Richard Meltzer - trivializer of the awesome or awesomiser of the trivial?

And let me tell ya this...I don't pretend to be intimate pals with Richard...but we have conversed a lot over the last 2-3 years and there are a lot of traits in the man that I didnt expect to find after knowing his writings.

Chris

As for Meltzer, how is it that Gulcher still has not been mentioned? It's the man's best work!

I never answered Chris. He worried that I was pigeonholing Meltzer as a music writer. This isn't true. Obviously, I think Meltzer's ideas apply well beyond music. Check my Frith-Meltzer-Smash Hits comments on the Trouble with the Sociology of Pop thread: There's a basic dishonesty in journalism and academia. I still dream that by using Meltzer's ideas we can shock those two discourses out of their stupidity, at least here and there. I liked the pinefox's response, too ("pop for me = stability, maybe; whereas a serious engagement with sociological tradition might, for me, be demanding and relatively destabilizing").

"Great Writer" is a sad fate for Meltzer because it allows people to praise him while evading his ideas. Allows Meltzer himself to evade his own ideas.

As for some of what's been written above: Meltzer's the guy who said that, in rock, pertinence could be just anywhere. So to claim that he's not writing about the music or that he's only writing about himself is simply irrelevant ? at least, it's a way to fend off his ideas rather than to actually consider them. (Anyway, the claim is wrong in so many ways: "The medicine made me throw up." "Well, you're just talking about yourself, not the medicine.")

There are things I just don't get about this thread. "I don't think Meltzer's approach has gotten music listeners anywhere near as far as Marcus' or Christgau's methods." I don't understand why someone would write such a sentence and then not say what he thinks Marcus's or Christgau's methods are, how they differ from Meltzer's, and why they're better. Are we supposed to guess? I'll concede that the statement has some intellectual value: as a display of hairstyle or gang affiliation. I'm not against such displays, but you have to take them somewhere, otherwise there's no reason for anyone else to give a fuck. Where have Marcus and Christgau gotten you? What's it like to be a Marcus/Christgau man? What does it do for you, what does it demand of you? When you're a Marcus man, are you a Marcus man all the way, from your first cigarette to your last dying day?

Meltzer wrote (review of the Doors' Absolutely Live):

But the change, if there is any, can be indicated in a number of ways. For instance, are the performances just as good? Are the press parties just as good? Are the fans just as good? The answer to the last one's a damn sight easier than the rest, speaking from the standpoint of yours truly, of course. I'm just as good as I was then, and everybody else I've asked is just as good, some even better.

So here are standards of judgment that aren?t typical in written criticism. There's no law that you have to use these standards yourself ? Meltzer himself hardly limits himself to such criteria ? but if you're going to think about the man's work, you need to think about what it would be like to adopt those standards.

By the way, this thread would be a far better party if there was more attention to the actual words that Meltzer used, and the actual ideas he propounded. Not that his writing style and such aren't part of his ideas. But what does the style do. What ideas does it serve? And what did the man say?

ain't there a shadow of the possibility that you somehow substituted 'pop culture' for 'pop music'??

maybe kogan did though

a) ok get to the point now
b) what the fuck does that mean?
c) hahaha very funny
d) hmmm that's valid if he means what I THINK he means
e) omigod that's fucking genius, why didn't I think of that?
f) what the fuck does that mean?
g) (repeat)

i think it'd add a little color to her cheeks.

That's exactly my point.

kogan's line — probably laid out further up the thread — that as his writing got better his thinking got lazier is on the whole true (interesting also: eg name a writer this is NOT the case with...) (ie whose writing AND thinking improved in lock-step) (apart from me obv) (joke) (kinda)

+ there's no way you can call the thinking 'in' the writing in The Night (Alone) (for example) 'lazy'.

Lazy isn't neccessarily a bad word to use in respect of later Meltzer, but this is bound up in the enabling/disabling baggage of rockwrite that he endlessly, er, 'negotiates'.

yeah and whatever happened to those? all the links have been down since that site went out of business.

overall its worth a read.