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.

do you have to be confusin'?

There are a lot of songs with my name in them, even more if you count nickname variations like Susie. The best one I've heard is Susan by the Buckinghams. It starts out as this rather inane pop song that rhymes Susan with "confusin'" and "losin'," and ends with an unexpectedly freaky, chaotic instrumental outro. It's like two completely opposed 1960s aesthetics colliding.

That's just my favorite of what I've heard, but if anybody has any suggestions for other good Susan songs (or notably bad Susan songs I may not already know) feel free to let loose in the comments.

they used to say ma'am and yes sir

There's this Sears commercial that always comes on during the soaps (yeah, I watch them sometimes, shut up) with this song that sounds like a band who are pretending to be Spoon. It's funny, I don't usually think of Spoon as a terribly original band, but they're more original than these people who are hacking off of them shamelessly, down to Britt Daniel's vocal quirks. Anyways, I googled around and apparently the band is called The 88 and the song is called Coming Home. Apparently there have been Sears commercials recently featuring ELO and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks as well. Seems like this trend towards more musicians letting their music be used in commercials is still on the rise. I wouldn't be surprised if Spoon would have allowed one of their songs to be used in that commercial, which makes it seem dumber that Sears used ersatz Spoon. But I guess they have their reasons. Maybe it's just that Spoon don't have a lot of songs with the word "home" in them. But they do have "Fitted Shirt."

dubious charity

So, Voxtrot got panned by p-fork. It's the most charitable bad review I've read in a long time. The tone couldn't be more different from the infamous review of Sound Team's Movie Monster, which was downright snotty. There's an extended sort of disclaimer thing about how it must have been really hard for them being under so much pressure due to the hype surrounding their early EPs and so forth. Seems like this has more to do with Pitchfork maintaining some degree of consistency after they've spent so much time hyping up Voxtrot themselves, though who knows. Could just be a matter of one writer being more softhearted than another, or any number of things.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the purpose (well, purposes) of music criticism, including reviews specifically. There are some questions about this stuff that are really hard to answer. Some that aren't so much questions you should even try to answer, but just things everyone has to decide for themselves, like political views or personal aesthetics (and they can encompass both those things). But there are some things I'm pretty sure I know what I think about right off the bat. Things that I don't think there's a lot of room for argument about. And one of them is as follows: Speculations about what sort of reasons a band or artist might have for making a mediocre record are outside of the scope of a review. Sometimes some context makes sense. Is the record a big departure for the band in some way? Is the album centered around an important personal event that occurred in the artist's life? Even commenting that the record was a disappointment after a great deal of press attention might make sense. But if you try to explain the shortcomings of one album by detailing all the mitigating circumstances that could have caused them, in the interest of fairness you ought to extent the same grace to everyone. And if everyone got this sort of treatment, well, that would be pretty silly.

Like I said, I can see a lot of complex potential questions about how music criticism should be practiced. (I've been thinking about these sorts of questions a bit too much, actually, and it has left me with a tendency to insert these little disclaimers which I hope aren't too annoying.) But I think it's a pretty accepted truth to say that when people approach reviews they are primarily expecting to find description and evaluation. They want to know what something sounds like and whether it's any good. Why it sounds one way or another, or why the result is good or not, is not supposed to come into play in any major way. I can think of a few reasons to break this rule, a few examples of times when it might make sense. But being under pressure or having to rush to get out an album are not unique or even noteworthy circumstances to contend with.

In addition to all of that, it's important to note that if this sort of explanation on the part of the reviewer was intended to soften the blow of the bad review for the band, it probably failed. I don't think many musicians would take kindly to this sort of review, which in addition to finding fault with their work, goes on to patronize them. The only purpose I can really see it possibly serving is that it might help Pitchfork to save face given how fervently it championed this band early on. But their flagging credibility isn't really helped by this sort of wishy-washy writing.

for your consideration

"Forbidden sexualities stay vague because they fear detection and punishment. Historically, music has been defined as mystery and miasma, as implicitness rather than explicitness, and so we have hid inside music; in music we can come out without coming out, we can reveal without saying a word."

Wayne Koestenbaum, in The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire

In other news, today I saw a guy named Slim Something-Or-Other singing Everybody's Talking At Me on the Lawrence Welk Show. It was kinda surreal, but nice.

Also, I saw the video for Karma Police and was reminded of something. Does anybody besides me remember the Jim Henson TV special that happened in the early 90s, that had a version of Karma Police starring Elmo? I swear I didn't make it up.

on accidental originality

My sister once saw Doug Martsch play a solo show at which he did a cover of Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. She said that hearing him sing that song made her realize that Morrissey was a big influence on Martsch vocally. That the way he sang a Smiths song made her see that his way of singing on his own songs was almost indistinguishable from the way he sounded imitating Morrissey. But no one could have guessed without this clue, because Martsch's voice is so utterly different.

This is a perfect example of something that I think we all underestimate when accounting for what music sounds like: imperfect imitations. It takes just the right confluence of factors, and a good deal of certain sorts of talent, to be an effective hack. But trying to do something somebody else does and having it come out different than what you intended can lead to originality. If you mangle your influences so exceedingly that they are no longer recognizable, you might seem like you have this great unique voice.

It's not that I don't think true, intentional originality exists. But so many new and interesting things come out of people trying to be like their heroes and not succeeding. I guess the trick is knowing when to keep working on emulating something and when the failed approximation has become its own valuable thing that you should pursue for its own sake, or at least preserve in its current state.

mix-related ruminations

Dang, just my second day doing this and I'm already doing a last-minute entry before bed. I've gotten distracted today because I've been making mix cds for a swap with some friends from school. Once I start making a mix I get really focused on it and obsess over all of the transitions and stuff. Recently I made a mix for someone I had a crush on and I spent hours on it every day for almost a week, and didn't even give it to my crush until weeks later.

But crush mixes are always the worst. I get extra intimidated, of course, but I also get a complex about not including anything that sounds too sexy or mushy because I'm afraid it'll be obvious how I feel. I guess there's the method of actually declaring your feelings through a mix. I've never done that, I just send mixes with impossibly subtle undercurrents of repressed feeling. But I think I might have given people mixes that seemed flirty, because if I only want to be friends I feel totally free to put all kinds of love songs and scandalous material on a mix. It's part of a larger tendency in my life, where I can't seem to flirt effectively when I want to but end up seeming flirty to people when I least expect it. Luckily I don't have to worry about that with these folks as everyone else in this group is a) in a committed relationship and b) only into dudes.

I also have a bit of a confession to make about mixes. Sometimes when I'm looking for stuff to put on a mix I end up listening to something I've had for a while but haven't listened to much. So in the process of recommending something to someone else I discover it myself. I find it embarrassing to admit this, but I imagine it must happen to other people too.

There's certainly more I could say on the subject, but I'd better get to bed...