OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

Btw it's twice now I've seen professing to like Bangerz as a gesture of whatever, which raises Alfred to "I don't care if I like this at all" and is p irritating tbh

huh?

Sorry. Like: saying I don't care if I like something next week is one thing, saying I like something irrespective of whether I actually do or not is another. A couple of times, counting upthread, ppl've used "liking" Bangerz as a tool to say "Hi I love pop, so there." Seems oddly specific

I'm doing that at all. I'm citing one of the more pernicious anti-pop arguments used by the people katherine describes.

Yeah I didn't think you were

*I'm NOT doing that all

Except one, as succinctly demonstrated above, is treated with far more vitriol and hyperbole than the other, so any pretence at parity immediately goes out the window.

― tsrobodo, Wednesday, 16 April 2014 11:41 (1 hour ago) Permalink

Well tbf one of them is almost inescapable and the other one is highly escapable.

lol at the thought that miley is anywhere remotely near 'unescapable'

back maybe 16 years ago britney was sort of the same cultural signifier miley is today. i'll rep for brit's stuff as more straight ahead enjoyable, but the same sort of discourse was going on, where unironic, nonpervy enjoyment of brit's music _as such_ was a really divisive thing to profess. and it was exactly this odd specificity, because so many, in general, cultural anxieties about art and taste were all projected into this one flashpoint of debate.

so if i said "i don't like britney, of course, but xtina has some real pipes" that would be an acceptable opinion. or if i said "mandy moore has some surprisingly good songwriting" that would be ok too (because for the most part she didn't [still rep for "wanna be with you" tho], but nobody i was talking to would know that!). but you couldn't just say "...baby one more time" was a great song without inspiring livid outrage.

lol at the thought that miley is anywhere remotely near 'unescapable'

― balls, Wednesday, April 16, 2014 9:46 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well people in the office lunchroom talk about her, she's in the free subway newspapers all the time, magazines, tv, etc. I can't even remember what the Black Keys look like. I can't remember the melody of a single Black Keys song.

I get facebook or youtube suggestions every few days about the latest parody-of-a-parody of wrecking ball

Look Hurting if you choose to engage w/current culture at all that's on you

yeah just don't sit with those people in the lunchroom if you don't wanna talk about bangerz

thx

Well people in the office lunchroom talk about her, she's in the free subway newspapers all the time, magazines, tv, etc. I can't even remember what the Black Keys look like. I can't remember the melody of a single Black Keys song.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock,11150/

I've done a pretty good job escaping both Miley and Black Keys with very little effort/intent. And I still haven't heard a note from the latest Beyonce; did it get radio play? However, I can't escape Katy Perry, Pink, Lorde, Rihanna and Lady Gaga's "Applause." These are the top 40 acts I hear everywhere, whether I want to or not.

Well yeah if you want to get specific, Miley was more inescapable around the time of that VMA thing, less so right now.

I can't escape people talking about people talking about people talking about Miley, though.

everyone's a critic critic

― estela, Wednesday, April 16, 2014 2:29 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

in 2014 if you're 'overexposed' to any kind of media it's a result of yr own choices, everything is very very avoidable, ed sullivan died a long time ago

I can't escape people talking about people talking about people talking about Miley, though.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:14 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i feel like nothing is really inescapable today!

i think that's part of why this debate goes on a lot because it's mostly critics/writers writing for other writers and for so many years a lot of pop and culture writing was based around this idea that there was a large scale pop culture that everyone embraced...but that's all gone. i work with ppl about 10-15 years younger than me quite a bit because of the business i work in, and i find they don't seem to largely have a lot of these ideas of pop vs rock...like one guy was into amon amarth a lot and then he was into queen but now he's into some kind of subgenre of electronic music that kind of sounds like 80s tangerine dream that's called "OutRun" music (there's a subreddit)....and one woman that's only 25 i think responded when i tweeted about the new mazzy star how they were one of her favorites of all time! she was so little when even among the swan came out! i know she likes amanda palmer and beyonce, but she wears a The Who t-shirt to work too...

i dunno, just random.....there's nothing like how, say, thriller was back when i was a kid...i mean people might think that beyonce or taylor swift is really culturally huge but it's peanuts....my friend bought an imitation Beat It jacket at the JC Penny in my town of 3,500 ppl in the middle of nowhere....

So I guess I feel like Whiney's right the whole popism vs rockism thing is pretty much irrelevant anymore because there's not really mass scale pop or mass scale rock anymore

i feel like everyone that's arguing about it now are just the pop culture writer version of civil war reenacters, on some old battlefield that's grown over with weeds

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, heard a Miley Cyrus song. And I had never heard Lorde until that Nirvana thing the other day. And the only Black Keys I've heard was a TV commercial? I think? Everything is escapable.

but that idea that "this thing is more relevant than another" or "this music is really the next wave of where music is going and this other music is way retrograde and not where it's at" is hard to give up....but it's not true anymore...because everything is going everywhere and nowhere....

i'm listening to the one MGMT song that I like (Kids) and a minute ago I was listening to some old pre-war blues, all on Spotify... it's crazy

So I guess I feel like Whiney's right the whole popism vs rockism thing is pretty much irrelevant anymore because there's not really mass scale pop or mass scale rock anymore

but it was never about pop vs rock, and even among this brave new utopia you describe, old assumptions are still pretty pervasive

i mean it would be logical to think that the internet etc breaking down walls would mean that old hidebound values also get thrown out but it's interesting that this isn't happening

The question I guess is if being popular alone is enough to make something "relevant." I say no.

The question I guess is if being popular alone is enough to make something "relevant." I say no.

i say no as well, but it's a hard line to draw, and there are plenty of critics who aren't so much poptimists as just straight populists - if something's at #1, then it's relevant.

I think old hide bound values are totally being thrown away by ppl all the time, fratty type dudes that would have never gone to a rave are going to huge EDM shows in the US now...they don't give a fuck about hidebound anything

yeah, it's questions of context and marketing
those same dudes will also do rodrigo y gabriela as fast as they'll do girl talk

yeah exactly what i'm saying

yeah but there are things that those dudes will disdain or dismiss for hidebound reasons...the specific goalposts shift all the time in terms of what's "acceptable" in any given demographic but the reasoning behind "acceptability" doesn't, really - some things will always be beyond the pale or mockable

One Direction, I guess

well, indeed! or like bieber. it'll depend on the particular social group obv.

and don't forget that being seen to have varied/~eclectic~/wacky taste is a good thing to many

i feel like everyone that's arguing about it now are just the pop culture writer version of civil war reenacters, on some old battlefield that's grown over with weeds

well, there's probably a sense in which this is true in the same way that almost no one has ever thought there was much value in reflecting in this way about anything. and the moments when what reflection there was had some kind of realistic prospect of 'affecting the culture' or whatever (not to a huge extent, but outside the circle of those mostly responsible for doing the reflecting), like say at the height of the rock era when there was a lot of ferment and a lot of creative and authoritative criticism being written—those moments are few and far between.

but the alternative is basically not thinking/talking about it at all, right? i think forks was right yesterday that there's a lot of instability/uncertainty when the culture is changing a lot very quickly. and that's one of the major points at which people engage in this kind of reflection.

i don't think it's irrelevant that one of the biggest 'thought leaders' (hem hem) in the rockism/poptimism debate has been tom ewing, since he happened to make such canny use of the internet for music-criticism purposes through times at which it was changing (the world at large) a lot. nor irrelevant that he was schooled as a historian and works as a market researcher.

i thought the original popists or w/e they were called were like early 80s NME type dudes who like MJ and scitti politti and stuff, like ex post punkers who embraced 80s pop

i think ewing hearkened back to a lot of them?

but he started out in a climate where, like, post-nirvana punk/rock authenticity was re-entrenched (and quickly squandered w/ commercial debasement via yarling etc.), w/ new artsy 'quality' aspirational dimensions in britpop, 'no depression' style authenticity was valorized, indie rock's establishment was pretty firm and it was making overtures toward 'pop' posturing ('if only it could get on the radio') and genre dabbling, even the indie and rock types had started coming back around to the early 90s uk dance scene, u.s. rap was reaching the height of its combined commercial/critical ascendancy…

good context for a lot of those issues to come up in new ways

"So I guess I feel like Whiney's right the whole popism vs rockism thing is pretty much irrelevant anymore because there's not really mass scale pop or mass scale rock anymore"

pop is more private now. there are people who sell millions of albums and get millions of youtube hits and the public ,by and large, has no idea who they are. their fans are online and listening to them with headphones on.

j otm. One of the things abt those 90s times was that even if you were open to listening to pop, a lot of what you'd then hear was affirming values you were kinda trying to question (lots of Britpop stuff, Sebadoh/Pavement stuff, etc). P much noone could take pop as even worthy of listening to, unless they were yr 10 yrold sister

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_for_Peter_Hughes

Check out track 4

^^From 1995

People were always (maybe) listening to this stuff, just maybe not writing about it so much and with such volume. I blame the internet culture

Uh don't you mean credit? I liked Britney, just couldn't admit it to my bandmates

xp dude, you ARE the internet culture

your bandmates otm

scott, i think that's very important, i'm just not sure it's limited to pop. most music now is private. maybe to an unprecedented degree.

i think the older coordinates for a rockism/poptimism debate had to do with a different map of what was public and private, relative to what—which maybe comes out in the way that the stuff i mentioned being in tom ewing's context had starker contrasts between mainstream/underground/respectable/not attributed to it.

maybe one reason that the debate can seem so muddled and wishy-washy a la powers/wilson is that in combination with the privatization of the listener/fan experience, the major site for anything prospectively 'public' about music has undergone a huge leveling of those old complex distinctions in status/respectability/purpose/whatever. like, what codes as 'pop' now is loosely inclusive of dance-pop, edm, country, rap, rock, 'folk', indie, etc., depending on the level of media-machine exposure you want to count. and relative to that extreme level of media visibility the choices have more to do with vulgarity-gentility/urbanity than with any of the old distinctions.

pop has always been that way though

Feel like pop just historically kind of faces an uphill battle in the rock-based music criticism lexicon, the split between the two happening at rock's birth (The Day The Music Died), and then continuing on from there. 60's pop was more or less immediately embraced by rockers (which was basically English bands doing R&B/pop covers) and certainly in the 60s rock was considered pop. Maybe the shift from singles to LPs (singles popularity peaking in the mid-60s) is to blame. At an rate it feels like every year the wool is pulled back, and nostalgia/re-contextualization/the leveling qualities of the internet/listener fragmentation puts a "this pop is OK" stamp on acts previously derided by rockists through kitsch or irony or genuine reappraisal. So once you had rock bands playing Monkees songs and now you have rock bands playing Fleetwood Mac songs, and in the future, I don't know, that's where my train of thought leaves the station. By the late 90s rock and pop were so intertwined (Avril Lavigne, pop-punk, nu-metal like Linkin Park) that it complicates things too much for me.

avril lavigne was not the late '90s, neither was linkin park