Have Greil Marcus (et al) weighed in on the rockism issue?

Huh?

Whoa dude!

haha!

why you wanna hate hegelian marxism?

I disagree with Greil Marcus 90% of the time, but there's no way the man's a racist. Why doesn't someone call this Tippy Turtle out on the fact that tossing about hysterical (and frequent) accusations of racism is, you know, slanderous. Not to mention pathetic.

(a) people who don't like rockism
(b) people who disagree with them

Yeah, it's great. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, it's hard to deny that he reaches a sustained eloquence that is quite scintillating. I think the context needed to follow his post is that the guy Carl at Zoilus is undertaking a project to re-evaluate Celine Dion, motivated by the fear that he may be overlooking something of value in an artist whose popularity has defied critical disapproval for so long. Simon had criticized that effort in a previous post as being quasi-Maoist. In the current post, here, he takes that dispute as the starting point for a wide-ranging exploration of the intellectual and political roots of the poptimist project.

Interesting. Seeing how Simon names Frank Kogan three times in that post, he might want to read the Celine Dion piece Frank wrote in the Voice a couple years ago.

i think that celine is a demographic issue, it is mostly bought/loved by people who are in a demographic advertisors have decided as unsuitable, for one reason or another.

i have also heard enough of her music, to know that i dont like the way it sounds, i think this whole popist/rockist shit flinging contest should be settled in with critically receiving everything one hears, and when you come down to it, and you dont like it, then drop it.

i dont like beans, i dont eat beans, in chilli, in cassoluets, on toast, with franks, as a side dish, lima, fava, navy, kidney i just dont like them. i have tasted them in all of the above dishes and varieties. it just aint goin' in my gullet.

i dont like celine (and dont really find her interesting, like i dont find most mariah, shania, etc interesting) they tend to grate, for a variety of social and formal reasons. listening to them i often find physically painful, the lyrics are sappy, and the bombast is unpleasent. but then i dont really like sopranos, and the female singers i like who have a techincal mastery (callas, odetta, anderson, etc) tend to have deep voices.

the exception is joan baez, but thats mostly i think growing up in a hippie household.

The reason that these words are coming under interrogation is not merely because of anti-vanguardism w/r/t aesthetics, but because the words are too damn vague. Any of these criticisms can be valid, but a person has to explain why they're valid in a particular instance and how, specifically, it works. How is it that something seems overproduced? How is something "too clean" or "slick?" Why, in a particular instance, is melodrama unpleasant or annoying? Etc.

(a) The question of how much there's really a need for critics to "redress" the popular, since the popular has gotten along fine without them; sometimes I feel like there's a kind of publication rockism going on in the notion that it's important for (say) the Voice or New Yorker to be spending inches on poptimist favorites, as if that's in some sense more important than hip-hop mags doing same. Or rather, it's a kind of academic bias, this notion that "serious" criticism should respond to these things -- which has as its backside the notion that the way other people talk about music is unserious.

(b) The question, maybe stemming from that, of whether it's really so terrible for "serious" criticism -- which is itself a specific kind of culture, a specific social group with a specific language and specific reference points -- to have cultural beliefs in particular things. (Not "biases," as some might like to call them, but "beliefs" and "values," and all those other things we call them when they belong to people who aren't educated white men who are pretending to be very neutral and culture-free about everything.)

I mean, the responses to that are obvious: there are people within that critical culture who just plain don't like those beliefs, and if they're going to be within the culture, there's no reason they shouldn't try to steer its values in a direction they find more intellectually useful or realistic. But at the point where purging rockism becomes a program, it's probably important to kind of run over those two things. (And it becomes important to consider how inclined we'd be to try and purge strong belief/bias out of other camps apart from the critical establishment, which we do pretend to be in favor of when it comes to e.g. fusty old men who don't like rap -- but probably not so much when it comes to e.g. random folk preservationists or hip-hop heads.) (And why not? Because in the end I feel like the anti-rockist agenda is fundamentally less about any principle in particular and more about a narcissism-of-medium-sized-differences thing wherein people shout at everyone around them: JUST BE LESS BORING. Nobody minds bias and belief, they just mind always seeing the same ones and disagreeing with them every time.)

I just went back and reread that Kogan piece on Celine Dion from 2002 (here). It's a good piece of criticism and certainly not knee-jerk Celine-bashing, but it's not at all clear that Kogan is an unabashed Celine fan. Kogan admits that he is somewhat mystified by her popularity, even though he finds some things to like on the album.

I'm not so sure about this.

So I think there's something interesting in the way we section off certain things as "serious criticism" and then use terms like bias -- because we're somehow expecting them to be fair-minded ultimate arbiters. And in other cases, we're content to consider it not bias but just belief or interest or mission or culture. Hence the narcissism-of-medium-sized-difference bit -- it's one explanation I can think of for why people used to get frustrated with Pitchfork for being "too indie" but not with Jazz Times for being "too jazz."

But that might just be me.

"I don't believe Arabs and/or Muslims all over the globe give a damn about the Palestinians. If they did, as fellow Muslims they would be as enraged and committed to rectifying injustice in the Sudan, the Philippines, Indonesia and so on. I do believe they hate Jews, and I do believe anti-Semitism is the reason non-Muslim and non-Arab nations have helped keep the Palestinian conflict at the center of world politics since the 1960s." -- Greil Marcus, from http://archive.salon.com/news/letters/2001/09/17/israel/index.html

Looks like the "Arabs and/or Muslims" decided to follow his advice regarding the Sudan and Indonesia, at least.

i still think that utopian turtle dude is a seriously obsessive dip, though.

GEE I WONDER WHY.

>"biases," as some might like to call them<

There's a reason that this word exists. "Bias" suggests a lack of open-mindedness, I think. Not just that you come from a culture and that this is your belief system, but that you come from a culture and you've constructed a particular belief system out of your cultural/philosophical-hand-as-dealt in a way that might be considered to be reactionary or closed-minded.

simon's post is great and then it gets stupid is the thing, because the point is that certain things are endlessly interrogated and others aren't -- to adopt his food analogy, its like he'd be complaining if ppl who wrote about food started writing about junk food too. the problem is that things that are "bad" for you are worth thinking about too and his attempts to prove what's "good" for you all fall flat -- what's "good" for ppl. is thinking about what they listen to and why (which i'd contend has a bit more of an absolute cast to it, as a statement, then just another "cultural preference").

one thing i've found is that these days ppl are often loathe to talk about their music tastes in any serious way to one another precisely becuz music is so close to so many important things about how they feel about themselves and the world, so they sort of shy away, and when they start to talk about why they like something they suddenly feel terribly fanboyish and embarassed, like if their social group doesn't share their tastes they should be ashamed. this happens with ppl. of all tastes -- classical, rap, whatever.

the problem is that simon limits his value judgement to the music -- not how ppl. USE the music.

also i wonder again who his unnamed "anti-rockists" are that use it as an everything-is-everything mishmash, coz all the foax he cites have V. strong agendas and don't see (nor should they) a contradiction between that and their anti-rockism.

for me, part of the point is reconciling things that are good to think with with things that are good for thinking about.

not that i'd call myself an anti-rockist even (nor is what simon describes anti-rockism) but much more pro-pop (which most of his "targets" aren't, despite that being what he accuses them of)

A more recent problem is acts that "choose" their audience upon/before release, thereby limiting it. I recently talked about this with Daniel Ladytron in an interview. He thought it was also a good way for bands to excuse themselves to make the same record over and over.

Except that defining obscure or typical taste is much harder than it used to be. The Internets and other obvious technological innovations are so much more efficient in fostering group identity and musical exploration; nobody's limited to a couple of rock stations and Rolling Stone anymore. Obscure music is no longer hidden nor particularly hard or expensive to discover or enjoy. I wouldn't even dare guess what typical is or how to measure it. "Typical" seems more related to proximity or environment more than anything else.

Exactly - and with a presumed endpoint of listening to and liking more stuff. There is absolutely no analogue of "nutritional value" within music, and there's nothing you can say against people choosing to listen to and like, say, Celine - but if that's all they listen to then that's obviously cause for criticism. I'm always suspicious of people who say "I don't like fish" or "I don't like spicy food" and it's just the same with wholesale dismissal of music genres. N.B. I still do this myself nevertheless.

I'm totally with nabisco on this. I wrote about it a couple of years ago in response to SFJ's slate.com defense of Timberlake against the eeeeevil New Yorker critic; my take basically boils down to, why should critics be required to say nice things about pop? Pop music has won the cultural battle. It's inescapable. Critics' time would be better spent writing about bands/artists/songs that need help squeezing out from under the pop steamroller and into the light of day. Anybody with a multi-million-dollar ad budget doesn't need critics (or reviewers, or whatever term you feel like using).

This relates somewhat to the carping about Christgau's appeal to objectivity in his SY review...
Sonic Youth new album "Rather Ripped"
Christgau on Sonic Youth

(ledge xpost)
So now we get to the nub of the real problem - noisy neighbours!

Why? A critic can do whatever she pleases.

sure, if the only purpose of criticism is to be a very wordy kind of advertising...

I think this is one of the most persuasive anti-anti-rockist arguments. It's possible that by trying to rid themselves of all traces of "bias", anti-rockists are in fact killing whatever it was inside them that made music worthwhile and interesting for them. Or, as Simon writes on his blog, "All of this has a slight air of the Maoist self–criticism session about it, party members and low-level bureaucrats calling themselves and others out for their crypto-bourgeois tendencies." Where does this need to grovel before the mass-mind come from? I think the best critics know that "objectivity" is not the right ideal to aim for. The dirty little secret about criticism is that no critic is ever "objective", and, more importantly, nobody who reads them wants or expects them to be. A critic should amuse, entertain, provoke, baffle, etc - but for them to think that they have some higher duty to be "objective" is for them to overrate their own significance in the scheme of things. This need to be "objective" reveals an inflated sense of self-importance, as well as a certain amount of arrogance to think that this vaunted quality is even within their reach. Worst of all, it leads to bad writing. I'd rather watch a critic passionately defend a hopelessly irrational and selfish love than grovel their way to a pre-ordained, but eminently rational and objective, conclusion.

Agree that objectivity is critical fool's gold; wondering what you make of Christgau's recent paternalistic call for it (discussion kinda petered out on the SY thread).

Plenty of popular artists/songs are written out of history rather easily. Its just now that we're fixing that whole 'punk>disco' critic mess, right?

Hooray!

I think that Christgau makes a mistake by using the word "objectivity" but if you read his explanation, I think what he's really calling for is just good, old-fashioned close listening and precise, descriptive writing.

"Who's Michael Jackson?"
- a 6-year-old boy last night at my son's T-ball game

Anti-rockism, I think, is about examining your biases and accepting that they're biases before you go on and do something, it's not saying "oh no look a bias KILL IT!", and it's not the point you're aiming to eventually end up at. To be an anti-rockist is to say 'actually these criteria by which i've been evaluating music, now I think about them, are kind of bollocks; these narratives I've been using to justify my musical taste in fact exclude stuff that is great; maybe I should think again.'

multiple xposts.

xpost to Tom - yeah, you're right. But again anyone who has reached that kind of neutrality has obviously made a wrong turn somewhere.

It's problematic not only in that he advocates the concept (illusion?) of objectivity in criticism, but he frames his methodology as the means to that goal. Isn't it like saying "His goal is wrong but his methods are sound"? I'm not baiting you btw, I'm genuinely curious about how you reconcile that.

We'll just have to fulsomely disagree over how precise his writing is (don't want to sandbag this thread haha)...

I don't think most people are in on this mythology; isn't the common line of thought for most listeners that punk is STILL not music for 'the masses' but music of teen rebellion? Punk music was more popular w Blink 182 and Green Day than it ever had been before, and if anything this reinforces my argument; when people are told by some critical authority that 'this is important' they take it to be true. Coming up the way i viewed music history was through the limited lense of available magazines, friends, etc - i didnt actually experience most of pop music history so my perspective is entirely distorted by what certain people have decided is worth remembering.

If the internet in some way levels the playing field, de-concentrates the power that certain folks have over the discourse of music history, then thats a good thing. But right now it still seems like the story of pop music is skewed and less comprehensive than it could be.

However, some anti-rockists are not against bias per se, but rather they just think that the biases of the rockists are politically unsound (because they align the rockists with the bourgeois, middle-brow hordes of PBS watchers, NPR listeners, and indie rock fans) and the anti-rockist biases are more valid (because they align the critic with salt-of-the-earth folks who have been unfairly shut out of the cultural conversation and haven't forgotten how to have fun). So it's true that objectivity is not a necessary part of the anti-rockist position, though it is for some anti-rockists.

You're appealing to some mythical beast here - who knows what the perception of punk rock is by the average person, or by the millions who own Green Day records? A lot of people don't even know who made up the Allied forces in WWII. But if someone has more than a passing interest in music it will become readily apparent punk was not a massive success early on, even if all they read is something as obscure as Rolling Stone.

Part of punk's mythology aligns with the perception by the general public that radical art movements are undertaken by underappreciated oddballs - it's an extension of the classic "artiste starving in a barren garret" cliche. It's like saying, "People don't remember that Van Gogh couldn't sell his paintings for $2 when he was alive! Now people pay millions for them! Stop rewriting history!"

Also, I just realized it's more useful to talk about "anti-rockism" than it is to talk about "rockism."

But that sort of disavowal of a subjective stake in the game is just critical sleight of hand isn't it? Again there's the pretense that one can (and should) rise above personal biases and adopt the omniscient, third-person gaze.

Uh, should I even bother to point out that you just separated them yourself?

xpost

How on earth could this ever happen? Good luck with yr quest Don Quixote...

Do you think kids today have any idea how much more popular Chic were than the Ramones?
-- deej.. (clublonel...), June 9th, 2006 9:45 AM. (deej..) (later) (link)

Deej, your point here reminds me of a Chronicle of Higher Education article by Michael Berube from a few years back (linked to HTML version of the PDF).

Not necessarily - you could say a lot of postmodernist thought is concerned with identifying bias without advocating objectivity. There's a difference between saying, "Look at how biased you are. You claim to be objective, which is an illusion." and saying, "Look at how biased you are. You claim to be objective, when *I* am the true objective one!"

ledge, but what do you think about the critic's responsibility to a 'fair and accurate' narrative?

A reporter covering events in a warzone should try to be 'fair and accurate' - kind of a ridiculous notion if you're trying to figure out if the new Mariah Carey record is any good. Fair and accurate means you spell the musicians names right, know what label the record is on, and what day it came out. Everything else is putting on a mask of false authority if you're claiming to be objective when saying "she spins an elaborate weave of vocal harmonics like a beautiful angel" or "her sickeningly slick production makes my gall bladder hurt."

What is my responsibility?

Balance, or allowing different viewpoints to be heard; now that's a different goal.

Hooray!

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (soto.alfre...), June 9th, 2006. (later)

You bastard, you stole my line! ;-)

Danny Baker? Why not?

Now Deej, didn't we talk about this a bit when you first joined the boards? ;-)

It's interesting that this outrage at the privileging of certain perspectives is not something that bubbled up from the grassroots - ie., from the people who are supposedly being disenfrachised by it - but rather it is something that is coming down from those in the so-called elite, privileged positions. If there has been an uprising of Toby Keith and Lil Jon fans against the slighting of their favorite music in the pages of the NY Times or other elite cultural venues, then I haven't heard about it. Is it possible that these fans really don't give two shits what is said about their favorite music in the pages of the Times? Is it even more likely that they would secretly prefer that their music was ignored and/or lambasted by the cultural elites, because an anti-elite status is part of what attracts them to these artists? Perhaps the surest way that the elites could destroy the credibility of these slighted artists amongst their fans would be to embrace them.

Actually, it's just honest curiosity. Ever since this "rockist" epithet resurfaced, I've often wondered what that generation thinks of those artists the self-proclaimed "anti-rockists" champion today.

That's why I like the term "anti-rockist" when talking about these things. I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a "rockist" - it's more a term that gets hurled at people by others, others who then get to feel all superior and warm inside. Exactly when did you stop beating your wife?

By talking about anti-rockism you're focusing on the discourse-framers, which is really the more interesting topic.

Next question, who are the anti-rockists? Have you now or have you ever been a member of the anti-rockist party?

http://www.retrotrader.com/catalog/images/new007%20035.jpg

I've never bought this as an arugment against the existence or non-existence of "rockism": did racists, sexists, misogynists, etc. ever describe themselves using these terms? Would the yes or no answer to this question necessarily change your or my use of these terms? Should it?

TRASHMASTER. (BTW, heard yer CDs finally, liked 'em a lot! Hard to listen to them at proper volume at work, though. ;-) )

o.nate, (and lets never mind the catch 22 of yr "elites""grassroots" dichotomy) this isn't about getting certain artists into the pages of the Times. And you could read your statement and have it be about ANY artists, indie rock or mainstream country. PBS-ification happens no matter what - its just a matter of ensuring that certain artists are not forgotten simply because they weren't playing FOR critics.

Now Deej, didn't we talk about this a bit when you first joined the boards? ;-)

:-)

-- Michael Daddino (epicharmu...), June 9th, 2006.

Well, for one thing, we're talking about music, which makes the "-ism" label seems kind of over the top in the first place (might be part of the allure of the word "rockism," if you don't these things too seriously).

Aside from that, I'm not sure if racists/sexist/misogynist terminology helps debate or stifles it. I call you a racist. Now you're yelling at me, or defending yourself. It's a shortcut word that usually signifies the end of civilized discourse.

Unless you actively take up the name (as some racists / sexists do) I don't think they're particularly helpful terms, no.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), June 9th, 2006.

(blushing)

Perhaps this was once an issue back in the days when printing presses were expensive and only the establishment could afford to print criticism. Forgive me for getting all techno-futurist and internet-millenial, but the internet changed all that. Today every band gets the critics it deserves, and they all have blogs, or MySpace pages, to celebrate their love. There's no longer the need for any critic to think that they have some privileged position that places some duty of neutrality or covering "everything" equally on them.

I think the internet has the potential to do what you say, but realistically, if 'today every band gets the critic it deserves' was true we wouldn't be having this discussion.

See, I think Nate understands part of what I was saying above, except in this little slip here: what constitutes "cultural conversation?" Where, precisely, are rockist attitudes so overwhelming? If we were at all honest about this, we'd have to admit that apart from middle-aged men, classic rock stations, and indie kids (i.e., people who have pledged themselves to the culture of rock), the main places where run-of-mill rockism is really so overwhelming consist of the middlebrow publications most of us pay attention to. This is because we ourselves come from a culture that asks for music to be considered "seriously," and these publications are the ones that speak the same "serious" language we privilege as being the stuff that really matters. Look at the real bulk of "cultural conversation" in America, though, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a particular problematic strain of rockism infecting anything. (Funny that deej's reasoning for why that doesn't matter is history, the way rock bands get canonized and pop bands don't -- hasn't one major argument of anti-rockist thought been all about impermanence being okay?) The boring old rockism of those middlebrow publications -- how much is it on network television or People magazine?

Well, here's the trick: it is, but only insofar as everyone has it. I mean, fine, let's describe "rockism" as "bias masquerading as objectivity," or whatever that was. But when it comes down to it, that's pretty indistinguishable from everyday fandom. Jazz fans who say hip-hop isn't really music, folk preservationists talking about how valuable the music's human connections are, salsa fans who'd say rock just sounds like noise to them, hip-hop fans who don't much care for anything but hip-hop. On some level that can just be what it means to belong to a culture -- to think it's just plain better than the alternatives. (All we ask in real life is that people realize how subjective that is, and not be dicks about it.)

Right. But when we're talking about critics, as distinct from just fans, it seems reasonable to ask that they recognize and confront that subjectivity, at least a little -- that they can speak eloquently about getting outside of it, and reacting to music that doesn't come only from whatever music-culture they personally pledge. Totally fair. What's interesting to me, though, is that those involved in our whole rockism conversation aren't much worried about all culture-allegiances. We're worried about one in particular, and that's Old-Fashioned Rockism. Nobody berates a salsa evangelist -- we'd find one interesting, a fascinating new opinion to bring into the mix!

And this is why I say there is some narcissism of medium-sized differences going on here; this is why I say that the emotion I see underpinning anti-rockism is just BE LESS BORING. It consists of a lot of people within a particular discourse -- a middlebrow discourse that's flooded with predictable rockism and indie-rockism -- suddenly butting against that tendency. It consists of people who wondered why the New Yorker couldn't say something decent about hip-hop -- and not why The Source wasn't saying something interesting about the Guggenheim. It consists, if you ask me, in a lot of the same specialists-kicking-against-the-middlebrow impulses that were presumably responsible for rockism (and modernism, and indie culture) in the first place.

Which is fine by me, to be completely honest, and useful in terms of getting decent criticism out of people; more good writing comes from investigating outside your sworn culture than elsewhere, sure. But I do feel like some of the rhetoric of it all just hides a much simpler and purer and more basic social (rather than intellectual) urge.

I don't understand how exactly Sterling was disagreeing with me, though from the way he's dismissing my argument up there I'm tempted to think he wasn't entirely following it. (Which is okay; I'm not entirely following his, either.)

I do! If that's all they evangelise. To me, anti-rockism has to default to anti-everythingism. But y'know I'm not really coming at this from a current-state-of-music-criticism perspective.

I think it's more likely that the way we discuss music will impact the way future generations will remember us. The music will still be there for them to refer to. If the music's great, and we're on record as saying it's crap, then we'll look like idiots. I don't think that today's critics should refrain from judgment out of fear of future generations' disapproval. Judgment is a critic's job, after all.

(a) Is it possible that history-keeping and canon-making is just a rockist tendency? I.e., the rockists win that war because they bother fighting it?

(b) Is it possible that we look in the wrong directions for history? Should we go to old copies of Rolling Stone to figure out what things used to be like, or should we watch variety shows and read celebrity magazines?

(c) As with point (a), is it possible that even beginning to approach the written history of music is something that's mostly done by people who are already a little bit pledged to the kind of discourse we call rockist?

So I agree with you, but I feel like there's something else bubbling in there. Possibly the transition of critical missions has been: (1) "we will record the life of the music we like," (2) "we are recording the life of all music that's worthwhile, i.e., the music we like," and then finally (3) "surely other music is worthwhile too, so clearly our mission now is to record the life of it all." And that's a totally fair sequence, although the thing that goes unexamined in there is the part of #2 where the recording begins to aspire to universality -- the part where it goes from a self-acknowledged special interest to wanting to be something grander.

I'm almost convinced your neighbours used those Eurotrance records to fall asleep so they wouldn't be exposed to your wild 'n' wacky choices of records.

It's funny, cause you probably say to your friends (and yourself): I only play the music I like, I don't give a shit what others think. Yet... you do give a shit.

er, no it doesn't. at least, most of it doesn't. not more than any other kind of music anyway.

Objectivity when deployed right is totally punk -- or the aim of objectivity is at least. If ppl. actually get meaning out of rock (rather than transfering meaning TO rock) then they're not rockists at all.

Rockism when deployed right is also totally punk. Punk when deployed right is totally pro-pop too.

The NY times gives T Keith and Lil Jon their due actually (tho T Keith and Lil Jon [and so of course their fans] like to pretend they don't) except the due they give them is PBS due.

The Source is boring too I should note and maybe would be less so if they covered T Keith as much as the Times (though I doubt it).

Again, I wanna know who the "it's all good, we all have tastes, let's say everything is good" people are. Because they're sure not critics (except maybe actually the rockist ones in retreat).

comparing Beyonce's musical dishonesty to Mitt Romney's intrigues me

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/greil-marcuss-history-of-rock-n-roll-in-ten-songs.html

Kind of a weird analogy:

but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on ‘American Idol’ is supposed to sound.”