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

or at least it saddens and confuses me since I really like the product but cannot identify with the commercial message it's sending

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

any critique of an object that centres meaning in the culture it came from rather than that object is equally so tbh

NV otm upthread (darragh otm too)

i’m not anti-capitalist

critic of but not anti-

this comes down to aesthetic compromise, really - and strength of aesthetic. it is entirely possible for pop to manifest in an uncompromised aesthetic that the critic regards as strong. personally i find plenty of pop aesthetics weak, but i find many strong as well. i even find a few compromised strong aesthetics to remain strong, although of course compromise weakens the aesthetic in almost every case. what am i on about. flag my post.

been drinking cherry wine on an empty stomach all day

is that a strong, weak or compromised aesthetic

fortified

this is a little off-topic but i was just thinking yesterday that while there are lots of movies, music, art etc that i find emotionally + aesthetically resonant, these art forms rarely do much for me on a political, ethical or philosophical level. sometimes there are exceptions but even the biggest exceptions ime access one of these other dimensions through their aesthetics and not in a direct confrontation. literature can be a little better at handling those questions but really despite its pretensions to leading the broadsides of politics, the -arts- rarely have anything particularly sophisticated to say.

i think that the very best music infers a sort of state of mind which could approach politics and ethics in a productive and interesting way. and that's the most primal & instinctive art form (imo) - film and literature can obviously be more didactic, and i find that sometimes it is so successfully.

i wouldn't disagree w/ an assertion that the arts are more important than politics/ethics/philosophy, or that they reach a deeper, more subliminal state of human consciousness. just that when they speak to these other things (and esp when they explicitly try) it doesn't work for me.

it is entirely possible that politics/ethics/philosophy are rationalist contentions forged in an esoteric thought-web of artistic immersion, but the process of forging need not be entirely subliminal. of course i would agree that the arts are more important, insofar as they can be separated - even they depend upon decision, aesthetic remove, possession of stance

fuck i'm wasted

for me, aesthetics and morality are linked in a demisublime and often very inscrutable manner

Go back to the pub.

i'm at the computer drinking at home and i intend to be here all evening, lucky for you i'm writing my frankly amazing novel mostly

any critique of an object that centres meaning in the culture it came from rather than that object is equally so tbh

i was more interested in the apprehending subject tbh but still, the privilege of the thing itself outside of context is cobblers

ah man it's good to have you back

its all down to the object and the subject of the object obv

not sure most worthwhile objects even have a subject but this is getting ridiculous

on the other hand given the circumstances

unrelated to what's happening itt right now, but i have a memory of a zine piece from ages ago (hermenaut, i think?) from a guy who was going thru architecture school, and was on a serious anti-modernist, anti function-as-form kick, and one of his projects was to design a mausoleum. of course the rest of the class came back with these grim slablike designs, half wright, half maya lin. but he had a simple open structure dwarfed by a towering mess of neon and statuary bolted on top, maybe (iirc) giving the pagan intent away with some kind of sphinx-like embodiment of the deceased. he tried to say that it was honest and celebratory (and by extension everyone else's were cowardly and ideologically constrained) but everyone incl the instructor looked at him like he was losing his mind.

so yeah no there are far fewer advocates for popism/poptimism related to art forms OTHER than music, it's true. except maybe TV.

I know of nothing better than the Appassionata and could listen to it every day. What astonishing, superhuman music! It always makes me proud, perhaps with a childish naiveté, to think that people can work such miracles! … But I can’t listen to music very often, it affects my nerves. I want to say sweet, silly things, and pat the little heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. These days, one can’t pat anyone on the head nowadays, they might bite your hand off. Hence, you have to beat people's little heads, beat mercilessly, although ideally we are against doing any violence to people. Hm — what a devilishly difficult job!

I like pop music but I don't like economic inequality, and I will be very surprised if it's controversial to suggest that most pop stars are rich and most fans are not rich.

I don't think pop music or pop stars are to blame for this and I realize there's probably a lot more rich record label people than pop stars (and even more rich warmongers etc.), but as a pop fan I still find it problematic - maybe because it legitimizes inequality, maybe because it's just weird, like I don't idolize CEOs, fuck CEOs, but I like Jay Z what's up with that I don't know.

When I've come across thinkpieces/discussions/reviews that maybe could have been labeled "popist" I've been impressed with how engaged with the world the writing has been when for instance focusing on politics of race and gender, and it seems like it would be logical for "popist" criticism to engage with pop economics (apart from reviewing sales, billboard chratings etc.)

I dunno, maybe there's nothing to be said, maybe it just kind of sucks and then you get on with enjoying great pop.

I enjoy pop music and dog-fighting

my interests include pop music and antisemitism

among my hobbies are pop music, the listening thereof, and the grinding of to powder the skulls of illegitimate children. my thoughts on income inequality I prefer to keep to myself.

u can have ur cake and eat it imo, contra bad readings of marx it isn't necessary to interpret everything solely in terms of its relation to capital, there are plenty of other criteria of analysis and judgement there for us which aren't wholly reducible to its value-form. though they are nevertheless utterly compromised and yeah that can be a bit of a bummer.

aren't two things going on there though? on the one hand yeah the big pop stars are rich, but they're not anywhere near rich by "masters of the universe" standards. but a different point concerns the topics of pop songs as celebrations of materialism. but if you're talking about African-American pop stars those markers of aspirations mean something very different than they would from someone privileged.

you get both these points made in criticism of salaries of sports stars, and similar replies are valid there too.

Are most pop stars that wealthy? I thought quite a lot of them didn't get their fair share of the money and go back to a modest life after their chart success is over.

totally agree two things are going on but my attempts to suggest that the ideology of pop is problematic were not well put/received so I figured I'd try a different approach

agree all this totally applies to rock/sports/books/Letterman/lots of mass culture, just figured popism was a poster theory for contemporary internet critical discourse and so it was extra obligated to engage or something

Can you be more specific?

It reads to me like you're being considerably more ascetic about pop music than you would nearly any other aspect of life: like, do you have an iPhone?

uhm don't want to come off as ascetic but no, don't have an iPhone, don't eat meat, try to buy most stuff 2nd hand

But yeah, that's maybe actually a good way of framing it, I see myself as a critical consumer and I have issues with my pop consumption since I can't buy organic/fair trade pop

or popism is liberating wrt my aesthetic choices which I really enjoy and I don't want to limit my cultural consumption but I feel like maybe I should

A lot of the "ideology" of pop music is basically the ideology of being a 15 yr old kid IMO.

wtf is "fair trade pop"

I mean if your issue is exploitation at the root of the business that's one thing but it's not the artist's welfare you're concerned with, it's more like ur worried about spiritual pollution from pop's ideologies which tbf you treat fairly reductively