Why are there far fewer advocates for popism/poptimism related to art forms OTHER than music?

LOL (xp)

Which is why something like that Amel Larrieux album felt so exciting - approaching the synthesis from the direction of pop

Since you're on an "untapped potential of pop music" tip at the moment, have you deigned to listen to the new Dawn Richard album yet or are you just going to wait until the end of year poll before freaking out?

you could, like, ctrl+f 'imago' in the thread (yes, i have, it's great)

Surprised this "untapped potential of pop music" trope isn't continuously laughed at.

Or maybe its a quiet, internal laugh.

It's a fairly hollow laugh tbh.

That's the problem with pop music, it's never really come into its own.

it could be so much more popular

It could experiment every now and then - shake things up a bit.

Oh boo-fucking-hoo the avant-garde, and I speak as someone who's spent many an evening sitting on a plastic chair in a draughty hall watching a man scraping some cymbals with a violin bow etcetera

― Quack and Merkt (Tom D.), Sunday, 19 April 2015 14:02 (2 days ago) Permalink

pop has already incorporated this, all the did was put "re rewind.." in front and hey presto smash hit

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81v9v0QjlXL._SX425_PJautoripBadge,BottomRight,4,-40_OU11__.jpg

I seem to be misunderstood as someone who dislikes pop music. Simply couldn't be further from reality. It's always been proudly part of my domain.

if we could have a thread for imago and the raccoon, and confine them there, that would be sweet

(xp) I hate to break it to you but I don't think anyone really cares :(

Most important takeaway from the article is U2 being fully enshrined in North American rockist canon

why yes I do take Katy Perry as seriously as U2, U2 is ridiculous, writer man

(xp) I hate to break it to you but I don't think anyone really cares :(

― Quack and Merkt (Tom D.),

Hate to break it to you Tom D but you reply to 90% of my posts

wooo!

auk nae

glad i've made a friend today

these kinds of threads are the worst on ilm. will happily never see another popism/rockism debate again as there's nothing interesting or new to say about these in 2015.

i think thats less true in 2015 than its been in several years! its hard to say interesting things tho, cant fault bloggers for not being up to the challenge really

https://twitter.com/perpetua/status/591297957267382272

xxp - meanwhile there are super fascinating things to say about CDs vs vinyl vs streaming in 2015

there are only like 10 music critics in the world.

And there are 143 of them on ILX.

― Quack and Merkt (Tom D.), Saturday, April 18, 2015 4:05 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Talk to an ILXer about the right band, and s/he becomes a (music) critic.

we are all music critics, but some of us are gazing at the stars

only two things in life are inevitable, bands and music criticism

a music critic is one who knows the band of everything and the critic of nothing

i have a dream that my four little children will one day post on a board where they will not be judged by the color of their band, but by the content of their critic

our band could be your critic

http://skynetandebert.com/2015/04/22/music-was-better-back-then-when-do-we-stop-keeping-up-with-popular-music/

lot of bullshit assumptions there imo

imo too much looseness around the meaning of relationship btwn popular listening and age/gender/parenthood - he says it means tastes calcify + mature but it could also mean that tastes just become more specialized + niche, which you'd expect from a developing music taste

yup and niche stuff is by definition "less popular" because fewer people are listening to it and it isn't on top 40 radio.

feel like there's also some tautological loop going on there about Top 40 radio = popular music but I can't quite articulate it.

on a personal note, the thing about ID'ing parents by streams of kids' music just seems really wrong - parents who specifically seek out children's music for their kids are a small subset of parents ime.

I mean we have a couple kids' albums thing around the house (mostly given to us as presents) but the vast majority of music my kids hear is just whatever I play around the house + what mom plays on the radio

most of what my kids hear is our music but we do occasionally play children's music for them - sometimes seeking it out (esp stuff we loved from our childhoods like raffi, broadway kids, older disney soundtracks) and stuff they specifically request (frozen almost exclusively)

it seems like he completely avoids one of the more obvious conclusions - that Top 40 radio is popular because it's the primary (if not sole) source of music for a certain demographic

popular music really means top 40, esp in poptimism. the movement to take traditionally popular folk + religious music seriously is an anthromusicological concern. pop music is what they play on the radio.

https://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/spain/bilbao/koonspuppy/0016.jpg

i wish this was on spotify:
http://www.amazon.com/Broadway-Kids-The-Petula-Clark/dp/B0011BJQ3O

pop music is what they play on the radio.

I don't really have a problem with the semantics of this - it's just nomenclature - but I would think it's obvious that what gets played on the radio is going to correspond to who listens to the radio, who is targeted, etc. Concluding that teen girls listen to top 40 radio and that the farther you get from that demographic the less people listen to it is not really earth-shattering news. And I don't think that really reveals anything about what is going on with people's tastes - like moving from "I am no longer/am not a teenage girl" to "omg my tastes have calcified!" seems spurious.

it seems more accurate to consider Top 40 pop as a genre in the same way country or metal or rap are considered genres. Just because teenage girls make up a large portion of the audience for top 40 and a smaller portion of the audience for others doesn't make top 40 any more relevant (and I'm skeptical that actual numbers would support that it's any more popular than other genres)

this is just based on spotify use data which isn't entirely neutral itself. When do they listen and under what circumstances? Are people putting it on in a shared work environment? Is it private listening?

Sometimes I find it a bit difficult to embrace popular culture, not because of the way it looks/sounds/reads but because it's an expression of a capitalist system I don't particularly endorse. From a marxist perspective it's probably a good thing to criticize elitism, but there's also loads of problems with pop as culture industry. So anyway, I was thinking of starting a "Popism >< Marxism" thread, but I'll just ask on this active popism thread: any popists out there who find it hard to reconcile popism with marxism? (not dogmatic marxism or communism or anything, really just the line of critical thinking that has its roots in marxism and also finds expression in queer theory etc.)

an overarching need to reconcile theoretical concepts is a fine thing, in itself, once the turf is in for the year.

what do you mean by popular culture and what culture produced within a capitalist socioeconomic system wouldn't be an expression of capitalism?

LOL yes plz start that thread. Nearly all pop is capitalist propoganda.

You can make non-capitalist culture but it doesn't take long for it to be commodified. But you can certainly go to Kinkos and print out anarchist lit or something.

Yeah, I can see how that was maybe not so clear but I don't mean that I want cultural products (!) that are somehow disconnected from capitalism, but there seems to be a difference in the way capitalism expresses itself when some hardcore punk band does a diy tape release and when Taylor Swift sells millions of copies of something and while I enjoy "I Knew You Were Trouble" as a great pop song I also kind of resent the commercialism of it all? And when rappers celebrate their riches I can enjoy it as genre characteristics, and actually also from a marxist perspective if it represents power to the lower classes, but the glorification of success & money in itself, not so cool?

i wd maybe read some Marx

or probably William Morris in this case

Nearly all pop is capitalist propoganda.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, May 21, 2015 5:53 PM

I agree and find this kind of problematic

Formalism is a reactionary bourgeois aesthetic btw