I Don't Know What a "Rockist" Is

rockism is an ideology of popular music criticism, coined by Pete Wylie and used extensively in the British music press from the early 1980s. The fundamental tenet of rockism is that some forms of popular music, and some musical artists, are more authentic than others.

ilx poster momus compared rockism to the art movement of stuckism, which holds that artists who do not paint or sculpt are not artists.

Ned Raggett talks about rockism

You guys! Thank you!

well done, lock thread.

P.S. the search function could have been useful here.

But which forms of popular music are generally considered inauthentic by rockists?

Could have, too late.

WRONG

LOCK THREAD NOW PLEASE MODS

What is a rockist?

Why would you lock the thread? I don't understand. It also seems that you're asking a great deal from what is essentially a pastime, that is, posting on a message board. What do you think will go wrong if this thread is not locked, what of ILM's integrity do you think will be compromised?

Also, your tone is hackneyed: "WRONG/ LOCK THREAD NOW PLEASE MODS." Completely opaque, too.

Troll

totally

Not a troll. And there's precedent for new threads being created on old subjects.

And what cause have you, Noodle Vague, to doubt my sincerity? You've seen me around.

Yeah this is true, but basically this is one of ILX's "hey! let's have a 6 zillion post clusterfuck replay of ground sodden with the blood of a million previous arguments about the same subject" topics. So it's kind of best to leave it really. A quick google will answer (lol) any questions you might have.

exactly. you're being lazy and essentially asking people to rewrite/reframe stuff they've already said, that you could already read.

how about reading through one of the threads esoj so kindly provided and then adding commentary to that? oh, you want the attention of your own thread though. hence my snide dismissal.

good night.

I guess so, although that thread is pretty brief and open-ended, and the subject is still presented nebulously. Also, it's mostly ilx old school.

xpost to noodle vague, not whoever sleeve is

Although, sleeve, who is sleeping, why do you assume that I'm looking for anyone to rewrite anything, or that I'm looking for attention? I'm pretty indifferent to what goes on in ILM or who posts on it; I'd rather hang out with Esteban Buttez.

I posted this because when people have used "rockist" it has not reconciled with what the word seemingly means, and I've asked at least one person in the flesh about this and was sort of brushed off, as if a word doesn't require a concrete meaning.

It game up on ILG, and its usage seemed flip and reductive. When roxy calls me rockist I'm befuddled, because I don't know how many major label R&B or dance or rock CDs I have to buy or WHATEVER to be labeled otherwise. I'm honestly curious about its muddy semantics.

And, geez, sleeve (who is sleeping), why do you seem to take this so personally? This is my pastime. There's no overstating that. It will not be more. I will not elevate it to hobby status.

Like all ideological terms, it's contested and it's slippery. So its meaning will be subtly different in different contexts. Electricsound's very first post gives you the kernel of it: privileging genres or ways of producing music or attitudes towards music that are believed to be "authentic" over those that are "inauthentic" is as good a definition of rockism as anything. A lot of the rest is turning this critical notion into a badge of dis/honour, butthurtedness over what bands people like, and this dude called Wangmann that you really don't wanna know about. ILM's archives are littered with this stuff. I assume when I come back later today this thread will either be locked down or 500 posts on ZEPPELIN SUCK NO ZEPPELIN ROOL.

guitars and amps still rule. although pretentious fucks with computers are getting laid as well.

Thanks. Well. I suppose I have no further interest. Mods can delete the thread and I won't mind.

No, eff that. I used the toilet and thought about this.

Reading someone's old conversation that you cannot participate in sidles up with punishment. It isn't a book, it's an eye-straining screen, and most of the text is doggerel at worst and off-the-cuff at near-best. Well composed posts are exceptional and there's still an element of ephemerality to them. When did you lower your expectations for your reading resources?

A discourse has different traits that I find appealing, and that you probably do also. It's starkly different from reading its dormant counterpart, as different from reading a newspaper from this morning or reading one from 1997.

If posters truly think a subject is old hat, they should not be drawn in, and if they are drawn in compulsively there is still no harm done to their lives. And given the format of ILX, a popular thread does not create noise on the general board, although we're still presuming this would be one, and I'm not convinced. I have an anti-Midas touch for killing threads all over the Internet.

It's hard to have discourse over the meaning of a word, unless you put it in some context first.

every time I see 'rockist' on here, I just skip over it, just like I do for 'indie'

I like esoj's three posts, they are very helpful.

I wonder if it's worth asking 'what is authenticity?'.

On the separate mattern of people re-asking old questions... new people come, they have fresh ideas, and they often need to ask old questions again. This is not a bad practice. Scientists have been asking 'what is gravity' for a long time, for example, and have not been upbraided for repetition. They ask the question afresh, in publications and elsewhere, and, to my knowledge, are not repeatedly referred to old discussions as if that settled the matter once and for all. So why don't we let newcomers ask old questions again, without an assumption that the matter has been settled, or that no new light can be shed.

I think there's such a history of heated debate over 'rockism' on ILM that, whenever the subject is broached in a broad manner in a new thread (rather than in a specific, new-angle kind of way), it is assumed that the questioner is trolling, looking to start a new clusterfuck 1,000+ post thread for shits and giggles rather than actual intellectual engagement with the topic, whether they be a recognised poster or not.

FWIW, I still think the idea of rockism is an interesting and useful one, sometimes. I think ti's very overplayed and misunderstood, though. Or... maybe not misunderstood, but interpreted very widely. For instance, I think of Lex as being quite rockist, in that these days he often seems bound to dogma and a particular critical angle, even if that dogma is seemingly diametrically opposed to 'rock'.

I don't see rockism as being about rock, per se, and privileging 'real instruments' and 'singer songwriters' etc; I see it being about... a blinkered critical approach (whether one is a critic or merely a 'consumer' [cos the critic is SO elevated...]). It's about received wisdom, for me, about pre-judgement, about trying to judge all music (or art of any kind) against a pre-ordained / pre-defined matrix of understanding that determines what 'quality' is. Thus, one can be rockist by criticising an indie band for not being able to sing as well as Mariah Carey can, just as much as one can be rockist by criticisng Carey for not writing her own songs.

(As an aside, a friend of mine said the other day, with regards to "writing one's own songs", "I wouldn't ask an architect how good his bricklaying is", which I thought was a great analogy - certainly some architects are also going to have excellent bricklaying skills, and that's to be commended, but it doesn't make a bricklayer poorer for not being an architect or vice versa.)

Rockism is about a certain kind of inflexibility to me. About why you don't like things as much as about what you do like.

xpost.

If it's about critics being inflexible, I can see that. I've often thought critics should only review within the styles they appreciate.

Is it narrow minded of me to think that people who love a piece of music, do so because of its sound, and not what it 'stands' for, or it's historical presence. Am I being to sanctimonious about this love of music?

Are music critics like people who talk about sex all the time, but never get any?

"it doesn't make a bricklayer poorer for not being an architect"

I'm sure if you ask the average bricklayer he'd tell you otherwise.

Is it narrow minded of me to think that people who love a piece of music, do so because of its sound, and not what it 'stands' for, or it's historical presence. Am I being to sanctimonious about this love of music?

No, I don't think so. I like to think that's how I approach music. BUT at the same time I have to recognise that there are root reasons why one might like one sound more than another, and that some of those reasons ona subconscious level might be to do with representation, historical presence, social conventions, race, gender, cultural values, etcerera. The aesthetic IS cultural, I'd suggest.

I think most critics do absolutely adore music (note use of caveat 'most'); I also think that it's VERY easy to get caught up in 'being a critic' and needing to have an opinion, and that this impulse is sometimes degenerative in terms of maintaining a 'good relationship' with music. Which is why I don't do much criticism these days, partly.

x-post; tommytannoy do you mean that bricklayers think they would be better bricklayers if they were also architects?

Or is that a pun on 'poorer' and hence a socio-economic comment on the relative pay / social caste of architects vs bricklayers?

Yes (the second)!

And it's weak, I know.

tommytannoy vs timmy tannin FITE!

also, the triumph of anti-rockism led to the rolling teenpop thread.
http://krigsfilm.dk/What%20Price%20Glory.jpg-for-web-normal.jpg

Nick, I broadly agree with what you've said upthread, except perhaps that what you're missing in the notion that Lex is as rockist as a typical rockist is a fuller explanation of how received wisdom works.

Lex pretends that everything he says is obvious, as if it were received wisdom, but he knows that it's not. Even on Poptimism (which he rails against for being too indie half the time, just as he does Popjustice), he's ultimately trying to surprise people with his inflexibility (as a tangent, Lex's odd love of dubstep demonstrates that he's actually not so much pro-pop as, rather, anti-indie in every possible sense of the word "indie").

In this regard he's much closer to being an oppositional version of the "nu-rockism" of Reynolds/K-Punk, both of whom argue that inflexibility is one of rockism's biggest attractions if deployed strategically - that is, steadfast, unwavering partisanship to particular positions (even in the face of compelling arguments to the contrary) is what makes music listening politically and personally meaningful.

Both nu-rockism and Lex's pro-pop versions of it are articulated as lone-voices-of-reason attacking the morally and aesthetically bankrupt bad taste of "the community".

Common garden variety rockism is mostly articulated within a community as a criticism of another community. That is, two rockists might snicker about the taste of teenage girls, but they snicker to each other rather than lambast the teenage girls. Arguably, rockism comes into existence at the moment when propositions like "such and such can't be that good because they don't write their own songs" can effectively go without saying in a conversation between two or more people. Lex likes to pretend it can "go without saying" that the Paris Hilton album is great, but he knows this is not the case.

Of course Lex is at his weakest when writing about anything indie-related because he literally cannot articulate in a sensible manner what his issues are. This is the problem with any "goes without saying": after a while you become incapable of saying it even if you want to (I should note that as criticisms of Lex go this is a very mild one: he's an excellent critic in the areas of music he likes).

Likewise, I see some of the attractions of the nu-rockist approach but it's a position which doesn't allow for much to be said of its targets (say, Mariah Carey) beyond a dreary retreading of its founding principles - blah kapital blah. The counter argument is: "why waste time critiquing this stuff more carefully?" To which the counter-counter-argument is: "in that case, why bother opening your mouth (or, rather, new blog entry window) at all?"

I actually like the notion of commitment in music criticism, and ultimately that has to operate as a limiting principle on aesthetic flexibility. Not holding to any position makes for a kind of critical nominalism which can lead to as much intellectual laziness as dogma and orthodoxy - if all positions are in quotation marks then you don't have to really think through what you're thinking/saying/writing, as you can easily disown it the next day.

Nonetheless, in my opinion any kind of commitment has to entail opening up rather than closing down discussion if it's going to be useful. Like, if you want to establish a position, any kind of critical integrity would entail that you try to investigate where and why that position falls down.

Crucially, no music arrives as a pure expression of a particular critical position - or, to put it another way, a given piece of music is never identical to the ideas the critic discerns in it. Music always contains so many overlapping and at times contradictory qualities that to try to reduce it to fit your critical model is doing an injustice to its capacity to affect. So perhaps flexibility is more about a certain level of humility regarding the capacity of your critical positions (even if you hold to them firmly) to exhaust what can be wrung from a particular piece of music.

This is what seems most perverse about people choosing to reject music on the basis of a single perceived quality, such as the performer not writing their own songs: as if this exhausted all that could be good or bad about a particular piece of music!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11ZALAHdmRA

tim's explanation of the lex could become the basis for a challops manifesto

What Is Rockism ?

Does Rockism Exist?

Can't we just refer to "rockism" as "purism" from here on in?

anti-rockism has a lot to say about what shouldn't be critical criteria...

etc

Wow! Another thread about rockism!

Must find time to reply properly to Tim...

"it's a position which doesn't allow for much to be said of its targets (say, Mariah Carey) beyond a dreary retreading of its founding principles - blah kapital blah"

Tim, do you mean some sort of economic critique with this? Like, reformulating the market's deficiencies in terms of art (like Adorno does in Culture Industry) gets boring because it's the same thing with every album? (Very few albums, if any, subvert the Capitalist structures.)

The counter argument is: "why waste time critiquing this stuff more carefully?

What exactly does that mean? (I assume someone doing a new musicality critique of Mariah Carey is not doing a more careful or less careful critique than someone doing a kapital critique - they are just doing a different one. Lyrical or musical or social or freudian analysis.)

Like, if you want to establish a position, any kind of critical integrity would entail that you try to investigate where and why that position falls down.

But the trouble with the anti-rockist position as outlined above is that ultimately it has to assume some sort of neutral critical apparatus by which you can "investigate where and why" a position falls down. Ultimately, you have to rely on something that "goes without saying".

"But the trouble with the anti-rockist position as outlined above is that ultimately it has to assume some sort of neutral critical apparatus by which you can "investigate where and why" a position falls down. Ultimately, you have to rely on something that "goes without saying"."

This turns our options into an orthodoxy/meaninglessness (or totalization/nominalism) either/or, which I think is too quick and restrictive.

Perhaps the apparatus that can investigate where a particular position falls down is itself difficult to apply in other areas (i.e. it explicitly does not go without saying), insofar as there is no necessary foundational apparatus (or, if there is, it exists so far down a line of infinite regress that we cannot access it), but a host of critical models whose reliability may not extend beyond a specific moment of deployment. Is there ever a conceptual explanation for why/how a particular piece of music works or does not work that can then be successfully universalized (in the sense of "...and this is how music works generally")? I suspect not.

I like to think, rather, that music and ideas-about-music exist in much more complicated and much less Aristotelian arrangements than simply that of music aspiring to express a single idea. If ideas about music are only completely universalized by virtue of a kind of critical violence (and maybe this is my "goes without saying", but then I can say it), this is not to say that the conceptualisation of music and the experience of music are not mutually structuring. What is crucial, however, is that we recognise this mutuality.

I should be careful to avoid becoming confusing here: I'm not saying that critical models are always only interpretatively useful (on the level of metaphors for some other, mystical-empirical engagement with music that we haven't yet conceptualised, or perhaps are unable to), but rather that concepts are ineliminably metaphorical, are always trying to establish like and like among situations that are at least marginally different.

And anyway, my point above wasn't that the critical ballast for any judgment must be dissected to the nth degree (which you can try to do if you have the time and energy), but rather the less time-consuming claim that if you're really pushing a particular critical model you should do so with caveats unless you want to be accused of myopic dogma.

"Tim, do you mean some sort of economic critique with this? Like, reformulating the market's deficiencies in terms of art (like Adorno does in Culture Industry) gets boring because it's the same thing with every album? (Very few albums, if any, subvert the Capitalist structures.)

The counter argument is: "why waste time critiquing this stuff more carefully?""

Well, that counter-argument is the nu-rockist argument: it's a meta-critical position which mostly contents itself with claiming that any more careful critique of (say) Mariah is a symptom of a late capitalist malaise. But yeah, it's by definition kind of limiting because it's a single meta-critical judo move in response to a whole host of different kind of critiques. It can, of course, be run in conjunction with any number of more or less nuanced economic critiques.

Weird thing about this whole debate is that it sometimes seems to hang around the assumption that a relatively small livejournal community and a couple of blogs are somehow the alpha and omega of all modern day music writing.

Perhaps the apparatus that can investigate where a particular position falls down is itself difficult to apply in other areas (i.e. it explicitly does not go without saying), insofar as there is no necessary foundational apparatus (or, if there is, it exists so far down a line of infinite regress that we cannot access it), but a host of critical models whose reliability may not extend beyond a specific moment of deployment.

Agreed, but I'm not sure the absence of a universal or foundational critical apparatus changes my argument. Once we have an 'acceptable' critical tool (ie one that is agreed upon among interlocuters), then it becomes an underlying assumption about how we should talk about a particular piece of music. Obviously, conversation without underlying agreements about what certain things mean and how arguments should be structured is impossible. So on some level there will always be a "goes without saying" element to the discourse. There will always be some bedrock for which no further justification is required. Yeah, we can and should always put in caveats, but that doesn't change the basic situation. The upshot, for me, is that criticism of rockism is really about trying to replace simple models with more sophisticated models, ie a brute rockism vs a more sophisticated rockism. Rockism itself, as it's commonly defined by the people who care about these things, is unavoidable.

Weird thing about this whole debate is that it sometimes seems to hang around the assumption that a relatively small livejournal community and a couple of blogs are somehow the alpha and omega of all modern day music writing.

In fairness, they are pretty much the only places where this debate seems to be explicitly played out so of course any debate is going to be focused on Blissblog/K-Punk/Poptimists.

I think, Tim, that if you're trying to identify Lex's opinions about Paris Hilton with Rockism, though, you're going to run into this economic problem. Regardless of what hidden assumptions are unarticulated, there are still vastly different readings going on. Nu-Rockism is always going to be a Marxist reading, and a pretty rote one at that (except for the potential to reread file sharing, Radiohead/NiN, sampling, etc), and ANY other reading is going to be more interesting. I remember on that Paris Hilton thread, there were social arguments, new musicology arguments, etc being made. So even if Lex was making assumptions, the conversation has a different timbre entirely.

(I just want to say too: I never understood that Rockism was about Marxism V Poptimism being some kind of nu-Freudian critique. Though I can see a relationship between Poptimism's promise/premise, ie: We're opening up the canon to MORE, as having a relationship to Poptimism's function, ie: You can read music in many MORE new ways than you could before. Which is likely where places like Teenpop got into trouble. They were trying to say different things about music than the discourse generally allows for. To quote Zelda upthread, "Obviously, conversation without underlying agreements about what certain things mean and how arguments should be structured is impossible.")

bryce i call you rockist cause you say things IRL like "everything good is a LITTLE indie, rite"

also, you are coming off a little like tuomas here! be careful

"Once we have an 'acceptable' critical tool (ie one that is agreed upon among interlocuters), then it becomes an underlying assumption about how we should talk about a particular piece of music."

Absolutely - and yeah, there's an unavoidable micro-orthodoxy at work here (what you call sophisticated rockism, or we could call it "small r rockism" maybe). But I think that the difference with nu-rockism (and rockism generally, including it's pro-pop variants) is that both explicitly set out to introduce ideas that by their very nature must apply almost across the board, including to whole swathes the interlocuters haven't actually heard. But, yeah, I agree with that last post Zelda. I thought originally you were trying to argue that if you have to adopt some neutral critical position ultimately you may as well be orthodox from the start! (this is close to an argument k-punk etc. have run previously)

"I think, Tim, that if you're trying to identify Lex's opinions about Paris Hilton with Rockism, though, you're going to run into this economic problem. Regardless of what hidden assumptions are unarticulated, there are still vastly different readings going on. "

Totally, mordy - my comparison between Lex and nu-rockism was a very limited stylistic one, I was simply making the point that neither Lex nor nu-rockists work on the assumption that they are adopting the voice of community consensus (unlike so much old-rockist music crit). However, the content and method of critique is entirely different.

Are music critics like people who talk about sex all the time, but never get any?

― nicky lo-fi, Friday, 23 May 2008 08:30 (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they're people who talk about music all day long but never get any sex

I get the impression that most music critics don't really like music all that much, they're just into critiquing culture or some shit

insert shit critique joke here