popularity

Had a late night last night and was curled up in bed with my eyelids drooping before I remembered about blogging. Guess it's a good thing I said I'd post almost every day.

I've been meaning to talk about my thesis here, but I haven't been sure how to delve into it without writing some huge epic thing. The short description is that I am writing about the EMP conference last year and its aftermath, and issues relating to poptimism/rockism/possible non-rockist alternatives to poptimism, elitism/populism, race, gender, and queerness. Mostly I'm looking at how the whole thing played out in the blogosphere, but I'm also looking at published articles and some books, including Carl Wilson's forthcoming 33 1/3 book on Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love.

That's the big picture, sort of. Well, it may not seem like that big of a picture--it's a pretty specific topic. But it raises a lot of big questions about the state of contemporary music journalism and popular music scholarship as well as art, politics, and other big ideas. So I'm just going to pick a few smaller things to bring up in posts over time, instead of doing the epic thesis post.

So, here's a question for today. How much should writing about music reflect the tastes of most people, versus focusing on music that meets some sort of standard of quality? "Writing about music" is a bit intentionally vague here. It covers both music journalism and music scholarship, even though the answer to this question might vary between the two.

There are other reasons why this question isn't as simple as it appears at first. Let's say that you think that popular music (in the sense of music that is widely appreciated) should be covered by journalists and scholars to a pretty great extent. Maybe you think that people who are presented as having authority on musical matters are usually too elitist. How do you propose some kind of alternative? The trouble is, finding out which music is popular is a lot more difficult than it seems on the surface. This is a point that Simon Frith makes quite well in Performing Rites, but frankly, right now I'm too lazy to look up a page number and give you a quote (though I'll dig up the information if anybody really wants me to).

Is the music that sells best the most popular? The music that gets played most often on the radio? The music that attracts the largest audiences at live performances? Maybe we could do some kind of poll to find out what music people bought that they continued to enjoy after they made a purchase, or that actually meant something to them, or that they considered a favorite. After all, just because people buy something doesn't mean they like it, or at least that they liked it for longer than the five minutes it took to buy it, and just because people don't buy something doesn't mean they don't (it could mean they can't afford to spend money on music, or that they downloaded it for free or copied it from a friend or bought a bootleg, or lots of other things). And that's just when it comes to new music. What about the copy of Gyrate by Pylon that I bought in 1992, my first vinyl LP, which I still listen to regularly? That's not going to show up in any sales figures, and neither does any other music people bought in years past and continue to listen to.

The other problem with the idea of popularity is that even if we could determine what was most popular among, let's say, the entire American population, different subsets of the population will have different tendencies. Some populations will have more disposable income to spend on music and music-related items, according to class. Which I probably don't need to point out to you guys has a complicated but important relationship to people's places in hierachies of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, etc. Even if class didn't weight sales towards the tastes of the privileged, it's problematic if we leave the question of value up to majority rule--it means that minorities (in more than one sense of the word) get ignored.

Just because I can see the complications doesn't mean that I don't think that it's important that music liked by regular people should be covered by both music scholarship and music journalism. But it's complicated to say how, and the answer is different for either type of writing. To be honest, I'm still figuring out what I think about all of it. I do think that really thorough, systematic attention to certain types of questions (like a. determining a tenable way of defining popularity and b. determining when/if popularity is a politically/morally tenable standard for determining objects of study) is better left to academics. Though that doesn't mean academic work couldn't, or shouldn't, inform the work of journalists. Or that journalists shouldn't think about these questions or hold themselves to high standards when they believe there are ethical or political implications to their professional practices.

I could say a lot more but I'm going to leave it at that for now. Any thoughts on this stuff would be very much appreciated.