Dave commented on an earlier entry of mine with some really interesting links, including this one, to a blog entry about Paris Hilton's album that turned into an incredibly long comments thread with some juicy arguments about poptimism, which got me thinking about a lot of thesis-related questions. One of the themes that kept popping up on that thread was emotion and passion about music, visceral reactions, etc., versus intellectual concerns or rational reasons for liking things that are affected by the arguments of others. Especially first impressions and whether initial opinions are really open to change.
Obviously, some of this stuff is going to vary from person to person. So it got me to thinking about the way I usually react to music initially. I know that there are presumptions and prejudices, some of them based on intellectual or political ideas that I've internalized. Sometimes I am really ill-disposed to something because of things I know about a band or artist, or even if I perceive that they have a fanbase of people I have very different musical values from.
But most of the time, if I bother to actually listen to something, I have reason to believe that I might like it. There is so much stuff out there and I always have a backlog of things that sound interesting, so I don't feel like I have time for things I don't think I might like. So most of the time, I am expecting to find something of value and not waiting to be underwhelmed. But sometimes I am. Usually, if I don't like something I know it right away. It's very unusual for me to feel differently after that point no matter what new arguments I hear or how much rapturous praise gets heaped onto something by people whose judgment I trust or whatever. And sometimes I like something right away too.
But it's actually a better sign if I hear something for the first time and don't know how I feel at first. I get this vaguely uncomfortable (yet curious) feeling. Sometimes I find myself listening to something over and over even though it makes me feel weird to the point of kind of bothering me. Usually if I get this feeling about something strongly enough, I end up liking it eventually, sometimes loving it and obsessing over it for years, as in the case of Cypress by Let's Active, which provoked very confusing feelings in me at first. It's always nice to like something right off the bat. I don't have the energy to plunge into records that provoke really complicated feelings in me all the time. But the things that end up meaning the most to me are the things I have to work a little bit to understand, that make me stretch a bit in order to enjoy them.
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Ha, I feel the exact same way, wrote this about a month ago in a piece about what people tend to mean when they claim they enjoy something "ironically":
the claim that any musical enjoyment might be “ironic” or “dishonest” has no relevance in any productive discussion about music. You could replace “ironic enjoyment” with “conflicted enjoyment,” which, when examined, subsequently reveals certain ironies about your relationship to the music: often I return to music that irritates me because it irritates me; the initial reaction of wanting to jam a fork in my eye can signal the potential to fall in love with a song. In my experience, something that provokes such an intense but unjustifiable negative reaction suggests there’s something worth figuring out in it.
This is one problem I have with, e.g., Simon's contention that emotional/visceral response seems to be missing from my own reactions to Paris's album (funny, since the usual claim of poptimists-as-a-class tends to be that it's JUST about visceral enjoyment, "pure pop pleasure"): most of the arguments about the "meaning" of any definable poptimism (and I still wonder if poptimism can be defined outside of an individual critic's perspective) have to do with what we SAY about the music we like, not whether or not we like it.
And as I've argued elsewhere, I think the deck's stacked toward like -- I think when we don't like music, we tend simply to ignore it, not actively dislike it. Things get complicated when your sample base includes lots of critics and music obsessives (which is where any poptimists would presumably come from), who listen to lots of music and may even get paid to dislike some of it -- or, more accurately, be forced to SAY things about music they'd otherwise ignore, thus leading them to dislike it much more (on paper) than they might in their everyday lives by ignoring it. If listening to music becomes an intensely active process, like a sucking air into a cavity -- painful pleasure (not "guilty") -- I'll probably end up not just liking the music, but adoring it beyond reason. Just in my experience.
*listening to music I dislike becomes an intensely active process, I mean.
It's interesting how similar we are when it comes to these processes, even if they take us to rather different places...it's got me thinking about how accessibility and/or mainstreamyness plays into my own initial perceptions of things, but that might just be a whole other comment or an entry.
It does relate to the ironic enjoyment thing. It's interesting that we're similar in this way too--I just don't have guilty pleasures, as a rule. In my case, though, it's not so much that I like these things I'm supposed to feel guilty about, but I don't. It's more that I don't like the things that make me feel conflicted--there might be some elements in there I could find enjoyable in another context, but the bad context keeps me from appreciating them. I guess it's a distinction between combining good and bad aspect and combining good ones and ones that I find challenging or strange but not decidedly bad. So a lot of time the stuff I end up loving has some really accessible elements and some inaccessible ones, usually in some sort of artsy-fartsy way.
The thing about "pure pop pleasure" is that you can get it without actually listening to music that is actually popular. I'm a good example of this, as an inveterate tweepop listener in addition to listening to other stuff that's more rockin' and/or experimentalish. If anything, "real," mainstream pop doesn't sound poppy in the right ways to me, but I guess that's the result of spending my youth poring over Field Mice albums while pseudo-rebellious grunge hackage ruled the airwaves. I lost any association between pop and popularity.
But to answer what seems like your central point: I can't speak for poptimists...but I do think that when it comes to a lot of the popists / poptimists / anti-rockists I have looked at closely, there seems to be a tendency to make arguments about value that claim a lot of immediacy and meaning. Arguments that I think are more tacked-on than those writers would care to admit...except that once someone starts to make these arguments, I think that they do start to have an affect on their initial reactions, more and more. I mean, as I tried to account for in my description of my own way of processing stuff, we are subject to all sorts of cognitive schema with varying degrees of consciousness when we listen to something for the first time, me included. I think there's a degree to which we kind of train ourselves to enjoy some things more than others, and that this can happen with musical value systems (including, but not limited to, poptimism).
Although I've never seen him claim the poptimist label (though I guess few really do), and he's not the most pure example, I think Carl Wilson's Celine Project is clearly related to poptimist trends. And it's clearly related to this question of liking stuff and changing initial opinions. In effect, he is trying to argue himself into liking something that he had a visceral bad reaction to for years and years.
It's been a while since I saw anything Wilson has written about the project, and his 33 1/3 book about it won't be out til September. But it seems like a tall order. Most poptimists, or people with poptimist tendencies, aren't trying to do anything like that. But I do think that arguments about why you like stuff have a cumulative effect. On people on the outside, sure, but even moreso for people within communities based on shared tastes (as Simon Frith discusses in Performing Rites, which came up a lot in that crazy comments thread).
I'm doing the thing again. The thing where I'm not sure if I really responded to everything you said but I know I brought up about a jillion other things I need to address in more detail eventually. Guess I'll leave it at that, except to say that I'm not entirely sure if I understood your final point in your comment, and it might be kind of important, so if you could expound on it a bit more I would appreciate it.
The cold-air-in-a-cavity bit was kind of lighthearted, just mean to say that if I'm irked in just the right way, I might listen to a song about a million more times than I would a song (I disliked) that bored me. Sometimes annoying's just annoying, but other times, like with "My Humps" (to use an example that's gotten me in hot water with people who don't like it), it just grows and grows and slowly my dislike evaporates, and in its place is undying devotion to Fergie. Er...something like that.
there seems to be a tendency to make arguments about value that claim a lot of immediacy and meaning.
Do you have an anti-rockist/etc. example, or common line of reasoning? I think I see what you're talking about; one thing that Tom Ewing brought up on an old comment thread was that he has trained himself on occasion into liking or disliking something, that sometimes you CAN consciously revise visceral response by basically saying "I will now listen to like/dislike this." (Funny, I've heard stories that when ya play a Paris Hilton track like, say, "Not Leaving without You" to a crowd full of Paris-haters, they dance anyway, blissfully unaware of whom they're enjoying. Followed by some surprise at the artist reveal...my gf was somewhat surprised to "blindly" like that particular track, thought it sounded like Sheryl Crow doing dance-pop.) My own interest in teenpop started an awful lot like this; though, not coincidentally, my worst writing happened during this so-called "training process" (i.e., I didn't really get it yet, and now my like/dislike is quite natural -- in retrospect, most of my "dislike" was socially, not viscerally, defined).
But I think that a lot of writers that I would consider poptimists are actually asking some of the toughest questions I've come across, constantly examining what their relationship -- socially, aesthetically, whatever else -- is to the music they like (would note Frank Kogan's new Las Vegas Weekly column; great discussion of justifying dislike semi-arbitrarly in re: Backstreet Boys here. This also relates to what I said in my last paragraph about the "playing field" changing when you go from disliking something to trying to describe to someone else WHY you dislike it).
It seems to me from what I know of the Celine book that it's something of a nonissue as to whether or not CW actually likes the artist (esp. if the premise is "I am going to like this by hell or high water," which is an interesting impulse, but begs the question "why shouldn't you have liked it in the first place -- and if you originally didn't like it, why are you now convinced you should"? But I thought that Carl's premise was to write a 33 1/3 book about an artist he just plain hated!). It would, in this hypothetical version, treat Celine's music more like a social thought-experiment than analysis of what the music might be doing -- which is valid, but again I question where that impulse comes from to begin with, what sorta people (the author thinks) Celine and Celine's audience members are.
There's a conflation that tends to happen, though usually from the "other side" (people distinguishing themselves as not-poptimists), of what SR refers to as "conscientious generalism" with the unique and often mainstream-leaning tastes of specific poptimist-seeming critics. But, to follow along with Frith a little, we (well, I -- can't really speak for anyone else) don't try to like everything because "one should try to like everything," which is a variation on his complaint about academia ("this subject is important; it's important because it's the subject). In fact, often (sometimes reactive) judgments lead me to consciously favor commonly derided artists over more critically respected ones. But in arguing this, I'm never favoring said artists (Paris, Ashlee Simpson, Aly and AJ, Lindsay Lohan) only to be contrarian ("learning" to like it when "deep down" I don't and then saying, in effect, nyah nyah to my more typical social circle) but because I really do think it's some of the best music going.
Hm, getting into tangent territory. Um...ah. I think with the Wilson book, or your interpretation of it (which is what matters as far as this convo goes), is a stab at this sort of "conscientious generalist" approach that (1) I don't think usually actually exists in any significant prevalence (again, usually it's used as an attack of critics who aren't consciously "generalist," but are merely attracted to generally dismissed forms of music -- mainstream country, teenpop, other popular-pop musics, and (2) if it does exist, it's pretty misguided, since at some point, no matter how much we train ourselves, we do kind of like what we like. But any critic who stops there isn't a very good critic, whether they dig mainstream or non-mainstream music.
This is why I'm hesitant to include an idea like "tacked-on justification" (which I read as ill-thought-out defense of music one could claim to like -- might be misreading you on this point) or "pure pop pleasure" or any other comparably intellectually wanting concepts into my own conception of what a "poptimist" might be -- because to me, the most important facet of poptimism, just like any other critical viewpoint, is a rigorous intellectualism directed toward music not commonly discussed intellectually in venues that support rock-crit, from magazines to message boards. Maybe that puts me in a minority, but in the Poptimists community specifically, I see a lot of complex intellectual engagement along with the fun and games, even if admittedly there's more F&G than the former (but that's also largely an issue of format, contributor pool, and regularity of posts -- not all of 'em are going to be fodder for a 100-post convo on the possible social make-up of Last FM users, etc. etc., and the threads you wouldn't expect to go crazily intellectual often do!).
There's a lot I would respond to here but one major thing jumping out at me is this--as an academic, the idea of people paying intellectual attention to neglected areas of music kind of smacks of academia more than journalistic criticism. Of course, people are totally free to talk about whatever they want to on blogs and stuff! The more discussion the better. But I think that there has been a dearth of good popular music scholarship in the last few decades, when academic ideas from cultural studies were filtering into popular consciousness but nobody was applying them to popular music specifically in a rigorous way. It's no wonder that journalists and others tried to pick up the slack. There hasn't been that much academic writing on popular music, period. A lot of what there has been has been from people like Simon Frith. As much as I love Frith for some things, he's a critic who got grandfathered in to academia, and it shows. Then there are the academics who secretly wanted to parlay their Ph.D. into being some sort of new Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs figure and those are just as watered-down. So I think that journalists, critics and just plain enthusiasts have integrated academic critiques into their ways of approaching music, but I don't think it works that well without somebody holding up the academic end. I mean, I think that there are some currents of poptimist thought that come out of a sort of effort to make up for academia's shortcomings, and I can see that those shortcomings are significant, but I don't think it helps that much to have non-academics try to compensate for them. Not that non-academics don't do lots of important stuff. And I think since it started (I believe) with academics dropping the ball, I don't want to point any fingers. But I kind of think that's the cause of some of my problems with (at least some aspects or certain proponents of) poptimism.
The point is, generalism makes sense in an academic context. At least, in a contemporary context. There may have been a time when academics were supposed to teach impressionable youngsters about the finer things in life, to focus on Joyce or Godard or whatever over the popular dreck of the day, but that has changed. If you're doing media scholarship you're supposed to know about stuff, even stuff you don't like. You're not supposed to be an elitist, you're supposed to care about what means something to people in general, especially groups that don't get a voice in dominant culture, but not just glamorous subcultures.
The thing you're talking about Frith taking academia to task about--I really had a different reading of that part of his book. I thought the point was that academia didn't have a way of talking about value, that value had been exiled to "hallway discourse" and in the process of dethroning an elitist canon a sort of taboo on discussing value had emerged. I can see his point. But I also think that if there's one place we don't need to talk about value in the strictest sense (as opposed to value according to a certain type of political project, which does come up in academia frequently), it's academia. Whereas taking poptimism to excessive extremes could mean calling into question assumptions of value in journalistic criticism, when really, what else are most people looking for in journalistic music criticism BUT discussions of value? OK, they also want descriptions and comparisons. But mostly they want to know if a given band / artist / song / recording is worth their time and/or money. So (to radically oversimplify) we get Frith calling academics on the carpet for their inability to discuss value while contributing to a tendency to suck the value judgments out of popular criticism.
Oh, and in an effort to ground both our discussions of the "Celine Project," an abstract of Wilson's EMP paper, which shows that what he said was just about smack in the middle of your version and mine.
http://www.emplive.org/education/index.asp?categoryID=26&ccID=127&xPopConfBioID=660&year=2006
Dang, can't seem to post that link! I'll put it up on my del.ico.us, though, which is here:
http://del.icio.us/pastels_badge
Yeah, fudged Frith a bit...though I always kind of read his critique as implying that if academia did question the value of what it studied, it might not study what it does (or study it in the same way).
I have serious misgivings about media studies in academia just from personal experience, having basically been taught myself how to "ignore" like/dislike and "get to the analysis" (and when you're with students as dismissive as yer average Ashlee-hater, I understand this technique). But this applies to film studies; for the most part, there simply isn't much study of pop music -- on its own terms, as it were (as something that we actually listen to and use in our everday lives as well as an object of study) -- anywhere in academia. And I think this is possibly because, unlike most, say, films, pop music is something that we tend to use as a kind of "exception" to general rules of analysis -- hence, really smart people tend to say really dumb things when they discuss pop music, like this subject gives them a "pass" from doing the gruntwork of understanding something in a rigorously intellectual way.
Might be generalizing here. But I think the intellectualization of pop music in the case of lots of poptimist-leaning critics I read is a pretty stark relief from both journalism and academia. I trust the latter more than the former, which, as far as music criticism goes, tends to muck everything up -- detached voice, emphasis on events/"stories" at the expense of musical analysis (cf. Paris Hilton, Kelly Clarkson)...anyway, my borderline paranoia and search for an "alternative space," for lack of a better word, may not typify the drive of most pop critics, who for the most part just want to talk about what they like without feeling like they're constantly under attack, or in the position to defend their tastes at every turn as if there is something inherently wrong with it. I get lots of questions about media systems and star systems and intended audiences that, though often valid (and though I enjoy discussing these, though I tend not to come to widely accepted conclusions about what these systems are or might be), I just don't feel like discussing those questions every time I write something about Kelly Clarkson (usually the questions raise more questions about the assumptions of the people asking them, but I don't even feel like asking those sometimes).
we get Frith calling academics on the carpet for their inability to discuss value while contributing to a tendency to suck the value judgments out of popular criticism.
Hm, off on another tangent...to go in circles a bit, the thing missing from an academia-derived conception of poptimism might be precisely that immediate value judgment/visceral response that leads one to prefer a certain type of music in the first place. I don't think Frith is (even unintentionally) sucking the value judgments out of popular criticism, but maybe not taking popular criticism to task for its own weird prejudices and deficiencies -- he sees popular criticism as a site for a kind of corrective to some of these tendencies in academia. But music and music criticism do seem to me to be more ambiguous fields of study and analysis -- there is so much wrapped up in the intuitive and visceral (as opposed to film, where structure lends itself to a certain kind of straightforward "textual reading," whether or not this is always appropriate) that, to me, issues of ideology and even the most basic frameworks of discussion tend to be constantly shifting, sometimes radically, based on a given set of responses to a new piece of music. I think most poptimists tend, rather than toward generalism, toward an openness to challenge what it is they like (and WHY). To keep their tastes in a state of incipient upheaval.
Wanted to respond to a few things.
I have serious misgivings about media studies in academia just from personal experience, having basically been taught myself how to "ignore" like/dislike and "get to the analysis" (and when you're with students as dismissive as yer average Ashlee-hater, I understand this technique).
I think on the one hand that academia has made some space, in some disciplines, for like/dislike. Personally, in my media studies classes we spend a TON of time talking about what we like or don't. Simple positive/negative evaluation wouldn't make a very good paper, of course--it would probably be a couple pages long at best. But most of our research and writing comes out of either liking things a lot or really not liking them. And I think good media studies scholars admit what their stake is when it comes to that. Given the acceptance of fandom studies in recent years, usually written by scholar/participants, a passionate investment in a text and a fan community is not only ok at times, it's kind of trendy.
But this applies to film studies; for the most part, there simply isn't much study of pop music -- on its own terms, as it were (as something that we actually listen to and use in our everday lives as well as an object of study) -- anywhere in academia. And I think this is possibly because, unlike most, say, films, pop music is something that we tend to use as a kind of "exception" to general rules of analysis -- hence, really smart people tend to say really dumb things when they discuss pop music, like this subject gives them a "pass" from doing the gruntwork of understanding something in a rigorously intellectual way.
Film is seen as a different kind of medium from others in a lot of ways, but that's only as a result of hard-won gains by people who wanted to treat it as a legitimate discipline when most people thought of it as just "talking about movies." The same thing happened when people within film studies and cultural studies started wanting to write about television. Taking television seriously was academically risky in a very real, career-defining way, but in recent years tv criticism has really reached the point where it's established. I think it's fairly analogous to music in some of the ways you're describing. But it's also different from both film and tv in ways that make it both more and less of a good candidate for study. I could talk about which aspects I think lend themselves and which don't, but honestly, I don't think it matters much. The things that are challenging need to be gotten over either way, because it doesn't make sense for their not to be academic work on popular music when academics are studying everything else. And anyways, the work is already happening, but right now it's in a really disorganized way. But I think that's going to change, even if it's already overdue.
...to go in circles a bit, the thing missing from an academia-derived conception of poptimism might be precisely that immediate value judgment/visceral response that leads one to prefer a certain type of music in the first place.
Actually, funny you should bring it up, there's a movement right now to bring in more discussion of emotions and getting rid of the taboo around discussing the body. It comes out of feminism and queer theory but it's getting a lot of currency with some media studies types, particularly in my department. Talking about things like visceral responses is becoming a lot more acceptable, even fashionable. I think that discussing first impressions would be totally ok academically--but if all you talked about was your OWN impressions, well, you'd be focusing on advocating for texts in a way that is more suited to popular criticism. But if you're talking about the way people in general process music texts, nobody would have a problem with that. And it's ok to admit that you like something or you don't and to talk about that, it's just that academic writing is different from journalistic criticism or exchanges between enthusiasts when it comes to really arguing value in a huge way.
I don't think Frith is (even unintentionally) sucking the value judgments out of popular criticism, (we'll have to agree to disagree here but I will say I don't think it was intentional) but maybe not taking popular criticism to task for its own weird prejudices and deficiencies (agreed) -- he sees popular criticism as a site for a kind of corrective to some of these tendencies in academia.
My point exactly! But popular criticism is always going to be a crappy substitute for academic work, and in the process it won't be very good popular criticism! The two types of writing have very different purposes, and it takes very different types of training to execute them. I'm not trying to say academic writing is better, but people spend years studying theories and learning to be critical of their own assumptions and subjecting their work to the scrutiny of other scholars and there's no real substitute for that. I love non-academic music writing and sometimes I think about trying to do it myself instead of pursuing the academic thing. Music critics can just pick an idea out of the air that they heard somewhere. They don't have to say where they heard it or even make sure they understood it correctly. And they can write a little piece about it and never put it in context or acknowledge where they got it. It just seems so freeing. You can say a lot more that way, when you don't have to dot all the i's. You can state opinions about provable facts and not have to back them up at all. But that freedom exists because there are fewer check and balances, because there are fewer filters (internal and external) than with academic work. Both ways of working make sense. Both should exist and they should be in dialogue. But they can't substitute for one another.
But music and music criticism do seem to me to be more ambiguous fields of study and analysis -- there is so much wrapped up in the intuitive and visceral (as opposed to film, where structure lends itself to a certain kind of straightforward "textual reading," whether or not this is always appropriate)...
I'm pretty wary of this sort of argument. I mean, clearly music and film are very different. But is film more structured? I wouldn't say so. Do we process films in an inherently more analytical way versus just "feeling" music? I would argue that if it seems that way, it's because people have broken down the ways in which films are made through decades of rigorous scholarship. Most people aren't conscious of film structure, they "feel" movies about as much as they do music.
...that, to me, issues of ideology and even the most basic frameworks of discussion tend to be constantly shifting, sometimes radically, based on a given set of responses to a new piece of music.
Do things really shift so much more radically with music than other media? I don't see it. As for issues of ideology, I think that's one of the areas in which academia really has popular criticism beat. The fact that these issues are incredibly complex doesn't seem like a reason why there shouldn't be academic work on the subject--it seems like a reason why there should be more. Academics spend a lot of time working out ways of understanding ideological complexities. That's sort of our raison d'etre. I don't think I buy that these issues are so much more complex with music, I just think not enough work has been done on the subject yet. But if they are, such complexities would suggest that music enthusiasts and journalist-critics are the ones who should get out of the ideology discussion, not people who have spent years studying that stuff. Personally, I don't think that's the case. But I do think that there has been too much haphazard discussion by people who have just a passing familiarity with the theories they're drawing from. And that this should be balanced out by more attention from academics. Both communities should be contributing, and we should all be playing to our strengths and trying to fulfill our roles and not each other's. Some overlap is bound to happen, and I think that's good. But too much, and you get nonacademics who are supposed to be writing popular criticism writing a sort of pseudo-academic hybrid thing that has all the worst qualities of both types of work.
And finally reading Carl's abstract, which I think I read a while ago but had forgotten about, my comments: (1) [i]how much is this like searching for my inner Republican[/i]
My answer: nothing like it at all! Relating to a given piece of music is not nec. synonymous with relating to a "class" who also relates to the music. And in the case of Celine, the "class" of fans is pretty hard to define anyway.
(2) [i]There's no such thing as a guilty pleasure, say the "poptimists," who argue that any music that speaks to you, from bubblegum to prog, is sublime.[/i]
I disagree on a couple counts...first, even ignoring the poptimists part, I think guilty pleasure is usually simply a slight misuse of language to suggest a disparity between oneself and an intended audience without exploring this (which, admittedly, is basically what the paper seems to be about). But the last part simply doesn't ring true -- I think part of poptimism as I know it is about understanding contexts, refusing to go in for "sublime" where it would be inappropriate. (Sometimes this is variable -- there are some sublime harmonies in High School Musical, which my gf's sis is watching as we speak, but I wouldn't call the music "sublime" without qualifiers. Ditto most bubblegum.) An important aspect of poptimism, to me, is how you let music speak to you. I asked, re: Paris Hilton, could you make it with her (paraphrasing Frank Kogan quoting the New York Dolls) when she asks you to? Can you take Ashlee seriously enough to find the depth in her banalities? Can you take Lindsay not-seriously enough to laugh with her instead of at her? These are all questions I don't see a lot of in pop criticism, be it pro- or anti-pop.
Ah, missed your comment. Agreed on (I think) all counts...your dept. sounds like my kinda place. My own experiences were like what you're describing on a good day, of which there were many, but there is a fine line between denying value judgments and getting people out of a rut of not adequately engaging with what comes AFTER the judgments, i.e. hard analysis.
But is film more structured? I wouldn't say so. Do we process films in an inherently more analytical way versus just "feeling" music?
Agreed on this, I certainly don't want to privilege analyzing over feeling (or even suggesting a clear dichotomy). Although I do think that film structure is more universally recognized than musical structure; even if you let shot/counter-shot, camera angles, editing, etc. in technical theory "wash over you" (like not knowing a I-IV-V chord progression, I guess), I think most people will read a given film in a more narrative fashion than a given pop song. Part of this just has to do with the resources required to make and distribute a film versus music, which can be pretty structurally challenging and still get itself on the radio. Structurally radical films tend to relegate themselves to art houses and classrooms. David MacDougall deals with film in a somewhat Frithian way, for lack of a better word, in documentary and visual anthropology studies -- makes room for analytical and visceral aspects that often go overlooked (leaves room for the unique nature of the image but notes stances that are culturally/socially mediated when they're often written off as "visceral" or assumed).
I would argue that if it seems that way, it's because people have broken down the ways in which films are made through decades of rigorous scholarship. Most people aren't conscious of film structure, they "feel" movies about as much as they do music.
Yes, and your point re: studies of fandom in academia is key here. But I do wish that in academia AND journalism, writers could include themselves in that fan distinction without making it into a binary (i.e. we can be fans, or we can analyze). On the one hand there's the "dispassionate PBS tone" that SR brought up in our exchange (whose major fault isn't dispassion but something more like disingenuous dispassion, a distancing mechanism that allows a writer shortcuts to dealing with the visceral elements of disliking or liking a piece of music without doing sufficient analysis, either -- I'd add pseudo-journalistic to your pseudo-academic distinction) and on the other there is that "pure pleasure" business, the "I like it cuz I like it." Which, though true, isn't really analysis (it's good for a paragraph, which I guess is long enough for a music review these days. That's a whole other set of gripes).
I don't think I buy that these issues are so much more complex with music, I just think not enough work has been done on the subject yet. But if they are, such complexities would suggest that music enthusiasts and journalist-critics are the ones who should get out of the ideology discussion, not people who have spent years studying that stuff. Personally, I don't think that's the case. But I do think that there has been too much haphazard discussion by people who have just a passing familiarity with the theories they're drawing from.
Really interesting...maybe the problem is finding ideology where it doesn't exist while ignoring it where it does -- e.g., there are usually definite class elements defining someone's dismissal of an artist or genre, but I'm not convinced (in fairly non-systematic popular analysis, most of the time anyway -- not sure how this holds for academic writing so I'll skip it) that those class elements could be reduced to a hard-line ideology most of the time -- usually it's just the result of a lack of any thoughtful analysis, because dismissals never seem to hold true across the board. (Also, from my experience, my actual ideological concerns tend not to apply as much to matters of personal reception so much as institutional issues -- I'm more comfortable discussing a Marxist critique of the Hollywood production system than, say, why people say the things they do about Paris Hilton's album, since the latter is almost always fairly random and essentially unformed in any ideological sense, hence doesn't lend itself to a pat theory explaining it. I guess this relates to your concerns about tacked-on justification above.
Passing familiarity irks me, not because I usually know more of the theory myself (I don't) but usually because it signals to me that someone has made their mind up and will now provide a framework that supports what they already believed (even if misrepresenting the framework). It's like what one prof called "pin the tail on the theory," you get your subject, you get your theory, and then you cram 'em together -- lots of times it's a square-peg situation. (Like the pseudo-Marxist breakdown of why it's good for people to jeer Paris's album without listening to it or, uh, making it with her.) So maybe rather than use the phrase "radically shifting" frameworks, I should say that my frameworks that DON'T radically shift tend not to be that bothered by what a pop song does to me (e.g. I think I can like Fergie and Paris and "My Humps" and not fall out of line with feminist theory, though that is and has been the subject of longer convos).
Interesting how many issues you have with Wilson's project and his wording in the abstract--despite his referring to "poptimists" as if he's not one, I think by some measures he is incredibly poptimistic, moreso than many who embrace the term. I'm also not sure if the question of whether it would be analogous to searching for one's "inner Republican" is so easily dismissed. I don't think he intends to completely equate the two, as if Celine fandom = conservatism. I think he's just pointing out politics as an area where we feel justified drawing a line in the sand and refusing to try to understand those we disagree with--it's a good example of how trying to see things from another angle could be threatening to our sense of who we are--could even be ill-advised. Well, there are a number of implications to the question that are worth discussing.
I also think "guilty pleasure" is actually a very apt description for a lot of people. They enjoy this thing and they feel guilty about it. It could be because they're an adult and it's supposed to be for teenagers, or some other disparity between who they are and who they perceive is the intended audience, but not necessarily. They could enjoy it while thinking on some level that it's aesthetically bad or politically retrograde or silly or just that they wouldn't want their friends to know. I said before that I don't really have guilty pleasures but honestly, the closest I come is occasionally when I like something and I feel like I am TOTALLY the intended audience. Like if I find myself enjoying some new indie rock record and I feel like I'm fitting into a perfect marketing profile (overeducated, underemployed, clad in the requisite thrift store t-shirt, etc.) for the new insert-name-here album. So it's hard for me to even let myself get into something like that. I end up pouring my energy into stuff that's old or weird or that otherwise isn't so obvious. And I actually end up having a mental block about stuff that I might actually get something out of it I would just give it a chance. It doesn't end up being a guilty pleasure because I tend to avoid that stuff, but it sort of comes to the same thing.
Liking your point about "disengenuous dispassion," I think it's very apt, though I might use the phrase to describe different stuff than you would...
from my experience, my actual ideological concerns tend not to apply as much to matters of personal reception so much as institutional issues -- I'm more comfortable discussing a Marxist critique of the Hollywood production system than, say, why people say the things they do about Paris Hilton's album...
I'm kind of the opposite. Obviously Marxist theory is easier to apply to economic structures. But there are theorists who have built on Marx (the whole line from Gramsci to Hall and so forth) and who base their ideas on other sources (Marxists certainly don't have a monopoly on radical theory). And I think the actual economic structures behind the production and distribution of texts is totally important. But that's not my main interest in doing media studies, and frankly, it doesn't seem like it's yours either when it comes to the sort of thought you put into musical texts. I'm interested in studying the politics of the texts themselves, of the way they are received and used in different ways by audiences, and in the way that the music press can act as a filter between textual producers (and distributors/middlemen) and audiences...as well as a lot of other things that aren't about economic theory in the strictest sense but have everything to do with power structures. Basically, in relation to the social sciences / humanities divide in media studies I usually find myself on the humanities side researching and writing about texts and meta-texts, but some of my interests cause me to inch into audience research and psychological theory and other social-sciencey areas, without becoming one of those people who does political economy.
...since the latter is almost always fairly random and essentially unformed in any ideological sense, hence doesn't lend itself to a pat theory explaining it.
I'm certainly not for pat theories. But how are things like the public reaction to Paris Hilton "random" or "unformed"? Seems to me like there's some really definite tendencies and trends there. Things you could try to zero in on in one way or another and study. You could study her fans in various ways, you could poll people on what they think about her, or in some other way study the public reaction to her. You could look at her work and make some arguments about what it tells us about how she wants to be seen (or how she and droves of corporate executes want her to be seen)--though textual analysis wouldn't yield the best results for that question. Speaking of record company executives, though, you could do a study of how she has been marketed, and perhaps how that marketing changed in response to audience research. There are lots of ways to get at how people see her and what that might mean politically. You could do crappy scholarship about it, that made silly assumptions or employed simplistic theories, but you could also do really good scholarship that actually added to our understanding not only of Paris's cultural significance but of the wider dynamics of which she is both a component and a sort of microcosm. Hm, I feel a conference paper coming on...just kidding. I think.
I think your "pin the tail on the theory" description is sort of what I mean by "tacked-on justification." Well, though such justifications need not always be theoretical, but the theoretical ones are the ones that bug me the most, because they're generally mangling whatever ideas they invoke.
So maybe rather than use the phrase "radically shifting" frameworks, I should say that my frameworks that DON'T radically shift tend not to be that bothered by what a pop song does to me (e.g. I think I can like Fergie and Paris and "My Humps" and not fall out of line with feminist theory, though that is and has been the subject of longer convos).
Well, it's probably a little far into this comment thread to start a debate about feminism anyways! Personally, I don't see why liking Fergie would be a problem from a feminist standpoint anyways, but then, I'm pretty far down the sex radical / sex-positive end of the feminist spectrum, so that might have something to do with it. But I have to say...I don't know, it sounds like you have a pretty big mental wall up between your politics and your musical taste, and that's fine. But not everyone does, either by nature or by choice. This boundary issue is one that comes up between me and my school friends a lot. My friend Peter can acknowledge that 300 is an incredibly troubling film from a political perspective while maintaining that from a formal perspective it is an amazing piece of work that will (deservedly) influence films for years to come. Personally, no matter how well-made or pretty something is, a certain degree of political ickiness makes it impossible for me to really enjoy it. As far as this difference between people goes, I think neither is inherently better than the other.
But when it comes to these questions we've been engaging about the purposes of academic studies of popular music and which questions are worth asking, I think that it's clear that there is a political dimension to music consumption / appreciation / etc. and it's entirely fitting to study it. Even if some of us can hold a hard line between appreciation and political critique, that doesn't mean that texts don't have a political dimension that has real effects that should be studied from a number of angles. (Not to imply that you would disagree--just kind of trying to clarify my own position here.)
Gah, formatting...re-post:
Re: Fergie, that relates to a discussion I had on my blog here, in which my gf and I attempted to break down what it was about the "My Humps" song and video that (we thought) Alanis (and supporters of the Alanis parody) might be missing in the original video.
Re: Paris...hm, bad example all around. There's something about Paris Hilton that just automatically turns lots of people into bloodthirsty maniacs. I'm this way with Avril Lavigne for some reason, but I'm also not the best guy to talk about her with.
But to maybe alter the focus slightly, staying within the general category of maligned pop stardom:
I'm certainly not for pat theories. But how are things like the public reaction to [Ashlee Simpson] "random" or "unformed"? Seems to me like there's some really definite tendencies and trends there.
Now the question gets more interesting for me. A better example of how reactions tend to be "tacked on" to fulfill a hatred that already existed in a more latent form (i.e. I don't think anyone was actively hoping to express hatred for Ashlee Simpson before the SNL fiasco, to name the obvious "breaking point," but I do think that "she lip syncs" wouldn't hold true for sudden vilification of any other musical celebrity I can think of. Britney Spears? Courtney Love? Maybe...).
Quite interested in discussing audiences, in fact sometimes privilege this over musical analysis when I write quasi-formally about stuff...but I really do try to include myself in the audience (usually as a fan of what I'm discussing), which does tend to complicate matters a bit when you're not in the (assumed) intended audience.
Personally, no matter how well-made or pretty something is, a certain degree of political ickiness makes it impossible for me to really enjoy it.
Agreed, and I'm being stubborn on "guilty pleasure" (my roommate made a similar and convincing case for it the other day, too, and you're right that it can be a valid term -- though I do think that generally it's used to obscure an issue that may not relate to "guilt," exactly, or more specifically where exactly the guilt's coming from). But just as a personal quirk, not sure if this relates to the "nature of the medium" or something (probably not), my political "wall" is pretty much nonexistent in film analysis. If I can reasonably a politically icky argument in a film, it will seriously impede my enjoyment of it aesthetically, even if I can acknowledge its artistry.
Thing is, I usually don't get "political ickiness" from songs -- usually explicit political arguments in pop music tend not to go over so hot, and implicit ones (tend to) say more about the ones claiming the argument (like Ashlee Simpson's music somehow being "representative" of a corporate, cynical, manipulative pop industry) than they do about the music itself. Hence a wall, to force myself into "adequate engagement," whatever that might be. (Funny, I don't get the "indie guilt" pleasure vibe, even when I feel like I'm being directly marketed to. But I totally understand it, I guess; it's a little embarrassing to think that someone just has you NAILED. But if the music's good and no one's getting hurt, OK nail me!)
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