Crayon Pop (artist of the year, 2013): bohemia from nowhere near bohemia

[koganbot]

Crayon Pop seem to be occupying a social space that doesn't exist in America: not of the mainstream but with no apparent estrangement from the mainstream either, not even to the extent that the mainstream itself is estranged from the mainstream (being estranged from the mainstream is a mainstream attitude). And while Crayon Pop gathered a fanatic core audience before they hit big — people who traveled miles to the Crayon Pop appearances and chanted along with the guerrilla street performances — that audience seemed to be doting-uncle types, not connoisseur types. But then, what counts as "connoisseur" isn't set in stone. For instance, Sunday evenings are an unofficial car show in the parking lots along Federal Blvd. on Denver's Hispanic west side, people hopping into their vehicles and finding spots to show off. There are many venues for discerning eyes.

In any event, Crayon Pop seem to be into music more for the art of it and the process than for fame and fortune or even a career.* Going "trot" this year with "Uh-ee" (and dressing like aunties) fits this: the attitude is "What can we try next?" Makes me think of the otherwise very different "Gentleman," by Psy: not a followup to "Gangnam Style" so much as "What can I do to shift around and fake you out?" But Psy is coming from a well-trod social territory, the outsider hip-hop guy who breaks big but still wants to set the terms of discussion. Whereas with Crayon Pop it's more like, "What color should we paint our house now?" At least that's how Crayon Pop come across. So even if they are secret bohemians (Way did got to art school, for instance), that's not where they live in the public landscape.

Whether or not you think I'm right about Crayon Pop, and even if you don't pay attention to K-pop, I have this question:

Who else — anywhere, present or past — seems to be occupying a social space similar to the one I describe for Crayon Pop?

I'm thinking that certain potential stuff wouldn't count, the reason being it has too much of a chip on its shoulder and too much outsider status: early hip-hop dj's in the Seventies, for instance, or the custom car shows and stock-car races and demolition derbies of the early Sixties that Tom Wolfe analyzed and celebrated in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Or maybe I'm wrong, and we should count these things.

Anyway, bohemia from nowhere near bohemia.

Also, we need a new term. "Bohemia" is played out. Care to coin one?

As delinquent lollipop girls in "Bing Bing," five months before fame [EDIT: Had embedded the Feb. 15 show at Music Bank but it's no longer on YouTube, so substituting Music Core from a couple weeks earlier, Crayon Pop dismayingly without lollipops; RE-EDIT but here's a link to Show Champion on Feb. 27 where they've got the lollipop, though the presentation is not quite as slinky and delinquent as I remember Feb. 15's being]:

Watch on YouTube

Recent disco-trot ("Hey Mister"):

Watch on YouTube

Opening for Gaga four days ago in Milwaukee (tonight they play Boston):

Watch on YouTube

One of the places I've tried to talk about this previously:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/345281.html

*Not that you can't do it for art and fun and for fame, fortune, and a paycheck; Crayon Pop's guerrilla performances and home-made posted-on-YouTube "TV" show certainly helped garner the audience and attention that eventually led to fame and the paycheck. And of course I may totally be misreading them.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Reading RJ Smith's James Brown biography now, and parts of this post remind me a bit of James Brown, though certainly fame and fortune (specifically with both black and white audiences) were prominent on his mind, not just creative restlessness. But what got him there (to fame and fortune), really, was painting his house different colors and helping spark a zeitgeist. (Maybe "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" is his "Bar Bar Bar" or something.) Brown had fanatic followers but operated pretty well outside the mainstream (but also with an eye on the mainstream from the chitlin circuit) for quite a while before he caught hold.

Anyway, as I type this it doesn't feel right. But will throw it out there. The problem with semi-pop in the US is that it has its own social boundaries that don't seem to be quite so rigid in K-pop. Robyn could never be Crayon Pop (in the US; no idea if this holds in Sweden, say), even though she comes to mind as a house-painter.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Unwisely combed through more recent ILM threads the other day, where snark about the previous rolling teenpop threads still crops up with surprising regularity, BUT at some point Tim Finney said something about the spark that you follow, from Dolls to disco to freestyle to teenpop to K-pop (to name a few), and there should be a "space" named after that thing, whatever it is. Disco Texas? But it should actually map onto a social territory. Almost think it should have something to do with restlessness, dunno.

[koganbot]

Most of the Land Of Disco Texas is in range of bohemia, I'd say, or feeds off the fame and status and profit urge, or both. Maybe I'm just trying to over-differentiate Crayon Pop. But, e.g., T-ara are in the fame and status and profit mainstream (which doesn't mean they have no concern for the art and fun of it), while Tymee/E.via is in bohemia or in something like it, and 2NE1 are both (just to name my last three Artists Of The Year).

Triage says that I ought not to look at those ILM threads. But any thoughts as to why it continues? One hypothesis is that bullying and snark is just a habit with some people, and we just happened to be vulnerable and in the way. But a different hypothesis is that for some of them we posed a genuine threat, not because we liked girl pop they didn't want to like (not sure they all disliked it) but that we were so damn analytical about it, didn't like it just for fun. Think that was a problem that the Milstein and Coley types had with WMS back in the day, and that Meltzer might have had too (he looked at a couple of issues enough to know who I was when I reviewed him). Don't think Metal Mike is much of a Frank Kogan fan, either. For that matter, I think we make even Tom uneasy* (and Tom is still a Frank Kogan fan, I think, I hope) — I mean, putting aside that I say negative things about our rockwrite/musicwrite world, but even prior to that — and it doesn't totally sit well in Freaky Trigger and may at least puzzle of not put off some of the people who posted on the old poptimists site. (Not that I really know how it sits with people, how I sit with people.)

*E.g., back in late '05, about the time Tom was closing down his NYLPM blog (which was on Freaky Trigger), he made an extremely positive post about an advance copy of Real Punks, but he nonetheless tried to put this uneasiness into words. Don't think I understand all the nuances of what he was saying, but I believe he fears that I'm doing something unpop, that I knock down the barrier between pop and work. Which indeed I do, since I don't believe in it.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Nothing of value there. It's mostly the same people who were being semi-creeps (most of the full-on creeps have left or been ejected from the board, I think). The history of the teenpop threads has been rewritten among those folks to basically have been a cabal of male over-30 cultists who poured uncritical praise on any old shit and had dubious relationships with young people. What's interesting now that a few years have passed is that there's a tinge of mea culpa from people who were more on the sidelines who know that that story is bullshit (and hurtful). Those folks were more put off for the style of intellectual conversation -- not anti-intellectual, per se, but I think that the earnestness and seriousness struck them as more sanctimonious than anything else. They thought they were being preached to. (I still think that's a misreading, but I understand it. I can be preachy.)

I won't link the thread I found here -- it was a Miley Cyrus thread for "We Can't Stop," seemed to come out of nowhere -- and it's not really worth looking into. A few folks defend the teenpop thread posters, and at some point xhuxk enters to sigh briefly at some obtuse bigotry but he doesn't engage. (It was mostly a reminder not to wander too far outside of a handful of threads I follow there.)

[koganbot]

"may at least puzzle of not put off some of the people who posted"

may at least puzzle if not put off some of the people who posted

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Actually I think that the spark throughline was from Sterling, not Tim. I tried to get away from the thread as fast as I could -- not fast as I probably should have though.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think I'd like to believe what Tom writes in that post: "I think a lot of ideas are un-follow-through-able, or rather than if you try to follow them through you get ground down and tired, so it’s better to just spray them out and see if anyone else can do anything with them."

But in some ways sending it out into the world actually makes the process *harder* -- because beyond the work you need to do yourself on the idea, you also need to communicate it well to another person, well enough that they can run with it and communicate it back. I think you (Frank) run with people's (say, Meltzer's) ideas better than they did or maybe could have when they came up with them, and they may not like where you end up, or more simply may not want to play anymore (or not play *that* game -- Metal Mike has his own game that I've often enjoyed and envied but could never really figure out how to play). Better than "spraying ideas" out, in my experience, has just been absorbing ideas from lots of places, sometimes ideas that are batted around but more often than not a kind of patchwork of good ideas from different sources.

Anyway, when you cut everyone else out of the equation and ask that single person, absent the ability to punt or pass, to really clarify or stretch their own ideas, they often just get defensive, or reveal their limits. It's often painful; occasionally humiliating. And here I'm not just applying this to "other people"; I feel like I've wilted lately under the pressure of trying to find value in my own writing. (I'm working on it.)

[koganbot]

Thinking that lots that people do is for fun and process rather than fun and profit. E.g., playing cards with friends, getting dressed up to go to a concert, singing in choirs, hiking, rock climbing, fantasy football, and so forth. Basic leisure time where you put effort into the leisure. None of this feels right as my "bohemia nowhere near bohemia," either, but maybe again I'm being narrow in excluding it. Some of it, of course, say fanfic, is actually near or in bohemia. Hiking and rock climbing aren't enough of a show.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

I don't have an answer to your question which may be taken as support for your theory. (Also just wanted to say hi since it's been a while)

[koganbot]

Hi! Are you still in Seoul?

[askbask.livejournal.com]

No I've been back in Norway for some time now, trying to find a job but most likely studying some more this fall.

Distancing myself from a thoroughly Korean year and a half I find myself listening to a little more j-pop (and other pop) than k-pop right now but very much excited for the upcoming f(x) album and as always BoA's activities - and not exactly out of touch with what's happening in k-pop, just replaying things I hear a little less. _My artist of the year 2013 was probably JP band tricot.

Fatigue or not there have been some disappointments in k-pop this year. I hope Chrome aren't spending too much time on their new artists as Crayon Pop still seems vastly superior to those. Fun to hear their fan chants at gaga shows.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I'd say Momoiro Clover occupies that space in Japan. Hyadain was writing "What color should we paint our house now?" music for them even before their sixth member graduated, (especially compared to how conventionally he wrote for other artists, as well as his Video-game music fanworks) but once they were down to five, their manager went "Fuck it, I'm not interested in this cutesy idol crap. Let's use this group to indulge my actual interests: pro wrestling and sentai."
That "fuck it, let's just do what we want" attitude seemed to carry over to their music, as well.

Then again, in terms of music production, a lot of Jpop composers do that anyways, because fans will buy the music for their chosen group no matter what type of music it is. As you say, they're not "connoisseur types," but only in the sense that since idol music is pretty independent of group, idol fans are connoisseurs of individual idols, not music. You can almost get the same mix of bubblegum, ska, and cheesy ballads from any group or artist, so what matters in the end is which personality grabs your passion.
This frees the music producers to compose however they want, even as each song is technically trying to help the group/artist into popularity.

[koganbot]

When you get the chance, could you list, say, five favorite tracks from the Momoiro Clover house-painting era?

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

In the case of Hyadain, writing the music he wants to write also involves taking into account his existing love for idols and nostalgic video game music, so while each individual segment in his more manic productions is pretty conventional by itself, he jacks up the BPM by 10 clicks and squishes it against other segments that aren't normally put together. So it does have more inherent appeal for people who already like the 60s-80s pastiche that others complain about reigning stagnant in Jpop.

This was the single right before Blue graduated.
This is the first post-Blue single. Note how they lampoon Blue's graduation right there in the second verse.
Then they did ninjas, hooked up with Ian Parton for their stint as drunk salarymen, and broke out into the mainstream as metal space pirates, with a side of experimental rock. In between, they sent up the obligatory Christmas single, (in concerts, Reni mixes up the gimmick during her solo section in the middle, such as walking on stilts, doing magic, and baton tricks) the cliched lineup and "Yay teamwork!" PR of idol groups, and putting nonsense answers on your summer homework because you're doing it last minute.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

Some translations for the songs that are enhanced by the experience:
Z densetsu ~Owari naki kakumei~
Wani to Shampoo

There's no translation of UFI online right now, (the subbed vid got taken down) so a quick run-down:
Red introduces the UFI as a hard-working idol group. She then laments how the members don't care.
Glutton Yellow lists all of the things she wants to eat.
Pink laments over her boyfriend not calling her.
Green is the rebel.
Purple is running a cabaret on the side, so she's focused on selling the audience stuff.
Red chides invisible sixth member "Miss X" for never saying anything. (This is another joke about Blue's graduation.)
Red continues to chide each member about their gimmick, before concluding "ah well, it's fun!" and they launch into the chorus again.
Same pattern of pointing out how much the members seem to not care about idolling, before the turnaround and they all determine that it's more fun doing their things with the other members. Cue last chorus.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

MomoClo is a good suggestion, for some reason I didn't think about japanese pop/idol groups, several of which could possibly fit with Frank's definition. Question is if a group like MomoClo is still there now, though. When you penetrate the mainstream in so many ways

[koganbot]

Well, so far my "definition" isn't really very comprehensible, and maybe there's another thing I'm trying to do here, to potentially grow an idea that doesn't really exist yet. So for my own clarity:

What I'm trying to get at by saying "nowhere near bohemia" is that Crayon Pop don't come across as thinking they're resisting society or advancing or leading beyond or subverting society, daring to flout convention and to stand against ridicule from the normies. And at the same time I'm sneakily working in the idea of reactionies who draw on bohemian attitudes without always knowing that that's what they're doing (say, some but not all evangelicals, some but not all libertarians, some but not all survivalists, some but not all right-wing populists [some but not all left-wing populists, for that matter, who tend to draw on both bohemianism and anti-bohemianism, just like the right-wing populists]), and differentiating Crayon Pop from them, as well. So the crucial point of Crayon Pop's what-color-shall-I-paint-my-house-next is that there's no connotation of resistance or subversion or forward social adventure or backward social adventure, not even to the extent that the mainstream itself endorses resistance-subversion-progression. Nonetheless, there's adventure! (Assuming that I'm right about Crayon Pop.)

There are many other house painters as well, but most of 'em do connote resistance and/or subversion and/or progression etc. and couldn't evade the connotation even if they wanted to.* And I'm so ignorant of J-pop that I have little idea where Momoiro Clover are on the social map.

*Not that I think artists always should evade it. Prior to people settling into and institutionalizing their "subversiveness," the pressure to be subversive can be creative — and it doesn't always lose it's creativity even after it's become routine, and even if the actual subversiveness is nonexistent. But now I'm off on a tangent. Anyway, just want to emphasize that I'm not saying that Crayon Pop are automatically better for not being near bohemia (assuming I'm even right about their social location).

And then I don't know how strong bohemia is in Japan and Korea, anyway. I think it's as strong or even stronger than in America, but I wouldn't know.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

My first instinct upon reading this post and its comments (which I missed) is that Tom's uneasiness probably has to do with the "time is a flat circle" place you're identifying for Crayon Pop. Though Tom frames a lot of stuff as resistance-subversion-progression stories with regard to Pop (Popular isn't exactly a flat-circle representation of time) so I don't know why that's the first instinct. Maybe it's mine? But then Tom's writing always posits the stories as stories, journalistic takes that announce themselves as such, assuming maybe there's a different story that's just as valid (hence the Popular comments). I think Tom and I have the same ideal for Pop, which is that it should come from that place outside the wheel that Crayon Pop typifies, and everything inside the wheel of social resistance-subversion-progression is somehow... Rock. Well, that's the first word that comes to mind. I guess what I'm saying is I grok the unease.

There's a thing called "normcore" which has conceptually gotten quite big -- it describes people who dress as squares (eg. t-shirt and chinos) because they consciously do not want to distinguish themselves via fashion. In other words they haven't adopted the mainstream so much as they're adopted semiotic hypoallergism (whereas actual mainstream ppl are either on some very detailed fashion tip in their own minds where they care about the Abercrombie label versus the Gap label or they haven't prioritized that kind of semiotics in their life so they end up there unintentionally). But normcore in the easily extensible sense is a lot like the Asian "face" or "tatemae" -- you put up a front and check off the boxes for society and that frees you to do what you want and play however you want without having to resist society or go along with it, let alone try to lead it. The ideal for Pop should be that you check off the box that says "this is Pop music, it neither resists nor leads nor motions for change" and then society leaves you alone. Like arbitrary_greay's comments about how the music is incidental in J-idol pop, so producers have more freedom (I found this a lot in anime music back in the day).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I would not ascribe the stance in the latter paragraph to Tom btw, paradoxically because he's more generous than I am -- Tom would like everything to be Pop, or at least hold open the door to the potentially of everything to be Pop.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

This also means that K-pop and J-pop are potentially more Pop in NAmerica than they are back in their home countries, because they have less social meaning. (But only potentially, because NAmerica cares more about the social meaning of music overall. But one of the unconscious reasons I listen to so much global Pop and world music and dance is probably because they do not mark me as a member of a sub-culture, particularly if you intersect them with my normcore front of a 33-year-old Asian woman who works in the tech industry.)

[koganbot]

Your three short comments are quite rich — so rich that I don't think I can do them justice in equally brief replies. This illustrates a difference between us, does it not? Also is my excuse for taking so long. Assume what I write here is provisional and that it'll take another month for me to add more.

I had to look up "time is a flat circle," which seems to have originated in the unseen-by-me TV show True Detective and according to Wikip has something to do with the idea of eternal recurrence. I don't know if that's what you mean by it — I don't think so, actually — but I'm sure I'm not connecting Crayon Pop to any eternal recurrence (which even if true requires astronomically long time and astronomically large space, years and light years in the billions, so isn't really relevant to human life on earth). But also — if this is what you're getting at — I'm not really placing Crayon Pop out of their time and place. That would be impossible, not just physically (of course), but metaphorically. What I'm hypothesizing is that Crayon Pop have found their way to a social space that's relatively free of particular stories of resistance and progression that some other social spaces claim about themselves. —I want to pause for a second to emphasize the word "claim."— But being relatively outside those stories doesn't mean Crayon Pop lack all progression or follow-through in their music. My metaphor, "what color shall we paint our house next," describes movement through time, which will surely get them somewhere, if only briefly. Lots of human endeavors have aspects that you can call "internal," i.e. not about the overall social development of the world. E.g., defensive coordinators in American football are constantly devising plans to counter offensive passing games, and you can chart how offenses and defenses have responded to each other's innovations and how the game has therefore evolved. These innovations aren't completely removed from, say, capitalism: rule changes are frequent, almost all of them being designed to ensure that defenses don't end up shutting down offenses and therefore boring the viewers, since it seems that if the game were left alone the defenses would always be increasing their edge. But the strategic innovations, though affected by capitalism, aren't about capitalism.

And of course colorists may be progressively increasing their understanding of color without their colors referring to an escape from a mainstream or an attempt to move society.

[EDIT: Also, "resistance" and "subversion" etc. aren't the only broad social stories one can tell about ongoing social changes.]

I hope my statement, "being estranged from the mainstream is a mainstream attitude" makes the term "mainstream" problematic. I obviously think the word is viable enough to use, but it can be misleading. That is, I'm at least skeptical that there really is an easily identifiable place called the mainstream, even if we can sometimes agree as to what sounds the phrase "mainstream pop" refers to (or what practices mainstream medicine comprises, or what the mainstream media is saying these days, etc.). And, while I think it's probably a coincidence that "mainstream" contains the word "stream," if there are mainstreams they're pretty fluid.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

If I understand Matthew McConaughey's explanation in the show (using a dissected beer can as prop), the idea is not only eternal recurrence (circle) but that in the eye of God all of it is simultaneous (flat). But there is movement and there is differentiation at ground level, or else you'd have a point and not a circle. Progress is perhaps illusory, is all, or more precisely irrelevant.

I guess? It's become a bit of a Tumblr catchphrase. I think we agree it's more about the claim than the reality, but what charms/relieves me with acts like Crayon Pop is that the claim isn't part of their consideration.

Oddly enough several key plot points in the TV show involve houses being painted, and schools, and schoolyards.

[koganbot]

St. Augustine may have been the one who first had the idea of God being outside time; if I'm remembering right, this was, among other things, Augustine's way of preserving the idea of God as transcendent (so to my mind was one way for Augustine to protect the idea of God from his (Augustine's) own brain).

If you're a Laplace's demon you also can see all of time at once, and you don't need to be God to do so — though this may require a Newtonian rather than a quantum world; I don't know, not knowing enough physics. But the idea is that if you know the momentum and location of everything in the universe, you can know all past and future momentums and locations as well. I read somewhere, though, that to know or calculate all this you'd need a brain bigger than several galaxies. Also, isn't there something unintentionally circular in Laplace's reasoning? To know the momentum, which is mass multiplied by velocity, you have to know every object's location at a minimum of two moments. So you have to already know something — the location at one other time — that you're supposed to be able to derive from the knowledge you already have. (Yeah, I know that Laplace is positing that you do already know the momentum of every atom at one particular time, but I don't think he gets to do this: momentum implies at least two moments, not one. But I may well be misunderstanding something. Laplace was very smart, after all.)

[koganbot]

Here's an analogy: In Penny Eckert's Jocks And Burnouts, her study of student life in several high schools in early '80s Detroit suburbs, she makes it clear that the school social structure is jocks vs. burnouts not just "jocks are popular," so therefore we'd be mistaken to view the burnouts as deviating from the school social structure. The only "deviant" thing about them is the way the school actively neglects them. But notice how the word "school" has two different meanings in the previous two sentences. And what most crucially sets the burnouts apart from the jocks is that the burnouts step away (or are pushed away) from having the school organize and regulate their extracurricular time. ("School" again with its double meaning.) I, who've never studied high schools in the Detroit 'burbs, would nonetheless describe their structure differently: It's not just jocks-and-burnouts. The structure is really jocks-burnouts-and-sometimes-freaks, the freaks (or punks, or whatever) just happening to be at a low ebb at the time of her study. She sees the freaks as rebelling against the jock-and-burnout social structure, whereas I see jocks-vs.-burnouts as generating the freaks, and with the freaks on the rise the other two groupings twist and fragment somewhat, then regroup but having taken on some freak characteristics (which I'm claiming they helped generate in the first place) as the freaks go into decline for a while. So I'm saying freaks are part of the structure but that all the groupings tend to move and elongate and break like blobs in a lava lamp without the relationships between them totally losing the overall shape.

So by analogy think of "mainstream" having multiple and somewhat contrary and contradictory meanings, in the same way as the words "school" and "structure" do in my school description. (E.g., the actual overall stream is jocks-burnouts-and-sometimes-freaks, but the term "mainstream" often contracts to mean "What's popular with the most popular jocks.")

(I'm not saying that all of the social situations we find ourselves in have as tight and inescapable a structure as high schools tend to have. But wherever Crayon Pop find themselves, and normcores find themselves, they won't be outside of society, even if they manage to walk away from some of the dominant dynamics.)

But an outgrowth of what I'm saying about the word "mainstream" is that many of the stories that "social spaces" (bohemia, evangelicals, progressives, etc.) tend to tell about their relationship to a mainstream are somewhat or even massively wrong, or at best incomplete. One of the points of my using the metaphor "PBS" for indie-alternative-etc. back in WMS #1 was that it was now a social niche. (I don't assume niches can't be in motion, but I was surely challenging indie-alternative's story about its social motion.)

A few more things:

(1) I think Celine Dion, for instance, has little or nothing to do with stories about resisting or subverting the mainstream — so little to do with them that she's different from a lot of the mainstream. But unlike Crayon Pop, I don't see her as being outside the mainstream.

(2) Your description of your own normcore (if that term really applies to you) does make normcore feel like estrangement, and you alienated, even if neither the estrangement nor the alienation are all that virulent. They are ways of getting by, perhaps?

(3) One thing your comments did was to pull together two of the streams of this comment thread, the Crayon Pop comments and the rock critic comments. I don't think they really do pull together, but I think you did something interesting in merging them anyway. And I haven't yet gotten to the rock critic part.

[koganbot]

Also, why is it your ideal that pop come from outside the wheel of social resistance-subversion-progression? I certainly don't require it to,* despite all the caveats above and the caveats in my WMS essays. (My original couple of Why Music Sucks essays attacked the indie-alternative marginal musical intelligentsia for being bogus in their social involvement, but not for trying to be socially involved, though those two essays also tried to understand the relation between the involvement and the bogusness.) While I think the various resistance-subversion-progression stories vastly overstate the extent to which songs and lyrics and hairstyles etc. reinforce or subvert anything, "overstate" doesn't mean the reinforcement/subversion isn't there. And if, when we're seeing and hearing e.g. HyunA, E.via (now calling herself Tymee), Ga-in et al., we're also not somewhere noticing and wondering about the tensions among sexiness being good, sexiness being liberating, sexiness being sexy, and sexiness being enslaving [EDIT: not to mention sexiness being "bad"], then we're not as interesting as the people who do notice and wonder. These tensions ultimately enrich the music.** And if I hadn't hypothesized that E.via herself might be noticing and wondering about and playing with those and similar tensions, I might not have been drawn into K-pop in the first place.

And fwiw I'm not drawn into the Crayon Pop story to the extent that I've been drawn into E.via, CL, and T-ara — though (see my second asterisk below), I think that E.via (Tymee) and CL are more vulnerable than are Crayon Pop to a kind of PBS shutdown; in contrast, Crayon Pop are vulnerable to a drift into cute inconsequence — esp. if they stick with the Speed Racer helmets, which seem to be clamping down on their sexiness.

You (explicitly) and Tom (implicitly) seem to be arguing against knowledge, which to me is like arguing against pleasure. But then, your and Tom's actual behavior doesn't always align with the argument anyway.

*And I hardly think of pop as a special, wondrous place with special "pop" characteristics or think that pop can be separated out from rock or techno or hip-hop etc., or that the supposed magic of pop can't survive follow-through. (And if I did think so, my response would be, "So much the worse for pop, and for magic.")

**Even if they also make it vulnerable to various PBS-ish protestant-ethic–type shutdowns.

cherry picking your points probably - I'm just working through thoughts as I type

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It is an ideal for praxis I think -- as you note my behaviour doesn't align with the argument. I analyze ergo sum, that's my personality really, but the real pleasure I get from Pop is sort of egoless, or ego-effacing. I'm experiencing this narrative (feeling, whatever) but I am not in the narrative, like the invisible close 3rd person narrator. If I tried to shoehorn myself into most Pop narratives/feelings I'd be forced to confront the fact that I don't fit in them, probably.

Maybe I'm describing an entirely personal ideal and not a social one for audiences (in that it's not prescriptive -- maybe I even think the kneejerk online wrongbot types need to analyze more, go deeper! but I don't want to be prescriptive). It is maybe a recommendation for Pop creators (or curators) because I think they *can* actively make room or even prioritize this listening strategy among the rest of what they do. I think social resistance-subversion-progression is important (perhaps unavoidable in the social context) but all participation in that respect tires me out, and I would like art to energize me sometimes. And that energy is communicated one on one between me and the art(ist), never in or against a scene.

Re: cherry picking your points probably - I'm just working through thoughts as I type

[petronia.livejournal.com]

TL;DR normcores are possible more alienated than anyone else (so alienated one doesn't even see a way out of the alienation vis blowing it all up, or even know one is alienated) but we deserve a coddle too hahaaaa

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Also I've just gone backwards in applying the terminology -- "There is a nameless thing that is my ideal, or at least that needs to exist in my life, let me call it Pop because it needs a name if I or anyone were to advocate for/against it, and that's close enough to start the conversation." Which is not the same argument as "Pop is a thing and this is what I believe it should be."

[koganbot]

Since some of what I just wrote is pretty cryptic unless you know some other things I wrote (you, petronia, know pretty well, but if I ever link this comment thread other onlookers may not know), so here are some maybe useful links.

For the jocks-burnouts-and-sometimes-freaks stuff:
Rules Of The Game No. 12: Jocks And Burnouts
Comment thread
Rules Of The Game No. 13: School's Out
Comment thread

For my PBS metaphor:
Rules Of The Game No. 24: The PBSification Of Rock (this, written 20 years after the fact, is a kind of Cliff Notes to my first two Why Music Sucks essays, though this turned out paler and less complex, I regretfully thought, but did clarify and make more pointed a dilemma or two; Why Music Sucks and ongoing variants (Why Music Socks, Why Mucus Slacks, Why Mildred Skis) was the name of a long-running fanzine I put out in the late '80s and early '90s and then again from the mid '90s to the early '00s).
Comment thread

[koganbot]

Do you have any particular favorite tricot tracks?

[askbask.livejournal.com]

Maybe this

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or this

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Don't know, definitely listened to it most as an album (+ EP )

Unpopular inclusion

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Where does Frank Zappa fit in here? A bohemian anti-bohemian, at least, and certainly ended up carving out a house-painting business for himself. Had pretensions to modern classical but never got full respect there; according to Paul Fieg's show bible for the show *Freaks and Geeks* you knew Frank Zappa only if you were "the coolest of freaks." Whereas the midwestern freaks he was interested in had no idea who the Sex Pistols or Ramones were.

Re: Unpopular inclusion

[koganbot]

No. As you say, Zappa's sort of anti-bohemia is totally bohemian; he ain't close to the social space I'm identifying (imagining) for Crayon Pop.

Romania is where to look

[koganbot]

Embedding is disabled on Celia's live TV handstanding version of "D-D-Down" which surely meets the house-coloring criterion but I'm not sure (a) if it's really for the art of it in an out-of-the-mainstream way (seems pretty mainstream, though that's assuming Romania has a really weird mainstream, which I do in fact assume, though not really on the basis of a large sample) and (b) to the extent it is both out and for the art, might it nonetheless be from a kind of dance underground that merely happens for the time being to be striding the earth and sky? I mean, it's not from the dance left in the way that techno, house, and Robyn are, but... er, not sure how institutionalized (in an anti way) Int'l pop dance is. I'm probably contradicting myself all over. Anyway, guessing Romanian dance is too mainstream, but I can never link this track too much.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9FZBF_Szag