Rules Of The Game #21: When The Wrong Song Loves You Right

[koganbot]

I talk about Celine and the White Stripes. I quote Nia (and once again rely on her brain).

The Rules Of The Game #21: When The Wrong Song Loves You Right

This time I'm doing something of a free association, stitched together at the last minute - I'd envisioned writing a different piece and then abandoned that other piece and did this - and the seams show a bit, but the following question might help you guys pull it together, and needs to be something we explore further:

What are we - "we" meaning specifically (but not limited to) my livejournal buddies and related gangs - trying to get out from under? This is a question I've been asking publically for 21 years or so (and asking it of myself since about 1970), but the question's never taken hold in the culture, and it needs to.

My hatred for antirockism - and for people's use of the word "rockism" at all, the whole discussion of "rockism" pro and con - is that the discussion sidestepped the question "What are we trying to get out from under?" and replaced it with "What are they doing wrong?" And since antirockism was about defeating an enemy rather than trying to understand ourselves, really what happened was that the antirockist was projecting a reductively stupid form of his own ideas onto the supposed rockist and then knocking down the ideas he'd projected, so achieving an easy victory over a nonexistent foe.* And this is true even when the antirockist was thinking of his former self - or even his own "rockist" tendencies - when he said "rockism."

(*Notice that antipoptimism follows the exact same pattern.)

A (too?) easy way of pulling the piece together would have been to say that an analogy to "doing it wrong" - and to using "doing it wrong" as a strategy to get out from under something or other - would be our liking what people such as us are not supposed to like (e.g., liking Celine Dion). I think this formulation is good as far as it goes - i.e., that liking Celine Dion may get us out from under something (though that's not a particularly good explanation of why I like Celine Dion) - but it's still wrong, in that what we're doing isn't particularly liking what we're not supposed to like (is "what we're not supposed to like" all that self-evident?), but rather taking seriously what other people aren't taking seriously - the other people sometimes including fans of the artists we're taking seriously.

I don't think it's cool that the intelligentsia was able to sneer at Elvis in '56 and that it sneers at Ashlee now. But I also don't think it's cool either that, e.g., poptasticuk, who loves loves loves pop, says that "for me all this analysis is unnecessary when it comes to pop music."

But isn't "taking it seriously" a big hunk of what we're trying to get out from under, what Leslie was trying to get away from when she had us detune our guitars? Give ourselves some space, some relief? Isn't the weight of "seriousness" what makes so much of respectable culture so stupid and dead? The question here might be "which form of seriousness is at issue?" But I like Ashlee (especially) for pretty much straight-up "respectable" reasons, and if the fact that her being confined to an area that stupid respectable intellectual culture holds in disrepute is one of the things that protects people like Ashlee and helps them to flourish, well, I'm trying to get rid of those protections.

I'm not saying anything I wasn't saying two decades ago.

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

further:
if yr at all unsure about fairness of trial, fairness of judgment (provided you are yourself just) will likely be bland; the more insistent you are abt fairness of trial, the freer you will be to give yr judgment bite and grip and force and use

(not sure how humour affects this claim -- probably sometimes by deliberately confusing the two, but even then it won't be funny if ppl don't know the two are actually different)

[koganbot]

The complaint that seemed to be lodged against me and - especially - Xhuxk was that we were coming up with powerful judgments right off the bat without pausing to get it right; whereas I and presumably Xhuxk think that coming up with powerful judgments off the bat are part of the long-run process of getting things right (or better, when "right" doesn't seem relevant).

(But then I'm really pissy when people get me wrong. But often those people have no interest in taking the process beyond the initial opinion.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

part of the process of judgment at trial includes statements for prosecution and defence obviously -- and prosecution is ONE of the roles a critic plays, clearly, but again, it seems to me that an awareness of procedural fairness is basic to good prosecutorial criticism (in other words if yr goin to make a vividly powerful claim, you radically diminish its worth if you make rebuttal by definition impossible) (which is to say cut the process off short with you)

also i think in a "cultural court", the protagonist and antogonist -- haha if not actually called THIS -- are more like proposer and antiposer, or maybe deposer and reposer (is that why they're called depositions?)

and the "course of the trial" in reference to cultural judgment is radically open compared to actual law courts *(where there are time limits and questions of relevance and are very strict rules about retrials and ect ect)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well not just rebuttal but (for me always more interesting) EXPANSION -- which i guess was the project i had in mind with ideas buried in jess's piece that you disliked, bcz i saw how it expanded into areas i am obsessed with

(disclaimer: i have not done any of the work on this expansion that you suggested, though yr right, it def feels like something i shd do)

(second disclaimer: this discussion happened in emails unread by anyone except an elite lizardgod Council of Three made up of frank me and dave, so apols to everyone else for being incomprehensible here)