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

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

I'm not totally sure I understand your point - is the idea of popism formalist and therefore bourgeois and therefore not cool from a marxist perspective?

Also, will reading William Morris soothe my soul or convince me that there can be marxist pop and is it a real recommendation or do you just mean my "analysis" overlooks that there's a lot of leftist pop?

can you please not say "marxist pop?" i'm pretty sure that's the "summon Momus" card

slightly off-topic of marxism and pop culture

http://www.filmcomment.com/entry/bombast-pop-pop-pop-popular

Popism/Poptimism and movies(art-house faves and blockbusters) and music

briefly: there is no single Marxian analysis of culture but drawing divisions like popular/elitist feels broadly antithetical to the spirit

Morris advocated a form of hand-crafted artisanal moralism that feels closer to this kind of argument

any critique of culture that centres meaning in the object itself is a bit rubbish

the size of your market is no real indicator of how capitalist yr product is

+ culture that situates itself oppositionally to the hegemony is still an expression of the hegemony in many many ways

oh and Marx really wasn't anti industrialization

and it's okay not to like stuff, you don't need a theory for it

i like the idea that resistance to capitalism could possible emerge spontaneously within a broadly popular capitalist process but it seems more likely that if resistance does exist it does so outside the industry. rockism was never simply about resisting corporate sponsored music tho bc plenty of rockist canon artists are pretty capitalistically situated

Haven't read much Marx actually, I really need to rectify that soon.

I have been reading a book called "Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism" and came upon this point:

Both radical feminists and socialist feminists agree that patriarchy precedes capitalism, whereas Marxists believe that patriarchy arose with capitalism. Patriarchy today, the power of the male through sexual roles in capitalism, is institutionalized in the nuclear family. -- Eisenstein, pp 24-25

Maybe a bit off-topic but the sexual division w women dominating pop and men domination rock probably has a lot of implications wrt undercurrents in rockism/popism. Certainly exploitation of artists seem to fall along traditional gender lines.

Just knock yourself out dude, it's now possible to enjoy that Taylor Swift album to your heart's content without giving a single penny to a capitalist entity (except the ones who created the technology on which you're listening to it and even then I'd be more worried about, say, the Congolese tin in yr smartphone rather than what liking Taylor says about your Marxist credentials.)

Unless you get similar pangs of contradiction every time you enjoy a coffee / a beer / a KitKat then I'm going to assume you're trying to rationalise a socially acceptable reason not to like pop music. It's okay just not to like it!

So the question we are trying to answer here is "How does one reconcile the West's history of oppression with one's desire to shout 'I love Britney Spears and hate Oasis!!!' at everyone?" right?

xp but my problem is that I like pop music! It's just that if you try and figure out the ideology of pop it's not very nice...

marxism has been so effectively commoditized by post-colonialism that in a heartbeat the conversation turned to Congolese tin and the 'West's history of oppression.'

well i've never read marx tbh

and yeah, I do get pangs when I buy stuff in general but this is a special kind of pang, maybe more similar to the pang I get when I really enjoy a Woody Allen movie and then I realize maybe he sexually abused his adopted daughter.

i have no sensitivity left to my participation in capitalism except for the anxiety that gnaws away at me as a participant + the fear that there isn't enough

Popism does seem to value quantity over quality, a short shelf life, so that the pop can be disposed and a new product purchased as replacement. This is even seen in the more long-lasting stars like Madonna and David Bowie who constantly must "reinvent" themselves, killing off the old model to make way for the new. The many phases of Britney. The tabloid tear-down/redemption culture.

wrt drawing divisions like popular/elitist I think it's fair to suggest that popism can be framed as in line with "critical theory" (note the quotation marks, I realize that all of these concepts are problematic) because it legitimizes the taste of a "lower class" (contradictory as that may sound) but then again it's not very good for a critical theory when you consider the ideology of pop

yeah even as a pretty dedicated Bowie fan I find his business-like approach to music a bit repulsive...