Rules Of The Game #24: The PBSification Of Rock

[koganbot]

Latest column. I look at some of my own ideas and start asking questions, hoping that I'll inspire you to ask questions about them, too.

The Rules Of The Game #24: The PBSification Of Rock

I don't really go deeply into what I think PBSification is, or how we turned rock 'n' roll into something that's "good for you" in a bad, stultifying way. A question: Is PBSification inevitable? Is there a way to praise and preserve the great music of the past (girl groups, soul, etc.) and to recognize and speak for the great music of the present (Ashlee) without ultimately laying a sense of deadening Quality and Significance on it (or a sense of Glorious Frivolity, or some other deadening anti-Significance stance that is really the same thing run through a convolution or two)?

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

[koganbot]

I'd say '64 or '65.

I shy away from saying anything like this is inevitable, especially since that just gives me an excuse to think about what happens in a particular situation.

It seems to me that reading auteurist and academic accounts of The Searchers, and thousands of other movies, helped me get a lot more out of those movies; yet there's something deadening about the whole discourse about classic movies, and to me there's something deadening about the whole discourse of ha ha ha shitty movies that are fun (even if I did like MST3000).

It's certainly better to think about and appreciate and try to understand things and to pass that information on than not to.

I think it would have been fake for rock not to have tried for capital-S Significance, and it would be fake for me not to write about Ashlee, and if Ashlee doesn't walk a million miles to find out what this shit means I'm going to think she's fake.

There's a connection here to upward mobility (which I do not think is inherently a bad thing), something wrong with how it is practiced. Or something.

I don't know, do I? I think my instincts are right here, but I don't know where to take them.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I don't think inevitability makes talking about specific situations less interesting. Death is inevitable but approaching or avoiding or trying to delay it makes for interesting situations.

Similarly I wonder if PBSification is something that can be warned of or averted or is describing it only a possibility within a system where it's already happened (since part of it seems to be a certain self-consciousness, and recognising it also requires self-consciousness).

Maybe the deadening effect of the discourse comes from a strong critical explanation killing other possible critical explanations - a reduction of possibilities within a work due to a strengthening of one possibility. When I write what I feel is a good piece of analysis of something I often feel like I've "finished" that thing, I don't look to come back to it again. Or: I decided to become a marketer rather than an astronaut - that not-astronautness deadens me, but also the not-marketerness would deaden me somehow were I not an astronaut.

Something I've noticed in your writing is that you seem to be drawn to discourses where an attempt at least is being made to not close possibilities off (but then getting frustrated with them, because in not closing things off they don't want to chase ideas either)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

sorry, "were I an astronaut".

[koganbot]

Were I an astronaut, would you love me anyway, would you have my baby?