Have Greil Marcus (et al) weighed in on the rockism issue?

Huh?

Whoa dude!

haha!

why you wanna hate hegelian marxism?

I disagree with Greil Marcus 90% of the time, but there's no way the man's a racist. Why doesn't someone call this Tippy Turtle out on the fact that tossing about hysterical (and frequent) accusations of racism is, you know, slanderous. Not to mention pathetic.

(a) people who don't like rockism
(b) people who disagree with them

Yeah, it's great. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, it's hard to deny that he reaches a sustained eloquence that is quite scintillating. I think the context needed to follow his post is that the guy Carl at Zoilus is undertaking a project to re-evaluate Celine Dion, motivated by the fear that he may be overlooking something of value in an artist whose popularity has defied critical disapproval for so long. Simon had criticized that effort in a previous post as being quasi-Maoist. In the current post, here, he takes that dispute as the starting point for a wide-ranging exploration of the intellectual and political roots of the poptimist project.

Interesting. Seeing how Simon names Frank Kogan three times in that post, he might want to read the Celine Dion piece Frank wrote in the Voice a couple years ago.

i think that celine is a demographic issue, it is mostly bought/loved by people who are in a demographic advertisors have decided as unsuitable, for one reason or another.

i have also heard enough of her music, to know that i dont like the way it sounds, i think this whole popist/rockist shit flinging contest should be settled in with critically receiving everything one hears, and when you come down to it, and you dont like it, then drop it.

i dont like beans, i dont eat beans, in chilli, in cassoluets, on toast, with franks, as a side dish, lima, fava, navy, kidney i just dont like them. i have tasted them in all of the above dishes and varieties. it just aint goin' in my gullet.

i dont like celine (and dont really find her interesting, like i dont find most mariah, shania, etc interesting) they tend to grate, for a variety of social and formal reasons. listening to them i often find physically painful, the lyrics are sappy, and the bombast is unpleasent. but then i dont really like sopranos, and the female singers i like who have a techincal mastery (callas, odetta, anderson, etc) tend to have deep voices.

the exception is joan baez, but thats mostly i think growing up in a hippie household.

The reason that these words are coming under interrogation is not merely because of anti-vanguardism w/r/t aesthetics, but because the words are too damn vague. Any of these criticisms can be valid, but a person has to explain why they're valid in a particular instance and how, specifically, it works. How is it that something seems overproduced? How is something "too clean" or "slick?" Why, in a particular instance, is melodrama unpleasant or annoying? Etc.

It's interesting that this outrage at the privileging of certain perspectives is not something that bubbled up from the grassroots - ie., from the people who are supposedly being disenfrachised by it - but rather it is something that is coming down from those in the so-called elite, privileged positions. If there has been an uprising of Toby Keith and Lil Jon fans against the slighting of their favorite music in the pages of the NY Times or other elite cultural venues, then I haven't heard about it. Is it possible that these fans really don't give two shits what is said about their favorite music in the pages of the Times? Is it even more likely that they would secretly prefer that their music was ignored and/or lambasted by the cultural elites, because an anti-elite status is part of what attracts them to these artists? Perhaps the surest way that the elites could destroy the credibility of these slighted artists amongst their fans would be to embrace them.

Actually, it's just honest curiosity. Ever since this "rockist" epithet resurfaced, I've often wondered what that generation thinks of those artists the self-proclaimed "anti-rockists" champion today.

That's why I like the term "anti-rockist" when talking about these things. I'm not sure if there's such a thing as a "rockist" - it's more a term that gets hurled at people by others, others who then get to feel all superior and warm inside. Exactly when did you stop beating your wife?

By talking about anti-rockism you're focusing on the discourse-framers, which is really the more interesting topic.

Next question, who are the anti-rockists? Have you now or have you ever been a member of the anti-rockist party?

http://www.retrotrader.com/catalog/images/new007%20035.jpg

I've never bought this as an arugment against the existence or non-existence of "rockism": did racists, sexists, misogynists, etc. ever describe themselves using these terms? Would the yes or no answer to this question necessarily change your or my use of these terms? Should it?

TRASHMASTER. (BTW, heard yer CDs finally, liked 'em a lot! Hard to listen to them at proper volume at work, though. ;-) )

o.nate, (and lets never mind the catch 22 of yr "elites""grassroots" dichotomy) this isn't about getting certain artists into the pages of the Times. And you could read your statement and have it be about ANY artists, indie rock or mainstream country. PBS-ification happens no matter what - its just a matter of ensuring that certain artists are not forgotten simply because they weren't playing FOR critics.

Now Deej, didn't we talk about this a bit when you first joined the boards? ;-)

:-)

-- Michael Daddino (epicharmu...), June 9th, 2006.

Well, for one thing, we're talking about music, which makes the "-ism" label seems kind of over the top in the first place (might be part of the allure of the word "rockism," if you don't these things too seriously).

Aside from that, I'm not sure if racists/sexist/misogynist terminology helps debate or stifles it. I call you a racist. Now you're yelling at me, or defending yourself. It's a shortcut word that usually signifies the end of civilized discourse.

Unless you actively take up the name (as some racists / sexists do) I don't think they're particularly helpful terms, no.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), June 9th, 2006.

(blushing)

Perhaps this was once an issue back in the days when printing presses were expensive and only the establishment could afford to print criticism. Forgive me for getting all techno-futurist and internet-millenial, but the internet changed all that. Today every band gets the critics it deserves, and they all have blogs, or MySpace pages, to celebrate their love. There's no longer the need for any critic to think that they have some privileged position that places some duty of neutrality or covering "everything" equally on them.

I think the internet has the potential to do what you say, but realistically, if 'today every band gets the critic it deserves' was true we wouldn't be having this discussion.

See, I think Nate understands part of what I was saying above, except in this little slip here: what constitutes "cultural conversation?" Where, precisely, are rockist attitudes so overwhelming? If we were at all honest about this, we'd have to admit that apart from middle-aged men, classic rock stations, and indie kids (i.e., people who have pledged themselves to the culture of rock), the main places where run-of-mill rockism is really so overwhelming consist of the middlebrow publications most of us pay attention to. This is because we ourselves come from a culture that asks for music to be considered "seriously," and these publications are the ones that speak the same "serious" language we privilege as being the stuff that really matters. Look at the real bulk of "cultural conversation" in America, though, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a particular problematic strain of rockism infecting anything. (Funny that deej's reasoning for why that doesn't matter is history, the way rock bands get canonized and pop bands don't -- hasn't one major argument of anti-rockist thought been all about impermanence being okay?) The boring old rockism of those middlebrow publications -- how much is it on network television or People magazine?

Well, here's the trick: it is, but only insofar as everyone has it. I mean, fine, let's describe "rockism" as "bias masquerading as objectivity," or whatever that was. But when it comes down to it, that's pretty indistinguishable from everyday fandom. Jazz fans who say hip-hop isn't really music, folk preservationists talking about how valuable the music's human connections are, salsa fans who'd say rock just sounds like noise to them, hip-hop fans who don't much care for anything but hip-hop. On some level that can just be what it means to belong to a culture -- to think it's just plain better than the alternatives. (All we ask in real life is that people realize how subjective that is, and not be dicks about it.)

Right. But when we're talking about critics, as distinct from just fans, it seems reasonable to ask that they recognize and confront that subjectivity, at least a little -- that they can speak eloquently about getting outside of it, and reacting to music that doesn't come only from whatever music-culture they personally pledge. Totally fair. What's interesting to me, though, is that those involved in our whole rockism conversation aren't much worried about all culture-allegiances. We're worried about one in particular, and that's Old-Fashioned Rockism. Nobody berates a salsa evangelist -- we'd find one interesting, a fascinating new opinion to bring into the mix!

And this is why I say there is some narcissism of medium-sized differences going on here; this is why I say that the emotion I see underpinning anti-rockism is just BE LESS BORING. It consists of a lot of people within a particular discourse -- a middlebrow discourse that's flooded with predictable rockism and indie-rockism -- suddenly butting against that tendency. It consists of people who wondered why the New Yorker couldn't say something decent about hip-hop -- and not why The Source wasn't saying something interesting about the Guggenheim. It consists, if you ask me, in a lot of the same specialists-kicking-against-the-middlebrow impulses that were presumably responsible for rockism (and modernism, and indie culture) in the first place.

Which is fine by me, to be completely honest, and useful in terms of getting decent criticism out of people; more good writing comes from investigating outside your sworn culture than elsewhere, sure. But I do feel like some of the rhetoric of it all just hides a much simpler and purer and more basic social (rather than intellectual) urge.

I don't understand how exactly Sterling was disagreeing with me, though from the way he's dismissing my argument up there I'm tempted to think he wasn't entirely following it. (Which is okay; I'm not entirely following his, either.)

I do! If that's all they evangelise. To me, anti-rockism has to default to anti-everythingism. But y'know I'm not really coming at this from a current-state-of-music-criticism perspective.

I think it's more likely that the way we discuss music will impact the way future generations will remember us. The music will still be there for them to refer to. If the music's great, and we're on record as saying it's crap, then we'll look like idiots. I don't think that today's critics should refrain from judgment out of fear of future generations' disapproval. Judgment is a critic's job, after all.

(a) Is it possible that history-keeping and canon-making is just a rockist tendency? I.e., the rockists win that war because they bother fighting it?

(b) Is it possible that we look in the wrong directions for history? Should we go to old copies of Rolling Stone to figure out what things used to be like, or should we watch variety shows and read celebrity magazines?

(c) As with point (a), is it possible that even beginning to approach the written history of music is something that's mostly done by people who are already a little bit pledged to the kind of discourse we call rockist?

So I agree with you, but I feel like there's something else bubbling in there. Possibly the transition of critical missions has been: (1) "we will record the life of the music we like," (2) "we are recording the life of all music that's worthwhile, i.e., the music we like," and then finally (3) "surely other music is worthwhile too, so clearly our mission now is to record the life of it all." And that's a totally fair sequence, although the thing that goes unexamined in there is the part of #2 where the recording begins to aspire to universality -- the part where it goes from a self-acknowledged special interest to wanting to be something grander.

I'm almost convinced your neighbours used those Eurotrance records to fall asleep so they wouldn't be exposed to your wild 'n' wacky choices of records.

It's funny, cause you probably say to your friends (and yourself): I only play the music I like, I don't give a shit what others think. Yet... you do give a shit.

er, no it doesn't. at least, most of it doesn't. not more than any other kind of music anyway.

Objectivity when deployed right is totally punk -- or the aim of objectivity is at least. If ppl. actually get meaning out of rock (rather than transfering meaning TO rock) then they're not rockists at all.

Rockism when deployed right is also totally punk. Punk when deployed right is totally pro-pop too.

The NY times gives T Keith and Lil Jon their due actually (tho T Keith and Lil Jon [and so of course their fans] like to pretend they don't) except the due they give them is PBS due.

The Source is boring too I should note and maybe would be less so if they covered T Keith as much as the Times (though I doubt it).

Again, I wanna know who the "it's all good, we all have tastes, let's say everything is good" people are. Because they're sure not critics (except maybe actually the rockist ones in retreat).

comparing Beyonce's musical dishonesty to Mitt Romney's intrigues me

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/books/review/greil-marcuss-history-of-rock-n-roll-in-ten-songs.html

Kind of a weird analogy:

but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on ‘American Idol’ is supposed to sound.”