turn, mid-thread, into other threads. A gain for intellectual productivity, possibly; a loss of clarity, possibly.

To come back to the original question: no, I don't think that that kind of talk is what I want in my music writing, unless perhaps as part of a cultural history which could explain, or rather suggest or imagine, how ideas and creative acts (eg records) were synchronous (rather than using the former as metalanguage to explain the latter). I would normally say at this point that perhaps Stevie Troussé can help us out with such a project: but since what he said about the Pet Shop Boys I have lost all faith in him.

There is something odd about Marxism (and Fench cultural theorists are all rooted in materialsim) being the mental plaything of the elite in the Ivy League schools whilst the poor and culturally dispossessed shift ever further to the right.

: whilst the poor and culturally dispossessed shift ever further to the right

The evidence for which is

: whilst the poor and culturally dispossessed shift ever further to the right

The evidence for which is?

Ah, Eagleton. I encountered him back in undergraduate days. Back then I was too readily convinced that when somebody tore down all the critical theory problems of the past they had found the way of truth themselves. This state of mind lasted about a year, when I realized that the entire English/comp lit/crit department at UCI essentially were advancing competing mythologies.

Anyway, I appreciate Mr. Eagleton for his discussion of how 'English studies' came to be -- and that's about it.

I've already half-spoiled this answer for the sake of a "clever" gag over on Stevie Wonder, but here goes anyway.

Fake Marxism is clearly a genre description, like Nigerian Death-Metal or Acoustic Gabba. The value judgment is "The Paul Weller of"... Thus: "Walter Benjamin is the Jad Fair of Real Marxism."

If Discourse X presumes to comment on Discourse Y, then it has to be able to withstand the rigors of Y's toughest backblow, y'know? If it's "all superstructure" then let it all BE superstructure: don't wall off little bits which swan around above the full-on funstorm. If commodity logic and material interest are the tool to unmask MTV with, then Oxbridge Dons and their slick, shrewd publishing strategies get the same treatment.

Oh, Marxism cd have been a Pop Thing. The Huggy-Bear-on-The-Word moment of oh-shit-they-just-blew-it came in the same month as Kronstadt, when Lenin approved the expulsion from the KPD of Rosa Luxembourg's protégé/lover Paul Levy, even tho — as he admitted — Levy had been correct, tactically, and Karl Radek and Ruth Fischer et al completely wrong (abt some bit of pinko agit-business which I can't now recall). He preferred Bolshevik party discipline — i.e. an crypto- bourgeois technocratic autarky — to the cultivation of whatever remnants of Second International democratic workers' mass-party potential still, in 1921, twitched, fitfully.

You read it here first (and, hey, that's the problem).

Now, abt the Zapatistas and Lolly...

(biting tongue, forcefully)

Okay. So I'll leave Levi aside, b/c I didn't hear it here first, and I don't want to get into that. Same with zapatistas, although I wrote a nice essay on the zapatistas and Benjamin's theses on history which sort of addresses part of the question. I will say that if you maintain the part about base/superstructure and critique of the critics then obviously Eagleton knows and understands more Plekhanov than you. I at least partially tried to speak to this question in an essay on some novels dealing with Mexican history done for the same class as the Benjamin paper. The essay leaves much to be desired, but it was written in haste. As for Eagleton, he resembles Plekhanov in another fashion as well -- he might be a snooty professor, but then P. ended up a Menshevik. The more things change...

A few non-Ivy league swings to the right...

George W

Sears ban Bennetton

NRA's ability to close down debate

I assume you mean "George W" as in "people voted for George W"? Because the American public was going to pick an Ivy person to be President (George W - Yale; Gore - Harvard; Nader - Princeton).

OK, Angel gets this way after sex with Buffy, and I — apparently — get this way after hearing Terry Eagleton's name mentioned in less than totally hostile tones. What gives? When I reread this thread after a nice quiet day poodling around my flat on my own, I cannot IMAGINE what it is I think Sterling is saying or doing that gets me so Fight Club up there, that ends up causing me to Use my Powers for Evil. Basically, Sterling defends an enthusiasm with civil restraint, making concessions and trying quite hard not to let himself be baited — and I go all needle-nose show-offy arsehole spoiling for a thump. Obviously I disagree with him: but I disagree with everyone! What is it exactly about Eagleton (of all the world's semi-stellar academics) that I find SO threatening? What are the implications of HIS (imaginary) commentary that send me into full-on goad mode? Hmmmmm.

And someone mentions Buffy. My life is now complete. Can I just take this opportunity to again trumpet