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.

[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]

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.

[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...