Artists With A Syllabus - is this or is it no longer A Thing?

This was a term that Suzy used to use, that I really liked, to describe those bands that came complete with their own set of wider cultural references, not just musical "influences", but books, literature, authors, visual artists, films, philosophy, politics etc.

Obviously this was especially common with 80s art-rock groups (Bauhaus, Echo & the Bunnymen, Julian Cope, etc) but in the 90s it seemed to reach a kind of peak, that many of the hugely successful or at least critically acclaimed/fan canonised indierock bands (Manic Street Preachers, Blur, Pulp, Radiohead, Stereolab) were bands that were highly literate and referenced and namedropped a wide variety of other artforms , not just music. And also that fans would pick up and investigate these references, that it was almost considered part of the canon, if you liked a band, to read the authors they mentioned.

Now this question is kind of inspired by two things - firstly, Let England Shake and the discussion of whether this was "sixth form" or "a PhD disguised as an album." Secondly, attempted discussion with a new generation of Radiohead fans who actually seem faintly embarrassed by concept albums and reading lists and actively resist engaging with the band's non-musical reference points as being something with the whiff of "sad fanboyism" bordering on what reads to me as anti-intellectualism.

And then I started to try and think of what artists, recently, had done this. And I rather drew a blank. Maybe I'm drawing a blank because I'm LOLold and not in touch with what The Kids are into today? Maybe it's just because I no longer engage much with obsessive fan culture of new bands? Is it the death of long-format music criticism, that journalists no longer have 10,000 word pieces to burn a few thousand words asking musicians what their favourite authors are? Do artists no longer do it, because it's seen as naff and 90s and concept-album-y? Or am I just looking in the wrong places?

This can also function as an "Artists with a Syllabus: Search and Destroy" - tho I'm not really interested in "Classic or Dud" because obviously I think this is a wonderful and good thing.

But then again, I was the kind of teenager that read Camus and Gormenghast because they were referenced in Cure lyrics, and watched Derek Jarman films because the Smiths talked about them so I'm just predisposed to think of it as a Good Thing.

I just wonder if something has been lost - that there was something quite special about a time when you were not considered A Proper Blur Fan unless you'd read Martin Amis - or if I'm being a curmudgeon about how now obsessive fandom means having a tumblr full of animated gifs.

lcd soundsystem got me into lcd soundsystem

Or is more just that, have all of the good references been taken? And when someone like Klaxons start going on about Pynchon and the Illuminatus trilogy, they don't seem cool and original, they just seem like they're ripping off the KLF in a really inept way?

I also wonder about how it can backfire - that a lot of people projected a lot of stuff onto LDR because of her reference points (Hollywood Babylon, faded glamour, etc.) - that turned out not to have any substance to it? I don't want to bring the LDR clusterfuck in here too much, but I do wonder if that was part of the disappointment of the backlash, that people were expecting World-Building, and instead it turned out to be a Vogue Fashion Spread in homage to an era, instead?

Saturday afternoon is probably the worst of all times to have started a thread like this, but I've been thinking about this.

I think what you're talking about is mostly to do with that sort of teenage fandom that seeks to absorb everything. I would rather now see into an artist's heritage and discover what his ancestors were reading.

I think maybe it's a consequence of bands forming in the Internet age. Instead of 'here are my influences: books I've read in the library or stuff I've been exposed to through art college' it's 'here are my influences: little snippets of stuff from all over the Internet', which is harder to put into a definitive reading list.

So you think it's the Information Stream, which has atomised people's exposure to culture?

I don't know that I agree with that, but obviously I am of the "books I've read in the library" generation rather than a Stream generation. It seems like people still have obsessions and focuses, people still have single-subject tumblrs? It's easier to assemble information more quickly when you can read the wiki and google up a hundred links in an afternoon. But does that mean people still don't get as deeply into the subjects that capture their attention?

Too Much Joy was one of these bands. I read Catcher In The Rye because of them and if I remember their liner notes correctly, they were pretty explicit about which of their songs were inspired by which texts, when that was the case. Since they've been deleted, they're the only CDs I still actually own, but they're currently at the bottom of a well-stuffed closet. I'll have to see about digging them out later to confirm.

What about Metallica: Hemingway, Dalton Trumbo, Lovecraft? Or is that more just "writing songs inspired by books" than actually "having a syllabus".

The piecemeal acquisition of information is in the foreground. It's how I approach a subject first, even if later I go and read a specific book about it. Maybe it's always been like that, getting exposed to things through bite-sized pieces and then tracking down the source later. It's just that with the Internet people can say "oh I was surfing", but before it was "oh I was reading a newspaper article/caught a bit of a TV show/overheard a conversation on the bus". These other things still happen, but surfing is a clearly definable action.

xp there's a disctinction here between 'having a syllabus but not talking about it' and 'having a syllabus and telling everyone about it as much as possible'. Are the pre 'Who's Next' Who any less intellectual because they didn't talk about their syllabus? Is Iggy? There's a guy who's well read, and it must influence his songwriting, but he doesn't make a point of mentioning it.

Thrice's Illusion of Safety is certainly one such album. I haven't been musically satisfied enough by anything else they've put out since to examine the lyrics closely enough, but I heard they did a Pynchon album. But a song heavily inspired by Poe, an e.e. cummings re-working, refs to various philosophers, the Bible...

actively resist engaging with the band's non-musical reference points as being something with the whiff of "sad fanboyism" bordering on what reads to me as anti-intellectualism.

Maybe there's a distrust of being openly intellectual nowadays, because anyone can superficially come across as an 'expert' on any topic by searching for it on Wikipedia?
Also we've been burnt by bands saying one thing and doing another, the big example being the Manic's socialism/communism stance contradicted by having their own personal toilet at Glastonbury.

naive reading of the Manics and of socialism i think.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d8/The_Masses_Against_The_Classes.jpg
That's the cover of 'The Masses Against The Classes' (which I got by searching Wikipedia #instantexpert)

0w3n and j0hn to thread, i suppose

And my objection is not on political or faux-intellectualism grounds, it's the same feeling I got when Brett Anderson remarked that he was a bisexual who'd never had a homosexual experience: "yeah right", IOW the recognisation that something is probably just an attempt by the artist to get attention by being 'outrageous' or in some way controversial.

The Who were HUGELY a syllabus band! Almost from their beginnings, they're pretty much the first band I'd think of as an example of "art school band." Even if they didn't talk about (did they? I don't know.) other people certainly talked about it with regards to them, be that discussing Auto Destructive Art or whatever.

And maybe Iggy doesn't talk about it, but it's certainly obvious - and not even just from the Berlin period stuff. Like, it's obvious that the Stooges were a band with their cultural obsessions (not just sayin' that coz I watched Wreck Detectives and Time Team with Ron.)

I'm just trying to think about who does it these days - like, that whole thing about Vampire Weekend being so collegiate and literate because they knew what a mansard roof was? Like, that's become notable now?

I dunno, Manics attitudes towards "Socialism" seemed to go a bit deeper than wanting your own personal toilet at Glasto because, let's face it, the toilets at festivals are revolting. I can understand that urge.

Like, the idea of Nicky Manic still living and paying local taxes in an end of row terrace house in the neighbourhood where he grew up vs Billy Bragg and his "I'll use the communal toilet in Glasto, but move to a rock star beach house in Dorset" (or wherever he lives now, rather than staying true to the Essex roots or whatever he talks about? But mainly I just think Billy Bragg shout STFU for many reasons)

the most recent uk version i can come up with is the libertines. but they're also the most recent band to be successful enough in the white-boy-with-guitar phylum (public school genus) to be culturally unavoidable enough that people would notice. american examples seem without number.

I had to google it, but my question is: did they want everybody else to know what a mansard roof was or did they just want to say "mansard roof"? Betting on the latter.

when artists tell you about the art they absorb themselves, there's a bunch of ways of doing it. a name-dropped list can look very shallow, but at some points in your life - especially adolescence i guess - it doesn't matter if it's shallow because you're just looking for reference points on the map of the world that you can go and explore for yourself.

i prefer artists who show you what makes up their experience-world, thru cover art or references or oblique conversations. as an adult i don't need reference points so much, but i'm interested in the ways that artists influence other artists - i want to see the trails.

when we talk to other people about our interests we're always exposing ourselves, especially to the hateful glare of "taste". i've said before how negative a trait i think good taste is. it makes people wary of discussing things they like in case their peers can sneer at their gaucheness or whatever. which isn't to say i'm above the odd sneer myself - i doubt any of us is. but i'd like to think that mostly what i sneer at is a kind of unreflectingness, an assumption that certain ideas or modes or things are inherently cool or correct or above analysis. i hate that shit.

some artists now i'm sure are still signposting and discussing art they love. maybe it happens less than it used to do because there's a deeper obsession with "good taste" in some genres? a lot of music fandom outside of the popular mainstream can degenerate into a game of cooler-than-thou that makes savvy practitioners keep their cards closer to their chests. and there's a streak of deliberate boorishness (occasionally funny and necessary but often just easy) thruout the history of music crit/fandom. but also maybe increasingly music practitioners take most of their experience-world from other music in a way that reduces their points of reference?

ramble ramble

i suspect this is actually a very small part of the larger story about how there are still smart and earnest kids at american universities, whereas every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

In the "flippin' lousy" TV interview (from around the time of 'Sell Out'), Townshend does mention that the band are "a relatively simple form of pop art", but he doesn't go into it much more than that. And during the rest of the interview he seems to be actively deflecting any questions that hint at the possibility of intellectulism in their music. Even around the release of 'Tommy', there's a German TV interview where the interviewer is asking all kinds of complications about the metaphysical themes etc. of the album, and PT is giving more or less monosyllabic 'yes/no' answers.

every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

this seems harsh and yet

in response to your earlier post i wanted to say something dismissive about how music fans as a group were the least well read people in the universe but i'm not sure if i agree with myself

I think how it basically breaks down is that something can be intellectual while seeming totally dunderheaded (Stooges), and also something can be labelled 'intellectual' while actually being just a bunch of random quotes cribbed from somewhere.
Alarm bells go off for me when a band makes a big show of their influences. It reminds me of Will Self's rant about 'you don't somehow know all about Italian cuisine because you've eaten a chiabatta'.

i want to say that the young people today are the least well read people in the universe but i'm trying to ease my curmudgeonly middle-aged man persona in gently

x-posts, wow, fast moving thread for a Saturday!

Well, I was thinking about Radiohead because, well, that's where my thoughtworm obsession is at, at the moment. And how they went from being the kind of literate band that would namedrop Coupland or Chomsky in interviews when asked what their influences were (I always found that endearing rather than pretentious, tho I know many disagree.) To being the kind of band that had a whole blog dedicated to what they were reading, not even in a namedroppy this is what we're influenced kind of way, but in more a OMG THIS BOOK IS AMAZING YOU SHOULD ALL READ IT TOO!!! kind of way. But then again, RH seem like the kind of band that if they weren't rock stars, they would be either college professors or the kind of marketing creatives who spend their lives telling other people what they should be consuming (or some odd mixture thereof.)

I dunno, though, Noodle, because sometimes I find the way that you sneer at "good taste" to be almost as hateful as the whole cult of "good taste." I kinda get what you're on at, in that "worrying about how other people will perceive your taste" is gross and worrying about being sneered at for the stuff you love is just so awful. But at the same time, that whole thing of refusing to contemplate or examine or engage with the stuff you put in your brain - that's even grosser (and that was when I really started shouting at the RH fans.) Maybe that's what you're saying, and I'm misreading you?

snoball i feel like you're having an entirely parallel discussion with yourself

nv i think the boat sailed on that one

wcc are you familiar with tom fleming and his band 'the wild beats'

xp

oh i think you shd grapple with yr own aesthetic, no doubt. it's unreflectiveness that i hate, but i feel like "taste" as a public quality is very much about unreflectiveness, like it's an acquired set of rules that save people from having to think when confronted with something that doesn't engage them.

every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

lol u old

sneering is generally unattractive, obviously. it's a reflex reaction like sneezing or like fighting back when you feel attacked.

i suspect this is actually a very small part of the larger story about how there are still smart and earnest kids at american universities, whereas every single undergraduate currently enrolled at a british school is a moron snakebite-drinking waster

I disagree with this SO HARD, mostly because the people I most often encounter this reflexive anti-intellectualism from are Americans?

And also because, I dunno. I remember (OK this is 4 or 5 years ago now) meeting a bunch of teenage LOTP fans and thinking, oh god, these ppl are gonna be terrible NME-reading, mindless cool-eating people who listen to Horrors albums, ugh - and then I met them and they so WEREN'T - they were far more engaged and curious and interested in following up cultural references and exploring concepts. Like, a generation of kids who had grown up with videogames, but were prepared to dissect videogames as art and reference them to Japanese literature and the explosion in 19th century photography technology and just WAU, like, these kids, these fans, are so much smarter and more articulate than the bands they're consuming or the press who are talking down to them, like, what gives?

I guess there's a difference between "I'm namedropping this influence because I think it will look cool" (even though bands like Bauhaus could make that work, somehow?) and "OMG, everyone should read this book because it's amazing, it inspired me so much, you might like it, too!"

But it's hard from the outside to sometimes tell the difference? Especially, yeah, when wikipedia makes every experts in 30 seconds, but sometimes digesting something and getting it wrong will have interesting results? (wasn't that one of the origins of the Bunnymen/Cope beef?)

lotp?

Late of the pier?

also i figured the way i formulated that was recognisably deliberately over the top, but oh well - i do think the ways in which 'smart' indie has survived in the states are more or less directly correlated to the different cultural/economic status of the universities there, and to city cultures more amenable to spending your early 20s doing something unproductive with your life

e. you're at u of sussex right? i submit that that university is an anomaly

Yup. They kinda seemed like they might have had a syllabus, or developed that kind of phenomenon had they gone and, but I think they might just have been a bunch of weirdos. heh.

Yup meaning LOTP = Late Of The Pier, sorry, x-post

I suppose the corollary question is really, when did naked enthusiasm become viewed as *so* ~uncool~? (Though I suppose the word "cool" itself implies a lack of heat or visible enthusiasm.) It seems deeply tied up with the whole hipster (cringe, I know) aesthetic, that one must never be seen to be *bothered* or concerned about anything.

And being a fan - sad fan or otherwise - is very tied up in notions of being a fanatic, of being enthusiastic to an almost unhealthy ideal, that being a hipster and being a fan are mutually impossible positions, which makes engaging with pop culture rather a dilemma?

(a side note that amuses me.)

a lot of Swift's earlier writing, and that of his like-minded peers, is fiercely dismissive of "Indexes" and "Keys" and the like - early encyclopaedias, basically - because they were convinced it allowed a shallow acquisition of learning that shd only legitimately have been acquired thru years of reading latin and greek etc.

so whilst it's true that tools have transformative social consquences, wiki is still just a tool and it doesn't in itself destroy the possibility of "deep" understanding. i'd argue a counter-possibility that it allows for much more rapid connection forming or mapping. i'm wary of shallow/deep dialectics of thought and feeling, and i'd argue they're both important surfaces for experience.

and yet i also feel like the "general culture" is moving towards more shallowness, and simple lists are a real manifestation of that?

i'm eternally gratefully to the sixth form english teacher who, on the first day of A-level class, dictated us a list of stuff we might like to read that wd be interesting or mind-expanding tho completely unrelated to the syllabus. and the list started with Blood and Guts in High School and in 1985 that was revelatory. but lists can be dangerously close to shopping lists and serve as a guide to consumption of culture. and one of culture's uses has always been as a commodity, to signify taste and therefore class and therefore bad things that culture is also always trying to absorb and melt.

and to wind back to the point of the thread - that's also a thing that syllabus artists wind up doing: "here are the products you should consume if you want to be One of Us". the positive, liberating, bridge-building urge is always lying right up against the negative, exclusionary ownership urge.

in 1985 that was revelatory

i was just thinking (before i saw yr two posts) that one difference over the past decade or two is the extent to which the publishing industry, the academic industry, and the general movie industry have attempted to capitalise on older ideas of 'cult' work. like it used to be a lot easier to present a set of Things Outside The Mainstream that had influenced you -- because they weren't as easy to find in the first place, admittedly -- like, try running through every author mark e smith ever made use of and thinking about whether they were in print at the time or whether there'd been a movie version of them the same decade

ha, this is an expost with your more recent post

xpost, rather. also, i was born in 1985, i'd like to just mention that here.

try running through every author mark e smith ever made use of

yeah i remember finding The Dice Man in a bookshop and getting v. excited

and the death of secondhand bookshops is maybe another issue here

see, i first saw that in a branch of hammick's in the luton town centre in a publisher's display of 'cult books!'

i guess i noticed the de-cultification of "cult" when the BBC started showing old Simpsons eps or something on a "cult" strand on BBC2? you're quite right, a word that at one time signified stuff that was hard to get hold of and difficult for an audience to form a relationship with has now become A.N. Other genre

actively resist engaging with the band's non-musical reference points as being something with the whiff of "sad fanboyism" bordering on what reads to me as anti-intellectualism.

I see where you're coming from but I have the opposite feeling about this (tho I've no idea what non-musical reference points any artists I know of even have). Anything book/film/non-musical I have an interest in occupies a completely different place in my head from music. Definitely don't consider myself anti-intellectual, just music and non-music don't occupy much shared space for me

nope- I guess it was those ever changing moods acting up again.

or was it "ever changing pseuds"?

didn't paulo hewitt claim it wasn't him and weller denied he was behind it? so who was it?

colin wilson on the bed for the win.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Dfd0P6f9SnA/Tr2_JOOahjI/AAAAAAAAG4U/oliMnsPPdEc/s1600/wide-boy-awake-chicken-outlaw.jpg

is that guy taking a dump in the bath?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0f/Belle_And_Sebastian_-_If_You%27re_Feeling_Sinister.jpg
just yknow reading kafka here, thinking about things

http://static.boomkat.com/images/272645/333.jpg
i fall asleep reading foucault all the time. don't you?

http://www.collabor.at/schwestern_bruell/cremebruelleemons/kathleenhanna/image_data
it really makes you think

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/reverb/up-matmos2_001.jpg
when we stole this idea we at least stuck a cute naked boy into the frame

http://i44.tinypic.com/16glteo.jpg

i taw a twee!

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XsFuCz4wVTk/Tk0196jLT-I/AAAAAAAABCg/aSUe-NmntPA/s1600/GrahamNash-WildTales-Front.jpg

There's a fairly popular group who name their albums after books by dudes like William Vollmann, Chinua Achebe and Malcolm Gladwell.
― President Keyes, Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And their name is...?
― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Sunday, February 12, 2012 11:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Roots. Though I've never listened to their records. Tried googling for musicians with GoodReads profiles but came up nil. That kind of appeals to me more than a curated list..

The album's iconic cover, photographed by Daniel Kramer, features Sally Grossman (wife of Dylan's manager Albert Grossman) lounging in the background. There are also artifacts scattered around the room, including LPs by The Impressions (Keep on Pushing), Robert Johnson (King of the Delta Blues Singers), Ravi Shankar (India's Master Musician), Lotte Lenya (Sings Berlin Theatre Songs by Kurt Weill) and Eric Von Schmidt (The Folk Blues of Eric Von Schmidt). Dylan had "met" Schmidt "one day in the green pastures of Harvard University" and would later mimic his album cover pose (tipping his hat) for his own Nashville Skyline four years later. A further record, Françoise Hardy's EP J'suis D'accord was on the floor near Dylan's feet but can only be seen in other shots from the same photo session.

Visible behind Grossman is the top of Dylan's head from the cover of Another Side of Bob Dylan; under her right arm is the magazine Time with President Lyndon B. Johnson on the cover of the January 1, 1965 issue. There is a harmonica resting on a table with a fallout shelter (capacity 80) sign leaning against it. Above the fireplace on the mantle directly to the left of the painting is the Lord Buckley album The Best of Lord Buckley. Next to Lord Buckley is a copy of GNAOUA, a magazine devoted to exorcism and Beat Generation poetry edited by poet Ira Cohen.

Dylan sits forward holding a cat and has an opened magazine featuring an advertisement on Jean Harlow's Life Story by the columnist Louella Parsons resting on his crossed leg. The cufflinks Dylan wore in the picture were a gift from Joan Baez, as she later referenced in her 1976 hit "Diamonds & Rust".

The black and white pamphlet lying across Time magazine with President Johnson on the cover is a publication of the Earth Society, then located on East 12th Street in the East Village. The Earth Society saw its mission as protecting earth from collisions with comets and planets. Their pamphlet interprets Immanuel Velikovsky’s notion that life on earth was so deeply affected by near-collisions of Venus with Jupiter and Mars that the impressions and interpretations of observers found their way into myths and semi-historical documents of peoples of many cultures. The pamphlet also claims that the Ark of the Covenant is a representation of a comet, which is what the white shape in the center of the pamphlet cover is intended to represent.

http://www.montevidayo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/bringing-it-all-back-home.jpg

Yes yes, we see all that stuff, but LOOK AT THE FLUFFLY KITTEN.

Morrissey was kind of the king of this back in the day, Oscar Wilde's sales in the 80s and early 90s probably reached previously unheard-of heights thanks to his championing. In metal during the tape-trading days (and in punk, too, on the sleeves of 7"s) offering a list of working bands was a good way to tell people "you may not know what bands to give a chance if you happen to see their name on a flyer" and in the absence of other information that could be completely invaluable for kids living far from active scenes - I feel like Big Black had a list that just started BANDS on one of their records, and when I met mrs. aero who grew up in a pretty remote area of Iowa (not remote for Iowa necessarily but pretty remote compared to places less than 4 hours from a major city), I realized that lists like that were a lifeline prior to the internet. They told you what to tell your one local record store, if you had one that was receptive, to put on the shelves.

I feel overwhelmed in that I wanted to say things, but the thread has gone elsewhere.

To address cult: I think that the video section of chain stores, for instance, have a "Cult Classics" that don't necessarily designate "cult" as a genre but do the following: cherry-pick the commercial or critical successes out of disparate genres; include the outliers of a genre that did poorly in the box office but have a dedicated following in home release; represent the work of so-called 'cult' figures with the few commercially available works they're able to have in stock. More examples possible, I guess.

The first thing that came to mind that is so obvious yet dumb is musicians who sample influences -- I'm kind of embarrassed it came to mind first, but Trent Reznor having clips of Midnight Express and THX-1138 probably made at least a few kids seek those out.

The syllabus idea was kind of extended by third-party fandom at some points, but I think this now lives mostly on the web. I picked up re/search's industrial culture handbook at a used bookstore a few years ago and it's such a great instance of interaction with musicians that ties multiple people, ideas, and influences together and presents them in a tidy package. Nowadays, that'd probably be a website, right?

also pretty sad that the Wu Tang Clan have only been mentioned in reference to the Panda Bear list, because oh man, do those guys have a syllabus

good call, the Wu are deep in associated mythos / lore / extended labyrinths of context and allusion; the infamous NWW list is also worth mentioning here as an actual list of titles, albeit musical

Sonic Youth were really big on this kind of references both in their music and surrounding artwork.

But perhaps more in the sense of, if an author I really liked said they listened to one piece of music on repeat while writing mh favourite novel, I would totally seek that music out?

Largehearted Boy - Book Notes

to clarify from yday i don't 'object' to things like the panda bear list - and to, say, a 13 year old fan in Winston-Salem that would be amazing! The only thing I find weird about the list is its sort of totality, and Panda Bears seeming desire to present this to the world like a badge (surely their records do this!). Their desire to tell the world about The Beatles and Bob Marley is sort of endearing (no sarcasm intended if it seems that way), but the longer a list is, the more of a manifesto it can seem, which is great if you like that kind of thing

do i think its bad that artists do these lists? no, of course not! turning people on to other music, books, ideas, politics, of course this isn't a bad thing! But do I wish more people did it? No, because I personally don't engage with music in this way (and its not how 'obvious' or 'obscure' any given list is, its that its a list) - and the orig question seemed to be asking more "do you personally like this",

HAS THAT KITTEN BEEN THERE ALL THIS TIME???

Ahem, anyway...

I dunno, back when the Echoes and bun were a thing, it was easier to count the bands that had no 'literary' references than the ones that did. Having said that, I usually got singularly put off by overly overt 'references' to books in songs. To the point where I would suspect that they were vaguely cheating at songwriting and say "Make up your own scenarios! Stop Copying!!"

I got a copy of "Anarchists in Love" possibly because I saw someone from a NWONW band reading a copy while on the bog (faked pic, usual way, you know..), and I thought it looked intersting (approved spelling there), and it was.

I still think "On the road" is boring tosh, and if you 'really really' like the lifestyle, go for it, no problem. Just don't do it vicariously, yawn...

I'm gonna have to turn pictures off on ILX because I've already shot through my data allowance for the month and it's actually costing me dialup money to continue this discussion, boo hoo hoo.

Hey, if anyone feels like expanding on the Wu Tang syllabus, go right ahead! I am not being prescriptive or rockist on this thread - it's just because my own personal knowledge is slightly better in pop and dance music than in hip-hop or rap (hence why I brought up Duran or Dopplereffekt (god I cannot spell that correctly ever) having syllabi)

I've been thinking about this more, what I like, what I don't like, and why. Sometimes it boils down to the culture as shopping list idea. Culture as something you can consume just by owning the right records or reading the right books. When I think culture is something kinda deeper than that, it's not just reading the right book, it's engaging with the ideas in that book. It's not just listening to that record, it's entering into and engaging with the worldview portrayed in that record.

(This is kind of going to tie in with something I'm about to say on the feminism thread, that it's not enough to just learn the lingo, it's about actually understanding what it means and the ideas *why* behind them. That it's not enough to learn a few words in a foreign language and think you speak it, you have to learn how to *think* in that language.)

So now I get into the entirely subjective bit, because I prefer when an artist doesn't spell it all out for you, when they make a bit of a *puzzle* for you, because I like puzzles, I like filling in the blanks myself and doing the research and finding it out for myself.

For example, compare and contrast two songs. Antonin Artaud by Bauhaus - that song is not a reading list. That song makes no fucking sense at all until you start to read about Artaud's life and his work and his death and once you've done all that research the song makes sense, but you've also learned a lot about surrealism and the theatre of cruelty and all these other ideas along the way. It was set up as a puzzle, that you can choose to untangle - or you can just go "hunh hunh, he said wank."

Then you compare that with Le Tigre singing "What's your take on Cassavetes, what's your take on Cassavetes - genius? Misogynist?" and it's like - all the work's been done for you, the conclusions drawn, the options presented. There's no puzzle, it's a straight Classic or Dud, taking sides. And that's so frustrating to me, because, obviously I think that the ideas that Le Tigre are trying to get across are amazingly good, and the world needs to be exposed to them, but treating feminism like it's a bunch of slogans that can be got across in a cheerleading chant makes me uncomfortable, and I'd rather it was presented as a puzzle to be unpicked.

Which is a shame, because I'm generally in favour of Le Tigre's politics, and recognise that Bauhaus were often incredibly clumsy and dire.

But that is me, and my prejudices as someone who is a child of the intelligentsia class (my lack of spelling ability is a rejection of my family values! - I'm someone who talked about Veblen at the dinner table as a teenager, but doesn't have a clue how to spell him) and I know for a fact that there were many, many 15 year old girls who did not have my Privilege, for whom Le Tigre's cheerleading WAS life-changing, even if I sneer at it as a shopping list. Toe-MAY-to, toe-MAH-to.

I think the difference between, say, the Panda Bear one and more traditional list is there's not much of a sense of personal curation. Seems to be mostly canon stuff, which reads to me as boring. That is to say: it is wide, but not very deep.

yeah but as crut says - whether its deep* or not depends on your perspective, many many people wouldn't know most of those artists (there's def more than a few on there I've never heard)

*actually whether its wide or not also depends on your perspective

Wait, what is Gormenghast and how is it referenced by The Cure?

it's a big fat-faced clown, and it's a big fat-faced clown

Gormenghast is a novel (well part of a surreal? fantasy? experimental? trilogy) by Mervyn Peake (sp?)

Robert Smith pretty much lifted whole paragraphs from it for definitely The Drowning Man on Faith but my housemate found another one on Pornography I think?

(Charlotte Sometimes was also based on a novel but it's more obvious and admitted, I remember the Gormenghast thing taking one of my friends by surprise when she first encountered it and making us all read it)

whether its deep* or not depends on your perspective

"deep" meaning "people with a passing familiarity of the genre may not have heard of the artist, let alone head them." With a handful of exceptions (The Free Design being a decent one), the list is all either contemporaries, artists that have been in the top 40 in the last 15ish years, or canon picks. The only real exploration venue is the house/techno interest, but some of those artists have been commissioned to remix Panda Bear!

Thanks, WCC. I love The Drowning Man, but I'd never heard about the novel(s).

Ha! On authors referencing music, Elizabeth Wurtzel just deliberately described something as "gigantic, a big, big love" in this terrible book and I did as much of a lol in my mouth as when I read the lyrics Robert Smith would lift for Drowning Man in Gormenghast so I guess influence-dropping can go both ways.

Frank Zappa's syllabus in Freak Out! was so off-putting that it gave me a dim view of artists' syllabi in general. In retrospect, I think the notes on the songs were more smug and obnoxious than the list of names.

forgot i started this thread. a little obscure, but a decent list:

what are your five favorite things/people listed on the back of the sufi choir album from 1973?

I suppose Sgt Pepper cover has a place here too.

yeah that's the big one. did all four of them actually pick all that stuff, though? i don't remember.

Not sure Ringo picked any.

Holy effing shit I've just thought of a recent one - and an artist I've listened to - and discussed on ILX loads recently as well!

Grimes writing a whole album around the universe of Dune. Maybe that's a concept album more than a syllabus but she certainly seems like she weaves references and allusions through her work in that non reading list way that I like.

But I guess she's more in the same vein as Owen P than the Bunnymen the way she does it, but still. Recent, relevant example that it may still be A Thing in some corners.

i had more of a sense of pop, arts and literary culture overlapping and intermixing in the 80s and 90s than i do today. at the time, i was reading art periodicals, the village voice, various mags and fanzines large and small, and listening to a TON of "underground" (lol) rock music. it seemed to me that there was a shared conversation going on between these things. greil marcus would talk about sonic youth in artforum, and sonic youth would put artforum-y artists on the covers of their albums. scenes were defined not just by musicians, but by filmmakers and photographers. everyone seemed to be obsessed with "sampling" (lol), and this allowed people to connect the dots between public enemy, basquiat, kathy acker and considerations of things like techno-dystopianism and the fragmentation of perspective in urban environments, or w/e. names like "harry crews" and "j.g. ballard" kept cropping up in different places. in forced exposure, byron coley not only drew a big circle around a bunch of punk, noise and artmusic bands, he made constant reference to his free jazz heroes and to writers like phil dick. the bands coley liked often namechecked the same folks (i.e., sonic youth, again).

as i saw it, certain artists and writers were instrumental in creating this intermixed arts culture: the RE/search crew, coley, kim & thurston, greil marcus, the folks at the voice and film threat, among others. there seemed to be something similar going on in providence, RI over the last decade, with a lot of cross-pollination between musicians and graphic artists, but that seemed more insular, less connected to an overarching narrative that took in other subcultures, art forms, and historical precedents.

Well, this is what we have in our pop stars today: "Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph ... I am a proud non-reader of books." --Kanye

Pic of Ital mentioned on the hipster house thread.

http://pitchfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/content/ital3.jpg

my syllabus these days pretty much the same as always. abel ferrara, christina stead, bruce willis. the usual.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JqTiKAqxR9c/Ty0wIwc9jiI/AAAAAAAAAXQ/XhTrKeatakA/s1600/skotrekerds%2B006.JPG

I've always loved this approach and definitely indulge in it myself

The Rawkus/Def Jux/backpack genre alternated between multiculturalist and sci-fi canons. Perfect for a late-90s early-00s humanities major.

Phillip K. Dick, Toni Morrison, Hawking, Cornel West come to mind first.

^ yeah, that's a v good point. was gonna mention DJ spooky as a late 90s/early 00s musician who definitely came w a syllabus, but forgot.

http://991.com/newGallery/Harry-Crews-Naked-In-Garden-H-519036.jpg

lol, yeah, for example

i'm pretty sure sonic youth got me into harry crews. before the kim/lydia album. from an interview or something. i lied to kim once when that album came out and told her i liked it. i was drunk. just trying to make small talk.

yeah, HC was definitely a "thing" in hipster rock circles before the formation of that band

Thinking about this now, with hindsight I didn't have 2 years ago, I do actually think (and it was the mention of Grimes upthread that put it in my head) that the rise of Tumblr may have had an effect on Syllabus bands, if used to its advantage?

Mark S just casually dropped a reference for something I had completely forgotten, but here it is, Ground Zero for Syllabus Rock: Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer:

http://www.listal.com/list/portrait-artist-consumer