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

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

The fair trade thing was meant to be funny, taken literally I recognize it doesn't make sense. I also don't mean to suggest I've presented any sort of analysis of pop or popism, just wanted to hear what other people thought about what I experience as a clash between my aesthetic preferences and my political convictions. But I guess people don't find it that interesting and that's cool.

Just accept that beauty is inseparable from decadence and roll with it imo.

But I'm suprised by what I interpret as a reluctance to criticize pop ''ideology'' or what ever you want to call it. To use a somewhat exaggerated example, suggesting pop is close to politically neutral, to me, is like suggesting macdonalds are just trying to serve food, or that the fast food industry is too complex to reduce to macdonalds as an example, which, cool but this is a message BORAD not an academic paper so maybe some inaccuracy or hyperbole could be excused

That's a pretty cool answer! Maybe you're right...

What about the way in which pop music is more accomodating to people's busy working lifestyles? Is it a bad thing to demand less of the listener? Isn't it kind of pro-working people to prefer something that doesn't demand your labor? Thinking too much about music is labor. It's free labor. What is liberal about that?

I've always felt that the preference for "the difficult", the arduous, the heroic, is anti-labor. Most of us work hard enough. Even the rich work long hours.

Talent should be the ability to accommodate US.

thinking too much about music isn't labor, free or otherwise

it produces nothing

But I'm suprised by what I interpret as a reluctance to criticize pop ''ideology'' or what ever you want to call it. To use a somewhat exaggerated example, suggesting pop is close to politically neutral, to me, is like suggesting macdonalds are just trying to serve food, or that the fast food industry is too complex to reduce to macdonalds as an example, which, cool but this is a message BORAD not an academic paper so maybe some inaccuracy or hyperbole could be excused

― niels, Sunday, May 24, 2015 3:22 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who is reluctant to criticize pop ideology? All I see online are (often facile but) arguments about pop's ideology & what it all means.

like, are you looking for ppl to explicitly come out against the listening of certain artists or songs? the only time I can think of that kind of advocacy happening has been w/r/t R Kelly, at least recently. and that doesn't have as much to do w/ the ideology of his music as it does supporting someone who as abusing other people in the real world

to continue this discussion i need some IRL examples cuz i don't even really understand what you're advocating...like, are you saying we shouldn't celebrate Big Sean's "IDFWU"? "Blurred Lines"? I think there are def examples of people rejecting individual songs because of the ideology they propagate but they don't become wider movements bc everyone except for extreme right christians tends to treat their relationship with pop music as a fairly negotiable set of values

Totally agree that there's plenty of criticism regarding ideas expressed by specific songs/artists/genres. I'm looking for a critique of pop for being capitalist or a critique of popism for ignoring capitalist aspects of pop. I can see how that maybe sounds totally crazy since popism can maybe in part be conceived as a reaction against only understanding pop as capitalist product/propaganda. I guess I feel like the current engagement with pop lacks balance, and I understand this is not an uncommon suggestion. I don't mean this to sound wrong, but maybe it also has to do with my Danish perspective: in Denmark it's not very common to celebrate wealth and success, and pop/popism does this a lot.

btw I also feel weird about for instance Bob Dylan being a very very rich blues/folk/singersongwriter, but maybe because his wealth is celebrated less and not so visible it's easier to ignore

thinking about the celebration of wealth and success within African-American art, religion, life generally, would be helpful for you, I think. I don't know what to point you to read on this, though.

I tried to get my head around the idea that e.g. Brian Ferneyhough is in fact exploiting the proletariat by by writing difficult complex music. Then I decided to revolt against the unpaid labour of thinking about it.

kickstarter to fund Sund4r's thinking on this important question!

I think the pseudo-intellectual jerking off over Mad Max proves that this is not true btw

pseudo intellectuals jerk off over everything I'm not sure the topic matters

i mean, i don't think 15 years ago the movie-review landscape would have been so unabashedly "YOU GOTTA SEE THE NEW 3-D CAR CRASH REMAKE OF A FRANCHISE FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD"

i guess the only way you could be more "film poptimist" is stanning for Pitch Perfect 2

And I think the whole "TV is the new film" attitude is basically a poptimist rescuing an entire format once referred to as "the idiot box" and reserved for killing hours before you fall asleep. See the increase in the auteur theory (ie., saying "showrunner" instead of the less-sexy "executive producer").

what did you think about mad max whiney

mainstream movie critics has always been populist/poptimist - the shitty local critic who ends with "FUN!" for every review of a summer blockbuster and with the snobs it sorta happened already with the future French new wave guys when writing and loving mainstream American filmmakers like Hitchcock and Preminger and it's never really left -- annoying aspect is that they can act self-righteous about loving popular movies now too.

whiney ffs

Whiney otm about marketing of TV. I think TV is much better than it used to be but also think long-form serialization is mainly a crass capitalist move more than an artistic one.

I think w the rise of Facebook and Myspace and social networks where most of your profile is made of products you consume has lead to an era where consumers are more vigilant than ever about being better at consuming than their peers.

Mainstream film critics might be populist but they all hate Adam Sandler and don't his movies still make tons of money? Also Paul Blart, etc.

trenchant thread

Mainstream film critics might be populist but they all hate Adam Sandler and don't his movies still make tons of money? Also Paul Blart, etc.

But do poptimist music critics love e.g. Nickelback?

But do poptimist music critics love e.g. Nickelback?

No, because poptimist criticism defines pop aesthetically (music by black people, mostly, that you can dance to, mostly) rather than by the numbers (music that's popular = pop). Thus a rock band (e.g. Five Finger Death Punch or Theory of a Deadman) can have multiple high-selling albums out, with songs that get played all day long on rock radio formats, and never draw the attention of critics, because a) there's no big rock radio station in New York, and b) a lot of music criticism these days is about preening for other critics (cf. the annual EMP Pop Conference, which I have presented papers at twice), and if a band is just four white guys with electric guitars, there's no intra-group status to be gained by, and therefore no value in, analyzing their work.

mj eddie vedder eating popcorn.gif

No, because poptimist criticism defines pop aesthetically (music by black people, mostly, that you can dance to, mostly) rather than by the numbers (music that's popular = pop)

This entire post is so wrongheaded that I had to just check to see if you were Raccoon Tanuki.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oBTzbKx0jo

^curvy Columbia dive

when poptimists stare into the void, Nickelback stares back at them and smirks.

I don't know everything all ya'll are talking about, but it might also be fruitful to talk about how the music is used?

Everyone already knows that when you give someone a dime for something that costs five cents, you're going to get a Nickelback.

See the increase in the auteur theory (ie., saying "showrunner" instead of the less-sexy "executive producer").

These two titles are very far from interchangeable and while the former might usually be the latter as well, they're not the same job

Art historian here. Visual art had its "popism" moment in the nineteenth century, with the advent of photography. Critics argued over whether these machine-produced images could be "art". Ditto the value of mass-produced images such as book and magazine illustration. Would be worth reading the anti-photography essays published at the time - these would be the "rockists" - no?

Photography's influence on painting is a fascinating topic.

Also you misunderstand me, and also take my earlier post too seriously. I DO think that rockist critics who demand that hard-working people listen to their twenty-five essential rock albums are being classist. I don't have time in my stressful working life to listen to boring depressing shit like Astral Weeks. A liberal music writer ought to understand labor and economics better. NOT that Van Morrison exploits workers, but I think critics do. Or at least lack sympathy for them.

the working class find it very hard to avoid rockist music critics

From the boss' kids'Mecca that is ILX. I come from three generations of steelworkers AND attended an elite university. I know both sides.

Rock music is working-class AND black in origin, it is amazing how many white male critics and editors pay no mind to this, nor are they grateful to the originators of a music that they STOLE. I don't like some privileged ass telling me that I'm not musically literate enough because I didn't like his pet rock albums. Ditto for rich old white guys who sneer at blue-collar students who haven't read all of the "great books".

The working-class has every right to read bullshit criticism produced by the bosses' class. Don't think they don't. Esp. when critics pretend to be "liberal".

Jesus be quiet