Death Disco 2012

[koganbot]

Embedding this just because I think it's brilliantly great, and to see if it gets a rise out of arbitrary_greay. Also, the Dead Lester thread is getting close to where LiveJournal does that horrible thing of collapsing subthreads on us, so if you have any more responses to what's on that thread, I suggest you do so on this one.

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Comments

Re: Don't call it a new thread; I been here for years

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

The academic fields I most closely follow are education and media studies (the intersection of those two fields is sometimes called "media literacy," which is the subfield I find myself in and identify with). And in these fields, returning to questions is habitual. There are general motivating questions that all scholars, regardless of their input or quality of their writing or credibility of their research, return to routinely, test out, and try to find different methodological approaches to "solve" or at least learn in more depth.

I would say that this is a community that can certainly sustain an intellectual conversation. But I also think that the conversation itself has huge issues, problematic questions, etc. But there are regular conferences, journals, departments, etc. etc. that are devoted to sustaining the conversation, such as it is.

To me rock criticism has the opposite problem; there are tons of great insights and ideas, lots of intellectuals contributing various bits of knew knowledge; and these people often come from strange places and can be wildly interdisciplinary. Some of the best books and pieces on music I've ever read come from neurobiology, history, musicology, media and cultural studies, journalism, network theory, and fiction. Over time, the isolation of all of these voices and ideas takes its toll on the field, which, especially in a time when funding is being systematically slashed and academic silos get paranoid about letting outsiders in, feels disparate and unsatisfying, despite its bright spots.

I return to my rock critic haunts out of a mix of nostalgia (reactive: "it's cool") and expectation that something will surprise me, if not always in the writing than at least in the music under the microscope (or being left out of the microscope, or whatever) -- sometimes especially when I'm not being surprised in the places people are supposed to be providing insights and discoveries. (Ashlee Simpson can activate me to be a better intellectual than almost anything anyone has ever written on Ashlee Simpson.)