"Surely its better when its a band that play their own music rather than girlbands in underwear prancing about onstage?

I wouldn't mind a jot if it was a friend who just casually liked music. But she professes to be a music geek and buys a lot of albums.

(and if they legalised monkey fighting - bad pun sorry.)

[/grandad]

Here is what she had to say about the Kaiser Chiefs on a different message board (no i'm not stalking her - she linked me out of pride for her 'rant')
**********************

don't listen to anyone bad mouthing the chiefs...

They are one amazing band. They saw what was missing in music and the produced the goods. Sure its pop, but when has pop been bad?

Their fucking amazing live, I've already seen them twice and I'm seeing them twice more in the following month.

Their care-free, fun attitude to music is like a breath of fresh air amoungst a lot of the bummer music going round at the moment. Ricky Wilson plays the happy, cheeky chappy well in the press but hes actually a very intelligent young man whos really giving the nation what they want..he knows how to act to do well in the charts. He's actually been in the business long enough.

In conclusion to this little rant, the Chiefs are a great band as faar as catchy, happy, pop tunes go and amazing live sets (please see for yourself, their honestly very good!) go. Yes the album is worth buying! I love it myself and can't stop playing it to get me in the party mood. Watch out for songs like Na na na na naa, saturday night and you can have it all...their amazing.
Please give them a go.

But Tom, that is the logical answer to this argument.

Why do so many people hold this view about bands and writing their own material? It's definately not the first instance of this i've come across.

(xxpost)

1. "amazing live"
2. "carefree, fun"
3. charming personality
4. knows how to play the music game
5. "catchy, happy, poppy"

You can be all of these things without writing your own songs.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), February 22nd, 2005.

Can someone prove me wrong other than "listen to what you like"? I mean, would you think it was odd to see me reading Sugar magazine or the Beano or whatever?

(I like the Beano sometimes and I'll sometimes pick up my sister's Cosmo, but I wouldn't buy it or subscribe to these).

Yeah, which is fine - I mean the thing with these attitudes is that for a lot of people they work as a guide to "what music will I like?", and that's great. (Hi Dog L!)

In this case tho' she's actively positioning the band she likes AGAINST "bummer music"! (by which she means serious artistes I guess, though she might mean something very different.)

similarly if someone wears make-up and is a guy, they are wrong because it's not marketed at them, just as yes it is as you say "weird" for straight 24 year old men to be into boy and girl mags.

honestly look at what you're saying. "people being different from societal norms are fucking weird, prove me wrong!"

Dan Hill
Don McLean
U2

It's when they go off at the deep end about it not being 'real' that it becomes a problem for me.

xxxxxpost

Including Mary Mary?

I'd take the Carole King penned 'Pleasant Valley Sunday' over Mike's 'Listen to the Band' though. Ugh.

Yeah, there you go. Carole King is the example you should throw out (re: the Elvis, Billie Holiday, Sinatra argument v. rockism). Anyone who ever sang a Carole King song > anyone who didn't.

Sure did:

http://members.tripod.com/~colli/moreof/mary.html

And speaking of Hal Blaine on drums, what about all the guff Beach Boys got for not playing their own instruemtns on Pet Sounds. That argument surely didn't hold up over the years.

(enter sacred cow post here)

I'm not disputing this Hari, but surely once you analyse and reanalyse the argument one can be as pernickety as the original rockist. It is arguable that there is a clear difference between music that is made for music's sake and music that has been fashioned to make a quick buck. Obviously there are fuzzy lines here where arguments can be made for or against each side (Daniel Bedingfield, Maximo Park, Busted etc). Pointing to the past is different, the way music is marketed has changed since the days of Elvis and the Monkees. We now have sprawling music videos and tv shows like Pop Idol to promote bands like Girls Aloud and what have you (showing my ignorance here).
I find a lot of "grown up" people who like the so-called "manufactured" pop bands of today listen to it for the camp factor, or they work within the industry and are genuinely interested in the pop climate. Is this genuine appreciation of music for music's sake or is it appreciation of the gloss and glam and tack?

wow! i never knew that.

Indeed. The basic argument is that discussions of r**kism can -- not must, but can and at points has -- veer uncomfortably close to questions of larger morality.

That aside, I think it's vaguely noble to pretend to listen to music in a vacuum. If it's recorded or on the radio, you can like *any* song by its merit, despite its origins. The same goes for live performances, although in that case you're evaluating a lot of visual and social input at the same time. Any time you trust anything beyond the audio or experience you get directly from the band, you run the risk of believing a fiction.

Maybe the Beach Boys didn't play their instruments, maybe they did. By listening to "Good Vibrations" I just can't tell from the music alone. For all I know, Britney Spears is a talented songwriter and producer and "Toxic" was the result of a weekend of recording and all the surrounding press and backstory is fabricated! Maybe the Kaiser Chiefs are talented performers doing songs written by a stealth middle-aged production team and it's a conspiracy to be unravelled. Obviously you have to trust what you're told at some point, but the music remains the same.

Music is largely a social interaction, even when enjoyed alone. Tastes are influenced by what you've been to exposed to, reactions from others, etc.

What 'rockists' and 'anti-rockists' seem not to discuss - and I know cos I surely haven't for most of my time on this board - is what this language and these ideas (of authenticity and manufacture in this specific case) are for. Who benefits? As you see in a lot of the posts upthread the idea of the 'manufactured' is incredibly problematic but also a lot of people believe in it and this belief has definite uses at pretty much every level of the industry.

For an individual listener it provides a readymade way to separate themselves as a real fan/hardcore/true head/whatever from other consumers. For the industry it's a godsend as it creates a language and framework to talk about product, and it's a very strong framework which acts as a real and useful guide for a lot of consumers. This is marketing gold: marketing isn't about persuading people to buy stuff they won't enjoy, because so much of value comes from repeat custom. It's mostly about getting people to notice stuff they would.

To do this you need a language to speak to people in and the discourse of authenticity, creativity and artistry provides that in pop (which isn't to say that the claims of self-expression that underlie these things are false, any more than washing powder doesn't actually clean yr clothes - you have to have a convincing product before you sell it). This discourse has powered a marketing miracle, taking something you flog to teenagers and sustaining a huge adult market for it. Authenticity has kept the "fat cats" DL talks about going for years and years.

I don't for a moment doubt that people who invoke the abstract of authenticity genuinely love music. And also I don't doubt that they loathe a lot of the music which the business invokes authenticity to legitimise. But I do think that we need other ways to talk about and value music (if only for variety's sake!)

Nym - given where Manu's right hand is in that pic, I think he DID pop!

This is wrong, or at least if an anti-rockist says this they're not thinking through things carefully enough.

The point is not that one can distinguish between rockists and anti-rockists in terms of who hears music "authentically" (a more precise word here might be "correctly") - we never hear music authentically/correctly, correct/incorrect is not even a meaningful or workable binary.

We all import "non-musical reasons" into the enjoyment of music. Talking about a band writing their own songs is on the same level as talking about what a girlgroup are wearing in their video clip in this regard. The anti-rockist position is not to assert a greater access to the universal "truth" of a particular piece of music, but to assert that the distinction the rockists use to defend their own superior access to the "truth" is illogical and unjustifiable as an objective universal rule.

(in other regards these two examples are different - what a girlgroup wears in a video clip is something that is concretely discernible, whereas the fact of a band writing their own songs is always processed as a myth rather than empirical fact unless you're in the studio with them at the time. I note this not because I think it's a meaningful distinction for the purposes of our argument, but because it's an interesting example of how poorly the "false consciousness" allegations that rockists fling at pop-listeners map onto what is actually going on)

and the monkees wote orignal songs too but weren't promoted, the monkees wote great songs but they're album tracks.

I HUNT IT AND SLAY

The only guitars to be played are blurry and pink and appear on Creation album covers from 1991. Yup.

"Look! The rockist in his natural habitat..."

"FREEEEEEEOOOOOOOWWWWW...ONE MORE TIME!"

Review in Guitar Player magazine: "I looked up from transcribing the chord changes and wondered what strange music I heard. This lick, it was not tasty."

Strictly speaking this is an x-post, but then again maybe not.

http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/winter03/eng-4_files/1914-student-surveyors.jpg

"I think we need to lay the foundations for modern music over there. Has the guitar been electrified yet?"

Splicing the first rockist DNA...

"Tip Drill" to thread.

I mean, Del Shannon, Paul McCartney, Beach Boys, 10cc, ELO, Supertramp, ABC, Duran Duran, Wham!, Prefab Sprout, Thomas Dolby, Scritti Politti, Crowded House, Jellyfish, Dodgy

There is no way that one would call any of these acts rock by any means, they are clearly pop, but still, they wrote or write largely all of their own material.

And when you play power chords you make Euro-Trance!

Ned, come to Toronto so I can buy you a beverage.

Also, continuing from my post from yesterday...if all music was made by Milla this debate would not need to be made at all.
Writes and Plays her own songs + Talent + Saucy Underwear Model == Perfection.

Yum!