It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

if those wretched fucking "acclaimed music" top lists that someone keeps polling are any indication, then the canon is alive and well and hasn't shifted much in the last couple decades. the consensus is strong, it was established early, and at holds. btw, rock albums by white guys are the best.

― contenderizer, Friday, July 20, 2012 10:36 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

the consensus is weak vs. other mediums though, is my point. i don't know if a mainstream list of the best films or books from a given year would prompt dozens/hundreds of alternative suggestions like an album list would. music is still a much more personal/subjective experience in terms of people happily putting their favorites up against the known classics.

lol contendo I was just going to bring those up. Yeah, the canon exists, but considering how inordinately pissed those polls make you, maybe we'd be better to go on acting like it didn't :)

btw, rock albums by white guys are the best.

― contenderizer, Friday, July 20, 2012 10:36 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

kinda racist, but you have a point

i mean zz top and all

was contend making a point or just expressing the same taste he always does there

canons are more a product of mass consensus than elite management.

canons are more a product of mass consensus than elite management.

I agree, which is why canon-building always strikes me as a futile exercise

i don't buy that, tho yr elite might be a pretty big group. sure we've been here before anyway, disconnect between biggest sellers in various artforms and yr actual Canon is usually clear

but again, in the case of literature or movies you can absolutely point to a handful of critics who play a big role in shaping the canons

canons are pretty interesting

'the canon' is pretty interesting

no one ever espoused cultural relativism and meant it

npr is not "the worlds largest public radio audience", gtfo american

"no one" is pushing it

xpost

yeah it's that tim westwood guy i think

no one ever espoused an unmotivated cultural relativism and meant it

a motivated cultural relativism is not actually cultural relativism

ergo, no one ever ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

How many of these albums regularly appear on "all-time greatest" lists?
How many of these albums contain songs that regularly appear on "all-time greatest" lists?

The disconnects can be explained by the albums/songs in question being too recent to be properly canonized as easily as them not being approved by the tastemakers

My main point here, and I think this ties into some dude's point about the mass production and saturation point of music, is that the distance between "the canon" and "the popular" isn't nearly as large as one would think. Obviously there are canonized acts who are not megasellers, I'm not trying to argue there aren't, but you can't handwave the influence of popularity on what strains of music people start with when coming up with canonized lists.

maybe cultural relativism is an unexamined way of thinking for a lot of people who don't think about criticism?

well if i had to put numbers on it i'd say it's 70/30 "what everyone enjoys and plays voluntarily"/"what critics want to talk about"

critics meaning the whole range of deep-interest folks, ie anyone on ILM, etc. "everyone" is a highly divided thing, too, by genre and identity.

critics are stereotypically known for trying legislate in the unpopular-but-worthy; their most important bad function is masking or ignoring things that are absolutely canonical (in the sense that further listener experience and artist work can't help but be informed by x artwork), but that's a well-known class and media-access story about what is discussed seriously.

he may have been soft on garage bands but dude definitely was happy to dismiss large swaths of music

― da croupier, Friday, July 20, 2012 7:18 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean i love bangs, but yeah he's a great example of someone saying culture is worthless for pretty solipsistic reasons

― da croupier, Friday, July 20, 2012 7:20 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Which swaths did he dismiss? Disco?

And I'm not sure how his criticisms of things were more solipsistic than others.

others' criticisms, I mean

so sick of Shania and Celine and Whitney and AC/DC clogging up critics' all time greatest lists

n.v. i think 'unexamined ways of thinking' are probably the majority of cases of what i'm calling 'not meaning it'. also did you see that q feature on the making of the dirty dancing soundtrack because man what a snooze

bangs thought 1979 was the worst year for music ever. all those guys kinda gave up on everything shortly after doors debut.

truly they were the Youtube commenters of their era

it is funny to me how so many older critics seem to hold a candle for The Doors considering that they're probably the LEAST revered big band of that era among critics now

Yeah, but the question would be about what they missed and how much that would affect your perspective on their careers. It would have been cool if Bangs had stuck up for Off the Wall - sure.

For the 1981 Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critics' Poll, Lester Bangs turned in a blank ballot, protesting the worthless state of rock and roll. "New Wave has terminated in thudding hollow Xeroxes of poses that aren't even annoying anymore," he wrote. "Rap is nothing, or not enough. Jazz does not exist as a musical form with anything new to say. And the rest of rock is recycling various formulae forever. I don't know what I'm going to write about - music is the only thing in the world I really care about - but I simply cannot pretend to find anything compelling in the choice between pap and mud."

i think 'inability to have critical perspective on own burnout' is this whole other thing y'know

is that the year he interviewed captain beefheart about retiring

thanks for finding the paragraph i was gonna paraphrase, scott

also bangs admitted to wailing the stones were dead and resurrected within a single night in 1965. Scott's point is that he's tired of boomer rock critics who didn't hesitate to dismiss anything that didn't fit their limitied view, and damn right that Bangs is stellar example (even if I don't begrudge the fact as much).

see the sad thing is when i finally outlive the last baby boomer i'll have to read long articles about the legacy of wilco written by generation x people. and i might not outlive all of generation x!

no you won't, unless you want to

haha i meant "reading long articles about wilco" not "surviving gen x" but i guess that's true too

Did rap constitute a "swath" of music in 1981, though? How much do you fault the guy for a quote like this:

"I wrote in another publication: 'What I did (in 1981) was what almost everyone else...did: listened to old music, when I listened at all'. So I get a letter from one kid berating me for listing Beck, Bogert, and Appice as a listening preference over, say, X or Joy Division: 'How can you be so nostalgic? Don't you know there are all kinds of great new groups like the Fall, Fad Gadget, the Dickies, Clock DVA, and Orange Juice?'"

you know, you're still allowed to think bangs was a smart, observant rock critic and still accept that other people will not be wrong find his perspective heavy on the emotion and short on perspective

haha woops at the double "perspective" but c'mon is it really hard to grasp someone having this complaint about bangs even if had a good fad gadget zing and liked half japanese

No, I have the same complaint but he was good and I thought the "dismiss large swaths of music" and "saying culture is worthless for pretty solipsistic reasons" comments were overstated.

if we're going to chalk his dismissal of 1981 up to critical burnout I'd say you've standing on small semantic ground

tbh i'm not entirely sure what relevance bangs had to the wider conversation or how we ended up talking about him

we were talking about rock critics in a thread about rock criticism, scott said he was sick of all the old rock critics for being so dismissive of stuff outside their purview and some folks went "SURELY you don't mean BANGS" etc...

scott said he was sick of all the old rock critics for being so dismissive of stuff outside their purview and some folks went "SURELY you don't mean BANGS" piled on the hyperbole.

bangs's dismissal of the-culture-as-is wasn't a matter of reverence for the canon, though. i don't know, i have now reached the point where it's so long since i read them i can't remember which bits are bangs and which meltzer: who had the rather facepalm bit re: MAYBE THE CLASH ARE ENOUGH TO GIVE US HOPE

Bangs was preoccupied with both novelty and music-as-transgression, values which I don't find particularly relevant. good writer though.

Fwiw, Scott also said, "i kinda can't take them seriously about music" and I just don't happen to feel the same about the guy who wrote, say, the liner notes to the Them reissue (Bangs) or parts or The Aesthetics of Rock. Because I don't know how many music critics I take more seriously than those guys.

meltzer wrote BOC lyrics so he is the greatest rock writer ever

I think Bangs' '81 ballot, or thoughts about 1979, needs to be placed in the context of his life. Just about everyone who writes about pop music for a long time (Christgau being the obvious exception, and even he has his moments) hits a point where disengagement/frustration starts to creep in. Generally, re-engagement happens soon enough. The timeline is different for everybody. My guess is that Bangs' '81 ballot was just a stop along the way, and had he lived, he would have found lots to enthuse about soon enough.

was contend making a point or just expressing the same taste he always does there

― Barack 2 Chainz Obama (some dude), Friday, July 20, 2012 8:56 AM (1 hour ago)

well, i was trying to make the point that canon, in its current, informal incarnation, remains both solid and influential. this seems to be true despite big changes in tastes, values and media over the past few decades, and despite the fact that the established canon and its promoters have been subject to aggressive interrogation. i don't accept that canon is weaker in relation to music than to film and literature. it's different, sure, but the landscape in question is no less well mapped out. while popular taste may be as big a part of what establishes canon as critical opinion, one of the principal features of canon is durability. once enshrined, songs, albums and artists tend to stay stuck there for a good, long while. i love exile on main street, but i have to believe that its continued elevation in the rock canon is as much a product of its canonization as anything else.

i don't think i'm making a big or controversial point here, but that was the essence of my argument. i also spun out into pointless griping about the retrograde features of the late 20th century pop canon, but only cuz that's what i do.