Conscious, deliberate effort

[koganbot]

Convo between J0hn D. and Weingarten over on the ILM US #1s thread after J0hn calls himself "out of the loop" for not recognizing any of the songs to hit #1 this year. Convo doesn't go anywhere, but it did get me thinking about my own in-loopsiness/out-of-loopsiness etc.

I've been a music fanatic since I turned nine in early '63, and there's been no time from then until now when I knew what was on the pop charts except when I made a conscious, deliberate effort to do so. And there's been no genre or subgenre that I approached where I successfully felt that I knew it, that I'd caught up with it or would ever catch up with it, be it folk in '64 or FM rock in '69 or no wave in '78 or postpunk proto indie in '81 or freestyle in '88 or whatever was going on in the '90s, or crunk or teenpop etc. in the '00s. But the key word in the previous sentence is "felt," since I may have known some of that music better than some people who thought they were fluent in it.

This primal estrangement began in the family, where our listening was "fragmented" from the get-go (note the scare quotes). I wasn't able to, or wasn't willing to try to, follow the classical music my mom and dad liked, and when I got bored with Top 40 radio in summer '63 and jumped along with my brother into folk, our parents didn't really participate. Unbeknownst to me, my brother stuck with Top 40; also kept his ear on classical far more than I did, I only hearing it through closed doors or when I was dragged to concerts. There was no music that was native to me, whether pop or folk or musicals. And of course my not listening to Top 40 made me feel behind when I picked up again in '66.

Also, I had/have strange blocks in how I hear music, a strange lack of conscious perception. I don't notice structure unless I force myself to. Often enough when playing in bands I wouldn't have been able to say how many verses there were in a number or when the break came or if there was a middle eight, unless I'd written the song myself. I simply could tell, picking up cues, when we were going into the break or when the song was about to end. There must be a piece of me that just never wants to demystify music.

Even when I owned almost all the no wave records in 1978, all six or so of them, I knew some of the musicians who made them and knew that I hadn't heard a lot of music they'd heard.

People like me were inventing what loosely was being called "postpunk" and then "indie," and it was already too vast and varied to get a handle on, but by '80–'81, when I was now appearing on stage and strangers could hear me, I was beginning to think that the music sucked (not that of me and my friends, usually, but the broader scene, "sucked" meaning dumber and more mediocre than I'd have expected given its promise a few years earlier), and I was trying to feed my music from the sources - blues, funk, disco, reggae - or from salsa and hip-hop, none of which, of course, I felt I'd ever master.

In regard to the scare quotes: people who use the words "monoculture" or "fragmented" don't know what they're saying - at least they need to find different words, or stop thinking that "monoculture" and "fragmented" explain themselves without elaboration.

From my point of view, the '60s were more fragmented than the '00s. Another way of saying this is that in the '60s it was easier to exclude people from your story without particularly knowing or caring that you'd excluded them. When I was sixteen, living in eastern Connecticut, I knew no one who listened to country music or who had any sense that one might be missing something by not hearing it. While some of the musicians we listened to wouldn't have had that attitude, their range hadn't penetrated to us. (It'd have helped if Dylan hadn't sounded half-dead on Nashville Skyline.)

For sixteen-year-olds now who are more-or-less like I was then,* that attitude is not going to fly. A kid may have that attitude, and may not know anything about country, but he's going to meet someone pretty much like himself who doesn't go with that.

"Openmindedness" can be its own form of narrowness and disengagement, but that's a subject for a different post. My point here - one that I've been making a lot - is that while people might feel that music is broader and more diverse than in the past, and the culture more "fragmented," this isn't because music is broader or the culture more fragmented, which I don't think it is, but rather because people are more aware of what they don't know, because they're more likely to run across or hear about someone who does know it, at least a little.

*Actually, the sixteen-year-olds I know now aren't demographically that much like I was then, but I'm making educated guesses about other sixteen-year-olds who might be.

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The fragments are more visible to each other even compared to five years ago! The other night I went to a Korean karaoke place and sang MGMT's "Kids" and Girls Alouds' "Untouchable" (original promo videos both). The sort of place where in 2004 you'd've been happy to find recent US Top 40 on top of Karen Carpenter and the Eagles.

Tumblr commentary

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Posted this over on my Tumblr but thought I should re-post here, too:

This squares a bit with a project I’ve been working on lately, which is to try to define the debate about “monoculture” and “fragmentation” in more useful terms than those (and avoid those specific terms because of their already-accepted analysis dead ends). My thesis is more like this: in the new(ish) media atmosphere, in which it is possible to understand multiple forms of “other” media consumption (and to identify, more clearly, one’s place outside without necessarily feeling particularly “inside”), the only viable route for cultural commentary at large involves anthropology, a spirit of investigation that earlier ideas of media reception/consumption — usually based on the passive reception of information from a centralized source — allows us to side-step. The point is that we can no longer — if indeed this was ever possible (and I think it wasn’t ever possible, despite its being popular — survey popular culture from above, assuming that it’s possible to track audiences as a cogent whole, extrapolate effects en masse onto easy social categories (teenyboppers, “country fans,” etc.), or even at a basic level comperehend popular culture from the vantage point of the expert.

Good criticism in part includes principles of good anthropology — it requires actual fieldwork logged and observations true to the fieldwork made (I described reviews of the High School Musical concert tour as “lazy fieldwork and lousy anthropology” here). This isn’t literally a process of conducting anthropological studies on audiences (though that would also be useful) but rather a sense of embracing a sense of otherness —one that is perhaps more acutely felt as information access spreads — from a source of media as a reason to investigate it, not as an impediment to investigate it.

Re: Tumblr commentary

[koganbot]

Well, I'd like to put your response and petronia's response together, since hers doesn't involve "cultural commentary" or "understanding other forms of media consumption" but rather singing the song yourself. Here mastery means learning what you yourself can do with the song (sing it, blast it from your speakers, revile it, change the lyrics so that it's about someone's sister, and so on). Of course, you're likely to do this better if you understand what the music means to the people who made it and what it means to other consumers. And understanding what someone else is about is often good for its own sake. If we can't do that, then we're only half alive. But using the music ourselves, making it sing to our world, in our voice - understanding what we ourselves are about, what the song tells us we could be about, if we take the song and use it as ours - is equally important.

Re: Tumblr commentary

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Part of the "anthropological impulse" I'm trying to talk about is turning an "outside" to an "inside" -- and arguing that in an era in which more people feel like outsiders because there seem to be smaller "insides" (the "fragmentation" argument) one thing you need to do is find a way in, because by listening to and participating in music in the first place, you have placed yourself "inside" -- this is something you can't negotiate in listening to music, say, that you arguably can if you're, e.g., doing anthropology of a given cultural group. So along with investigating your outsider relationship, you also need to admit and then understand your insider relationship.

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about the varying ways that a person can relate to a musical scene. I listen to a lot of genres, but except for maybe one or two, I only know the genre through other people's mediation. Generally I know a ton of Jewish genre albums, way beyond anything that breaks on to the mainstream (which is helped by things like living next door to Matisyahu for a year and knowing many of the artists personally). But for something like indie, or emo, even if I may listen to a lot of releases from those genres, I'm generally only listening to things that have been recommended by other people. I couldn't call myself on the ground floor of that genre. It's sorta like covering a beat in journalism. You can know all about downtown Manhattan real estate from reading the NY Times, but you wont know as much as the NY Times writer you're reading. I get the sense, Frank, that even when we say the music scene is fragmented, we just mean there are a lot of beats to cover. But not that we have a ton of people still on the ground roots of a particular geographic of genre scene. Those people still exist, but I think they're as rare as they ever were. (Even when you were really following teenpop -- not sure if you still are -- would you say you were hearing 99% of teenpop records being recorded in a given year?)

[koganbot]

Ah, I was posting at the same time you were posting. See what I wrote above in response to Dave. There is a sense in which we are on the ground; we're on our ground, living our lives. Of course for a permanent alien like me, who's always shifting ground or feeling it shift, that can be problematic. Remember what I wrote here? "When I heard the song again, four years later, I knew exactly what [the lyrics] were about, ironically enough. I knew better than the guy who wrote them." Maybe "better" is wrong, but my point is that I knew where to take the song and what to do with it, and I might have known something here that the guy who wrote it didn't know, about what the song "meant."

Our particular ground is one where we juggle lots of musics. Juggling musics means having a sense of what we don't know, but that sense of what we don't know hardly needs to take first place over our using the music in the world that we do. Using it might mean making it a passage to someone we know who knew the song before I did. Using it also might mean introducing the song to someone who'd never heard it. Either way I can alter that other person, possibly, by bringing myself to the relationship that that first person already has to the song, or by changing my relationship to the second person because I've added that song to our relationship.

[koganbot]

Most of the primary audience for any genre is only hearing music that's been recommended to them by another person (even if that person is a record executive or a radio programmer).

I think that back in '06 I was hearing most of the teenpop that was hitting, though that depends how you define "teenpop." The teen rock confessional that I loved was aimed at a somewhat older crowd than Radio Disney, and when Disney pretty much claimed the genre, that sort of teenpop went into eclipse, though Aly & AJ are still going and Demi Lovato has tendencies in that direction. And of course, country gal Taylor Swift sashayed right into the vacant teen confessional spot, uneclipsing the eclipse.

A point that fits in with what I was saying above, though, about our being on our own ground: I wasn't in touch with, or particularly trying to be in touch with, how "the average teenpop fan" (whoever that is) understood Ashlee Simpson. But I will take my own understandings of Ashlee Simpson's music over anyone's, thank you, including Ashlee's (though some of "my" understandings are lifted from Dave and Erika and Mike et al.). Which doesn't mean I don't have more to learn.