Historiography of popular music criticism

-- -- -- KEN BURNS "ROCKISM" -- -- --

_____________coming december 2005 to PBS____________

Intellectual historians to thread...

I haven't come across much poststructuralist writing on popular music, although I'm hardly widely-read in that area. Barthes would be a good bet, though. But regardless, that school of thought really got going simultaneously with rock crit, yes? Adorno counts as a precursor because he's from the cute li'l marxists in the frankfurt school. I'll ask my musicologist friend and see what she has to say.

Per xgau, I'm assuming the line leads in some way through classical music criticism slowly adapting to pop, but I could be wrong.

jahsonic.com - Culture
http://www.jahsonic.com/Culture.html

jahsonic.com - Music Theory
http://www.jahsonic.com/MusicTheory.html

jazz criticism has had a long and occasionally quite healthy life. "pop music" criticism is pretty much a history of missed opportunities IMO. it's barely gotten started yet.

I sort of agree with you, Spencer, but I sort of don't--in many ways, one of the best things about pop music criticism is that it's ignored the tired old debates that go on in critical circles and have sort of started anew. It allows you to go at things without a lot of preconceptions, and without a lot of issues already being decided and closed-off.

see that's where i'm not sure if folk culture counts as low culture, in a sense. And folk culture definitely isn't popular culture, if that makes sense. I don't really think of the boundaries being destroyed until at least Cage with his imaginary landscapes radio pieces, though retrospectively from that point there are people who played with the "pop" of their day (Charles Ives comes to mind, but he was rediscovered).

Well, no--musicology/music history is a fully recognized branch of music theory and has a long rich intellectual tradition. Pop music criticism doesn't seem to have any place in the academy--THANK FUCKING GOD.

i never did finish putting the whole project (all 250 some pages) up on the site tho.

I'm sorry, I'm being elliptical here because I've talked a lot about it in other areas. Basically, while I do wish that pop music crit would incorporate a little more knowledge (especially as regards music theory), I disagree immensely with a lot of the basic tenets of literary or otherwise criticism, and the great thing about pop is that it doesn't come in with these already, so it can sort of be steered in another direction. In other words, there are theoretical issues you can productively address via pop and only via pop partially because it's somewhat boring in the abstract, partially because it's interesting when you can ground it in a discussion of, say, Britney, and partially for other things. You know.

All well and good, but English classes are a requirement and I would suspect that there are at least 10 times as many Art History elective classes than Musicology.

A History of Knowledge
Piero Scaruffi
http://www.thymos.com/know/history.html

The bounderies never really existed and thus were never really destroyed. If they perhaps existed in criticism it does not in any way follow that they existed in the minds of artists.

Folk culture of certain kinds was very much a model for pop culture--on a sort of obvious level, there's Shakespeare with his feet firmly in both worlds, and there's Bakhtin's stuff about carnival and all that jazz. I think there's a basic model and the labels we put on it changes. I won't deny that the existince of a mass culture didn't begin until the industrial era, so we could certainly start then, but I think once you hit that point, the basic model hasn't changed an awful lot.

Again, I've done far too much thinking about this, but I have to go to lunch, so.

folk culture obviously overlaps with pop culture to some extent, but pop culture is part and parcel with mass media in a way that folk culture isn't.

Well, the important ones; I would assume that in making a list you'd be making your own interpretation of the history of music historicism.

...music has inhabited a peculiarly postmodern corner of ‘culture’ ever since the late [19]50s, when the critical paradoxes of [John] Cage opened the ear of ‘serious’ music onto the world, when the machinery of international capitalism coalesced with the machinery of popular music, when both ethnomusicology and music history became participatory enterprises for the active listener. It was only in the 50s that it became possible to listen to records of weird jazz, avant-garde music, and music from other times and cultures.

This was the turning point from a regime of writing music to a regime of listening. Many things at the time pushed this change, even though there has been very little comment on, or understanding of, the core paradigm shift that this represented for music.

But really, they are worth reading as far as pretty smart magazine-style reviews go (I think, it's been awhile since I've taken a look at the stuff) and would also, I'm fairly sure, shed some light on how music criticism was prepared for more public consumption before, say, Rolling Stone or what have you.

Also does this paste make any sense I can't tell at all.

In terms of historical documentation, you might want to include all the essays and lists from the Pazz & Jop polls.

http://www.continuumbooks.com/(awjbmh45cirsbx45fyifoz55)/BookDetail.aspx?BookID=10741

Audio Culture
Readings in Modern Music
edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner
October 1, 2004
ISBN: 0826416152
paperback
472 Pages
6 x 9
£12.99

SERIES:
SUBJECT: Performing Arts/Media
IMPRINT: Continuum

Description

The groundbreaking Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum; September 2004; paperback original) maps the aural and discursive terrain of vanguard music today. Rather than offering a history of contemporary music, Audio Culture traces the genealogy of current musical practices and theoretical concerns, drawing lines of connection between recent musical production and earlier moments of sonic experimentation. It aims to foreground the various rewirings of musical composition and performance that have taken place in the past few decades and to provide a critical and theoretical language for this new audio culture.

Via writings by philosophers, cultural theorists, and composers, Audio Culture explores the interconnections among such forms as minimalism, indeterminacy, musique concrète, free improvisation, experimental music, avant-rock, dub reggae, Ambient music, HipHop, and Techno. Instead of focusing on the putative “crossover” between “high art” and “popular culture,” Audio Culture takes all of these musics as experimental practices on par with, and linked to, one another. While cultural studies has tended to look at music (primarily popular music) from a sociological perspective, the concern here is philosophical, musical, and historical.

Audio Culture includes writing by some of the most important musical thinkers of the past half-century, among them John Cage, Brian Eno, Glenn Gould, Umberto Eco, Ornette Coleman, Jacques Attali, Simon Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, Paul D. Miller, David Toop, John Zorn, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and many others. The book is divided into nine thematically-organized sections, each with its own introduction. Section headings include topics such as "Modes of Listening," "Minimalisms," and "DJ Culture." In addition, each essay has its own short introduction, helping the reader to place the essay within musical, historical, and conceptual contexts. The book concludes with a glossary, a timeline, and an extensive discography.

I'm certainly not disinterested in theory or sociology, but you don't find many people in the profession who are focused on aesthetics.

http://newmusicbox.org/news.nmbx?id=00445

In Conversation with Christoph Cox

By Molly Sheridan
© 2004 NewMusicBox

Christoph Cox

An interview with the editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music

Start w/ Adorno and his "On Popular Music." His influence is probably negligable on the whole when it comes to the majority of pop music critics, because on the whole they probably don't know who he is, but a lot of his ideas crop up on the conservative side of music criticism for many years - marxism as it relates to music, a strong division between high art and pop music, etc.

Presumably Barthes fits in here somewhere as a response, although not having read the book yet I can't be exactly sure how he slots into the story. Presumably he refutes the myth that "deep" and "shallow" are meaningful terms when it comes to describing music.

A bunch of rock magazines become popular in the mid-late 60s; Crawdaddy founded by Paul Williams, who writes a pieces called "How Rock Communicates," where he argues that the artist who released the album was communicating a very specific set of musical ideas, and that from album to album this personal expression would develop and grow.
"The music and the group are the same concept, the same thing in our minds, the same thing on record." Or as Xgau put it, "the artist with his or her name on the cover was expressing a vision traceable from album to album."

The auteur theory is picked up by Landau who brings it to rolling stone. It reinforces canonization and (xgau again) "reinforced the culture of reverence by paying obeisance to trusted mainstays."

Landau's Springsteen review epitomizes this idea; "every gesture, every syllable, adds something to his ultimate goal – to liberate our spirit while he liberates his by baring his soul through his music."

Now here everything in my historiography becomes sort of convoluted, because it's hard to place everything in time. "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" tells a story that puts the postmodern music star as the driving force behind music, arguing that the DJ is responsible for every musical shift of the past 5 decades.

You also have Cornel West and Stuart Hall arguing that "the seminal cultural development of this century is the collapse of the hegemony of European "high culture" and its replacement by popular culture, with the popular culture of the United States coming to dominate worldwide," as summarized by music historian Ted Vincent.

Then there's Lester Bangs, who argues that

"I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette" - arguing (my interpretation) for the cultural value and importance of popular culture.

Bangs also deemphasized the "rock star" as (Williams emphasized it in his Springsteen piece and auteur theory) in favor of the intangible spirit. Sez bangs: "rock & roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it’s true: anybody can do it. Learn three chords on a guitar and you’ve got it."

Then you have Greil Marcus writing on punk, arguing that the music was about the "inauguration of a moment" when "odd voices, voices no reasonable person could have expected to hear in public, were being heard all over the place: sometimes as monstrous shouts in the marketplace, sometimes as whispers from an alleyway." This is the rise of the revolution myth, the idea of the revolution followed by a period Jon Landau described as a genre being "formalized by unimaginative record companies and A&R men." Followed by another revolution.

(There are also superconservatives like Bayles, who isn't really worth discussing here as far as I'm concerned; she's adorno minus the marxism, a moral conservative)

Then of course there's our own Chuck Eddy: "Idealism limits music more than commercialism does."

There's Simon Reynolds, arguing along a similar line that the "progressive" or "intelligent" movements within a genre tend to be a step in the direction of conservatism and traditional ideas of "musicality."

Sasha Frere Jones in the New Yorker online, arguing that the pop charts are like a "feedback loop."

At some point in this path I've mapped out, music changed from being a medium for a message to being the message itself, according to the writers.

This is probably a hopelessly amateur summary, but it's what I could cobble together. I'm hoping to find books that will fill the holes - whether they be about music explicitely or not depends on how much they relate to a story of western music crit, i suppose.

Then there's This, the gatekeeper aspect of music crit and how perspective affects what makes the canon and what doesnt.

Obviously missing from what I've laid out here: gender, race, sexuality and aesthetics of such as they relate to music crit.

All What Jazz Philip Larkin
Blues People Leroi Jones
Really the Blues Mezz Mezzrow
"The Art of Bop" Jack Kerouac
"You're Too Hip, Baby" Terry Southern
"Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" Gay Talese
"The First Tycoon of Teen" and "The Fifth Beatle" Tom Wolfe
After the Ball Ian Whitcomb
Disco Albert Goldman

it's also hard to leave dick hebdige out of the discussion, even though he doesn't exactly pertain to "popular music criticism" - his writings on subculture are pretty indispensible.

plus, i'm a sucker for hebdige.

I'm pretty sure that there's a reasonable amount of academic research (especially by grad students) on rock criticism, but I'm really out of touch about how to find stuff like that.

man can we do a better version of this thread now

doubtful

<3 some of my naivete itt

i think a good first step would be to sketch out a rough periodization of the interval (19th century to present at most, i'm guessing) you'd like to find the readings to illuminate.

Good point on that culture link--pop music doesn't even become a subject for consideration until low culture gets recognized in a culture and people start to talk about destroying the bounderies between high and low, etc. But music's incorporated low culture for ages (Bartok w/folk songs etc. etc. Mozart's "low" operas) as has literature. So it's sort of hard to say.

Rock and popular music was low culture to begin with, until the baby boomers in the late 60s adopted it as high culture, only their generation's high culture. Then it became increasingly high culture (for some, including most critics) until punk arrived with values that rock is not supposed to be high culture, and critizism became more a means of guarding rock's low culture status and giving bad reviews to anything that appeared too "clever".

see George Orwell on boys magazines, Larkin on jazz, Kingsley Amis on science fiction for early examples of high/low cultural crossover. these are more relevant to rock criticism IMO than Adorno or Walter Benjamin

Might push back to TS Eliot on Marie Lloyd, for high/pop cult crossover, espec. because he uses 'authentic' pop culture as a stick with which to beat degraded pop culture (cinema) & middle-class taste.

Mencken was the first serious writer to be saturated, as Edmund Wilson noted in a 1921 essay, with “modern commercial America,” a culture that captivated and appalled him. And so his prose, as Wilson said, married an almost 18th-century lucidity and force to “the slang of the common man … and compelled it to dance a ballet.”

Oh, this would be relevant maybe - heavyweight historian talking about the practice and history of mid-century Brit jazz criticism - Eric Hobsbawm on his time as a jazz reporter.