"Pop", not 'pop'

Apologies for the cuteness of the title.   A distinction worth retaining, nonetheless.   Just to follow-up briefly on the post below, which has provoked some good discussion...It seems The Believer has issued an indirect rejoinder of sorts to Mark Greif's essay in n+1 (via, via).   (These two young magazines are often made out to be rivals, though to be honest I don't see that The Believer is any competition.   Then again, I may well be missing something?)

This bit gives you the idea:

The novel sings, dances, screams Pop. As much as any prose ever written, it is Pop. It has the gleam of chrome fenders, the action of clubland after dark, the slang and verve of the radio. But its attitude is bitch and bitterness, so full of articulated acid the lines fairly burn. N. N., a snarky fashionista, is forever noting someone’s “floppy dung-colored garments” or “shoes like tin-openers.” N. N. on the London roads: “Streets of dark purple and vomit green, all set at angles like ham sandwiches.” N. N. on flashy drivers: “I get so tired of characters in motor vehicles behaving like duchesses, when usually the car’s not even their own, but part-paid on the never-never, or borrowed from the firm without the board of management’s permission, and all they really are is human animals travelling much too fast with their arses suspended six inches above the asphalt.”

This MacInnes-mouthing hero also bemoans the co-optation of postwar youth (“absolute beginners,” or “teenage products,” or “sperms and chicklets”) as an economic class with money to spend, and recalls the days “before the newspapers and telly got hold of this teenage fable and prostituted it as conscripts [read: adults] seem to do to everything they touch.” That’s the novel’s nourishing tension: MacInnes is wild about pop culture, its novelty and irreverence and raunch, but he deplores its other reality as a buffoon’s buffet of plastic commodities—not to mention a recruiting field for racists.

Episodic for its first three sections, the novel reaches unified climax and cataclysm with a full-scale race riot smack on the narrator’s own streets. Here MacInnes conducts a present-tense postmortem of actual events—events he had, in fact, foreseen. In the essay “Pop Songs and Teenagers,” published in February 1958, MacInnes warned of how easily the adolescent “instinct for enjoyment” could become a “kind of happy mindlessness—the raw material for crypto-fascisms of the worst kind.” Warning became prophecy in August of that year when, on the same night, a race riot broke out in Nottingham, and nine bludgeon-swinging Teds attacked five black victims in the Notting Dale section of London. Racing back and forth between rioting outskirts and oblivious town, N. N. feels his metropolis collapsing into “a prison, or a concentration camp: inside, blue murder, outside, buses and evening papers and hurrying home to sausages and mash and tea.” That offhand conflation of a teenage race riot with Auschwitz and Belsen may be the first recognition anywhere of what would one day, on the far side of the 1960s, be called the thanatology of pop—and later become the provocation of punk. The devil roams the arcade: “I certainly believe in Satan after tonight,” says our stunned narrator in the aftermath.

Yulch.  Who ever wants to think of death?   This sounds too much like a certain Nietzsche.   Thankfully it is not the only Nietzsche.   

This will not have been, therefore, my contribution to the symposia on populism.   The battle is over, the revolution does not start now; there is only ever past, and sans rapport.   The past was written, the future will be read.

Comments

[CR]

The author's blurb:

Devin McKinney, author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History (Harvard) and a music column for the American Prospect Online (www.prospect.org), recently renamed his wife’s cat “Little Taco.”

Is this the kind of sincerity they're after?

I know, it's beneath mention. Utterly banal... But seriously, wtf? Sometimes you start to feel like the kid at the school play who's singing their heart out when everyone else is just, I dunno, pantsing each other and spurting koolaid out their noses.

Forget it. HA! "Little Taco!"

The beau monde brooklain stalks its transsumption into a limitless flickr pro account, full of inside jokes about the korean candy at the bodega, a costume party where somebody comes as a burnt siena Crayola Crayon, an empty can or two of Genny Ale, the morning after...

Or am I just being a pisser?

[Craig]

The beau monde brooklain stalks its transsumption into a limitless flickr pro account, full of inside jokes about the korean candy at the bodega, a costume party where somebody comes as a burnt siena Crayola Crayon, an empty can or two of Genny Ale, the morning after...

Like this? Here's a good example. Or, maybe, this?

Is that what you were getting at?

[Matt]

It's the repressed side of the tweeds, or the spoiled rich, is all. Kind of cute, and nauseating. n+1 is so much more sincere, not to mention smart, it hurts.

[CR]

You know, here's the interesting thing: "we" made a very early decision, almost unspoken, here at LS not to do the cutesy stuff, didn't we. No favorite mac applications, no new paella recipes... And "we've" (or "you've") stuck with it.

All to the good. Sure, there's the danger of falling off the cliff the other way, into a false sense of, dunno, unearned squareheaded "significance." But you give the game away at the start when you're doing culture with urban misfitters sideshow in the margin, don't you think? "Don't take this seriously - I certainly don't. See, I named my gf's gato Chalupa..."

I've heard that Said used to browbeat his advisees into dressing properly. He had high standards, brooks brothers type stuff and up... (I certainly don't live up to this myself...) But it's interesting to think about the connection between his sartorial attitude and, well, the fact that he may have thought once in awhile that his work actually mattered, that something might change, that he and the whole fucking show wasn't some crazzy Volkswagen commerical, where the kids move into their first real place, and like jack up the iPod connected boombox to bother the respectable nabes....

(Boy, am I in a mood tonight, no?)

[Ari]

Usually when someone displays that kind of cutesy poor taste gesture I just stop reading with any care. Conservatives, of course, depend upon such winks for identification purposes, like barely-veiled racial slurs (using this particular tick is sometimes a useful way to fool them--but beware the consequences, as Dear Leader says...)

Maybe we could reduce this to a set of aphorisms:

"Those who wear their sense of humor on their sleeve, don't have one.

Groups identified primarily by their acts of exclusion, or their tokenism, have no class."

Poor attempt, but then it's late.

It's funny, because in the next breath they're liable to be waxing pompous in canonical platitudes, eulogising something (literature!) that, in truth, either is not dead, or has never lived. I say waxing, but they are still mundane, blunt, and manly. Not too flowery or interlectually complex. Praising "literature, for literature's sake!"

I agree with CR, that this peculiar complicity of genres has yet to be examined fully.

[Matt]

Ellis Sharp links to this article by Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan. It's an interesting article. I find myself somewhat more sympathetic to it's tack than does Ellis, if only because one has to be wary of repeating the iconolatry Dylan thematizes, etc. When Ellis says that "Masters of War" "transcends" its original historical context, I can't argue with that, because it's a context that we're still in.

In any case, I thought this quote from Mike Marqusee on Dylan was apropos:
“He can no longer tell the story straight,” Marqusee concludes, “because any story told straight is a false one.”

[Squibb]

(Accidently cross posted on the old thread)

I think we cut loose at LS a little from time to time. Certainly the party.hipster.music thread started by Craig awhile back. (It was craig, right?) But I do think there is a certain performance of seriousness to the thinking here, and that it is all the better for that. There is a difference, it would seem and I would argue, between irony as a structural necessity, as means to an end, and its pursuit of itself on its own terms.

I recall the moment in the Derrida movie when the selfrighteouscollegian challanges D's discussion of unconditional forgiveness before an all white audience in South Africa. Are you trying to be ironic? he asks. Saying, in effect, is that all that is going on here, can we file this discussion under (I)rony and then move on?

D's response is something that I think of often when confronted with, well, this. (I still need to learn that cool linking trick so just click on Matt's links above) He says, (and here comes an awkward paraphrase) yes, to some extent there is a taking place of irony, but only insofar as his work requires the distancing labor that that term invites. The relationship of irony is invoked along the path of his thought, sometimes more than once, but (and this is D's eternal grace) he is never content with THE ironic, with the nihilism and vacuity that the term marks when trotted out on its own.

Irony is here like vanilla extract, added in touches to a larger recipe, but absolutely untenable when tasted on its own. It makes you want to puke.

However, I do think we have to be honest about the origin of this over-emphasis, or reduction to irony that I see as operative in the mini-zeitgeist we would here berate.
And, interestingly, I think this turns somewhat on where we ended up in the pop/Pop discussion we were having earlier,

Matt formulates, with characteristic grace,

“Greif presents a compelling case that the aesthetic ground addressed, that is to say maybe cleared and nurtured in (or in spite of) pop...though significantly neutral, only ever indirectly ethical, always already abstracted, and however easily appropriated by the interests of the beast whose mouth it uses...is still one of...let's call it communist, semi-child-like potential, shall we? And that there is political potential mixed up in this, however the aesthetic priests would no doubt scoff…

I think(Greif’s argument) is one for redeeming a certain potentiality in 'pop', in a manner of speaking, that is without merely either sneering nor indulging, which is common enough. This potentiality is not something grasp-able as such, but elusive and desistantly, rhythmically, elsewhere. Homeless and maybe homesick, you might say...

What kind of futurism is at stake in 'pop', what kind of messianicity perhaps salvageable, you know, from messianism proper. If one thing is clear it would seem to be that 'pop' is not merely "anti-" anything. Such formulations may be simplistic, if not quaint.”

I see us objecting, in this thread, to the simultaneous gesture of high-hipster Irony, which seem, constitutively, to be the acceptance of Pop delectability, occurring simultaneously with the rejection of its “communist, semi-child-like potential.” Thus the important thing is to let everybody now that you’re not (the one) being fooled, that you are, that most important of words today, 'authentic.' (Something of a determinate adolescent affectionforrejection, no?)

The (potentially redemptive) homelessness of Pop is ruthlessly located by the approach of the Ironic, fixed as always-already a certain taking place of fascism, (and bigotry, and plebian dirtiness, and fundamentally, poverty) which cannot be denied, but can only be reappropriated by the evacuating gesture of the Ironic. The hipster is the living embodiment of the quaint formulation of Pop as anti-authentic, as anti-everything.

Thus the theoretical scenesterism we would decry is the encroachment on those who would hold onto something, anything, be it in Pop or in irony, that does not dead end in a certain assembled vanity of vintage clothing and ideas.

RePosted by: Squibb |

[Matt]

'twas in fact Carl. Thanks for the kind words Squibb, but flattery will get you nowhere. I don't think I'll clutter up this new thread with the somewhat banal reply I posted on the other. But thanks; that's very interesting.

CR,

I once knew an old-school liberal professor who addressed all his students with "Mr." and "Mrs" (and meant it; a rare gesture of respect, for a climate choked to death wtih status-obsessed and condescending, pompous young scholars). From what I hear, it largely had the desired effect.

[Matt]

Just to piece some things together, while they're still fresh (and as much for my own sake as anyone's):

“He can no longer tell the story straight,” Marqusee concludes, “because any story told straight is a false one.”

Greif:

"A fissure has opened between occurrence and depiction, and the dam bursts between the technical and the natural.—These are not meant to be statements of thoughts about their songs, or even about the lyrics, which look banal on the printed page; this is what happens in their songs..."

Squibb:

"He [Greif] is saying that the potential for Dylans and Radioheads was always present within pop, but he forgets to specify where the difference between broadcast culture and the inarticulate complaint, comes to-be-by-virtue-of…"

The answer lies, I think, in the experience of an aesthetic, from which cue our man Mark Greif, again:

"Either you know aestheticism and perfectionism as philosophy today, or you'll get them, disfigured, in weaker attempts at the solutions to the pressures of experience."

and on the failures of imagination:

"But I cannot understand the failure to be disappointed with our experiences of our collective world, in their difference from our imaginations and desires, which are so strong. I cannot understand the failure to wish that this world was fundamentally more than it is."

Which ties in nicely to (my original humble intent with this comment):

I should clarify my remarks to Ellis Sharp (poor form, and I'm sorry; I'd comment over there, only he lacks a box).

Certainly a song may "transcend" "it's historical moment" and yet still be "identifiably of its time" in the manner we might associate with 'pop'. These are hardly mutually exclusive. 'Transcendence' is, after all, deeply attuned to "its time", to every waking moment of its time––'absolutely modern' even, one might say––if it is anything, is it not so?

(To what time-scale do these lines belong?

"While you are wasting your time on your enemies / engulfed in a fever of spite // beyond your tunelled vision, reality fades / like shadows into the night

To martyr yourself to caution / is not gonna help at all // because there'll be no safety in numbers / when the right one walks out of the door...")

...

To quote a bit from the tail of that last link, a general sentiment with which I happen to agree, absolutely:

"...If Mullen's is a "theoretical" poetry, it is one that has nicely internalized the theories in question.

But--and this is where the situation has become problematic such internalization is hard earned. Like any mode, the production of "text without walls," as McCaffery called it, can become a mere tick. And so can the theory that ostensibly animates it. One of the most problematic manifestations of what we might call post-language poetics is that, in the wake of the foundational theory that filled the pages of avant-garde little magazines of the eighties, poets, and this has been especially true of women poets, perhaps because they have felt, quite rightly, excluded from the earlier formulations of poetics (a situation that can be traced back to the homage paid to Charles Olson's "Projective Verse"), a good bit of "soft" theorizing is taking place. Indeed, exploring such venues as the "Women /Writing / Theory" symposium for Raddle Moon (#11 and #13), the most recent issue of Poetics Journal (#10, June 1998), or the "Poetics and Exposition" section of Moving Borders, I am beginning to wish poets would once again take to composing poetry rather than producing so much "theoretical" prose....

Such theory buzz, like the current spate of what I call Big Name Collage the large theoretical essay or even poem that is no more than a collage of nuggets by Big Names Agamben and Heidegger, Cixous and Wittgenstein, Deleuze and Adorno without any real analysis of what the philosophers in question are actually arguing, is problematic because this particular form of "innovative" writing may well alienate the very readership it hopes to capture."

Thanks guys; I'm happy to move on now.

[Jonathan]

"Mrs." or "Ms."?

[Matt]

"Ms." -Goofed the obviously.

[Matt]

One last item, for your pleasures, from the latest issue of Naked Punch:

Vicky Steiri: How do you find the music life in London as regards contemporary music today? Do you believe that there are more things to be done? Are you satisfied? Would you change something if you were in a position to do so?

Roger Redgate: I think it's deeply problematic. We are reaching a crisis point in this country. First of all, the notion of what contemporary music is has changed radically over the years. When I was a student, or when I first came back to this country, contemporary music consisted of avant-garde music, Boulez, Stockhausen, Harrison Birtwistl...Now, it means a wide range of music, from world music to jazz, to popular music. For example, look at the prospectuses of concerts at -say- the Barbican. If you are lucky, some major known composers like Xenakis, or someone, might get in there. But generally speaking, not. And, okay, you can say that that doesn't matter, but that attitude over the years spreads into the Arts Councils. So, if you want to get funding to put on some contemporary music, in the sense I mean it, it is virtually impossible. They'll fund it if it comes from ethnic minority groups in this country, or if it involves some kind of cross-over: for example if I decide to go and work with a rapper or a jazz musician. I spoke to the Arts Council recently myself, because I run this contemporary music group (for twenty years now), and I said, 'Look, I want some regular funding from the Arts Council'. They do these schemes and they give you regular fundings for three yeras, or something. And they said, 'What do you do?', so I told them what I do, and how long the ensemble existed and the musicians who are involved in it, and they said, 'You can forget it. There is no way you're going to get funding for something like that'!

VS: In a post-modern era where, as some people say, everything has been done, how do you see the future of composition?

RR: I don't think everything has been done, to be honest. We never know what is over the horizon in terms of technology and who is going to come along with a completely new way of thinking. We've had composers like Xenakis, who suddenly came along with a completely new kind of music. Radelesku is another composer whose music has interested me, he himself makes it difficult to perform his music, but he has a very interesting and original approach. I think in the 20th century adn now the 21st, we have become so obsessed with the idea of doing something new. No one of the contemporaries of Beethoven would have been obsessed with the idea of doing something new. Having an original voice mabye, but not necessarily doing something new. We will say, 'that's Mozart, that's Mendelssohn, that's Shubert, that's Schumann, that's Beethoven', we can recognise that; even if they all work with tonality, there is something about their music which is uniquely their own. Dittersdorf for example, is far less interesting and you might listen to it and be not sure who it was or from which period it is from. When I teach composition, lots of my students tend to say, 'I am not interested in what composers before me have done, I want to do something new'. And then they bring something to me and I say, 'Yes, have you listened to Ligety's second string quartet? He did something liike this', or, 'Do you know the music of Helmut Lachenmann?' You cannot get away from it, you know; we have hundreds of years of musical history. There is a limit of what we can do with the notes and things we've got. I think the only way ahead is to develop your own language. That's where originality and new and interesting music comes from. And also I think that the only way you can do it is to be absolutely steeped in what has gone on before. I think it's a big mistake for a composer not to be interested in what composers before him have done. And not just 20th century composers. As I said to you earlier, I listen to alll kinds of music, because they are all very valuable to me as a composer.

-Naked Punch, my emphasis in bold

[Matt]

Yes, "I may well be missing something..."

[link]

www.inrainbows.com

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this is the music genre par excellence, liked by young and old, has always been known as great exponents of music have emerged out of this genre, this is the case of the now defunct and loved by many MJ Jackson, Madonna, Britney Spears among others.
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[John Petterson]

I like Nietzsche. His ideas can help young people in XXI century.

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I listen only pop music... just do not like nothing more.