Why are so many of you so afraid of even slightly embracing inherited values. the canon, etc. for fear it will compromise your individuality, but at the same time, so willing to embrace THE NEW (some

Maybe the answer to your question is, BECAUSE WE LIKE DIFFERENT MUSIC FROM YOU.

also "the old" may not be stuff that has entered the canon. x-post

Many ILM people, including me, react provocatively against the 'music was better in the past', 'nobody writes em like they used to' stuff one still hears a lot outside the rarified confines of places like ILM. Yes, that is true.

And the only reason it's possible to know what he's saying is cos it's such a yawningly conservative and established question.

plus, people like feeling part of something. punks, ravers, teddy boys, hippies etc, what was coming out at the time was in some way 'theirs', a sense of belonging, of course. also, a sense that the story is being written, it isnt all done and dusted.

in its own way, this can often extend to older music that is 'undiscovered', not just new music.

perhaps, it is about the untold story, about being on the page somewhere

of course, this is arguable, and may be the heart of the question. people who were punks, dressed that way, went to the shows etc etc, did create punk in a way, as much as any of the bands, the creation of a scene requires others, a new audience, participation in different ways. so its not quite so cut and dried. of course, after the fact, it is only the music that remains, but during the fact, there is more. this can make newer music more enticing for a variety of non-musical reasons

That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that I see a lot of talk (especially any time rockism or "the canon" are mentioned) about upholding individual choice and taste against common critical judgments, or any claim to consensus. Meanwhile, what's new, the latest trends, etc. are not suspect in the same way as something that could compromise individual choice, even though they are equally determined beyond the sphere of any one individual.

(I think I could dredge up examples, if I have to.)

all we do on ILM is define a canon of our own. id say its a pretty democratic process, too.

Just so's I had a better idea of what you were getting at, not because I didn't think you had a point. Yeah, they'd be nice

The point is, I rarely (if ever?) see embracing new trends, new consensuses (sp?), looked at with the same suspicion as embracing the canon often is.

or, to put it another way, the consensus about new scenes is often not reached until after the fact, when perhaps the debunking can begin?

also, the majority of scenes are very ephemeral, and die an early death, before the wider audience really gets to even know what they are?

Too true, every age and grouping has its own loose consensus about what is good and what is bad. Then eventually that consensus hardens into the rockism of that age. Hating on past canons just because they're past canons is one variant of noughties rockism

i think disregarding or circumventing past canons, where consensus is set in stone, isnt the same as disregarding an as-yet unformed canon. i think a canon has to exist before it can be disregarded, otherwise, well, there is nothing to disregard!

for fuck's sake ronan. compared with your vapid 'spiritualism' 'question' on ile this thread's title is a model of clarity. your posts seem to imply that you have *always* had totally on the money responses to new music, and have grasped immediately where it should be going. i find it hard to believe.

this is not to say that theres not compulsion to jump on new trends in an atmosphere like this, where a lot of people get really fired up about new stuff. i dont know - i see it as an excitement to keep things fresh. if you eliminated all the talk about "new trends", youd still have the best discussions about every other kind of music youd ever want.

You seem to think "the new" is an entire genre which we all worship. Why the fuck would someone turn up on a get physical thread and say "YOU GUYS WHO EMBRACE THE NEW, YOU ARE FOOLS" when they could by your theory make the exact same argument on an Annie thread or a Dizzee Rascal thread.

Honestly, rockist in lumping disparate groups of music he doesn't understand into one group non shocker.

x-post hey Miles I don't remember that thread questioning peoples taste in records but if you have any interesting perspectives from Dave Clarke or Orbital don't hesitate to enlighten me.

Rockism is;
Privileging of received wisdom over new discourse
Privileging of credibility / authenticity
Privileging of numbers and categorisation / lists

Mythology making the arbitrary appear necessary / essential

Making the cultural appear natural by making it appear to be invisible

The pursuit of objectivity

-- Jimmybommy JimmyK'KANG (sickmouth...), September 16th, 2004.

The "if not rockism then what" question reminds me a little of the fundamentalist Christian trope about "if not god then what" when it comes to devising systems of morality: i.e. without this one specificially defined system of mores and norms, everything will fall apart. That's a stretch, I know (the rockist worldview is way less stringent and more forgiving than the fundamentalist Christian one), but there's something of the same dichotomy of thinking. A failure to conceive the world in more complex and creative terms, a reliance on received wisdom and canonical hierarchies. (The 10 Commandments, The Ten Greatest Albums, etc.)
It seems to me the argument isn't really about replacing rockism with something else, it's about exposing the basic fallacies of the underlying assumptions (about authenticity, authorship, originality, and all the other things rockism holds dear) -- defeating "rockism" by demonstrating that it doesn't -- can't -- really exist, because it's built on false assumptions about art and the world.

-- gypsy mothra (meetm...), November 18th, 2004.

Disliking pop out of aesthetic preference = not rockist
Disliking pop (or indeed rock) based on ideology and received ideas of 'superior' styles of music = rockist. Some of the biggest rockists are in dance music.
Hating technique or musical profiency is uber-rockist, clearly.

[Not sure I get that last line at all--?]

I could swear I have seen other examples really recently but keyword searches on received or inherited with canon, rockism, or rockist in the title, aren't pulling up as much as I expected. (Naturally, this doesn't convince me that I'm wrong, just that my searh isn't good enough.)

also, its not necessarily a conscious process as such

What about the old one?

THe past has already been cleaned out of the garbage.

I mean seriously ILM isn't even 100 percent anti-rockist, it's a fucking huge messageboard, is it really so hard to fathom that people actually like the stuff they post about alot?

Has anyone on ILM ever started a thread saying "Why do people like the Beatles instead of new music?"

Why are so many of you so afraid of the canon for fear it will compromise your individuality, but at the same time, so willing to embrace THE NEW?

I guess the key word is 'individuality': it's totally irrelevant. Very few people like music because it makes them stand out from the crowd, contrary to myth. People actually like what they say they like.

At the same time there is a tendency on ILM to do down the canon, mainly because the people who defend it are ogres, rockists, bullies and frauds. The trouble is that the anti-rockist impulse against rockist *signifiers* ('live' sounds, acoustic guitars, songwriting) too often extends to pseudo-critiques of these *as such*. There's nothing wrong with old-style instrumentation except the privileging of it in discourse above 'the new'.

xpost: miles ppl may not like acoustics and proper songs bcz of what the end product tends to be -- things like coldplay. But I don't think that ppl on ILM hate acoustics on any kind of principle or that they even hate it.

that's not even a point about music - just life in general.

I really find it impossible to give a fuck about any of this these days. "The Canon" was, poss still is annoying b/c it consisted of a bunch of artists, most of whom i don't/didn't like, most of whom got a lot of mostly uncritical coverage in most of the mainstream musick media. I don't really give a shit about that anymore, since all I read is "classic rock", "Terroriser" and "sound on sound".

oh very good

its surely not that difficult to accept that some things are socially/culturall accepted in ways that others arent?

ie, a canon is not an individual thing

x-post there are socially defining structures and I'm ALL for noticing them, but I don't see who here is wholly avoiding them. Maybe I'm confused. I just don't see exactly what the debate is, unless RS is arguing that canons and structures should be accepted with religious fervor.

but, im disputing that and saying a canon cannot be an individual thing, it is a societal thing that informs and directs (ie, what albums will get the digipack deluxe reissue and resulting magazine)

i think the idea, with the start of the thread is about received ideas and the 'new'. is it possible to have received ideas about thing which havent really happened yet?

also, this is talk about a mini-canon, a canon on a small web board, with limited wider reach. the canon, really, is something that permeates society at a much deeper level, than just being in one small place

totally! I rarely trust my first take on an album, as I'm comparing it to what I expect or desire in my head (which is influenced by buzz and hype as much as personal assumptions based on previous work). It's not until the second or third listen that I can really start dealing with it on its own terms.

Scott, why are you afraid of embracing Black Sabbath when you go nuts over everything Yellowcard has created?

PS: This is not an endorsement of eitiher Low or Bright Eyes.

The "canon" has changed a lot, obviously, and it's gonna keep on changing. My take is that what a canon is has changed, too. You know, someone like Lee Hazelwood is perhaps a decent example--there are now many people here in Nashville, and in other places, who embrace that whole idea of gloss or "countrypolitan" as the NY Times so amusingly called it in a recent stupid article. But my point is, Lee Hazelwood is obviously, to me, no great artist, but the *approach* is what's being canonized, everybody can now relax and do whatever it is that Lee Hazelwood did, and it's hip to do so. Which seems to me a shift from the "great records" idea of a canon. I think if we polled all the folks here we'd get a fairly predictable picture of a collective canon of great works, and of course I'd think a lot of them weren't great works actually but that someone just liked the approach used on the particular record. And I think that is far healthier than sitting around worry about whether some record belongs and another doesn't, which is frankly the big problem I have with someone like Christgau, who I bet now goes back all the time and says, hmm, I missed something. There are plenty of flawed records I think are greater than any number of "perfect" records, and that seems to be the only healthy way to look at it. I mean, I don't understand why people would want to listen to prog shit at all, since I grew up with that crap and I never ever want to hear anything like that again, except maybe a few things that work. So I think it's just the old hipster factor--you like the "approach," and that's fine, maybe something new will come out of it. I mean, Comets on Fire, I listened to that shit recently, and OK, Hawkind or something, but I'm just conditioned to find that pseudo and geeked-out, so I'm not gonna worry about it. And I'm neither wrong nor right, that's just me.

I don't think I do. Except that probably we all react Against things ('provocatively' is perhaps the wrong word, N?).

I accept the case made for the New on the thread. CharltonLido has put it persuasively. Yes. But another factor is: new things are scary and disturbing, and old things are safe, familiar and comforting. Yet - even that is only partially true!!

The Rockism Debate, if it exists, is Old. ! It is comforting and safe - is that why we enjoy having it, again?

There's is more merit to this than many people are willing to admit.

Consider one of our recent ILM polls. Almost any of them will do, but let's take the 90's singles poll. Had ILM been around in 1995 (when Pulp were "the new", yeah I know they'd been around for 14 years by that point, but you know what I mean) there's little doubt in my mind that we'd have had multiple threads fawning over Pulp just like the Dizzee and Annie threads that we have now.

Now, almost everybody who used to like Pulp still likes them, and they are considered to be part of the canon. Then we do the poll, "Common People" predictably wins, and the reaction isn't "OK, just what we thought, we all still love Pulp, hooray!", it's "Meh. 'Common People' won, so predictable, so boring".

On one hand, it's hard to get excited about a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, there was a sense that many people would have been a lot more satisfied with an unexpected #1, and a top 10 (or even top 100) full of many non-canonical picks, just for the sake of it.

Or maybe I take lists too seriously.

On the other hand, when I strike on something older, I'm still influenced by information and opinion (from a critic, allmusic, whatever), but I feel like whatever it is I'm listening to has space to breathe and really come alive for me on my own terms, rather than on the terms of some frantic contemporary debate. Often, the music feels so alien and self-contained that I can pick and choose what makes it great with a lot more freedom -- there's something about a contemporary piece of music, on the other hand, that almost demands an immediate decision, so I feel like you get a lot of acclaimed artists who are acclaimed because there's something you can easily praise in their work within a timeframe of a couple of weeks. In my experience, albums (more than singles) take several months, even years, to really reveal themselves, and although waiting for that eventual click might make me rockist (or, more accurately, a boring formalist), it still feels to me like the most rewarding thing you can get out of listening to music. So I usually approach a genre a couple of years after the fact, and that allows me to go more by my own reaction than by a flow of opinion (though I'm still significantly influenced by the latter).

Have you been watching my downloads in the past week, or is this just a coincidence? (Didn't like the Hawkwind much, primarily because of the Born-in-the-USA-like drumming. Mostly like Comets on Fire, though I admit they are really retro sounding.)

Having interviewed them, I'm pretty sure they would take this as a compliment.

I agree MindInRewind, well put. Now clearly this could get into judging other peoples' intentions, but I often get that feeling too.

whatever order these people see themselves as contributing towards, helping fine music for reasonable people to triumph as it should or whatever, seems so much more determined by the already-in-place economics of sales apparatus than by any attendant journalism.

yeah, I'm not sure if the former (new is scary) is true. Certainly new pop as mediated through the mass media doesn't have very much shock to it, at least not to me. What's interesting about ILM and the people who post here (no matter their tastes) is that there's generally a scoping out of new in less of a received way, although I admit that's debatable too.