koganbot | The Visceral Extends Its Domain: The Rules Of The Game Continues

I really am sure I have some interesting thoughts to say on this one but I'm not sure how to articulate them. Am I weird for never seeing class as a factor? TBH, I don't really pay that much attention to what other people are listening to a lot of the time, and my appreciation of, and search for, the music I like, is almost completely a solitary thing other than my writing about it.

that would make you an outlier or limit-case in my "private community/public community" dance (which frank did not respond to probably bcz it no way makes any effort to address the actual question he was asking) (yay me er er)

(i guess my suggestion was that even solitary appreciation of music operates within some form of imagined or dreamed-of community....)

May not have even seen your comment until I submitted my copy, but would have held off replying anyway, since I had scads and scads of input - hurray! - which I'll surely be mining over the next weeks and months.

My friend James R. Paul, who likes classical but doesn't fit into the stereotype of "classical music listener" (unless there's a stereotype for hockey fans who listen to classical music), says "Most of my friends have always had very different musical tastes from mine. And most of those who like some classical music can stand about five minutes of me talking about it before their eyes start to glaze over. What little interaction I have with other classical music fans is mostly over the internet." Of course, THEN he goes on to detail the classes that these people break into: "Serious classical music lovers represent probably less that 3% of the population and they come in all types. Sticking to fairly broad categories, there are: orchestra fanatics, piano nuts, violin fanciers, early music specialists, opera buffs, chamber music fans, lieder aficionados (the most sophisticated of all), organ freaks (god help us), lovers of renaissance polyphony, classicists, romanticists, atonalists, etc. etc. etc. And each of these gets broken down into smaller and smaller subcategories. Some piano nuts think the sun shone out of Glenn Gould's behind. Some that he belonged in a nuthouse. (It's possible both groups are right.) Some love Alfred Brendel and some think he's just a nice man who can't play the piano. (If you think I exaggerrate, you should visit some classical music forums some time. You'd see that I'm putting it very mildly.) Opera lovers are the worst. If you want to start a bloodbath in a room full of opera lovers just say, 'Callas was FAR greater than Tebaldi!' or vice versa. Of course, some of them will abstain from the fray. Those will be mainly the tenor freaks who are sick to death of pointless arguments about sopranos, and the hardcore Wagnerians who think Italian opera is fit only for organ grinders. Oh, and the Mozarteans. And the baroque opera fans (broadly divided into the Monteverdians, the Handelians and the French baroque lovers). And..."

My eyes do something like the opposite of glazing over when Jim talks about classical music, and I wish he'd publish on the subject, though he describes himself as ambitionless.

the guy the next dorm room over when i was a freshman was a classical music aficionado and hockey fan. i believe he was from michigan, if that matters. (he became a chemistry professor, i believe.) (no wait, i just looked him up, he is becoming a rhetorician instead!)

i was at a (philosophy) talk recently where the speaker made an offhand remark about some historical figure's apparently silly taste in opera. a number of the audience members CHORTLED at the folly of thinking whoever it was was better than some other composer. CHORTLED.

As a member of a classical board I'd say its also encouraged by the way its organized - I'd rather everything ws on one page, like on ILX where you can read about Dancehall, R&B, classical, jazz, artist X, etc. In a way that is ILX's strength over most music boards, although it doesn't looks very friendly.

Well, you don't have to think about what other people listen to for what you hear to nonetheless cluster (somewhat) with what other people listen to. But also, for instance, listening to what's on the Czech top ten in a given week, which is the sort of thing you do, is taking account of what other people listen to. (Compare to selecting ten songs at entirely at random.)

I haven't listened to the Czech top 10 in ages. Funny, though, I was going to start blogging about music I hear in my actual life, "in the wild", appreciated by other people, if you get my drift; i.e. write about the world I'm in, rather than the one I merely imagine (to steal

dubdobdee's excellent idea from the above post and probably mangle it a bit).

That said, the listening to the Czech top 10 was more curiosity and.. well, thoroughness in the execution of a concept more than what I want to be doing.

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umlauts.livejournal.com - 2007-06-05 15:58 (UTC) - Expand

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koganbot - 2007-06-05 16:07 (UTC) - Expand

My attention span held out for long enough and I did a comment!

umlauts - although class has never been a factor for me and I haven't seen or experienced it, I can see how the same logic might apply as for other divides (race/nationality, gender, age). If 'they' like it, then 'we' can't possibly like it, and will have to listen to something else...

My attention span held out for long enough and I did a comment!

It doesn't look like they posted it yet. (They're shortstaffed, apparently.)

I notice that yesterday, independently of one another, both

dubdobdee and

koganbot have used the word "rubric." Does this put them together in the same social class, Those Who Use The Word "Rubric" On June 4, 2007?

Moreover, can you describe your visceral reactions to the word? I'm not sure if I'd categorize it as "like" or "dislike" (my reaction set seems to signal "like," and certainly not "dislike," but for the most part I simply ignore this word. Am I consciously or semi-consciously differentiating myself from you?).

i always assume it is a word picked up by people in pedagogy or by people who serve on lots of committees.

Yes, I didn't talk about class. It's certainly a factor, as is ethnic community (which also affects class, and so on). Part of it is the music addressing things that make sense to you, so that it's natural enough for black, urban, poorer people to be interested in hip hop - but of course this is immensely more complicated than that, since there are non-poor black people who want to be the kind of people who like 'real' 'street' music, and those who don't, and white people who want the coolness of being urban black, and those who don't want that, but like the danger of this music, the voyeurism of looking into lives unlike their own, and countless other reasons in some way related to class.

There are also odd delusions around this. I've been all over the class spectrum in my life, from (to use a US term) trailer trash to riding in a Rolls with a TV in the back, and what people identify with often has an element of fakery. Pulp made a big deal of class some years ago, with most of the Different Class album, and while they may have grown up working class (I don't really know), their fans, who were singing along to Common People, were mostly middle class. In my experience, your indie fans are mostly that, whereas the working class here is much more likely to be listening to metal or dance music. (I'm not sneering at Pulp fans here - I'm totally middle class now, and I adore Pulp.)

I think defining yourself against others is part of this. Indie fans don't promote themselves as more middle class than rock/dance fans, they promote themselves as smarter, more able to see through the commercial front and so on, but all that kind of becomes another way of saying the same thing - you're an advertising executive rather than the sucker that believes the ads. There's also a cool outsider thing, at a fairly weak level, about indie that isn't there for metal or house. There is a wanting to be better than these other fandoms, and it maps pretty easily to class. Metal's self-image is a different one, promoting hardness and so on, whereas dance fans see themselves as hedonists, and so on. If you want to see yourself as a fun-loving high-living hedonist, it's a hell of a lot easier to sell that, and to live it (I'm not saying this is fake) and to find likeminded people if you are into house and so on rather than country or jazz.

Re: class, which I forgot to mention in a vaguely epic and probably entirely bollocks comment I just submitted to the actual page, the other week I got very emotional whilst drunk and had a cry about being the girl from 'Common People.' This was very embarassing in retrospect but probably perceptive.

I'm not sure musical groupings are actually issues of class so much as how many people were trying to (metaphorically or literally) flush your head down the toilet in primary school (grade school in the US?) or indeed how many people were beneath you in the flushing order and how capable you were of directing someone into one. Snobbery is definitely an issue (and I generally assume bullying etc. is snobbery but bearing in mind that I use the term without meaning to refer to class, merely to some form of social elitism or other) within music and I think that's because of the power of music, particularly to affect the socially disaffected etc. so that they have to build the sort of characters which Martin describes in his comment in order to affirm to themselves that the music is morally right. It's quite cultish I suppose really on some level, or at least pseudo-religious.

That and generally it is better to be friends with people whom you can relate to sufficiently to be able to discuss music (or anything else) within the same language.

Sorry I have been reading too much poststructuralism I think.

See Mark's comment below. Cliques and broader groups do function as classes (even in the standard sense) in schools, and status within those groups does function as status in schools, even if such status and classes don't map directly onto parents' class (or even your own "class" outside of school). But one doesn't belong to just one class. "Boys" and "girls" are classes, especially in primary school, where there's no harder friendship barrier to cross on school grounds than that one.

In the main study I've seen of high school social groups, Penelope Eckert's Jocks and Burnouts, about 33% of the jocks (generic term that included the preps and - to some extent - the brains) were from blue collar families and 66% from white collar families, the percentages being reversed for the burnouts. But, e.g., all burnouts took on burnout characteristics such as smoking cigarettes, using more "urban" diction (the study was in the Detroit suburbs, and the blue collar families tended to live closer to the city), etc. And these behaviors/affinities could have effects later in life (though I don't think there were followup studies to confirm this): burnouts tending towards blue collar jobs as adults, even if they were among the 33% from white collar backgrounds.

What the standard "upper-middle-workingclass" divisions miss is the way the power structure actually works. In high schools, it isn't simply jocks and preps rule with the burnouts on the bottom. The actual social structure is Jocks Vs. Burnouts, and this structures a lot of the rest: most people being neither jocks nor burnouts but - significantly - thinking of themselves as in-between; and these in-betweeners will have fewer friends and therefore may have lower status (depending on who's doing the looking!) than the burnouts do. And the misfits, outcasts, and nerds may be the real low status kids ("nerd" not in the sense of "computer geek" but in the '80s sense of "idiot who doesn't get it")("loner" might be something different: someone who'd be a misfit except he gathers respect for being different; is considered different by choice rather than by social incompetence). A burnout who is popular with other burnouts and something of a leader among them probably could be considered fairly high status; and the "upper-middle-workingclass" scheme doesn't take account of status hierarchies within the various groups. As I said, you don't necessarily belong to a single group. E.g., someone can simultaneously be a jock, can be a girl (might be a "cheerleader type," even if she's not a cheerleader and doesn't play sports, or might play volleyball or soccer or field hockey), can be in the honors society owing to good grades, can be black.

Another idea that Eckert had was that when the freaks were a strong enough group (freaks then not being misfits but being people with a lot of freak friends, with some being high status in the way that high-status burnouts are high status), the situation became unstable, since the freaks don't just challenge to the two major groups, they are a challenge to the whole Jocks Vs. Burnouts structure (and my speculation is that the result here would be that jocks and burnouts start absorbing freak characteristics and freak values, until the freaks have been co-opted and aren't as strong a group: and in this way society progressively takes on more and more bohemian values, which seems to have happened in the last 60 years).

I'm not sure if what I'm saying holds in detail in actual schools, or outside of schools, but you can see why I'm trying to use the word "class" (yes, this has to do with status and power) yet trying to use it differently, since standard rhetoric doesn't match up with class as people actually experience it. This doesn't mean that the standard vocabulary is of no value - there's certainly a difference between managers and those on the shop floor/manning the counters. But even there, one needs to look at "internal" status within groups. E.g., the head of the word processing department in an engineering firm is likely to be serving and taking guff from a new engineer off the street, but may be pulling a higher income, and as for her status, that may depend on whose eyes you're looking through.

Eckert gathered her info in the early-mid '80s in suburban Detroit at a time when freaks/punks weren't particularly strong. Don't really know how much transfers to other times and places. In my high school in the late '60s/early '70s the freaks were so strong that everything was kerblooey, which meant a lot of stress but also a lot of mobility. I had a friend whose status went from Geek Misfit Kid Whom Everybody Picked On to Eccentric But Interesting Kid Whom Everybody Listened To Including The Teachers And Administrators.

This is all making me think about Gilmore Girls. I'll try and put it into words later today.

"See Mark's comment below"

That is, see Mark Sinker's quote. Avoid Mark K-Punk's.

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dubdobdee.livejournal.com - 2007-06-07 13:45 (UTC) - Expand

just poppin in on a v.busy day to point that when fk says class he does not eg (necessarily) mean what marx means, or (less grandly) a.n.other sociologist; grits vs jocks is a class distinction for fk which may or MAY NOT map simply onto proles vs bourgeoisie or C2 vs A1 or whatever-- and my assumption is that he is saying "it is not an easy map onto a pre-existing systematics cz if it was, pre-existing theory could do the heavy lifting required"

Since Jessica got me to read his site for the first time in a while, I might as well throw a k-punk thing in here that seems relevent:

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/009421.html

There is a very definite class dimension in my distaste for Popism. Popism seems to be the working out of set of ruling class complexes: a sneaking past matron to enjoy forbidden pleasures. 'We ought to like classical music, but really we like Pop!' (Incidentally: how many Popists are there who didn't go to Public School?) For those of us who weren't brought up into high culture, Popism's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture are very much like being told (by our class superiors, natch) to be content with our lot. In working out its own resentments, what Popism takes away is nothing less than the right to resentment of the subordinate group. By contrast, the significance of something like Dennis Potter or postpunk was that they gave access to aspects of high culture in a space that de-legitimated high culture's exclusivity and privilege. The utopian space they opened up was one in which ambition did not have to end up in assimilation, where mass culture could have all the sophistication and intelligence of high culture: a space which pointed to the end of the current class structure, not its inversion.

Obviously a bit of class self-identification going on here!

Sorry, but what the hell is he talking about??? Who are the popists? Where are they saying that we should always be "cheerful about mass culture"? What does public or private school have to do with it? (I've attended both, though I guess he's British?)

"The utopian space they opened up was one in which ambition did not have to end up in assimilation, where mass culture could have all the sophistication and intelligence of high culture."

This follows a statement that reads to me like "bringing some digestible class to the proles," though I'm being unfair (because this whole quote -- like many quotes on this subject by him and Reynolds -- just generally pisses me off for being so pompous and so WRONG...by the time post-punk came around, "the masses" had plenty of access to "high culture" along with the "low" -- "high" and "low" had been collapsed in ALL pop music for many many years before the alleged utopia happened; and neither post-punk nor Potter ever "de-legitimized" exclusivity and privilege where it actually still existed, even in the post-punk era, and still exists: recital halls, academia, etc.).

But anyway, how was post-punk (or Dennis Potter) using strands of "high culture" any differently, or any more effectively, than other kinds of pop music? How aren't current pop stars collapsing high/low culture distinctions in interesting ways? What is his distinction between "assimilation" and "integration" -- why is Dennis Potter's ironic melancholia (I've only seen the Steve Martin Pennies from Heaven, mind) allowed into Utopia while, say, Margaret Berger is (presumably) shut out?

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koganbot - 2007-06-06 22:38 (UTC) - Expand

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mooxyjoo.livejournal.com - 2007-06-07 20:10 (UTC) - Expand

Christ. I have never bothered to read any of k-punk before, and I don't think I'll bother again.

Frank has just made this point too but I will anyway. Let's rewrite the first half this passage:

"There is a very definite class dimension in my distaste for Tom Ewing. Tom seems to be the working out a set of ruling class complexes: a sneaking past matron to enjoy forbidden pleasures. 'We ought to like classical music, but really we like Pop!' (Incidentally: he went to Public School) For those of us who weren't brought up into high culture, Tom's calls to be always cheerful about mass culture are very much like being told (by our class superiors, natch) to be content with our lot. In working out his own resentments, what Tom takes away is nothing less than the right to resentment of the subordinate group."

Now if I read this I would be quite upset BUT I would think the first section was a harsh but fair comment - public school was where I first started defending and privileging pop and it was also a space where I did discover the personal value of publically liking what I'm "not supposed to". The public school experience has influenced me and I wouldn't deny that.

The second bit would be more problematic - my calls to always be cheerful? OK you can see this as a rhetorically hostile misreading of what I *do* often say - that because pop isn't difficult to 'get', the mass audience for pop can't be glibly characterised as misled and what is popular is almost always interesting. But obviously a look at the criticism I actually *do*, in the form of a track-by-track write-up of one strata of "mass culture", would dispel the idea that I'm always cheerful about it, let alone that I call for anyone else to be.

And then the third bit collapses completely - I "take away the right to resentment" - BY WHAT AGENCY?? Am I actually that powerful? Obviously not - this is nonsense. (And K-Punk might say, well I wasn't talking about you.)

But the way K-Punk is phrasing it in his post, he's disguising the shift he's making between points that might apply to individuals and the whole that individual represents. It's dishonest!

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bottom of the class

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WHY DO PEOPLE SAY THESE THINGS

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*Kerplunk*

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Kerplunk