Sunday, March 16, 2008

Over the past three months, whenever (like today) I've felt like procrastinating from the massive amount of work and papers I should be focusing on, I've turned to reading and mulling over a bunch of long form music criticism endlessly. I've kind of refrained from dipping my toe in the water because...well, cowardice mainly. There are already people out there tackling this stuff in an interesting, articulate manner, but it's probably time to start puzzling out my stances on this stuff rather than just absorbing uncritically. Even if it's been written about before, or better.

Anyway, not sure if I'll write something out tonight. If I don't, it'll wait until I'm done these stupid papers. The point is simply that posting this should (hypothetically) motivate me to actually write. In the meantime, some interesting music writing:

Rules of the Game - Frank Kogan.

Kogan's probably my favourite writer of criticism at the moment. His pet project is exploring what music does and how we use it. Intelligent and exploratory, although his modus operandi is often to assume that his audience needs to be cajoled out of certain modes of thought. This would come across as a bit condescending at times if he weren't absolutely right. This stuff kind of guided me through the January bubblegum pop experiment. Speaking of which,

Cure for Bedbugs - Dave Moore

More freeflow in form than Kogan's stuff and easier to follow if you work your way forward from the beginning.

Clap Clap

The Late, Great Stylus Magazine

Filled with great stuff...wander through the archives. Miss this site like whoa.

Anyway...I'm not sure where I want to go with my stuff...The teenpop/country kick that Bedbugs and Kogan provoked me onto is still going strong, but I'm not sure what I have to say about it right now that they haven't. Also, the only people likely to read this are friends of mine, and I don't have the patience to try and convince them of the merits of having a serious discussion about Paris/Lindsay/Ashlee/Miley. Hell...it took me a few months to get past my issues with it, and I was consciously seeking to be pushed. That said, this tends to be where I find the most volatile discussions of music going on so odds are on ILM or Kogan provoking me into some kind of response.

"Indie" is frustrating me right now, and I have a rant in me on the stagnation of rock due to its obsession with "canon" and "importance" and how the shift away from the sense that music has political agency and towards an apolitical nature has left rock as a genre at loose ends. That said, it's a) probably been written about at length elsewhere b) an underdeveloped train of thought and c) a set of ideas that i don't necessarily think is correct. I need to work it out a bit more.

Part of me wants to say that rock lacks ambition, or at least the ambition to be the best due to the glass ceiling of canon, something which a genre like rap inherently lacks (I mean...GoaT is something endlessly debatable and a title claimed by every third rapper) and pop, which is kind of a perpetual chain of singles trying to one up each other. Rock has diminishing returns with every "Best Band"? Coldplay will never try to be better than Radiohead and don't even hit the as good as. Beatles, Dylan, Stones, Ramones, etc. made important music that Changed the World. Ergo, we can no longer do this. Ergo, why bother trying.

Problem? Since our means of evaluating value in rock IS "importance" (= changes the world) any rock that shoots lower is not "important". Perhaps rock needs to find a new means of evaluating itself? Because idolization of the past is just resulting in an endless stream of backwards-looking signifiers and revivals. The Killers have already done both parts of the 80s moving from gaudy to Springsteen. Springsteen's the big touchstone of the past year or two wrt "importance" (see Neon Bible, Boys and Girls in America, etc.). Which is not to say that these are bad albums or albums I dislike, but simply that they're operating quite restrictedly. Maybe?

I want rock to find a way to explore, incorporate other genres and have fun while doing so. Instead of shooting for "important" just...move forward and see where we can go with it. As I type this I'm coming up with a list of rock bands that don't really fit with this. Hmmph.

This doesn't mean that pop is better than rock per se, but just that as the industry is declining in sales and stability, a lot of rock is still trying to make big important albums in the old model of culture while pop is trying on 400000 different outfits to see what will work and spitting out stuff that's got both nothing and everything to lose and is thus awesome.

Gah. Ok. Poorly thought out, general, lacking in concrete examples or argumentation, filled with bullshit assumption and false dichotomies. Scratch this. I'll come back to it later. Hopefully with something specific, thoughtful and original.

5 comments:

Digitalis said...

Hey Alex,

I know you included a disclaimer on the bottom about how you don't really have any supports, but even though I acknowledge it, I choose to ignore it. :P

I can see how you may think that rock is moving in the direction of "why bother" and apoliticism (sp?), but what if a) Coldplay won't surpass Radiohead because they're just not that talented or b) we see the trend as it is now, but we're viewing it from a bias of living here and now (we're on the wrong end of the pendulum swing between war, repression, and revolution).

I'm very ignorant about music, but in environmental science, Asimov claimed that hurricanes were becomming more frequent due to environmental turmoil, but he was apparently just seeing the momentary upswing of a general downward pattern. Or something like that.

~ Pamela.

Frank Kogan said...

Prior to trying to cajole people I tried badgering and berating them. Experience shows that it makes little difference what tone or strategy I use: a few will be moved to change, most won't. I suppose flat-out rage would be less condescending, but these days anger makes me stupid, so I've been trying to cut down on it.

Are LCD Soundsystem and Panda Bear (for instance) using the idea of "canon" as a glass ceiling, trying not to be better than some Great Artists who preceded them? I think LCD and Panda Bear are vastly overrated, especially Panda Bear, and in both cases it's the singing that's deadeningly mediocre, but I don't think there's the ethos that, "Oh, all the great singing is in the past, so we shouldn't try." It's more like "Great singing is a dead language that's no longer available to us (or is owned by the wrong people, or something), so therefore we can take our own shitty singing as a starting place to maybe develop something new." But I don't know if that's their ethos either, and maybe they think their singing is good, anyway. (And I think James is at his best when he's doing a straight-up Mark E. Smith imitation.)

it's a) probably been written about at length elsewhere

By maybe four or five people, at the most, and few of us followed through on our thoughts with any persistence. Your actual attitude should be "If I don't write about this, no one else will, and the few who do so will probably screw it up and ultimately evade the issue, so it's up to me."

A couple more thoughts:

Beatles and Stones had no clue of their future importance (or intention to be important, as far as I can tell), and Dylan's most influential stuff was in 1965 and 1966 when he turned away from specific political agitation.

So "importance" is often accidental, and often occurs precisely where someone is far from the well-worn groove of "importance," capital-I Importance being a dead world or one that apparently belongs to someone else.

Frank Kogan said...

Btw, ILM seems to have been taken over by babies, bullies, and bores, and a lot of the original crew has migrated over to poptimists, though its being on livejournal is something of a pain in the ass, given that livejournal nests threads and doesn't show new posts, so if you're not on a thread the day of the convo, you've basically missed it, and few people see late posts.

But here are a couple of interesting threads on "influence" from last year, if you want to take a look:

the impulse to group-historicise vs the causes of bad writing

(dubdobdee is Mark Sinker, freakytigger is Tom Ewing (the guy who started ILM back in the day), dickmalone is Mike Barthel, braisedbywolves is Andrew Farrell, katstevens is Kat Stevens (but not Cat Stevens), jauntyalan is Alan Trewartha (I think that's his last name), xyzzzz__ is Julio Desouza.)

i opened the window and INFLUENZA

(And by the way, here's my own livejournal.)

Frank Kogan said...

Because of software glitches or something, a few links are missing from that page that has my Rules Of The Game links, so go here for #28 (which is my favorite of recent weeks, about Taylor Swift's dresses), here for #27, and here for #23. I doubt now that this will ever get corrected, since they've asked me stop submitting my column for the time being, and I think it's quite possible they'll kill it permanently, given that there's been a staff shakeup at LVW and both the people I worked for are gone.

Brendan McKendy said...

From the archives:
http://weasel-seeker.livejournal.com/41148.html