It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

Critics and cannons have always served a purpose for me.

http://content.scholastic.com/content/media/products/7X/043965467X_rgb8_xlg.jpg

lolz

"i think the only real problem with the big C Canon is that the lazy assumptions that formed it still inform a lot of non-specialist music writing, so you're still gonna rub up against painful examples of it in the popular media every so often, in the same way that school literature classes cling on to ideas of criticism that most professionals have long moved on from."

i agree!

has there always been such a huge agreement between rock critics before?

(I don't remember if we ever covered that aspect of theat in those huge post-GAPDY P&J conversations)

that Lester Bangs line "I can guarantee you one thing, we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis" seems pertinent

xpost

"except for Tuneyards"

lol

i can't remember if i'm a rock critic anymore, but i don't agree on lots of things that critics agree on. i think the history of pop music crit is pretty dismal though. like, i'm way more apt to read and agree with a 50 year old lit crit book or film crit book than i am an old book about rock or pop or whatever. bangs and all them, they were really entertaining and i like their love of language, but they were so friggin' dismissive of so much music. and i kinda can't take them seriously about music because of that. and while i'd like to think that people have broader horizons now, i'm not so sure if that's true. i think most criticism is the pits nowadays.

so true

i guess for all the old lit and film crit had an element of exclusion it was centred on close reading which is never completely useless. the history of music crit feels more centrally concerned with praising one thing at the expense of a lot of others, maybe because there's a lot less close reading going on.

Not sure Bangs is the best example there--his single most famous piece was a passionate defense of garage bands that people dismissed or had forgotten about at the time. (xxpost)

he may have been soft on garage bands but dude definitely was happy to dismiss large swaths of music

i mean i love bangs, but yeah he's a great example of someone saying culture is worthless for pretty solipsistic reasons

I just think Bangs and Marcus and the rest praised what they loved and dismissed what they didn't, like anybody else. Sometimes, like Marcus with the Velvet Underground, they'd experience a turnaround years later.

Sorry--old guy defends older/dead guys. Habit of mine.

music is just a very different medium from lit or film and is a lot more resistant to consensus or universal standards that transcend cultural differences. for one thing a lot more happens much more quickly, other artforms don't have much of an analog to new songs being released and discussed literally every minute of every day, even pre-internet. a lot of good and interesting stuff can be done with music crit but canon-building and asserting values, narratives tends to be kind of a mug's game imo.

i'd argue it's a mug's game with other artforms too but i get your point

Not sure what i think about this canon business - had sorta assumed it had faded a bit as "a thing"

― coal, Friday, July 20, 2012 2:30 AM (4 hours ago)

music is just a very different medium from lit or film and is a lot more resistant to consensus or universal standards that transcend cultural differences.

― Barack 2 Chainz Obama (some dude), Friday, July 20, 2012 7:24 AM (2 minutes ago)

"it holds"

those "Acclaimed Music" lists are nothing to go by really tho cos they're the work of a tiny fraction of music listeners with a specific kind of bias?

if those wretched fucking "acclaimed music" top lists that someone keeps polling are any indication, then the canon is alive and well and hasn't shifted much in the last couple decades. the consensus is strong, it was established early, and at holds. btw, rock albums by white guys are the best.

― contenderizer, Friday, July 20, 2012 10:36 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

the consensus is weak vs. other mediums though, is my point. i don't know if a mainstream list of the best films or books from a given year would prompt dozens/hundreds of alternative suggestions like an album list would. music is still a much more personal/subjective experience in terms of people happily putting their favorites up against the known classics.

lol contendo I was just going to bring those up. Yeah, the canon exists, but considering how inordinately pissed those polls make you, maybe we'd be better to go on acting like it didn't :)

btw, rock albums by white guys are the best.

― contenderizer, Friday, July 20, 2012 10:36 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

kinda racist, but you have a point

i mean zz top and all

was contend making a point or just expressing the same taste he always does there

canons are more a product of mass consensus than elite management.

canons are more a product of mass consensus than elite management.

I agree, which is why canon-building always strikes me as a futile exercise

i don't buy that, tho yr elite might be a pretty big group. sure we've been here before anyway, disconnect between biggest sellers in various artforms and yr actual Canon is usually clear

but again, in the case of literature or movies you can absolutely point to a handful of critics who play a big role in shaping the canons

canons are pretty interesting

'the canon' is pretty interesting

no one ever espoused cultural relativism and meant it

npr is not "the worlds largest public radio audience", gtfo american

"no one" is pushing it

xpost

yeah it's that tim westwood guy i think

no one ever espoused an unmotivated cultural relativism and meant it

a motivated cultural relativism is not actually cultural relativism

ergo, no one ever ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums

How many of these albums regularly appear on "all-time greatest" lists?
How many of these albums contain songs that regularly appear on "all-time greatest" lists?

The disconnects can be explained by the albums/songs in question being too recent to be properly canonized as easily as them not being approved by the tastemakers

My main point here, and I think this ties into some dude's point about the mass production and saturation point of music, is that the distance between "the canon" and "the popular" isn't nearly as large as one would think. Obviously there are canonized acts who are not megasellers, I'm not trying to argue there aren't, but you can't handwave the influence of popularity on what strains of music people start with when coming up with canonized lists.

maybe cultural relativism is an unexamined way of thinking for a lot of people who don't think about criticism?

well if i had to put numbers on it i'd say it's 70/30 "what everyone enjoys and plays voluntarily"/"what critics want to talk about"

critics meaning the whole range of deep-interest folks, ie anyone on ILM, etc. "everyone" is a highly divided thing, too, by genre and identity.

critics are stereotypically known for trying legislate in the unpopular-but-worthy; their most important bad function is masking or ignoring things that are absolutely canonical (in the sense that further listener experience and artist work can't help but be informed by x artwork), but that's a well-known class and media-access story about what is discussed seriously.

he may have been soft on garage bands but dude definitely was happy to dismiss large swaths of music

― da croupier, Friday, July 20, 2012 7:18 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean i love bangs, but yeah he's a great example of someone saying culture is worthless for pretty solipsistic reasons

― da croupier, Friday, July 20, 2012 7:20 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Which swaths did he dismiss? Disco?

And I'm not sure how his criticisms of things were more solipsistic than others.

others' criticisms, I mean

so sick of Shania and Celine and Whitney and AC/DC clogging up critics' all time greatest lists

n.v. i think 'unexamined ways of thinking' are probably the majority of cases of what i'm calling 'not meaning it'. also did you see that q feature on the making of the dirty dancing soundtrack because man what a snooze

bangs thought 1979 was the worst year for music ever. all those guys kinda gave up on everything shortly after doors debut.

truly they were the Youtube commenters of their era

it is funny to me how so many older critics seem to hold a candle for The Doors considering that they're probably the LEAST revered big band of that era among critics now

Yeah, but the question would be about what they missed and how much that would affect your perspective on their careers. It would have been cool if Bangs had stuck up for Off the Wall - sure.