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

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hm, y'all are probably right about this, though there's something appealing to me about jurisprudence-the-metaphor. As long as we're finding limited comparison points and not suggesting (as "fairness" in a certain way suggests) a (relatively) inflexible value system with clear outcomes (but of course there are outcomes -- Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography will never stop being good, which isn't to say I've exhausted its possibilities by a long shot.

But judgment doesn't damp curiosity because it never acts alone, or if it does, it's not really criticism (along these lines, is jurisprudence really primarily about the outcome to the prosecutors?). "GOOD" doesn't describe why I like Ashlee Simpson, so the curiosity isn't just in listening to it instead of not (though I basically went through this phase a few years ago and said plenty o' dumb things), but in trying to understand it. This is one thing that's (allegedly) affected by shortening hype circles, the ability to sustain engagement or whatever, but frankly I don't think you can blame a fast system for widespread critical inadequacy (i.e., if you feel overwhelmed by too much information or whatever, the problem is probably YOURS, not "the culture's").

Reminds me a bit of Eco's "literary detective" who is basically paid to be a pre-internet high-end Wikipedia for scholars (one who mostly hangs around shooting the shit in bars). Dilettante investigator/instigators. Part Marlowe, part Woody Woodpecker. (The Pecker Detectives -- that'd be a better band name, too.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Simon R used this line of reasoning: "an actual opinion is where the process of thinking comes to halt. if you're dedicated to the thought process as supreme value you can get into this thing of making and unmaking your mind up that goes on forever."

No, an actual opinion can come to a relative halt and still entail total openness. Good criticism remains open but isn't afraid to know what it likes!

"Making and unmaking your mind" might deal with specific strategies of music/how it works for you, without ever having to undermine whether or not your Big Judgment (GOOOOOD or BAAAAAAAD) is final (it usually is; as I've said before, I've never disliked something after liking it, and I've often liked things after disliking them, after which point I never dislike them again!).