"writing about pop should feel like pop"

[koganbot]

Tom posts this in quotes as his hed, gives his response, including this:

It's a cry which goes up vs boring writing sometimes but it's a standard nothing else I can think of gets held to. Writing about film should feel like a film, writing about sports should feel like sports, writing about memes should LOL W/EV, writing about dance etc etc

I've never seen anyone promulgate this standard for writing about pop, not stated like that, anyway. (Was it on some blog last week?) Probably never saw it stated like that — as a requirement — about any music, actually. But I certainly felt it when writing about rock 'n' roll back in my young days. That someone might have said it about current pop makes me happy, despite my nondesire to make my writing feel like Bruno Mars. Maybe someone feels about pop the way people once felt about rock 'n' roll! Feels that it makes demands on its adherents, that it has a promise that you need live up to.

So, writing about pop should be as _________ as pop is! What can go in the blank? Many things? If pop is setting a standard, what is that standard?

I can't believe that Tom and the 24 people who clicked "like" have no idea why writing about pop or about rock 'n' roll or about disco or rave or jazz (as opposed to sports or film) might be subject to a vision or standard or ideal that pop or rock 'n' roll or disco or rave or jazz itself sets.*

Tom again:

You certainly don't need writing about pop to feel like pop when there's such an insane deluge of pop around

Why are you so certain?

Dave quoted me quoting Meltzer (mid 1970s) saying "I'd write like Bo Diddley rather than about him," which is Meltzer misrepresenting himself a bit. I'm sure Meltzer disbelieves in the like/about dichotomy. He's not a dichotomy kind of guy. But I did pose a question to myself, when I first read it: If Bo Diddley is already being Bo Diddley, why do we need Meltzer to write like Bo Diddley? There are some potentially interesting answers. You've got to be willing to ask the question. I gave something of an answer near the end of "Presentation Of Self," though I don't have a copy of Real Punks handy so I can't quote it. My review of A Whore Just Like The Rest may give a smatter of what I think were Meltzer's reasons. ("Meltzer also... aspired to the mind of rock 'n' roll, chose rock 'n' roll as his intellectual activity.... And if the rock 'n' roll mind had gone dead in the music — pertinence now seemed to stay where it was told — pertinence could still be anywhere he wanted on his page.") And I tossed a few half-articulate ideas on Dave's comment thread: "What might be at stake is that where criticism and analysis go, Bo Diddley isn't welcome, even among readers who are delighted to hear Bo Diddley on the player. Also implies, though, that criticism and analysis can travel where music can't."

*Not that I have to accept the vision, standard, ideal, etc. The judgment's mine to make, not the genre's. But if T-ara is making interesting demands, I'd like to think I might try to live up to them.

[UPDATE: The word "feel" in "writing like pop should feel like pop" isn't the most interesting word in the world. "Pop" isn't either, actually. In any event, K-pop, rock, rave, dancehall etc. do a lot more than just make people feel things.]

[UPDATE: Commenter suspects that this post by Neil Kulkarni might be what inspired Tom's post.]

Comments

[koganbot]

The idea that writing about "pop" (or about whatever) should be any one thing is pretty obviously stupid, since not every writer or critic is good at the same thing. But such slogans — and again, I've never actually seen this one — aren't ever used to try to impose a standard on the endeavor, but rather either to beat down writing someone doesn't like (as not being "pop" enough) or to generate some kind of adventure in one's own prose.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Your comment here kind of sums up my take on this and similar claims. If we were to say "writing about pop could feel like pop," you'd have something that could still be interesting to explore a little, a potential that we could think about realizing. But then writing about pop could also feel like a technical manual and be pretty good (dryly analyzing how chords are constructed) and it could also feel like a slap in the face and be pretty good (those Meltzer reviews that "walk away" from the subject), even though pieces of criticism that had these characteristics might not necessarily be good (and might often, in practice, be quite bad).

Would generally be happier in any given conversation about "what makes for good criticism" to just be talking about "what's making for good criticism right now and why"? This is what people in the rockcrit community tend to do by default 90% of the time, even though it's those 10% meta arguments that get everyone's fingers flying in response. I'm not against meta arguments, lord knows (that would be me saying "meta doesn't make for good criticism" which would be a rule made to be broken), just not some of 'em. Would say that it's easy to confuse the "and why" of what counts as good right now with the trap of assuming that thing will still be good next time.

FWIW, the Meltzer quote is in one of your post-scripts to the Presentation of Self essay.

Source for the quote

[(Anonymous)]

I believe Tom is referring to this: http://fuckyouneilkulkarni.blogspot.com/2012/05/new-list-from-nme-and-some-thoughts.html

I thought his subject was a quote from the piece, but that's not the case. It certainly "feels" like a sentiment that gets bandied about by hopeful provocateurs, but that's just my impression, and nothing more. There is this line in the essay:

"For pop writing to be as entertaining as pop it's got to be diverse but the writing being put out there, the writers that are paid, are almost indistinguishable from each other, much like the middling musical mulch those writers spend most of their time boosting."

In any event, I'm one of the people who "liked" the post, and I did it so I primarily could refer to it if desired. But I did admire the... I dunno, frustration, maybe, that Tom expressed. I believe a wealth of approaches is on the table, to be selected and contrasted and discarded at will. I don't restrict myself to experiencing a particular musical form, or cinematic form, or narrative form, or comedic form, and thus I reserve the right to pull from dry biography or personal essays or structural analysis or cultural criticism or original theory or a DJ spinning on the second Sunday of every month. Would that everything were as entertaining as good pop, or good sex, or good trips, or good travel.

My thoughts on the matter are only partially-formed, which is why I've got Tom's post and the F.U.N.K. post at the ready. I certainly don't mind fervor, and I'm intensely wary of proscribed approaches. Still, bad facts are bad facts, and listicles (which the F.U.N.K. author implicitly denounces as the "capsule-review lubrication of commerce") would seem to be a writing modality that hasn't done me much good in the last 10+ years. Time and thought will likely change that, as it usually does.

Re: Source for the quote

[koganbot]

Many thanks!

I like the Kulkarni rant, even if he was wasting time shooting a sitting duck. I didn't feel in the least that he's telling me I have to sing like the song, and can do nothing else. He just wants writers to do something rather than nothing. So if I'm being cold and analytic, I don't fear Kulkarni on my ass, as long as my analysis was inspired by the music and potentially takes the reader somewhere.

I thought Tom's post was half-assed, but that doesn't mean I didn't like it, at least somewhat. After all, it's a blogpost. Ideas do tend to start provisional and half-thought. There's no reason in principle that a convo can't take a post like his in multi-interesting directions. A quick skim says the Tumblr convo won't, and fifty previous Tumblr convos say the same, but that result's not written in stone. (Which means maybe I'll get back to the thread, possibly. A couple of the Tumblr responses seemed to be along the lines of "Tom's really put his finger on it," whereas I think he merely tossed a couple of pebbles in the vague direction of a stream.)