Frank Kogan

Interestingly, your first three examples are of music that was somewhat intended as conscious critique (e.g., of social injustice, of radio being dumbass), while what you draw out of them as potential or actual critique isn't really — or isn't much — the intended critique. Btw, there's no reason the same can't happen with books and essays, a main intended social message not being nearly as potent (and not being the same) as what's embedded in the "hairstyle" (e.g., social markers) and writing style.

You immediately — and crucially — go into the relationship between work and audience. In my proto-auteurist examples, Ferguson does more with this than Bazin does. Of course, how an audience uses a work is not always going to be embedded in the work (e.g. brick in the wall & hot in herre), though a commentator can read a new work for how it can potentially be used. Ferguson has a nice bit where he predicts the lines in a movie that people are likely to repeat upon leaving a theater.

(I find Ferguson's film criticism more useful than his music criticism, his eye for how movies look, how they're constructed, how they relate outward and radiate outward.)

Not to speak for Jones-Baraka, whom I need to reread. But what I was reading in him (or into him) was what I was also getting from Ferguson, Farber, Bazin, Truffaut, Bangs, Meltzer, et al.: the idea that behavior itself contains possibilities and messages, even or especially behavior that isn't explicitly "social commentary," and that such possibilities go deeper when embedded as behavior than when merely stated verbally. And — believe it or not — my basic complaint in "The Autobiography Of Bob Dylan" and in the first several issues of Why Music Sucks — that modern music circa mid 1980s, especially punk and postpunk, was letting the symbol stand in for the event (an extension, "the feeling stands in for the event")* — is a cousin to Truffaut's complaint in the early '50s that the films in the French postwar Tradition Of Quality were in effect illustrating a bunch of simplistic verbal points rather than deeply communicating by way of mise en scène (mise en scène being, e.g., the "what to show, how to show it" stuff in my post).** An example of my complaint would be:

Dylan feels most real not when he's attacking injustice but when he's attacking Dylan (ditto Stones providing greatest rush when pulling rug out from under Stones) --> punks running this into the ground --> finally, in punk and postpunk, self-destruction merely symbolizes a critique without being a social critique --> HENCE ONE REASON I FIND THAT JONES QUOTE ABOUT HEROIN IN BEBOP SO PROBLEMATIC.

I mean, come on, can being a junkie really be a social critique? —I don't want to simply say "No." Maybe in certain circumstances it can be. But I'm not confident I'll arrive at a "Yes." And my complaint about symbol standing in for event is about how "Yeses" turn into "Noes," anyway.

Hope this wasn't too condensed.

*This is where, back in the day, you and I began our convo, right? Don't get hung up on the word "symbol" — I'm not using it in any deep way, just as a synonym for "signifier."

**This misleadingly makes Truffaut seem anti-verbal. When I get back to my apt. I'll try to dig out a great quote where he talks about how a novel ends with a passage that's essentially mise-en-scène, which the movie version ruins by changing the setting to make a sneering social point.