Frank Kogan

Yeah, I'm often hesitant to project PBS onto music itself because most of the time I'm saying to myself something along the lines of "Remember, *I* am, in part, PBS-or-whatever and that is not entirely a bad thing but can make things lame, my very being here and doing this will have some impact on the thing that may also kill the thing, though hopefully it will make it better..." (which is a longwinded to say usually I use it as a tool for thinking about my /"our" relationship to something less than the thing itself).

In that version of PBS, YG (to use a recent example) and Kendrick Lamar, both of whom (e.g.) reference life experiences and culture that most people (not all) in the social circle of PBS know nothing of firsthand, created music those folks, or that circle, would rate pretty highly. But here Kendrick is sort of playing to and against that audience -- in playing against the audience he's playing into their hands -- he's closer to the circle himself even though he doesn't *need* to be for PBS to happen to him.

Anyway, I'm not sure the metaphor really works in this milieu anyway. Do I think the symbol is replacing the event in Kendrick Lamar's album? Not really, or not entirely. It's infected but it isn't dead yet. And I often think about the idea that some PBSification, of the second type, has a kind of preservative effect, and that one doesn't need to (oh lord forgive me for the pun I'm about to commit) kill the butterfly entirely in the context of one's appreciation (or, from the vantage of the artist, in the context of someone else's presumptive appreciation) to exploit it. (If there's no one "in" to hear something "out," does it make a sound, etc?)

There's something to the precariousness of this process, being right on the edge of *marking* as significant (no scare quotes) and *damning* as "significant" (maybe scare quotes AND no scare quotes?).

For some reason this evening I'm imagining it a bit like gentrification, where looking merely at its results paints too simplistic a picture of what's happening on the ground -- some features that seem "evils of gentrification-y" (let's say, upwardly-mobile artist types moving into vacant buildings in an area of working class people) don't *necessarily* end in the phonification (that's "the process of making phony," not "the process of inundating with telephones") of the neighborhood that once was -- a little bit of movement may even benefit the whole neighborhood. But in large doses, it essentially pushes what was once unique or special out entirely, sometimes, in the process, "keeping" the neighborhood's "charms" without any of the actual things (or people) who ostensibly made it charming.

Problem with THAT metaphor, though, is that it's too easy to point to "gentrifiers" and "authentic neighborhood people" -- which I would like to actually kind of be my point (i.e., gentrification itself doesn't really work this way, it's more complicated) -- but it still doesn't quite work, because in the case of PBSification who counts as "out" and who counts as "in" is less a form of colonization and more...I dunno, cannibalization? "We" are kind of out already, and we use "in" to broaden or legitimize it/us, and in doing so we replace this genuine thing (event) with a mere symbol of the thing. But there's not some "other people," some group of phonies, who did this process to the genuine people -- we did it to ourselves (is the claim, as I understand it).