What Hath SFJ Wrought? David Brooks Decries Fragmented Music Tastes, Niche Marketing, Young People's Lack of Familiarity With The Allman Brothers

discus

ugh

"if Robert Johnson came along now, his music wouldn't get written about, because he's not using the latest digisampling whatsits!"

Song of Lamentation for The Demise of the Mega-Group

david brooks is a special special guy

It’s considered inappropriate or even immoral for white musicians to appropriate African-American styles. And there’s the rise of the mass educated class.

If you're going to appropriate African-American "styles," be sure to get permission from the Republican National Committee.

whats he call those people who live in the exurbs and shop at big box stores? he luuuuvs their fragmentation. david why u hate an emo? :(

I’m not sure they enjoy music more than the throngs who sat around listening to Led Zeppelin, but they can certainly feel more individualistic and special.

holy fuck

It's ILM's fault we invaded Iraq

his path from full on bush admin mouthpiece to obama fanboy is pretty fascinating especially since he wont really admit that anything is going on or that he was wring.

or that he was wrooong

hey now that I'm an admin I can just delete all the david brooks threads and we can all pretend to live in a special zone where this fucking imbecile doesn't get paid to write

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches

as I read the long tail, its point wasn't that companies are forcing consumers into narrow segments but as more and more choices become available a surprising number of people opt for the most obscure stuff.

but then I don't go to marketing conferences

oh come on tom this guy is amazing admit it

most stupidest behind-the-curve boring bullshit artist ever

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/02/opinion/ts-brooks-190.jpg
tommy why you no luv meeee? i didnt mean it abt the emos swear

yeah columns about stuff that Wired covered two years ago more concisely and accurately is pretty fucking amazing I guess considering the massive cognitive disabilities brooks apparently has to deal with

he should really be wearing a bow tie there

like being 178 years old and not knowing how to read

brooks is a middlebrow hack, he skims issues and summarizes sources he half-understands and then plugs the results into whatever cliched "insight" he's peddling in his next column or book.

seeing him get pwnd every week by mark shields was pretty awesome - he just kept coming back for more. how come i never watch the news hour any more.

u guys pointing out that brooks is a hack is kinda hackery in itself. everyone has known abt it for years and its been written abt better elsewhere. so can we just move on to the talking abt how great and amazing he is part of the conversation.

I think calling brooks middlebrow is an insult to lots of things I consider middlebrow (like most magazines). He just writes long crappy old man Letters To The Editor.

do you think hes really into the allman brothers or he just thought that they would be a cooool group to include

and why no mention of the teen rap dance craze subgenre longtail

that's the first band he thought of because they start with A and are easy to spell, unlike ABBA

seeing him get pwnd every week by mark shields was pretty awesome

the classic instance of this was right after bush's "mission accomplished" stunt. mark shields nearly exploded with sputtering outrage and then brooks followed w/huge shit-eating grin and said "I thought it was neat."

hahahaha oh man

What a nincompoop. What a maroon.

http://www.washingtonpolicy.org/images/Will_George_EMAIL.JPG

"YO. Did you guys see my EMP proposal last year? Fuckin' phat!"

Oh no! Mark, you should recall what happened the last time there was a Little Steven related thread

i saw little steven at katz's once

Over on ILE there's a thread about people not reading as much (allegedly) and many posts are about how the dullness of school assignments regarding literary classics being badly shoved down people's throats turned them off to much of it. If Van Zandt wants to do that with music and if Brooks wants to help, who are we to save them from self-destruction?

Whenever Van Zant (and Springsteen) talk about blues, folk, and roots music. I just don't buy it. They should cut the crap and go back to talking about Del Shannon and the Ronettes.

Zandt

You prefer more of a Lou Reed approach.

This is an article Id want to pick apart line by line and go NO NO NO to except I would have to include every single line, so just pasting it in its entirety is enough criticism.

America is fucked up, isn't it?

god, don't you remember the good ole days of writing? Like, back when it was all integrated? Before these indie writers like SFJ and David Brooks started writing articles that only appealed to upper-class college students? Jeez, I think we need to start teaching writing in school and I know just the person to educate the masses with his brand new curriculum:

Chuck Klosterman, bi'atch.

America is fucked up, isn't it?

-- Scik Mouthy, Tuesday, November 20, 2007 7:20 AM (Tuesday, November 20, 2007 7:20 AM) Bookmark Link

^^^

let's not forget david brooks' recent column denying that ronald reagan's mention of "states' rights" at his 1980 campaign kickoff at the neshoba county fair in philadelphia, mississippi had anything, anything to do with good ol' racism.

sis you see krugman's response? awz

sis did

both krugman's and herbert's responses were great, really pwned brooks (not like it's that difficult to do, but still).

it must really warm sf-j's heart to have such a great ally as brooks, tho.

seeing him get pwnd every week by mark shields was pretty awesome - he just kept coming back for more.

Those two were my favorite thing about the last election. It was like watching a 10-year-old try to do commentary with his dad.

they're on the news hour like at least once a week, maybe more, i forget.

he's picked up sf-j's argument from the wrong end hasn't he? sf-j was writing about producers of music, brooks is on about the audience, which is at least twice as wrongheaded. i'm suspicious of all of these "back when there was a monolithic audience" claims, but at least in the realm of tv it's a little more plausible because there were so few networks. but pop music has always (or for many decades anyway) had a profusion of niches and niche audiences.

Also, SF J was telling people (I think) to catch up with modern hip hop, not teach an Allman Brothers class in middle school.

"Recent" fragmentation? Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music quotes Joe McEwen to the effect that James Brown meant to him what the Beatles meant to other white kids. Then, I once read Teddy Pendergrass' recollection of being knocked out by them in the '60s.

-- If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up, Wednesday, 21 November 2007 08:37 (4 hours ago) Link

OTM. I get annoyed as well at many "Summer of Love" 1967 retrospectives in the media or in art exhibits like that one at the Whitney Museum in NYC that ignored what was going on simultaneously in African-American neighborhoods and around the world.

I'm just saying context is important and explaining the fragmentation is part of that (I'm not minimizing Beatles or Summer of Love psychedelia)

Whenever I read articles like this it always comes off as older people being uncomfortable with the fact that "rock" is no longer the dominant musical style.

Was it ever?

Good point, I was referring to the Rolling Stone canon crowd. I'm sure country, pop, rn'b, etc., have always sold as much or more than rock. I remember when Soundscan first came along and many people where surprised how much country sold. Rock used to get most of the critical love and deep sociological analysis, but not so much now. I see it as evening the scales, giving you a more realistic look at past musical tastes and cultural trends.

There's no question a lot of this is the "get off of my lawn" sect -- but to dismiss any talk of commonality or a return to shared experience as some kind of latent (or explicit) racism or willful ignorance is beyond lazy. It's not just sentimental whites who love The Beatles, you know.

Even if it is just sentimental whites who love the Beatles, it's silly to pretend that the youth culture of the 60s is the same as that of today, to pretend that popular music isn't more fragmented now than during the early and mid 20th century. Pointing out that culture, class and ethnic divisions aren't new is hardly a meaningful rebuttal.

Article's still shitty, mind.

Yea, Youssou N'Dour has covered a John Lennon song and spoken highly of the Beatles but I don't see David Brooks writing about him. This ties in with the privelging of indie-rock notion alluded to here and in the SFJ thread. It's certain sentimental whites in the mainstream media getting nostalgic for their version of the present and the past through rose-colored glasses.

Again, Naive Teen Idol, can you please give examples or anecdotes or something that explains the Brooks/SFJ theories and the Stereolab strawman followers who don't know the past, in context--that means accounting for fragmentation and changing tastes and James Brown fans in 64, the rise of narrow major-label rock radio programming and its contrast with pop hits radio, jam bands embracing funk and rap(Galactic), LCD Soundsystem, Eminem, Justin Timberlake, indie bands embracing afropop(per the Will Hermes NY Times article)

I guess it depends on whether you see fragmentation as a good or a bad thing. I don't see this splintering as inherently good or bad.
There's no doubt it exists. The more interesting question is whether cultural fragmentation and political fragmentation go hand in hand and who benefits, but that's probably another thread. I think we all agree the article's pretty dumb.

i'm not at all convinced pop music is more "fragmented" now than 100 or 50 years ago. into at least the 50s, you had a lot more regional fragmentation than you do now, for one thing, with not just the range of styles but also distinctly different popular performers in different parts of the country, only a small number of whom broke through to the national level. listen to the harry smith anthology -- all that stuff was going on at more or less the same time: blues, folk, zydeco, country, and that's not even mentioning jazz and the other more urbane forms of the time (rudy vallee!). we hear it all as one thing now because it's been compiled, but each of those styles had their own audiences, and while there was obvious crossover there was also a lot of segmentation.

i'm not saying pop music's not fragmented in its current form, i'm just dubious it was ever not. no matter what little steven thinks he remembers. and whatever brooks thinks, we do still have big stars. jay-z just tied elvis for 2nd-most #1 albums. just cuz brooks doesn't listen to or know jay-z doesn't mean there's not a huge mass audience that does.

(and brooks leads with the hoary old beatles-on-ed-sullivan, but that's a tv moment more than a music moment. and obviously the limited number of networks did produce more of a tv monoculture. but that's a forced monoculture produced by a limited marketplace, which i have a hard time believing a free marketeer like brooks thinks is a good thing.)

Back in the Feb. 18, 1982, issue of Time, Jay Cocks wrote that American music was in splinters

I want to contribute to this thread by pointing out that Jay Cocks is a hilarious name.

The Illusion of a Common Culture. Sounds like a Greil Marcus essay.

i'm not saying pop music's not fragmented in its current form, i'm just dubious it was ever not. just cuz brooks doesn't listen to or know jay-z doesn't mean there's not a huge mass audience that does.

- tipsy

Good point, but it misses how relatively limited most people's cultural/entertainment options were in the early/mid century, and how that allowed certain cultural moments to be symbolized by musical artists and styles in a way that resonated across the culture, even if you didn't like their work. The late 60s / early 70s youth culture was sometimes indistinguishable from its revolutionary counterculture, and its primary soundtrack consisted of fairly few "big" artists. These were massive pop stars like Jay-Z, but they were also culture warriors, and they often seemed to represent a legitimately revolutionary movement of some sort or another (even if that representation was nothing more than wolf's clothing, or paranoid imagining). The mainstreaming of the counterculture seemed not just a stylistic revolution, but one that could conceivably unhinge society at every level. Maybe I'm making a mountain of a molehill, but I don't think we've seen that kind of cultural response to music since the PMRC freakouts more than 20 years back. Pop music may still be familiar to lots of people, it may still please or unsettle, but it doesn't unify, symbolize and polarize in the same way. It doesn't seem to mean as much to so many all at once.

"but that's a tv moment more than a music moment."

and I don't think this distinction is meaningful, then or now.

Did more people watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan than any more recent tv music event including Super Bowl halftime shows and American Idol (although one has to account for more tv options, changing demographics, cutural fragmentation then and now, various other music related changes)

Dunno. CW sez hell yes. Best taken with a grain of salt, but come on - there were only four channels back then, and no internest.

The late 60s / early 70s youth culture was sometimes indistinguishable from its revolutionary counterculture, and its primary soundtrack consisted of fairly few "big" artists.

it might seem that way in retrospect (largely because of little steven-style canonization), but go look at the top 40 charts from those years. they're all over the map. this is just a snapshot because billboard will only show the top 5, but here's 1969: only one song overlaps between the main pop chart and the r&b chart, and neither overlaps at all with the country chart. and in albums, not a single shared record between the pop, r&b and country charts. so where was this unified audience?

and hip-hop has prompted plenty of establishment freak-out (including from david brooks), as recently as earlier this year.

(i'm not saying that all eras are the same or anything, and there's obviously to the idea of digital-age atomization. but whatever differences there are aren't simple ones, and if they're radical they're not radical in the ways someone like brooks thinks they are.)

(...obviously something to the idea...)

http://www.ageod.com/forums/images/smilies/papy.gif

Agree that hip-hop still freaks the squares, no argument. But I don't think it represents a cataclysmic threat the way the 60s counterculture seemed to, when the line between fashionably revolutionary rhetoric and the total annihilation of the American Way of Life seemed very thin indeed. This is arguable unto death, of course.

And I'm not saying there wasn't a whole lot of music out there in the 60s. The pop charts have always reflected a wide variety of tastes, cultures, groupings of whatever sort. But the real range of stuff available today is unthinkably vast compared to what was out there for the "Average American" in the late 60s. Nowadays, the pop charts as a whole are just a fragment, and that's why the majors are feeling the bite. We have scenes within scenes within scenes. We can research, cross-reference and raid the whole library of musical history at the push of a button.

Meanwhile, in the 60s, it was cool to reject what was theirs (the music of your parents, and by extention, The Man), and to imagine that all Right Thinking People liked the same things. It was fashionable to imagine an entire generation unified around the same music, the same politics, and the same social values, with no real separation between any of those things. It's no longer cool to think like that. Hipsters people are no longer encouraged to think of themselves as a single, inevitably victorious, generational wave united against the wrong shit. The loss of that kind of group-mind revolutionary unity, in both white and black popular culture, is a big part of what we're talking about here.

Remember Brooks' odd reference to the "mass educated class". This just means college educated folks, a group that's grown a lot since the 1960s. That's his audience in the NYT, and I think it's the culture of that group that he cares about splintering. So the R&B chart from the late 60s is irrelevant to him, because that wasn't that group's chart, and he assumes it isn't that group's chart today (hence his reference to people seeking obscure stuff).

Meanwhile, in the 60s, it was cool to reject what was theirs (the music of your parents, and by extention, The Man), and to imagine that all Right Thinking People liked the same things. It was fashionable to imagine an entire generation unified around the same music, the same politics, and the same social values, with no real separation between any of those things. It's no longer cool to think like that. Hipsters people are no longer encouraged to think of themselves as a single, inevitably victorious, generational wave united against the wrong shit. The loss of that kind of group-mind revolutionary unity, in both white and black popular culture, is a big part of what we're talking about here.

That sounds like a bit of an over-simplification, what with *serious* activists often expressing contempt for hippies and whatnot, although I still think you have a point.

"Remember Brooks' odd reference to the "mass educated class". This just means college educated folks"

OTM. Brooks really means white educated urban/suburban middle class people. That group totally dominated the mainstream cultural discourse in 60s & 70s America (arguably still does). As a result, they are habituated to talking about their experience as "our experience" - universal experience.

Even if they were wrong, they saw themselves as unified and profoundly empowered during the late 60s and early 70s. And however cluelessly crotchety they may now seem, they're still capable of noticing that their children see things differently. Their children are more inclined to draw arcane lines between peer groups than to collectively wage war against the Forces of Evil. Big surprise. Big surprise, too, that this relatively apathetic political/social fragmentation is reflected in contemporary musical culture.

P.S. Agree re Hurting that I'm being simplistic. Complexity makes me look fat.

right well we're no doubt a bigger (50 percent population increase since the 60s), noisier, more diverse country, with (crucially) many more avenues for the expression of culture, subculture, etc. but in some ways all the multimedia just makes that stuff more visible. you can dial it all up on youtube or in chat groups or whatever. with 300 cable channels, every ethnic, religious, cultural or subcultural group gets its own channel, or at least its own show. but most of those subcultures were there before too, they were just muted by a more homogenized, more controlled "mainstream."

the point about 60s youth culture as a political or countercultural movement is obviously historically true and was unique in a lot of ways, but even there the story gets oversold. most of the kids who bought inna-gadda-da-vida were not looking to overthrow much of anything specific (their curfews, maybe). the actual revolutionary edge of the culture was very small, no matter how much it scared 'em in peoria.

(and anyway, while it's possible little steven is mourning lost revolutionary fervor, i really don't think brooks is. brooks' argument seems something more like, "we were all the same! and now we're not!")

the actual revolutionary edge of the culture was very small, no matter how much it scared 'em in peoria.

So very very OTM. For the most part, the notion of "youth culture as a political or social movement" was used to sell soft drinks, casualwear, and yup music to teh youfs.

Agree with Roger. In talking all this revolution shit, I'm not insisting that it be legitimate, only that it lent an aura of meaning and unity to the moment.

Anyway, I'm coming around. More I think about it, more I agree with Tipsy. Suspect Brooks is mistaking the loss of the (fashionable, thus illusory) "revolutionary unity" that reigned in both black and white pop culture for a decade or so with loss of some real, deep cultural coherence. Not sure that was ever present in the first place.

Still think options were far more limited, but that point doesn't seem contentious.

Still: is the semblance of coherence and unity, or the perception of such substantially different from the thing itself? In practical terms, I mean? Accepting for the moment that there was a great deal of musical and demographic variety back then, a fully contemporary multiplicity of viewpoints, in no way different than the musical culture of today...

If the people experiencing that moment saw all these disparate threads as aspects of the same thing, if they saw it all as contributing to a meaningful, unifying whole, then didn't that meaningful unity exist? Weren't they all unified by music simply because they saw themselves as unified by music?

And since we don't imagine the same level of meaningful, communal interconnectivity through music today, doesn't that mean that it has ceased to exist, i.e., fragmented?

Completely fragmented. I think poptimism or whatever you want to call it is actually a bit pernicious in that respect, it's reaching back to that impulse and continually trying to reestablish a new 'now' moment. That they're doing so knowing it's always being recycled is good enough, but at the same time it's a bit...well, limiting.

Poptimism = cargo cult?

Interesting way to look at it. Not completely accurate but...perhaps.

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/1990/db900310.gif

Sorry, I "borrowed" that from Ned's thread over here

Thievery! Oh wait.

If the people experiencing that moment saw all these disparate threads as aspects of the same thing, if they saw it all as contributing to a meaningful, unifying whole, then didn't that meaningful unity exist? Weren't they all unified by music simply because they saw themselves as unified by music?

we are stardust, we are golden, etc. yes. and it's true that it is hard to find a contemporary equivalent of that. it was a moment. but as you acknowledge, it was a somewhat illusory one -- it represented much less of the total culture than it imagined it did. really, it's part of the same solipsistic boomer mythology that brooks is so prone to mock.

but as for "fragmentation," i think there are some countervailing trends right now too, not least of which is the ease of connection and access across all kinds of cultural lines. people still tend to cluster in subgroups, because that's how people are, but in some ways i think you could make a case for there being more connection of various kinds now than during whatever golden age somebody might posit.

That seems right, more connection with smaller numbers of people.

When people talk about a golden age in the late 60s, among many things they mean is it was a time of racial harmony. On the one hand this is silly, because just because Sly and Taj Mahal played Woodstock, it doesn't follow that racial harmony was at hand. But on the other hand I think there was an alternate future visible in 1968 where James Brown and the Beatles would both be leaders of the whole generation, rather than leaders of two different parts. In that alternate future pop music didn't get commercialized the way that it did in our future. There wasn't the same kind of niche marketing that took over in our future.

I've said it before, but I got a glimpse of that alternate future at a Primus/Fishbone concert in Atlanta in 1991.

Uh, why the hell is Steve Van Zandt, who whatever his moldy fig tastes is a bona fide lefty, talking to a reactionary milquetoast like Brooks in the first place?

they have milquetoastery in common? they like each other's company?

I wonder if they talked about whether Reagan was racist.

"I Might Just Play Sun City"

Brooks is a "Sopranos" fan? they both think Jackson Browne rocks?

That's lame, Alfred. The were both "Born in the USA," natch.

something seems weird and tossed-off about "the Beatles on Ed Sullivan was a TV moment, not a music moment" to me. it seems to me people became interested in music, formed bands, etc., as a result of that appearance; they didn't start TV shows.

anyway, that's reductionist too. I just mean why can't it be both?

it was both, obviously. but as a shared cultural moment, of the sort brooks is talking about, it was more a tv moment -- it was the ubiquity of tv ownership combined with the tiny number of networks that made it possible as a mass event. the whole myth of the culture-we-all-used-to-share, which is what brooks is really idealizing, is bound up in the pre-cable/pre-vcr years of tv. so it's telling i think that his column about the unification vs. fragmentation of pop music starts with a tv anecdote -- because it makes it easier to perpetuate that myth.

We'll get back to the culture-we-all-used-to-share once these 5 media conglomerates pare down to 1. Then we can just have 1 TV show and 1 band again. Yay!!!