Have Tracer, Mark, and Alan not heard Margaret Berger?

[koganbot]

In relation to Episode Three of the Resonance FM series A Bite Of Stars, A Slug Of Time, And Thou:

(1) Results 1 - 10 of about 1,940 for "margaret berger" "robot song". (0.04 seconds)

(2) How would you compare Mark's and Alan's accents as to class, geography, and personality?

(3) Mark mentioned that the field of science fiction has been and to some extent still is anxious about its quality in relation to supposed real literature. (Frank: And well it should be.) Two questions:

(3a) Does this anxiety manifest itself in an attempt to raise the genre (say by infusing more literary or social elements) or just to do it better? (The field of mystery stories probably suffers from a similar anxiety, but back in its great days there were some writers - G.K. Chesterton and Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout come to mind - whom I'd put into the "do it better" category in that they had writers chops but didn't think they had to monkey with the conventions they were given, so they didn't come across as adding "superior" elements [except maybe when Chandler got to The Long Goodbye, which is his most overrated novel anyway].)

(3b) Does popular and semipopular music (incl. indie and alternative and noise) feel a similar anxiety, and if so, how does it act out the anxiety? I think it's shot through with anxiety, but unlike science fiction, it doesn't have an established "real music" that's equivalent to "real literature" to compare itself to, given the abandonment by so much of the intelligentsia of "classical" and "serious" music as the measure of quality. So pop and rock can be obsessive about their search for the real, but the real always remains provisional, because you don't know where to locate it.

Comments

[koganbot]

Don't know what you mean by "existentially" secure but the question I'm asking is about how "socially" secure literary "realness" is, and the point is that when SF wants to improve, it thinks that at least it has some idea of what it would take to be more "literary"*; obviously literature is part of a larger culture that has made hierarchies of taste less secure in a lot of endeavors, and the intelligentsia has consciously (and admirably) made itself less secure but...

Music is the vanguard here, where the hierarchy takes its first, hard beating, with the high regard given Elvis, Beatles, and Brown, who were basically unlike anything that was considered high art but were also not to be conveniently lauded as folk art. Elvis was a threat to literary and art hierarchies too, in that an intelligentsia that's ready to embrace an Elvis and question a hierarchy that got away with treating him as if he didn't exist will then take the questioning to other fields. And of course you're right that classical and jazz haven't simply been dropped, and you can find various universities - maybe most of them, those that still have music departments - where "music" still means "classical" training and analysis. But what you're not getting in literature and art, that I can see, is the sense that there are a whole bunch of cultural activities that are massively different from high art and are as good as or better than high art. "Art" is still what the galleries show, and what you see at art fairs and on motel walls doesn't take its cues from somewhere else. Architecture and design may be a different story (and one for sure that I don't know), and comics may be more of a genuine challenge than I'm realizing (both to art and literature, and I haven't read Martin's post yet), but (in my ignorance?) I don't see comics as remotely having the impact (and being nearly so far from the galleries) of r&b and rock 'n' roll and reggae and disco etc. The "postmodern" ferment in art and literature isn't because there've been art or literature equivalents to Elvis and James out there as counterforces. Not sure how relevant the "actual modes of judgment" of composers actually is to our discussion. The assumption by curators and high-school English teachers of what constitutes the subject matter would be more to the point; whereas a music teacher who leaves out hip-hop and rock and disco - and most would, I assume - has taken herself out of the game, not 100% out (right, classical and jazz haven't simply been dropped, and classical and jazz themselves are sources for popular music, which isn't going to ignore (for instance) classical harmony altogether**), but way out. Where is the disco and hip-hop and rock of "art" and "literature"?

In any event, the relevant question is still, when SF wants to "improve" itself, where does it go for "quality"? And compare this to where popular music goes for "quality."

Frith and Horne's Art Into Pop might be relevant here; it's interesting that the relevant "pop" that art schools generated in the '60s was pop music - or some of its packaging, anyway - not popular art. To an extent, popular music has absorbed the high romanticism of high art. But what popular music doesn't have is a high art to aspire to, when it wants to "improve."