Yup. I liked it, took notes, got a half-dozen new names.
I do feel a little guilty about not keeping up with new music or expanding my playlist, but I just have enough. Dexter Gordon and Cesaria Evora have not yet been exhausted.
I'm saving up my troll-force for the Jonathan Chait bashing thread. Nobody in that webstorm has pulled Spivak from behind the poster yet.
(And I still recommend a visit to Kotsko's. Radical academic feminism + negative theology gets absolutely psychedelic. Help me out here on distinguishing that discourse from something "sophomoric.")
Yup. I liked it, took notes, got a half-dozen new names.
I do feel a little guilty about not keeping up with new music or expanding my playlist, but I just have enough. Dexter Gordon and Cesaria Evora have not yet been exhausted.
I'm saving up my troll-force for the Jonathan Chait bashing thread. Nobody in that webstorm has pulled Spivak from behind the poster yet.
(And I still recommend a visit to Kotsko's. Radical academic feminism + negative theology gets absolutely psychedelic. Help me out here on distinguishing that discourse from something "sophomoric.")
I skimmed the linked exchange and mostly thought it was interesting, slightly pretentious, and a little much for early in the morning. But then I got to the discussion of pop music, and I have to say that it just clunked.
I recently read on one of those sites a thoughtful essay arguing that resistance to Beyoncé as a feminist role model must be rooted in fear of blackness and sexuality. Fair enough, and I love Beyoncé's music -- I finally bought the self-titled album on vinyl and it's just perfect pop. But is it not problematic that she's worth hundreds of millions of dollars? If she's a feminist role model, where does that leave feminist critiques of affective and domestic labor (Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James)? Who speaks for undocumented women who clean toilets for minimum wage? I mean, it's farcical.
You know, I've always wondered if you like Beyoncé -- glad this mystery is now solved! Anyway, I don't want to sound grumpy, but the more interactions I have with college students who are desperate for a feminist culture that simply was more visible when I was growing up than it is now, the more reasonable it seems to draw a line in the sand and say, "It's a better world where X-Ray Spex puts out records with EMI and you could see Salt-N-Pepa and Sonic Youth on MTV than one where it blows people's minds that a public figure would self-identify as a feminist." Beyoncé's never going to hook up with Precarias a la Deriva, and Taylor Swift is never going to write a song about how Manhattan is a gated community embowered by a police state. But as a person like you, with a great love for popular music, I think we've had and should have a more interesting and robust mainstream. What's happened to radio in this country, and to the price and possibility of being an independent musician, is not trivial; it's slashed and burned the field of what's sonically, lyrically, and politically available.
That seems like way too much work trying to say something that sounds smart, without actually engaging with pop music in a meaningful way.
Now, obviously, I should qualify this by saying that they (apparently) listen to contemporary pop music, and I mostly ignore it so they may have more reason to be frustrated with it but . . .
1) "I think we've had and should have a more interesting and robust mainstream. What's happened to radio in this country, and to the price and possibility of being an independent musician, is not trivial; it's slashed and burned the field of what's sonically, lyrically, and politically available." That sounds good, but I'm not sure what it actually means. That seems like a rhetorical gesture rather than an actual thought. Yes, pop radio appears to be fairly uninteresting right now but that fact seems fairly irrelevant to what's lyrically and politically available.
2) "If she's a feminist role model, where does that leave feminist critiques of affective and domestic labor" again seems like a bit of posturing and a bit of creating a strawman. No, Beyonce isn't doing much to advance feminist critiques of affective and domestic labor, but would we expect her to? Does anybody working on those issues think that people calling Beyonce a feminist takes away any energy which would otherwise have been available for political reform?
Secondly I'll note that if you want to look for mainstream pop music that engages with class politics I still think of County (and, I presume that there's still political hip-hop, but I'm less familiar with that). See, for example this review of American Middle Class.
Her solo album refuses the romantic sentiment of some of new Nashville's worst excesses, such as how the genre seems to now advertise small towns, drinking, Sunday church and Saturday fucking. There is something slippery in Presley's response to these excesses, and this unresolved quality establishes a difficult tension with how to love a place, where you are aware of its hypocrisy, and the genuine violence that occurs in that space, the reconciling could be seen to be impossible. This is especially true in the problems of the domestic, especially the intersection of domestic trauma and drugs or alcohol. If we are talking about moralism, this might be the best argument in favour of prohibition, while knowing how much of a disaster the war on drugs is. This is only one example of being caught between two middles.
The whole album is filled with the aching melancholy of wanting something and never getting it, or never wanting someone because you will never get it. How everyone is both broke and broke down, the corruption and failure of the market rotting from the bottom and squeezing from the top, is profoundly realized here. I am thinking especially of the one-two punch of "American Middle Class" and "Dry Country Blues", which arrives in the middle of the album. "American Middle Class" begins with a taped interview with Presley's father, discussing his coal miners history. She calls herself a product of the "never give up, american middle class", and this might be the first mention in recent memory of a big label record extolling the ethics of Union history, but it also talks about how "scholarships went to the rich / and grants went to the poor", about shit jobs and bad degrees, and eventually becoming a part of the middle class. I keep thinking that the right and the left are collapsing among people Presley's age. This song, which talks about how her father didn't get a pension, works hard enough to pay for welfare families, but also about how the middle class sustains America, and how that sustaining class is dying, with the anthemic chorus about tearing down the poor house, but only if we can build it up again, suggests a radical ambivalence that surrounds American politics.
I don't love the song, and I haven't bought the album, but it's clearly (if incoherently) political, and she's sung on Letterman -- and seems like clearly part of the mainstream.
I do feel a little guilty about not keeping up with new music
Also, I have to recommend a recent album that I've been really enjoying lately -- Leyla McCalla's Veri-Colored Songs.
It's an impressively ambitious and personal project for a debut album -- most of the tracks are poems by Langston Hughes set to music, there are a couple of Haitian folk songs, and one original composition. It could easily feel overwrought, or just leaden and too serious. But it manages to be musically interesting, serious, and yet with a real interest in the veins of humor in Hughes' poetry.
Here's the opening track which I think is stunningly good, "Heart Of Gold."
The opening lines, "If I had a heart of gold / Like some folks I know. / I would sell my heart of gold / And move North with the dough." are funny without being a joke -- serious, but I still chuckle each time at the rhyme of "know" and "dough."
Or listen to "Too Blue" which is another example of just how individual her style is, and how good she is!
3.last made me smile from ear to ear
I'll look for her.
I can't bear to see a thread with just bob and NickS. Too odd couple.
3.last made me smile from ear to ear
I hadn't thought about that, but it does seem perfectly suited to your sensibilities -- and notice, she's smiling too when she plays it.
Beyonce's anthems of the past 5 years seem to amount to "I am the world's greatest and wealthiest person, everyone else is pathetic". But just as with all the rap about bitches and money, it seems like people in the "everyone else" category see it as empowering, so who knows.
I hasten to add, that also applies to the lyrics of Motley Crue and Kiss and bands like that. I remember back then wondering why your average small-town fan didn't just feel enraged and insulted by songs about a rock star's hedonistic lifestyle.
This was pretty neat. I wouldn't have seen it on my own; thanks for posting.
I think I'm going to get that romanticism book. What she said about it reminded me a lot of Frederic Jameson's chapter on Le Guin in his SF book. (Of which, actually, I remember only the short section on fantasy (I disagree with it totally and Hal Duncan's ideas are much better); the chapter on Le Guin which I like; and the chapter on KS Robinson, which I really read only for the plot summaries as I had not read any KSR at the time so I don't know if his argument is any good. And then I lost the Jameson when we moved, or I lent it to someone...*
As far as the pop music section: it seems like the hip thing for young academics now is to talk about how they looooove Taylor Swift or some other bubble gummy young pop singer. It's sort of a way of performing cuteness and modernity and "I am smart but we can still talk about Taylor Swift", and a way of disavowing an older generation's borrrrrrrring old-person critique of major labels, etc. I assume that in earlier years one would have loved the Taylor Swift equivalent but not made as much noise about it.
(I was just thinking at the gym - while listening to my special anti-humanist gym mix - that a whole bog-standard genre of small label/independent nineties dance/industrial has totally gone the way of the dodo - that whole Meat Beat Manifesto-ish kind of dance music that had all these anti-capitalist lyrics and was deeply skeptical of consumer culture (while being embedded in it, yes, I know). And now it just sounds dated, like why would anyone who wasn't some kind of Truthout weirdo make or listen to music like this? Although it's absolutely superlative for making the body into a good little gym robot.)
Beyonce: better than Madonna, both as a musician and politically speaking. Queer academics who were super into Madonna in the nineties had at least better be into Beyonce now.
I do think that the "Beyonce the best feminist" thing that you see on tumblr is very much used to silence any kind of speaking about class and labor. As a white person, I'm not going to try to police any conversations about Beyonce, but I've seen a bunch where basically any talk of Beyonce's class position, wealth, the creepy glorification of owning lots of stuff and having servants (which I find the creepiest bit) gets stopped cold as politically offensive.
Was not entirely comfortable with the "why must we explore difference when what matters is solidarity" line in the interview and was not entirely surprised to see that it came from a white-appearing dude. It was interesting to see the response recalibrate his point.
"This in turn means rejecting claims that there is nothing distinctive about humans as a species, or that the category of "species" is itself arbitrary." That is an interesting thing to say, a great way to make yourself unpopular and probably the wave of the future.
*Oh, also, I lent a book to someone I don't even like, who doesn't like me, and with whom I had a very awkward evening. He borrowed the book as sort of an "I don't hate you" gesture and I lent it as sort of an "I don't hate you either, probably" kind of gesture, and I expect never to see him again, and now my copy of Mimima Moralia is gone.
As far as the pop music section: it seems like the hip thing for young academics now is to talk about how they looooove Taylor Swift or some other bubble gummy young pop singer. It's sort of a way of performing cuteness and modernity and "I am smart but we can still talk about Taylor Swift"
I think several of them actually just like Taylor Swift and like talking about music they like. I'm as into the hermeneutics of suspicion as anyone* but I don't think this is all performative. (I get the aspect of not making as much noise in years past but it could simply be easier/more accepted to make the noise, not an aggressive staking-out of territory.)
*not really
I love the idea of an anti-humanist gym mix, though. You might like some of the stuff on Public Information (though it's not overtly political)? the self-titled Acteurs album is pretty swell. Or (not on that label, also not really overtly political) maybe Prinzhorn Dance School?
One of the members of Acteurs was also in the one-off recording project Bleaks, which is super great.
10.*: Would you say you're more or less into it? I have some suspicions, but figured I might as well go to the source.
I do think that the "Beyonce the best feminist" thing that you see on tumblr is very much used to silence any kind of speaking about class and labor. As a white person, I'm not going to try to police any conversations about Beyonce, but I've seen a bunch where basically any talk of Beyonce's class position, wealth, the creepy glorification of owning lots of stuff and having servants (which I find the creepiest bit) gets stopped cold as politically offensive.
Good to know. I don't actually have a strong position on Beyonce, and I do think that most of what they were saying in the paragraphs I quoted were accurate -- I just also thought it was using pop music as a excuse for intellectual posturing.
But that's interesting to know. In the corners of the internet that I frequent I've mostly just seen comments about the idea of Beyonce as prominent feminist.
12: I'm super into that Acteurs record! What in particular were you asking about?
Oh, the hermeneutics of suspicion. Less into it.
9: I think that the idea of aspirational appreciation has collapsed, so that while a previous generation would be embarrassed admit liking Taylor Swift, now they're not.
Also, I think that there's a kind of "rally around the flag" effect. In previous generations, shitty popular entertainment aimed at men -- things like detective novels, James Bond, or Star Wars -- would be treated with a modicum of respect, while shitty popular entertainment aimed at women always embodied the worst excesses of popular culture. Openly liking Taylor Swift is a backlash to that.
Aspirational appreciation gave me the taste I have today.
(I think its collapse is unfortunate, tbh. And I could have benefited so much more!)
10: I mean, yes, people like what they like...but I've noticed this huge uptick in a sort of teenybopper "oh I love Taylor Swift and others of her ilk" thing in interviews and blog posts among people with pretensions to intellectualism. I feel like there was some kind of big "I went to a Taylor Swift concert and unlike what you frosty snobs might thing it was awesome" article a couple of years ago that was a tipping point. Also the whole political move toward name-checking everything that can be described as "femme" - although I feel like that's crested in queer circles for now.
I just have trouble with when it's okay to remember something in pop-academic-feminist circles and when we're supposed to politely forget it. Like, a few years ago Taylor Swift was unacceptable because of that song with the video where she wears the glasses. And Lana del Rey was unacceptably racist, but now we're all supposed to be all over her new album, same going with the tUnE-yArDs. Which just messes with me - I am perfectly okay with holding artists to stringent political standards, but it gets confusing when we're holding them to stringent standards in 2013 and it's unacceptable to like them and then in 2015 all that is forgotten. One or the other but not both.
Also I notice that I have been veering more in the direction of Scritti Politti's "Perfect Way" and such kind of poppy stuff, and I assume that the zeitgeist is getting me too - ie, I don't like what I like, I'm being influenced by whatever mysterious currents drive other academics to listen to Taylor Swift.
(My anti-humanist mix is mostly acid house, things which sound good with acid house (23 Skiddoo, for instance) and chilly yet rhythmic things generally which help me feel like a good neoliberal entrepreneurial gym-going subject. It's not so much that any of it is political except by accident; it's that all of it seems to me to deny sort of standard humanism either in tone, lyrics or structure. Not everyone might find the mix anti-humanist, though. Once I'm home and can play music, I'll listen to the Acteurs and so on.)
Music critics today are all in love with pop music -- it strikes me as a reaction against "rockism".
I am fundamentally a big old snob, and I do often judge people for liking things I consider puerile, but I think I could fundamentally do without characterizing certain tastes as bad because they're "teenybopper"-y or "housewife"-y or any of the other handy dismissive demographic labels that map too easily to "lesser women we disdain." (I find this especially true when we're talking about things that get people off -- there are about eight million zillion politically and aesthetically distressing things about the Twilight books, but every terrible review at the time that adopted a "comical" vapid tween girl voice to make fun of them really enraged me. What we find arousing is rarely highly intellectually respectable! Leave the masturbating middle-schoolers alone!)
Like, it's not just that aspirational taste has collapsed; it's that it is actively unfashionable to seem to have aspirational taste, hence one must clearly signal via referencing Taylor Swift that one does not, that it's vieux jeux, etc.
On the one hand, I've learned a lot about dance pop and bubblegum and so on and have a greater understanding of why these are important genres; on the other hand, I really just don't especially like Taylor Swift or Beyonce and I really do like, say, Owen Pallett and various kinds of shrieky wailing music and, and I've had several conversations where it's very clear that I am being seen as signaling old-fashioned and politically retrograde views when I...just like noisy and abrasive music.
Leave the masturbating middle-schoolers alone!
Words to live by!
Leave the masturbating middle-schoolers alone!
I just had to pull that out, but it's good advice especially because where you'd cross the line into sex crimes if you didn't do as rfts suggests is not entirely clear to me.
20: I think what I was trying to convey by "teenybopper" was not about the music but about a certain playacting of peppy naive youthful enthusiasm in conversations about the music. I seem to read a number of these interviews where the point of talking about Taylor Swift, etc, seems to be to convey a particular affect more than to talk about the music. It's the affect that is "teenybopper" - not a function of actually being teenage, but an image of "teenage" enthusiasm that is performed.
That's what makes me uncomfortable, actually, because taken across multiple conversations and interviews, it seems sort of unstable. Like, if we're really going to be into Taylor Swift, sure, let's be into her....but I get really uneasy when I feel like we're supposed to say that we're into Taylor Swift as a way of signalling that we have this particular way of being, an antic free spirit, etc.
But I admit that I really think that, for example, Tikkun's essay on the young-girl is misogynist, even though the young-girl is intended as a figure for, like, the neoliberal subject or something, not as an actual young girl, so I take your point.
He's not a middle-schooler. No need to be shocked.
25: Well, to really be into pop music you have to be unstable, so you can keep up with the latest trends.
So did those academics who tried to be cool by writing about Madonna back in the 90s pave the way for this sort of thing?
Agree/disagree.
27: Okay, because I cannot use words today - I was thinking of "the terms of this conversation are unstable/shifting" rather than "unstable" as a pejorative for mental illness. Just in case it seems as if I'm replacing insulting women by insulting people with mental illness.
30: We're just insulting random people because we don't like their taste in music. Is that ok?
I remember something by Dave Marsh in the . . . late 70s? early 80s? where he said something along the lines of, "Don't make fun of teenaged girls. Teenaged girls' musical taste is always right. They were right about Frank Sinatra; they were right about Elvis; they were right about the Beatles, and they were right about them *first." That's a lot of cherry picking there, but.
Is noisy and abrasive music often politically retrograde? I guess sometimes it is; I know people have suspected Magma (not really that noisy, I guess) of being fascistic. Or ... certain aspects of the occasionally noisy and abrasive neo-folk exemplified by e.g. Current 93, but mostly I think not Current 93 itself but satellite or generically affiliated acts, are definitely super sketch.
Maybe it's the sort of thing that Cardew was thinking of in "Stockhausen Serves Imperialism" that led him away from abstruse weirdness and towards bland Irish folk songs. (Not that Irish folk songs are necessarily bland, but Four Principles on Ireland definitely is.)
Like, it's anti-popular or anti-revolutionary or something.
32: Back in my day, they were right about Duran Duran. Not sure what that does to the theory.
35: Shall I post the pic of 13yo me in my fedora? Duran Duran were awesome!
36: I could be wrong, but I'm guessing Dave Marsh would disagree.
36: Ha! I remember the girls wearing fedoras trend. Now fedoras seem to be associated with MRAs for some reason I don't really understand.
25: I think you've just reached the point of grouchy old personness. (I say this because I have as well.) In two years, there will be another inexplicable shift where Swift sucks, and Tuvan throat singing is in.
Left-wing politics has always had a strong performative aspect to signal in-group membership. (In that, it's not so different from any other group, except you'd think we would know better.) The performative aspect will gyrate inexplicably at least until the Singularity. But, like Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon, you're too old for this shit.
I do think that the aspirational taste may be permanently gone, though. The modernist love of deliberate difficulty seems like a fairly time-specific event.
The stuff teen girls like is (almost always) well-crafted pop. When talented people turn their attention to well-crafted pop, you get really good music.
But I don't think anyone is seriously going to argue that NKOTB is really good music. The important thing about Marsh's statement isn't that teen girls are, literally, always right, but that they're always dismissed, even though they've been right (first) on some awfully important artists.
In the rock era, at least, I think teen boys have a much worse track record (e.g. Doors, Styx, hair metal), largely because what they like tends to be some of rock's worst excesses: self-indulgence, pseudo-erudition/sophisticaion, and a certain dumb loudness. But I'm not sure teen boys are as monolithic[-seeming?] as teen girls wrt musical preferences (does anyone ever get teen boy audiences as massive and defined as Peak Britney? I can't think of any), so the effects are hazier.
32: I think there's this weird reification of "teenage girls" though, which was what I was trying so badly to convey upthread. Teenage girls are pretty diverse and their individual musical tastes vary a ton - it's not as though all teenage girls like [particular pop artist] or teenage girls who like [particular pop artists] don't also like a lot of other stuff. Like, you look at the playlists on Rookie, and they are amazing in their breadth and quality. My college best friend's teen listening seems to have alternated between ABBA, the Dead Kennedys and Fear of A Black Planet.
33: I don't think it's whether or not complicated or abrasive music is reactionary (which seems silly and undecidable unless you're going for the very unattractive 'difficult things are too difficult for the proletariat' argument). It's that at different times it's fashionable to believe that complicated and abrasive music is radical or that it's reactionary, that pop music is a useless tool of the man or that it is radically democratic, etc. Certainly in the mid-late-nineties, it was fashionable to like abrasive music; the fashionable young academics I knew then liked Nick Cave and free jazz and....er...some other stuff that I'd have to look at some old mix tapes to remember.
It's the fact that there's fashions in moral assertions that messes with me. Like, we're supposed to forget or disregard the pronouncements about the morality of music that were such a big deal in, like 1998, while replacing them with new pronouncements about the morality of music.
It's interesting, as long as I don't have to take a position, because you go from a very developed political critique of major labels and mass distribution that is...not wrong, but rendered irrelevant by, on the one hand, the absolute success of neoliberal mass media distribution and, on the other, bandcamp and so on. So the questions being asked and answered are different. But at the same time, I feel like it's considered impolite to raise those old questions about music distribution, content and mass media, because new means of music distribution are so pervasive that it's difficult even to imagine an outside.
Fashion, ethics and signalling all go together really well, I know, but it keeps tripping me up. Fashion plus signalling, sure - why, just recently I bought a pair of fancy dark-colored suede sneakers because I keep up with men's style blogger styles and there's a shift away from preppie toward sport and a general fakey grimdark-ness and I'm shifting right along with it; ethics plus signalling, god knows you can't be an activist of any kind without annoying everyone around you with endless blah blah.
a certain dumb loudness
I am kinda getting into Hard Rock from, say, Blüe Øystër Cült up-to-but-not-including-GnR and Mrs. K-sky has drawn a frickin' line in the sand. I think it was me cooking dinner to the strains of "Here I Go Again On My Own" that did it. I was such a TMBGy high school boy! I never did the cock rock propaganda.
42.1: Doesn't everybody listen to way more stuff than they used to? I mean, Marsh was writing ~35 years ago. Color me skeptical that most teen girls then were listening to Donna Summer and Styx and Gang of Four and Barry Manilow. In the AM era, Top 40 was pretty diverse stuff (in its way), but I feel as if that gave way to the segmentation that dominated from (say) 1980-2000, when file sharing meant that it was trivial to amass a really broad collection without spending a ton of money (I think there were music world trends as well, but I don't think it was pervasive until it became cheap/free to own a bunch of stuff by a whole bunch of various artists).
42.2 is pretty great.
43: When I was in that target demo, my idea of dumb loudness was pretty circumscribed. I liked rock music, but The Who were the only primarily loud band I owned. I never liked GnR, frex.
In what non-nerd world has Star Wars even been treated with a modicum of respect? I mean, sure, people appreciate the money it made, but the thing itself?
43, 45: if you don't like "Welcome to the Jungle" (or most of that album, for that matter), there's something wrong with you. And I say that as someone who booed Axl Rose when he opened for the Rolling Stones at the Coliseum.
The only time I saw the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam was opening for them. I didn't know I was supposed to boo.
44: Well, the ABBA/Fear of a Black Planet/Dead Kennedys business would have been a full 25 years ago and in small town Missouri, so there was at least some diversity of music around. I mean, it's not that every teenage girl was listening to a wide range of obscure music, but even the radio - remember the radio? I do! - had a range of stuff. And a lot of kids got stuff from their older siblings - my friend who had Pixies albums got them from her older brother at college; my friends who were into Grateful Dead bootlegs, ditto.
.....But what about the rest of the interview? Surely someone here has read Gilead. What do you think of this part?
"It's true that I refuse to read Robinson's essays all the way through, because I'll get fed up by the first paragraph; like that last one you sent me, which opens with her describing how, under the influence of her older brother, her young soul did some time "gloomily captive to the determinisms of Positivism, Behaviorism, Freudianism, Marxism, and the rest." Leaving aside the question of whether all those very different philosophical schools are actually deterministic, I find her opposition of "Modern Thought" to "liberation" deeply anti-intellectual, and for me that's an insuperable turn-off. I disliked Gilead -- which replays this same opposition between the narrator and his older brother -- for the same reason"
I have not read Gilead; now I kind of want to read it to see whether I think this is how it works. I haven't been able to get into Marilynne Robinson, but I never really thought about why that was the case.
Also, what about this? It seems like a bob passage, somehow, and I find it dangerously alluring and that "renunciation" does a lot of work:
Anyway, none of this entails commitment to a great-chain-of-being model, in which humans are and should be at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy; it just means rethinking categories like "agency" to be collective rather than individual, and oriented not toward self-actualization and fulfillment but toward the more radical purpose of renunciation.
Also, I did not mean to make this thread about Whether These Two People Are Sincere In Their Love Of Taylor Swift.
Guns N' Roses wrote at least 23 of the 25 best rock songs of all time.
50: Wow! Who knew? What are the other two?
"You can say her stories have not a word out of place" is a very telling bit of wording; it's written in the language of the blurb, not the language of conversation. Aspirational taste may be on the way out but aspirational prose (that aspires, alas, to the past's vision of what's poetic) is bigger than ever.
Slash recently got divorced (again). The most recent wife had made him sell all but a very few of his collection of literally hundreds of snakes. So now he has no wife and almost no snakes. Rock and roll is a harsh mistress.
I'm only a few paragraphs in and the amount of "as you know, Bob" is overwhelming.
46: You missed the one million words spilled on how Star Wars embodies Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey? You are a luckier man than I. Somehow, Siskel and Ebert dedicated an entire episode of their show to explicating the Campbellian themes of Star Wars.
Oh man speaking of fakey grimdarkness and shoes I found a shop on etsy run by an Italian woman with several different shoes I covet covet covet but damn, I can't afford them, especially not after forking over $$ to fix my dang automobile.
When Use Your Illusion I & II came out, I was ashamed but I wanted copies desperately. I couldn't bear the idea of GnR getting my money directly, so I haunted used record stores until I could buy it.
Anyhow, I think Frowner is onto something. There's a very specific thing about being into Taylor Swift specifically that seems to be attractive to lots of academic or well educated 30 and 40 year olds on my Facebook feed. And it's not a private liking, either, this is something people apparently want to shout to the world. (I think she's an OK pop artist myself; my kid likes her; but I would never voluntarily put on a song).
Isn't Tay Swift like, the nice white face of contemporary pop? There's something weirdly wholesome about her.
I really liked the Aphex Twin/Taylor Swift mashups that David Rees did. "To Cure a Weakling McGraw" was surprisingly good (I've never heard the original of the Swift song).
Also, I did not mean to make this thread about Whether These Two People Are Sincere In Their Love Of Taylor Swift.
It's okay, before that the thread was just the Nick and Bob Odd Couple show . . .
but even the radio - remember the radio? I do! - had a range of stuff.
It occurs to me, incidentally, that way in which I heard about the Leyla McCalla album was that it showed up as an Amazon recommendation. So there are still ways to find interesting music, even within the realms of faceless mega-corps.
Also, after Josh mentioned Tim Burke's "grasping the nettle" series in a different thread, I went back to look for Josh's comments. In doing so I noticed one of Tim Burke's replies which seems relevant to this thread and the discussion of academic tastes in popular culture (whether or not you agree with either Burke or the people in the OP).
I think one of the fundamentally difficult parts of remaining an intellectual is to learn to make intellectual responses to anti-intellectual interventions. Much as one of the hardest things about pluralism is retaining a commitment to it even in the face of anti-pluralism. So an intellectual response to an anti-intellectual dismissal requires, in my view, taking it more seriously than it takes itself. It is not as if the statement, "You are privileged and should recognize that your comment or intervention requires privilege as its necessary predicate" cannot be an intellectual statement. In fact, there's a huge, formidable, profoundly scholarly and/or intellectual literature that makes that statement in very serious ways. So even when that statement is not offered in that spirit, an intellectual engagement ought to substitute the best possible arguments for it in order to think about how to respond.
I also don't think modernist aspirational taste has gone away (look at, in different spheres, Pitchfork Magazine or whatever the art world is), but it's seen as unacceptable at cask-strength levels so people feel a need to cut it with a pop-culture mixer. You're not supposed to dislike e.g. Ulysees, you're supposed to like it but ALSO be able to quote Beyonce lyrics and, most importantly of all, be into comic books.
59: Rees, on his tumblr which I now can't seem to find again, had a post about why he did the Aphex Swift thing, part of which was that Aphex Twin is actually a big old softie (dig those melodies, man), and part of which was that TaySway is actually scary. Ah here it is.
I think Swift has an appealing public image. She's a singer-songwriter, which makes her seem less pre-packaged and more authentic. Plus, many of her songs are "fuck you" songs to exes, which makes her come across as independent.
It's been a year or two since I read Gilead (which is good and worth reading, although the religiosity may be a turnoff for you, Frowner), but I'm pretty sure that's a misstatement of the plot. I can't remember Reverend Ames (who is the narrator; he's had a child late in his life as the result of a May-December marriage and is writing a memoir for his son to read as an adult when he is dead) having a brother. Perhaps it's confusion with his friend Broughton?
There's a very specific thing about being into Taylor Swift specifically that seems to be attractive to lots of academic or well educated 30 and 40 year olds . . .
I first heard of her in Sasha-Frere Jones profile. I can't find that right now, but this from 2008 is oddly fawning.
You could also give a Swift composition like "Our Song" to someone twenty years older and it could work just fine. The concerns of kids aren't necessarily juvenile--just their reactions. Bridging this gap is the trick of pop music; when people sing "Love Me Do" to themselves on their way to a date ten years on the other side of their second divorce, it's a sign that a young songwriter has got to a universal truth. This kind of precocious wisdom is embedded in the work of songwriters like Hank Williams, Prince, Elvis Costello, and Randy Newman. People who aren't old enough to have lived the songs they've written nevertheless know how the song embodying that life should go.
I do think taht to a large extent the part of aspirational taste that claims that the thing aspired to is actually better (in any way!) than the non-aspired-to X, whatever it may be, is going/has gone by the wayside, replaced statements of mere preference (which can be shared or not shared, but are beyond critique). (Maybe my thinking this is a byproduct of too much time at Metafilter.) In which case it's natural that you'd leaven your high with your low.*
I probably shouldn't lament that but I kind of do.
* the middlebrow is still shunned, of course; that's the only thing that's really tasteless.
63: I could be imagining it, but "supposed to like Ulysses" feels like it's dying out to me. Aspirational taste is still important, but it's more proving you are a discerning consumer of roughly similar products. Pitchfork is like reading Robert Parker on wines. Nobody claims the the right cabernet makes a major statement on the human condition.
Speaking of the shunned middlebrow, after seeing the Man in the High Castle, I reread the book. The book is much better, and if you love and remember the details in the book, you may hate the TV show, as Choire Sicha does.
51: I can't really think of any, but I'm sure if I thought long enough I could come up with two others that deserve to be on the list. That's why I said "at least". Not to mention that it would border on preposterous to claim that GNR wrote all 25 of the top 25.
Ha, I did the exact same thing, beamish. I hadn't remembered the details of the book very well (though one very important thing did jump out at me—given that they seem to show Churchill at Yalta in the newsreel version of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, it looks as if they're setting up our reality to be the true one!) and was mostly curious how they were going to fit e.g. the earring (which I had misremembered as a necklace) in. I wasn't even certain that there were no scenes on the East Coast in the book, hadn't remembered that there was no armed resistance, etc.
Then I re-read the book and revised my opinion of the pilot way, way down.
70: One could perhaps describe it by saying that no one really believes, or will admit believing, in a distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Pushpin is no worse than poetry, if that's what's to your taste, but you can get better or worse pins.
There's a TV show of The Man In The High Castle?
Someone could totally troll me by claiming that there was, say, a mini-series based on The Female Man and that it was [X] based on [various statements about the show] and I would absolutely not know because there is just so much television now. I don't actually watch any of it, because I hate television*, but I like to flatter myself that I sort of know what's going on.
*Like, categorically. I keep wanting to like things because, for example, I love reading show write-ups about, e.g., Mad Men and would happily purchase a book about, e.g., Mad Men, but then I just tend not to like actually watching the actual show. On the other hand, I was reading about that sociology of deviance guy whose big contribution to the field was to show that you actually had to learn to practice deviant behavior and that it often wasn't very fun at first, and not only has this insight gotten me through a pilates class but it might also apply to TV.
Although the real moral seems to be that you can learn to like anything, which isn't precisely cheering.
73: That's sad. Part of what's great about the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy bits is that not only do they get the details of our future wrong, but they are wrong in ways that seem characteristic of science-fiction writers.
I don't think people actually believe 74, although it's certainly the officially-reigning ideology. Or, I mean, of course some people do, but not the kind of people who believed in high modernist aspirational culture in the first place. There's still a crowd of self-identified culture snobs for whom at least being able to understand the snobby side of the culture is pretty damn important. even if it's also important to demonstrate that you're also at ease with the lowbrow.
How will I support this contention empirically? Who fucking knows.
74: That's a good way to put it. I have the most exquisite taste in pins.
75: It's on Amazon. Just a pilot so far. Exec produced by Ridley Scott, who seems to be getting worse and worse.
76: I thought the preferred reading of the discrepancies in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy wasn't that it was a parody of SF getting the future/alternate history wrong in characteristically SF ways, but a typically phildickian implication that our reality is false too. (I guess these don't need to compete. Also I don't know if Dick was already onto the falsity-of-this-reality thing when he wrote TMitHC.)
What is the 23rd best G&R song? Maybe "Move to the City."
I do think taht to a large extent the part of aspirational taste that claims that the thing aspired to is actually better (in any way!) than the non-aspired-to X, whatever it may be, is going/has gone by the wayside, replaced statements of mere preference (which can be shared or not shared, but are beyond critique).
Combined with terror of liking something middlebrow, although I think the new word for middlebrow is "dad". Since it would take years and years to be able to tell what is truly good as opposed to being the sort of thing your dad would think is good, it's best to avoid anything he might like. And then you can't talk about things that aren't famous because you would be implying that there's some sort of market failure, the only option is to debate what are the most rewarding things about listening to Rihanna and Zedd.
73: I didn't figure they could come any where near the book, which is more about texture, tone, aesthetics becoming ethics, non-linearity. I remember many things, the young Japanese couple with the appreciation of American craft for instance.
But I thought Blade Runner really really fucking sucked as an adaptation.
69, 74: Aren't we sold connoisseurship as a higher pleasure, even while it's applied to any old thing?
I would like to do 81.2 as a Socratic dialogue but am not Mallory Ortberg.
Also, my dad's of the age that learned High Culture just in time to try beatnikism instead, so I can't do it honestly.
76:Also I don't know if Dick was already onto the falsity-of-this-reality thing when he wrote TMitHC
He started there, 1957 book titled Eye in the Sky for instance.
And falsity isn't right, more along the line of subjective realities or perspectivism.
Or maybe false. Funny, I don't view PDK as exploring much about socially constructed realities (F 451, BNW). Very much about the individual imagination. It may have to do with his sympathy for the marginalized and subaltern.
The Awl sure doesn't play nice with links (the browser).
Blade Runner wasn't a great adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep but it's good on its own.
I could be imagining it, but "supposed to like Ulysses" feels like it's dying out to me.
More like Ulysses is good for you, and good for humankind.
Somebody said it died in Auschwitz.
For me, if it has died, it died in the weekend of Ironweed, The Names, and Falling in Place
Anybody care to say the The Wire belongs in Wilde's category of the totally useless?
87.5 is probably complete and succinct enough to make the point, but the ambition of modernism was the improvement of humankind and/or human nature. The idea is that deep, profound, challenging, or expanding art (and education), with any sort of subjective meanings for those kind of words and any scale of hierarchy of "deeper etc" you like could and would improve people, make them more tolerant, ethical, cosmopolitan, whatever better and nicer. Wiser. High Epicureanism. Platonism. Marxism. Fuck all.
Have you abandoned that? Pretty smart cultured people did Treblinka, Nanjing, Hiroshima.
I though I abandoned study as self-improvement in the early 80s, but here I am desperate sad and self-contemptuously trying to feed my soul again. Makes me wanna cry.
So now he has no wife and almost no snakes. Rock and roll is a harsh mistress.
An all time great excerpt.
Too bad they didn't use more that 49 seconds of footage.
I really hated the TMITHC TV show for about half to two thirds of the running time, but I'd been more or less won over by the end. I still vastly prefer the book, but I was enjoying it enough in its own right I'd like to see a full series.
For snarkout @67: The anti-Robinson writer has that detail right; Edward, the reverend's older brother, goes East to college and finds German philosophy, and John Ames regrets that and mulls its significance. It seems strange to assign such importance to the episode - it's a very subsidiary subplot, fitted naturally into Ames' narrative and his historical circumstances - but I suppose it would leap out at a person who's noticed and abhorred a relevant pattern in Robinson's collected writings.
(I myself have only read Gilead, but I admire it enough that it's strange I haven't taken in other Robinson novels. I wouldn't say I engaged it substantively, but its style and sensibility won me over.)
I think Robinson is absolutely fucking amazing, but the most recent, Lila, is a hugely ambitious failure. It was the moment when, for me, the edifice toppled over into preaching but that is because she is trying to show redemption and heaven in a human life, whereas the other two in the trilogy showed their glimpses of delight and perfection largely in nature and things half glimpsed.
But Home and Gilead are an unequalled discussion of the ways in which good people can be thoroughly racist.
Has anyone been watching Mozart in the Jungle? [Speaking of Amazon tv shows]
42: Pavement. Of all the music you could listen to in 1998, you chose that? (really the same thing as the Fall, ten years earlier)
What is the 23rd best G&R song? Maybe "Move to the City."
I'd go with "You're Crazy."
95: I chose what? Nick Cave? Free jazz? I stand by both those choices, although actually I personally listen to free jazz but not to Nick Cave because I really hate that murder ballads album. I had a Pavement album on cassette that I listened to on the Greyhound a lot in like 1993, so it must have been Slanted and Enchanted. It was difficult to find Fall albums at that point, though, and I know because I looked and looked. Mark E. Smith is a better lyricist, but frankly Pavement was great music for dozing on the bus.
Really, most of what I personally was listening to in the late nineties was the Mekons, Chinese rock music, old Elvis Costello and a lot of Mark Stewart-related stuff, which was, yes, rather abrasive to the point that I don't listen to much of it any more.
As I recall, the late 90s was when I belatedly discovered trip hop.
Sadly, I'm more or less fully into "get off my lawn" territory re: current popular music. I managed to discover Janelle Monae shortly before she won a Grammy a few years ago, but that's about it.
97: I just took a guess at what the dark matter between the Nick Cave and the free jazz might be.
I want to know what Frowner thought of Acteurs!