A Roomful Of Elephant Calls

[koganbot]

A call to skyecaptain, freakytigger, petronia, and anyone else who inhabits the worlds where Rockwrite and anime-and-videogame and Fanfic worlds overlap. I claimed, while conversing with arbitrary_greay on the wallpaper-music-as-the-elephant-in-the-center-of-the-living-room thread, that:

Geekdom and video games and anime have enough cachet that the music that attaches to them is not going to end up in the category "We So Don't Pay Attention To This Stuff That We're Actually Hearing Quite A Lot Of That We Don't Even Notice That We Don't Write About It" in the way that AC does, but rather'll get written about by critics more and more as time goes on.

I can't say I'm the one to make the argument, though, so I hope you all might care to comment, on this or on what AG says.

And I'm linking Bob Dylan — not as an example of BGM but 'cause I assume "Ballad Of A Thin Man" is what first shot the words "freak" and "geek" into the culture as positives. 1965:

http://vimeo.com/52383325

Comments

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, in Japan anime opening and closing themes are just TV show opening and closing themes, meaning they're often enough known Jpop/Jrock acts and reasonable chart hits. And in the West, what has gradually happened is that the "instrumental electronica" side of video game music has become quite respectable, attracting both big-name soundtracking talent and informing the mainstream... of electronica/dance. So insofar as it's ghetto-ized, it's a genre ghetto. Of course Jpop too is a genre ghetto in Western media. Any of this stuff could well break out and start getting written about by critics quite a lot, the way Kpop has. So far, I would say it hasn't really. "More and more" and "as time goes on" implies a manifest-destiny sense of historical progression I'd hesitate to attach to these things.

I notice very much that we're not writing about this stuff, by the way. I could if I wanted to. My assumption is that no one else is interested, not that it's not interesting to me.

[koganbot]

Be careful that the assumption in your last sentence doesn't turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Putting together your comment here and what you said to AG on the older thread, would I be correct in saying that, in your view, the soundtrack stuff that veers towards or gets taken up by dance/electronica is moving towards more social attention from people who write with influence, whereas the stuff that veers towards AC isn't?

"People who write with influence" is a contorted concept; I'm sure in the nowadays of social media every fandom (at least in the industrial etc. world) gets expressed in writing somewhere, that there are Jason Mraz fansites, that there are fansites and vocal YouTube commenters for almost any anime and game. But what I mean by "writes with influence" is the ability to reach the nonfans or to create new fans. And (speaking of prophecy) what I mean by "more and more" and "as time goes on" isn't some long-run manifest destiny but a shorter-run social fact that people like you and me are part of what I called in 1987 back in WMS #1 a "musical marginal intelligentsia" (MMI) (unless it was "marginal musical intelligentsia," I'm too lazy to go look and I kind of enjoy my confusion) that actually, despite our marginality, has social authority. So what we take up tends to then get taken up by a more general and less marginal literary intelligentsia and at the same time percolates through the general collegiate and postcollegiate liberal left, or something. I don't think my MMI has the authority it once had (in days of olde it created the punk rock movement and indie-alternative), and maybe what I'm describing isn't so much influence as mere prescience — that is, we're harbingers and canaries in coal mines more than actual instigators, but I'm sure we're instigators too.

It isn't easy persuading types like myself, who feel marginalized and at best think of themselves as rebels and independent spirits and at worst as the overlooked and discarded, that we actually have and wield collective social power. But it's the truth, and one of my ongoing projects is to explore where that power comes from. Yes, many of us are the progeny of middle-class professionals rather than of the service-industry poor, but that's no explanation, given that most such middle-class progeny don't wield our particular specialized power, despite most of those progeny being more likely than we are (or than I am, anyway, as a chronic outsider*) to earn a reasonable living and become middle-class professionals themselves.

(Or course, we're not the only node of social influence, and we hardly create the only type of respectability.)

*Funniest typo in my book (I've found three, all my doing, two on the same page) was my transcribing "despite our marginality" as "despite out marginality."

[koganbot]

Picked up on the term "folk-filk" in your reply to AG. "Filk" is a term as old as I am, but I've only been familiar with it for five hours. I'd expect dubdobdee to have greater knowledge. Is there any crossover to indie? The Wikip filk writeup is stingy in naming performers or recordings. Tom Lehrer, who seems to have nothing to do with filk culture, nonetheless is cited; as is Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, neither of whom are particularly AC (maybe Arlo has his AC moments; his cover of "City Of New Orleans" probably gets AC airplay).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I suspect there was a lot of crossover versus the regular folk singer-songwriter pool in the olden days. Nowadays, if you're talking "mainstream indie", the crossover is probably nil -- joke songs about Star Trek don't exactly code indie cool even in today's superhero-charged media context; and Lonely Island types who do similar things in the mainstream start off there and don't associate back to geekdom necessarily. However, when the fandom is popular, the filk scene can be big. Wizard rock (Youtube it) is/was a proper insular underground with bands that toured and everything.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i had literally never heard this term till I read it here (repeat LJ outage ensuring i didn't say so sooner)

i am less convinced that there is crossover -- i suspect the absence of good old-time examples on wikip means that it existed at very much at a below-the-radar amateur level, visible in SF communities (maybe at cons? and niche clubs on campus) but *not* emerging onto the actual folk coffee-shop circuit, let alone onto the touring stage or any kind of professionalism

one thing indie means is the professionalisation -- and established routes of discussion-group mediation -- of layers of performance that would have been amateur and (relatively) under-explored back in the day. In other words, while the performance back then certainly happened, it only "mattered" to those watching it; it didn't enter a wider discourse so much (except perhaps retroactively); and I think there's a bit of ex post facto rejigging going on

(which I'm not against; but I think "crossover" is possibly a misleading way to look at it)

[koganbot]

Might "spillover" be a better term, for not implying a particular direction? According to Wikip the term originates as a typo in the title of Lee Jacobs' early '50s unpublished article, "The Influence of Science Fiction on Modern American Filk Music." My objection to "influence" in this title isn't our usual one but that it implies that the direction is from sf to folk. Whereas, if in the '50s and '60s a lot of sf fans are folkies and a lot of sf writers listen to folk, similar themes and references are likely to show up in both, e.g. gibes at conformity taking the form in each of a depiction of a conformist, dystopian near future.

But I wasn't knowledgeable or perceptive enough back then to identify actual spillover,* if there was any, and I surely don't know if there's now interplay and spillover between filk and folk and indie and fandom. There obviously are fans of sf who are fans of "folk" in its modern, quasi-"indie" form (Paul Krugman sometimes mentions sf on his blog, citing Asimov's Foundation trilogy as one of his original inspirations for going into social science and also giving kudos and references to Charles Stross and Iain M. Banks; meanwhile, on Fridays he posts Friday Night Music videos which lean towards fun but staid indie folk of the Civil Wars ilk). I wouldn't be utterly surprised were there folkies who participate in fandom who participate in filk who participate in indie who participate in folk, but I don't know this.

(Unfortunately, I sometimes forget to save my comments to my clipboard before hitting submit, and lj has been sabotaging me a lot in the last few days — though perhaps the sabotage has been to my benefit, by forcing me to continually rewrite.)

*Or maybe I was informed and perceptive enough and the reason I didn't identify it was that it wasn't there in a very big way: my peak of listening to folk and my peak of reading sf were more or less at the same time, ages 8 to 12, 1962 to 1966. Fwiw I think the Kingston Trio hold up better than do Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov, who at my age 13 began to seem psychologically too shallow for me. I should reread John Wyndham; I'm one of the maybe-not-so-few who knows the passage in Wyndham's Chrysalids that Paul Kantner is quoting in "Crown Of Creation." (A favorite Jefferson Airplane moment comes on 30 Seconds Over Winterland when, right after Paul Kantner and Grace Slick intone "In loyalty to their kind, they cannot tolerate our minds," a (possibly sotted) Grace interrupts herself to say, "I can't either.") —My mentioning the Jefferson Airplane here is something of a tangent, since I wouldn't say that they were ever folk-rock, even though I've read some people claiming that that's a reasonable assessment of their starting point. Kantner was obviously into sf, and I wonder if he's subsequently participated at all in fandom.

[koganbot]

(Not that the Winterland version of "Crown Of Creation" did the song justice. Btw, The Chrysalids stands at an angle from the ideas presented in the particular passage that Kantner reverently lifted from. In the novel, they're uttered by someone from a distant, rescuing civilization. To the main character they sound too much like a creed, and it's creeds he's fleeing.)

[koganbot]

My assumption is that no one else is interested, not that it's not interesting to me.

Now, I would assume that Dave, AG, and Tom are just the sort of people who would be interested in what you'd have to say about this stuff (and me likely out of the corner of my ear, anyway). Tom posts on and off about video games, and as you've noticed he's interested in music. And see below where AG says: "As one of the geeks who has become more invested in the music realm than the shows and games, I often feel a little empty when attending conventions because they don't offer many events 'for me,' due to that. There aren't any spaces to discuss greater music contexts and analysis, much less meeting people with knowledge of the industry, so as to discuss popularity politics and the careers of artists, as opposed to just their one work that was a show/game theme." Hmm. Do you suppose livejournal could be such a place? Freaky Trigger?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a numbers game -- you're actually better off trying to find people in rockwrite who play enough video games / read comics / watch anime etc. who're willing to talk about the music they find there, than you are trying to find geeks at a typical convention who're willing/able to discuss this stuff in the way that rockwrite types (like me, in this case) find satisfying. Like, what makes me a "rockwrite type" despite my amateur status is that to me, saying "here is a new thing that came out, it's good, go listen to it," is just marketing/promo, which is great and has its place but which I don't perceive as a conversation.

(This is, by the way, a huge issue with anime/video game criticism in general, not just the minor sideline of it that relates to anime/video game music. There's a lot of self-critique happening within video game criticism at the moment regarding grade inflation and the stuff skyecaptain talks about -- dodging the relating of video games back to the wider social context -- because video game fans are so defensive about the violence etc. it's very difficult to criticize stuff like misogyny or lazy plotting in games without being accused of wanting to take down the genre. The general readership willing to accept an actual critical stance like what you get with music and movies isn't there.)

The thing I was trying to say is that this stuff is AC because its core audience is AC, and you would have the same type of conversation with them as you would with an AC fan about Celine Dion -- like, my problem with Carl Wilson's book was that if you gave it to an actual Celine Dion fan, s/he would be offended because the basic premise is that anyone with taste must start from the original position that Celine sucks and move from there. They would just find it completely wanky. So if I said "hey Utada Hikaru is every bit as interesting as Kate Bush or Aaliyah in [insert x] ways" which is how you would legitimize it to a rockwrite type, that would mean nothing to the actual geek jpop fan because who the heck is Aaliyah, do you mean one of those poor-quality MTV manufactured pop singers I stopped listening to in the 90s and good riddance.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(Wow I had not realized I entertained a store of bitterness about all this but I apparently do)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I think Daniel on the Singles Jukebox wrote a blurb in which he said the new Annie song could work as the opening theme to Magica Madoka (one of the best anime of recent years) and I got really excited and nearly wrote this huge thing, but IDK, you would have to both know and care about Annie and Madoka in order to nod your head at that. You're better off making a Madoka AMV with the Annie song, and then any bloke who runs across it on Youtube gets the point.

[koganbot]

Well, no one said writing about music is easy. But who says you can't fill in enough of the background so that someone who knows only Madoka or only Annie or neither could nonetheless understand what you wrote and why you care?

(This thread seems to be the first time in history I'm more optimistic than you about anything.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of ways to "write about" the music associated with VG and anime. There are countless cover bands that play nothing but video game music; there are self-released compilations and remixes of video game music (Joker put out my favorite of this year, a re-imagining of SEGA Genesis music in a post-dubstep world: https://soundcloud.com/jokerkapsize/sets/sega-joker-drive); there is a thriving subculture that treats anime and video game music as The Text even though the "conversation" doesn't look like the rockwrite convo. (I wonder if maybe it's a good thing that it doesn't resemble the rockwrite convo. I'm secretly jealous of fandoms that don't fall into the intellectual traps of Conversations About Music on the Internet even though they also aren't explicitly asking the questions that those traps often dance around. Is an implicitly posed question that's addressed implicitly as good as an explicitly posed one that's never answered?)

To me that's the big difference -- the "unthinking" ignorance of background music in rockwrite is a kind of tactical not-knowing. The idea that Michael Buble or Jason Mraz or elevator music or commercial jingles "don't count" in the conversation isn't exactly a blind spot, it is more an elephant in the room in the "we DO notice that we don't write about it, sort of, since these references get peppered in to jokes, dismissals, and other peripheral musicwrite comments all the time."

A (Carl Wilsonesque?) project might take up one of these musics as "worth examining," but would probably suffer from the same basic problem -- that just because something acts as weaponized ignorance doesn't mean that there's necessarily a flipside of the coin where understanding leads it to be "any good at all." And good critics assume that anything can be any good at all, not that anything IS any good at all.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Wait, what was my point there? Oh yeah -- that actually, I don't think what you'll see ("as time goes on") is video game music or anime music getting written about in a way that codes "rockwrite." What you'll see (right now!) is that there's a thriving community who performs criticism in a more...I dunno, expanded way? Not "expanded criticism," but expanding who counts as a "critic." VG and anime and fandom communities don't necessarily care about people outside of their communities validating them -- but what criticism looks like within the community isn't necessarily going to be what you find elsewhere?

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Yes, my original comment was pointing out not that there wasn't writing about such kinds of music, but that it was all in, as petronia says, the genre ghetto, and thus ignored by non-genre-fans as a legitimate pool to of music to examine, much less as candidates to join the music popularity politics pool. (which I will refer to as "geeks" hereafter.)
The only true crossover has been in the meme arena, (Whatcha Say, Live Your Life) which does not necessarily have ties to genre.

Here's a sample of the kind of writing that is going on within the genre-music niche:
http://blog.animeinstrumentality.net/
http://www.squareenixmusic.com/reviews.shtml
http://randomc.net/category/soundtrack/
http://www.rpgamers.net/reviews/music
http://chezapocalypse.com/episodes/music-movies-shorty-the-music-of-persona-3/
http://animeworld.com/morereviews/macrossplusost.html
http://www.animevice.com/news/top-5-greatest-anime-soundtracks/6653/
http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/09/top-10-video-game-scores-and-soundtracks/
http://otakurevolution.com/content/otaku-revolutions-top-15-anime-soundtracks
http://kotaku.com/5968289/the-best-video-game-music-of-2012

I will, however, note a difference between the actual soundtrack songs and a show/games' associate pop song themes, the latter of which are what you've probably interacted with. (that Faye Wong song, and Utada Hikaru's claim to fame in the west is her Final Fantasy theme)
Even Kpop has some anime themes under their belts, which illustrates how sometimes these songs are written completely independently of the soundtrack production and source material content, although the good shows/games will use their OPs, EDs, and insert songs as motifs.

In that the licensed theme songs are the arena where fandom music interacts with the pop market, it should be noted that anime and VG geeks, despite having heard hundreds of themes, rarely actually venture out into the Jpop market beyond their fandom music bubble. As one of the geeks who has become more invested in the music realm than the shows and games, I often feel a little empty when attending conventions because they don't offer many events "for me," due to that. There aren't any spaces to discuss greater music contexts and analysis, much less meeting people with knowledge of the industry, so as to discuss popularity politics and the careers of artists, as opposed to just their one work that was a show/game theme.
Part of this is that such writings are more focussed on the combination of music and visuals that are specific to the show and its relation to the source material's content. (On the other hand, this has the potential to beget discussion on music inextricable from an audio-visual experience even deeper than most attempts that talk about regular music videos.)
http://www.glassreflection.net/anime-video-reviews/top-50-anime-openings/
http://www.jesuotaku.com/specials/top-20-anime-theme-songs-of-2012/
http://www.jesuotaku.com/specials/top-20-anime-theme-songs-of-2011/
http://www.jesuotaku.com/specials/top-20-anime-theme-songs-of-2010/

There's also more of a trend towards eschewing analysis in favor of simply urging the reader to just listen to the piece in question, followed by an embed to facilitate: http://kotaku.com/tag/kotakumelodic

This is adopted from the "let's just share this awesome thing we found and do nothing else to avoid sullying the experience" approach most media-covering blogs have, which has also been epitomized in the tumblr reblog structure.

[koganbot]

There aren't any spaces to discuss greater music contexts and analysis...

See my response upthread to petronia.

[koganbot]

I've noticed that, when trawling YouTube for good quality song-streams, I'll frequently run across fanmade vids where slides or clips from anime are used to illustrate beloved songs, which we can also conceive the other way around: songs are used to illustrate scenes from beloved anime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArxvJJZrSQA

Happens with clips from general TV dramas too, but seems more frequent with anime.

[EDIT: Er, that clip; didn't review it before embedding. Better make it a link. Guess I don't know what I'm getting into with anime.Is it typical?]

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I have plans to create a more formal space of discussion. The grand goal is to have a panel at a con wherein I teach and have the attendees play Apop Trope Bingo. (Precursors being me getting a keyboard and learning to analyze a song on the fly, including recognizing chord progressions and pop composition techniques.)

AMVs are a thing. Most conventions have a FanVid panel that doubles as a competition, as they showcase the best of submitted entries, or well known AMV producers show off their latest productions, such as the AMV Hell project.

Of course, the original first fanvid seems to come from Star Trek fandom.

As for the content of the AMV you linked...um, yeah, the content of anime can be, um, yeah. It can take some getting used to, and due to the rise of otaku money controlling demand, that kind of thing is a lot harder to avoid than in video games, which also benefits from there being a lot of western-based game companies. (Or, at least, in the official content of video games. Promotional materials for games can get about as bad.) That show looks like it's a low-budget C-level anime meant to put the focus on fetish humor. So, it's typical within its own niche within anime?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, AMVs are a huge thing and -- ironically -- actually front and centre of the "respectable" cult-crit conversation surrounding remix/mashup culture. You'll find AMVs curated into museum shows, for instance.

I would say for the most part that it's not clips used to illustrate the songs, but the songs used to illustrate the scenes. In fact the focus in AMVs is typically retelling/subverting/pasting disparate sources together to tell an alternate story from the media canon. So neither the interest of the original person doing it or the person curating it into the museum show resides in "what is this saying about the song."

[koganbot]

Is an implicitly posed question that's addressed implicitly as good as an explicitly posed one that's never answered?

This question jumped out at me because it doesn't say explicitly who is posing questions explicitly that no one is answering and who is posing questions implicitly that are at least getting "addressed" implicitly (if not answered). It also doesn't say, or imply, what the questions are.

My guess is that you meant that rockwriters pose explicit questions that are never answered* while the anime and video game people pose questions implicitly (and accidentally?) that somehow are implicitly (and accidentally?) "addressed." But I don't know. And I have no clue as to what you think the questions are.

To pose another question, one that's not so easy to answer: while I realize that rockwrite covers a wide range of styles and attitudes and concerns, could you give an example of a sorta typical piece of rockwrite and then an example of an especially admirable piece of rockwrite and say what it is about your examples that codes as rockwrite? And could you also give an example of sorta typical writing about anime or video game music and then an example of admirable writing about anime or video game music and say what it is that's different about the anime/VG writing and how it is that it fails to code as rockwrite?

And for extra credit, you could say what it is, if anything, that anime or video game criticism might gain if it were to make some moves that coded as rockwrite, and what it would lose. And you could say what rockwrite might gain, or lose, or both, if it made moves that resembled the writing about video games and anime.

By the way, sampling the writing that AG links, I don't think the various reviews are all that strange or different from reviews one might see in a "regular" music magazine about non-anime or VG music.** The anime/VG stuff has the potential "advantage" of being able to refer to what's happening on a screen or in a plot (there are many more words for this than are available to describe how music sounds), to which it adds some adjectives about the music and a brief explanation of how the music serves what's happening onscreen. Whereas regular non-VG/anime reviews pay more attention to identifying a musical genre and, in trying to describe the music, rely more on cross-referencing other pieces of music. Both types of reviewing (anime/VG and non-anime/VG) are equally reliant on adjectives.

From my brief sample, it seems that the anime/VG stuff sidesteps the basic question of why one is listening to the soundtrack when not playing the game or watching the anime; of how the music might serve someone's life; also, for that matter, of how the games and the anime serve people's lives. And unlike rockwrite*** the question doesn't seem to be always bubbling up from underneath of how one relates to other human beings — other critics and other audiences — and who has the better attitude, and whether someone somewhere is being misogynist or racist. The anime/VG reviews seem more generally positive, and have fewer jokes.

*Does "never answered" mean they're never even responded to, or just that the responses are inadequate?

**Of course, rockwrite these days has moved away from music magazines and is much less beholden to (or trapped by) the record review format.

***Which isn't to say that such questions don't bubble up all over, e.g., YouTube comment threads, not just in rockwrite.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Moves that rockwrite make: there's an impulse that I see in a lot of rockwrite (which I'm defining as "the orbit that has a through-line from alt-weeklies and fanzines and music critic websites/forums and a bunch of other stuff that maybe I shouldn't be lumping into one word but am anyway") to bring social questions to the surface explicitly even if the questions don't get answered (well). "How does this thing work in THE world, or in MY world, or in THAT PERSON'S world, and why does it work that way." Music itself is sometimes the context, but often *life* is the context, music being the conduit for analysis of itself and the life surrounding it.

A lot of anime/VG stuff I see in fandoms (and I'm biased here to younger fandoms) are overstuffed with life being performed, but not so much with people asking questions of themselves and their communities that rockwriters ask. I could just be wrong here, and I could be mistaking a particular brand of rockwrite for something else.

An example: I was thinking recently about an old column by Nitsuh Abebe (http://agrammar.tumblr.com/post/359990238/the-rules-of-the-game-a-fuller-thought-on-j-hopper)about "The Game," where responses to Vampire Weekend lead him to map out a game in which folks score points by being on the right side (or acting as scorekeeper) re: the sociocultural-whatever-al make-up of the band and their position in the world.

This strikes me as a line of inquiry that's groping toward questions it's not actually that interested in exploring/answering. It ends with

I don’t want to read people one-upping one another on this game anymore. I want to read criticism. I want to read criticism that acknowledges the variety of experience in the world, cares what people have to say about it, and has more than one neurotic framework for evaluating this stuff. And this game steers us ever farther from that.

Which seems like a punt away from the question of why this game gets played and how and why this game is different from the criticism that Nitsuh wants (and what that criticism would look like).

I'm not very well-versed in the goings-on of anime/VG music fans. My limited experience suggests that the kind of broader social context that gets called out a lot in what I'm calling "rockwrite" is more of an undercurrent in the fandom itself, which can write about itself plenty but doesn't exactly take the "text" to be the jumping off point to an analysis of its social world. And in not doing that explicitly, it avoids some of the pitfalls of asking bad questions about social organization, but leaves a lot unasked. (And provides its own answer sometimes -- the answer to "how do we create a better criticism" or a "better community" is, "become this fandom," "become this community.")

I'm mostly just throwing stuff out here, and I hope that a few others can (esp.) knock down some of my assumptions about VG/anime fandom. I need to read the last thread, follow the above links (thanks @arbitrary_greay) and think about it a bit.

[koganbot]

Yeah, Nitsuh can be very frustrating. He'll take a genuinely worthy stance and then stop dead. I remember reacting to a post of his on Kreayshawn in the same way you reacted to his Vampire Weekend post.

But I'll note first that it wasn't Nitsuh who asked a question explicitly, it was you, on this thread, a few days ago: "Why [does] this game get played?" And second, it's the sort of question I've been asking and answering for 45 years, scores of times, maybe hundreds. And I'll bet that right now you yourself could map out an answer to the question in about 200 words. I don't think the thread we're on right now should become a vehicle for me to rewrite "Death Rock 2000" and "The Death Of The Cool" etc. etc. etc. But, for instance, see my response to John Wójtowicz back in WMS #4, which I reprinted in Real Punks (chapter 17), where I quote LeRoi Jones* actually using the word "one-upmanship":

Heroin is the most popular addictive drug used by Negroes because, it seems to me, the drug itself transforms the Negro's normal separation from the mainstream of society into an advantage (which, I have been saying, I think it is anyway). It is one-upmanship of the highest order... The terms of value change radically, and no one can tell the "nodding junkie" that employment or success are of any value at all.

(Obv. "my" answers draw on other people's, e.g., Jones', Lester Bangs', Lou Reed's. And my "answers" won't speak for every aspect of everyone's participation in those games Nitsuh decries, but they do at least draw a picture of the psychosocial background within which the supposed one-upmanship makes sense.)

So I simply don't buy your contention that rockwrite asks explicit questions that it never answers. A lot of people botch the questions, but the ones who ask 'em right also give pretty good answers. There aren't enough of us, and most social analysis within rockwrite doesn't get much beyond posturing. But not all social analysis, all the time. (And I've not been keeping up with Nitsuh, but who's to say he hasn't returned more deeply to the subject he fumbled on his Tumblr?)

*Don't know whether he prefers having his old work cited as by LeRoi Jones or Amiri Baraka; one of my editors suggested that it was the former, so that's what I went with.

Inferences pt 1

[koganbot]

My limited experience suggests that the kind of broader social context that gets called out a lot in what I'm calling "rockwrite" is more of an undercurrent in the fandom itself, which can write about itself plenty but doesn't exactly take the "text" to be the jumping off point to an analysis of its social world.

I'm not understanding what you mean when you say "write about itself" and "undercurrent" any more than I get what you meant upthread by an "implicitly posed question." I know how to use such terms on behalf of my own ideas, but I don't know what you would single out as an example of fandom, or any discourse, writing about itself; nor what you have in mind when you say a context is is an undercurrent, or how you think this makes something implicit — contexts are there no matter what, whether they're referred to in the prose or not, but this doesn't mean that questions about or awareness of those contexts are "implied" by someone's text. You still need to describe specific events so I can know what's on your mind.

But the events you use don't have to be from real life, and they don't have to be altogether typical. Sometimes you're better off writing them as fiction, writing hypotheticals, because that way you can simplify if need be to highlight what you most want us to attend to. And since you're making up the details, in a sense we're in your hands and so we're not distracted by our own knowledge of actual details of some real situation.

I'll give my own example here. Suppose Sam says to Chris, "Let's get together for lunch. Are you free Thursday?" Chris replies, "I'm pretty much swamped for the next couple of weeks. How about after that?" Sam says, "Actually, as I think about it, I'm swamped too and Thursday was overoptimistic. Let's say around the end of the month." Chris: "That sounds good."

Now, I would say that they're each implying that they'd like to see the other, though they're also implying that they have more immediate (though not necessarily more important) priorities. Neither of these implications may be true, but each is definitely implied. Even if Sam and Chris are lying — perhaps they're secret embezzlers who plan to see each other the next afternoon to plan their latest chicanery, and the whole conversation is a charade to mislead potential undercover agents — they've nonetheless implied that they want to see each other but have more immediate priorities.

I'd also say that this interchange reveals a hunk about Sam and Chris and their world. It may not reveal what they really want or need, but it tells me what they want to convey and the social forms they use to convey it. Of course, I myself know something about their world (we'll say it's contemporary America, and Sam and Chris are socially more or less like me). E.g., "lunch" isn't the same commitment as "dinner," the latter implying (again, not necessarily correctly) a stronger friendship.

Okay, we can ask questions of this interchange. For instance, "What sort of friendship will Sam and Chis end up having?" "What sort of friendship would Sam and Chris like to have?" "What sort of friendship should Sam and Chis have?" Is this the sort of thing you have in mind when you use the phrase "implicitly posed question"? If so, "implicitly" is the wrong word, since neither Sam nor Chris implied the question. In some ways, their current and subsequent behavior may "answer" such questions, but that doesn't mean that Sam and Chris are either asking them or implying them. I'm the one who's asking them. I'd say the questions are there to be asked, simply because the world has a future and we can try to predict it, and, barring a sudden calamity or unexpected events, Sam and Chris are likely to at least have the opportunity to interact in said future. (I take it that neither is expected to be sentenced to prison in the next day or so.)

Inferences pt 2

[koganbot]

In any event, by changing a few words, we can ask ourselves similar questions about people in the anime and video-game worlds: how will they interact? how would they like to interact? how should they interact? And we can throw in all sorts of variables: race, class, gender, whether people are positioning themselves as fans or critics or intellectuals or geeks or are they there for fun or are they serious participants, and so on.

But I'm utterly at a loss as to how, unless some people in those worlds explicitly ask them, such questions could be there in some stronger way than they are in my Sam and Chris example. I'm inferring from* your phrases "write about itself plenty" and "an implicitly posed question" that you're thinking something stronger than just, "the questions are there if someone wants to ask them." But I'll put that feeling of being lost in brackets to jump to this one: I don't see how such questions can be less there in the rockwrite world than in the anime/VG world. That the rockwrite people may be more often pushing such questions to the surface, and then mostly dealing with them poorly, doesn't eliminate the questions from the subsurface. They don't go away. So if anime/VG is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions, then the rockwrite world is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions too, no matter how bad a botch the latter world's explicit questions and answers are. Fwiw, Nitsuh's post is absolutely fraught with the issue — if not the question — of what his relationship to Jessica Hopper and ilk will be. I don't see how such issues can possibly disappear, whether or not Nitsuh and Jessica ever make them explicit, whether or not Nitsuh and Jessica actually spend much thought or emotion on the issues.

To put all this more abstractly, and returning to my reply back in '88 to my friend John, there's a bunch of stuff that I generally put into the category "hairstyle"/"acting out" — I'm using these words as positives in this particular paragraph — that I consider to be at least a rudimentary form of thought, or at least as having the potential for containing thought. The way I put it is that, by choosing my cut of hair, or what shirt to put on, or what tone of voice to use on a comment thread, I'm to some extent answering some questions (what will my relationship be to others given their hairstyles and shirts and tones of voice?) even if I'm not asking them explicitly or implicitly, and even if I think the questions are a waste of time (which I don't, but that's a different issue). As I said, I don't see how rockwrite, no matter what it does, can make such answers and their attendant questions go away.

Btw, speaking of tone of voice — mine — I found Nitsuh's post shallow and Jessica's, if Nitsuh described it fairly (I didn't click through), juvenile. And I'm going to be all masculine and binary and tell you, Dave, that either you want to communicate your ideas or you don't, and assuming the former, you've simply got to give examples, describe events, as a matter of course. I don't fully understand why you tend not to. If it's fear of calling people out, I would guess that, e.g., Nitsuh would welcome the fact that you wanted more from him than he gave. At least, you gain more by assuming so than you lose if the assumption is wrong.

*Though this might not be what you're implying.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't really stand by the original question (implicit/explicit) since I threw it out there wondering if it had legs and it immediately fell on its face (or its ass, not sure which).

I guess the vague "implicitness" I'm referring to refers to VG and rockwrite equally, if what I mean is "lots of questions COULD be asked about the social etc." since this is a truism that could apply to any social interaction.

What I've been struggling with is something more like, "do people who write about rock music THINK and SAY they are doing social analysis more than people in videogames/anime, and, if so, are they, and if so, is it any good?"

I shouldn't really speak to the first part more than, e.g., minimoonstar or AG, who know more than I do about VG/anime I'm sure.

As for "does rockwrite do social analysis and is it any good," I would say the answers are probably "sort of" and "not really" most of the time, including a lot of what *I* have to say about rockwrite (here and maybe recently more generallY). (That is, vague hand-waving to social analysis that isn't really that good.)

I have been avoiding calling out problems as I see them in the rockwrite world (which at this point means my peripheral view of it from Tumblr) in part because I don't really want to interact with most folks there when they talk about music (that is, I'm not sure what role I have in "solving" any problems that might arise there as I see them and tend more often now to shut out the convo altogether) and in part because I'm not really firing on all cylinders with it lately. I should probably write something about actual music and see what happens, but perhaps until I do that I can lay off the broad generalizations from uninterrogated gut feelings...

[koganbot]

You didn't even give your idea a chance to have legs, initially, because you didn't tie it to events and people. After I goaded you, you gave us the Nitsuh example, which brought clarity and also, to my mind, knocked down your phrase "never get answered"; but this doesn't knock down your overall question. I don't think the word "implicitly" flies, or walks, or applies, but that's no big deal. You can put the word "potential" in its place, e.g., "potential question that's somewhat addressed somewhat below the surface." The real trouble with your phrase "implicitly posed question that's addressed implicitly" is that it makes the reader, e.g. me, have to play a guessing game as to what such a question might possibly be and what its being addressed might look like. You can't just give us categories, especially one with as abstruse a title as "implicitly posed question," and assume that we'll be able to conjure up the events that belong in the category. I continue to wonder what your reasons are for not providing examples as a matter of course.

But I didn't mean to imply that you should go around engaging and calling out a lot of people in your rockwrite world, unless that's what you want to do. I do mean that if you want to communicate your ideas to anyone, for instance me, you have to give examples of what in the dickens might give rise to or support the ideas. An idea that can't be applied to something somewhere isn't an idea. How could anyone understand it? But in giving examples, you'll inevitably call out actual human beings (or, if you're going fictional, types of human beings). Of course, there's a good chance they'll never see what you write; but there's always the risk or promise (hey, maybe they'll like your critique, and of course an example or two of ours might actually be positive) that they'll run across it, and there you are. But you still don't have to engage those people, if you don't have good reason to.

[koganbot]

Not quite finished picking at you (picking on you?).

broad generalizations from uninterrogated gut feelings

But your judgment — that most of rockwrite's social analysis isn't very good — isn't based on uninterrogated gut feelings, but on hundreds of specific observations. You haven't done a systematic survey, much less tested how hopeless or not hopeless the situation might be, say by constructively challenging a lot of people on the vacuousness of their social analyses and seeing if any of them improve as a result. But you certainly know what's wrong with most of rockwrite's attempts at social analysis. You're just not willing to say what you know. Again, I'm not telling you to go around calling people out. I am telling you that if you do choose to say something, especially to me, then really say it.

I also think that you're ambivalent about calling out problems, just as I am, probably for similar reasons. My hypothesis is that most of the people we'll run across simply can't find their way to critical thinking, and my second hypothesis is that I'd be better off spending time on other stuff than on testing the first hypothesis. But these are hypotheses, not facts, hence the ambivalence. And people like Nitsuh Abebe and, especially, Tom Ewing are maddening because they come tantalizingly close.

By the way, my experience with WMS Mk II was that when people wrote specifically about their own lives they included very sharp and interesting social detail. But few of these people could jump from direct social observation to social analysis that was more than a string of platitudes. Few tried the jump at all, actually, even when I asked them to. But there were a couple of jumpers that held promise.