Anyone who mentions 'Rockism' is UNCOOL

I try not to use the r-word any more, not because it's meaningless or wrong or anything like that but because its use spun out of control (CTCL is not rockist just because it likes rock music), because a lot of the time it was being used jokily anyway, and because almost all the anti-rockist arguments seem to me to be common sense.

That said, the cool/uncool divide is rockist :)

How wonderful if this were true. So easy to decide who to exclude from The Republic if the people who were wrong were the same as the people who were smug.

ROCKISM TALKING POINTS

In rock criticism, "rockism" refers to the fetishization of the real over the fake. This binarism manifests itself in discourse in a myriad of ways: authentic vs. inauthentic, acoustic vs. digital, rooty vs. rootless, intuitive vs. intellectual, American vs. European, rural vs. urban, black vs. white, Stones vs. Beatles, sincerity vs. irony, rock vs. pop, rap vs. R&B, working class vs. bourgeoisie, tradition vs. innovation, the canon vs. the ephemeral, the singles vs. the album, the essential vs. the contingent, etc.

Good things about rockism: 1) for a brief time, it served as a sturdy strategy for the legitimization for rock music and rock culture against a hostile overculture, and a good (if not complete) alternative to certain inane formulations of rock-is-art 2) was initially concieved in part (albeit in a flawed way) as a method of heightening the cultural achievements of the underclass, esp. African- Americans.

Problems with rockism: 1) it has as much intellectual sophistication as Holden Caulfield 2) it has, historically, been the justification for the wholesale a priori rubbishing of wide swathes of music. 3) possibly obsolescent as a method of legitimization 4) wound up the cover for a wide variety of social prejudices, including those against African-Americans, quite in spite of itself.

Worth noting: Rockism is not necessarily consistent amongst all participants. One rockist may not agree with another over a wide variety of issues. (viz. the relation of the single or the album to rock's "essence.") Corollary: rockism isn't (merely) a matter of privileging the Rolling Stones over Sylvester.

Also worth noting: the Nieztchean flip-flop of prizing the fake in place of the real (ONE of many anti-rockist strategies) is kinda dumb, too.

So some humility is in order. Rockism will be replaced by a different set of "invisible" conventional values. Their absurdities will be revealed and discussed with contempt in their turn.

honor the fire, by the way.

But you can still be rockist while you're in the midst of that social context (conjectural or no)...um...right?

Nah. Sheepish allegiance to Issues of Cool & Authentic aren't as bad if they're not 50 years old.

Insecure. And twattish.

Wait...are you saying we can't use the term retroactively? People use "modernist," "punk," and "capitalist" retroactively without much trouble.

By the way, in this thread I'm not using "rockist" and "rockism" in any perjorative sense at all.

I still humbly submit that I don't see how any of that definition has to do with Tracer's old thread, despite Mark S's insistence otherwise. "My taste vs. your taste" isn't the same thing as "this is real/this isn't."

being taken as a MORE SERIOUS MATTER than

DJ playing music punters didn't like vs punters wanting DJ to play music they liked

= rockism (used in jokey self-deprecating manner)

I am also starting to think that the opposite of a rockist is a markist.

ie: if you were actually talking to someone rockist, then you might either a) get genuinely polemical vs rockism in a new and interesting way; b) find interesting things and value in what is called rockism; or possibly a mixture of both.

This is like saying the only valid debate about the crappiness of processed American Cheese would be in Kraft Foods boardroom.

We're not talking about the rockism on ILx so much as we're talking about rockism in the world, and the fact that the general tone of this forum might happen to sway one way or the other does not necessarily invalidate the truthfulness (or even blunt the rhetorical force) of everybody's statements on this thread.

(btw, I thought your definitions upthread one of the best contributions by far.)

see also: hat-dwelling rabbit, flogged dead (trojan?) horse, rubber chicken

Uncool

great revive

sterling early work from custos as ever

😎

What exactly is the inverse of "rockism," "Popism"?
― Alex in NYC, Sunday, August 4, 2002 5:00 PM

by no means!

(for either word)

lol @ everyone in this thread acting like rockism is a boring and tired topic that’s been discussed to death

man baffled by literally everything assumes rest of world accurately sees into future, pretends it can't

OH NO DADDIO!

― Sarah, Monday, August 5, 2002 1:00 AM (sixteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^ not me btw

rockism kicks ass