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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

one element of the PBS problem is maybe the question of what drives a critic or reviewer who is not intrinsically confident they are able to get and keep a reader reading by virtue of their WRITING ALONE -- viz "why am i reading abt this movie? bcz i love reading this writer" --> won't produce the PBS effect?

so it's a product of pretexts against the unconfidence possibly produced by the industrial routinisation of the practice of reviewing -- "this is hurried; this is hacky; i have things to say but not sure if i can get to them well" ---> when all else (ie yr "pure" gifts as a writer) fails< reach for it-does-you-good as the locker-in of the reader?

[koganbot]

Pressure goes in two different directions (which I think are both part of an overall PBSishness, though only the first is like the actual PBS): a pressure to use one's prose to advertise the importance of the subject matter, as it were, and at the same time to be fun and exciting so as not to bore the reader.

Most rock writing is a terrible combination of both - a presentation that screams IMPORTANCE and a jokey prose style that screams FUN.