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

[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.)