As a praise word, "punk" was far deadlier than "poetry" was

[koganbot]

Just posted this on an old blogger thread that I found via Google:

Bug said: I've read it over thirty times now and am still no closer to understanding what the penman actually meant by this.

"through the process of our appreciating them[, we] turn them into nothing."

What does this mean?
Seriously. It's not a rhetorical question.

Wish you [rmd] had made more of an effort to answer this, as it is an excellent question that I quite sympathize with. In fact, it's what I was trying to understand way back then, and still am.

Anyway, if you're still in touch with Bug (whoever you are, whoever he/she is), I'll try to give a rudimentary answer, just with an example:

Ashlee Simpson has recorded some of the greatest sung poetry in the history of sound recording. If you don't believe me, ponder the line "Sunday morning blues always about you" and ask yourself if you've ever written a song opening (or for that matter an opening line of an essay, letter, story, poem, or novel) as good as that one. But a condition under which the song was written was that it wasn't trying to come across as capital-P Poetry, was just a mundane attempt at communicating a mood and a condition, the language making no claim to specialness, merely being a few words among the thousands and thousands sent out every month in search of the consumer throat lump.* So the line is not saying, "pay special attention to me," for if it did call for such attention it would undercut its own expressiveness - the ache is an always ache, not a special ache.

But in saying it's poetry I'm calling special attention to it, potentially layering sheets and sheets of English-teacher-certified quality and piety between the readers' eyes and the actual line, so that "poetry" and "quality" are what you perceive and the ache of the week-in-and-week-out alwaysness can no longer reach to you through the praise.

So that's how a great line can be rendered precious and impotent by how we appreciate it. Calling it "poetry" feels almost like a lie, even though it is poetry. The word "poetry" has been contaminated by all the tedium and destruction inflicted in its name ("destruction" being the unspoken English-class message: "The assigned reading is poetry and you're not").

But not to call the line "poetry" also feels like a lie, not just for the obvious reason that the culture shouldn't be able to get away with sneering at the great stuff (Ashlee) and then consigning it to obscurity while lauding a whole bunch of lameness and mediocrity, but also because Shakespeare and Jeff Barry and Iggy have had moments as good as Ashlee and because they and "poetry" can at least temporarily be pried free from the tedium and destruction that accompany their presentation, if we somehow do the Ashlee appreciation right.

Of course, when I wrote my piece, directed at the fading postpunk of 1987 (or the burgeoning indie-alternative music and fanzine network, if you want to look at it that way), "poetry" wasn't the word in play, wasn't the threat. As praise words, "punk" and "do-it-yourself" and "subversive" and "the untamed wildness of rock 'n' roll" etc. were far deadlier than "poetry" was, with "fun" potentially just as bad, and those were what I had in my sights when I was talking about how we transformed great stuff into nothingness via our gaze and praise.

*I really don't know if Ashlee, John, and Kara had any idea how good they were being with lines like "Sunday morning blues always about you," or whether they considered it poetry or not. It's possible they did, though I wouldn't bet on it. But if they did they were wise enough not to try to present it as poetry.

But I'm not saying that words that do call special attention to themselves can't be good, and I hate pop being told to always know its place and not be "pretentious" and never to aspire to importance as much as I hate indie generally forcing itself to make a claim to specialness and daring. And Ashlee's ambitiousness was one of the things that exposed her to ridicule, at least from those taunters and wiseasses who listened enough to realize that she was ambitious.

Ashlee has had several moments of attempted "poetry," such as "Does the scent of regret ever haunt you?" which isn't completely bad, but is really really clumsy, and not nearly as good as that same song's non-"poetic" opening line, "What's she got that I don't have?"

But her being too humble and sensible are much greater threats to Ashlee than her being ambitious.

Comments

[koganbot]

For a second I thought that Bug was confusing me with Ian Penman.

Made me smile.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ins't one of the problems of the difficult sentence quoted its rhetorical extremism?

(i am gettin you back here for the many times you have made this point at me: always quite correctly)

anyway, i think in the leap of intuition and insight to the claim, you (over)state that it turns the object of appreciation to NOTHING -- but this is surely obviously false; what happens is an unattended to diminishment and limiting

and the difficulty is guaging both the distance of YOUR leap and the degrees or stages of the diminishment -- if you could trace the step-by-step mechanism of the proof of the accuracy of the leap you would also (perhaps in the very same words) find yourself explaining how the machinery of our appreciation effected the diminishment?

[koganbot]

Yeah, in my LVW reappraisal I mention that they didn't turn it to "nothing" (though this is the second time I'd made such a claim, the first being two years earlier in "The Autobiography Of Bob Dylan") but rather something other than what I wanted. But no doubt it's the extremism of the phrase that attracted rmd to quote it. But really what I was trying to figure out wasn't how we turned things to "nothing" but how we took things that were virulent and rich and made them less potent and less interesting, and this is also (1) a difficult claim to justify, though something I believed intuitively, much less (2) something I could explain by identifying a mechanism, "PBSification," which nonetheless was exactly what I was trying to do. And which I still think is worth doing along those lines that I took.

By the way, I'm about to go to sleep, but I just posted not all too clearly on the JJ Barrie thread over in Freaky Trigger. I claim that the Velvets weren't indie; whether you agree or disagree I believe that you will understand why I believe they were not. Passages like "When the smack begins to flow/And I really don't care anymore/'Bout all the Jim-Jims in this town/And all the politicians making crazy sounds/And everybody putting everybody else down/And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds" really don't happen unless the band think they're potentially reaching a broad public space.

[koganbot]

Also, despite my line "English-teacher-certified quality," I wouldn't say it's remotely true that all English teachers turn whatever they touch into lameness. It depends on the teacher to some extent, also on what the overall school experience is like for a particular student, etc. Even bad teachers can help someone to a good book merely by making the student read it (presumably a good book will have some power to make its readers get it, enjoy it). And of course good commentary can open up material and help someone get it. As for music, this is what we do, right? We comment on music, and I'd say in my case rather insistently try to get people to think about it.

And I'm curious how various people might think the way the culture presents, say, Bob Dylan or the Velvet Underground has to do with how the people reading my livejournal experience them, if the performers' role now in the culture (as the Great Progenitors Of Whatever It Is They're Taken To Have Generated) has a positive or negative effect on the music.

[koganbot]

but rather into something other than what I wanted

obvious point: is there more to it than this?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

if we're talking about stuff that challenges consensus, the problem somewhat is being taught -- by teachers or rock critics or bar bores -- to adapt to a consensus-oid viewpoint on what challenges consensus: the "consensus-oid" element (in rock terms "alt-such-and-such"; in academic terms "critical such-and-such") being, yes, "against" a symbolic mainstream, but seeming to require an initiatory conformism from you before you get your "against" wings

(shorter above: can you be against the system by being a teacher's pet? even if the teacher is against the system?)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Negative effect for me, in that I feel like Dylan and Velvet Underground in particular always got short shrift from me for seeming like "homework." It was the stuff I had to study as counter-whatever and as such I either got fleeting kicks, acknowledged debts, and moved on (VU) or ignored entirely because delving in just felt to goddamn daunting (Dylan).

I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to engage with Dylan in particular in a looser, more on-his-terms (and not "on-the-teacher's-terms," the teachers here mostly being rock critic-centric writing, actually, along with the obvious cultural touchstones, I'm Not There being the most recent) way. He feels somewhat tainted by legitimacy. Weirdly, I don't feel this way about the Beatles, but I do feel this way about the Stones -- there's something about an openly oppositional, or oppositional-seeming, stance that mixes extra-poorly with approved/sanctioned appreciation.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that there's a conflict between ANY sort of "teaching" and the "English Teacher" mode you're interested in here, though -- the major fallacy of what you're calling English Teacher is to assume importance rather than identifying it specifically and then bringing it (or "teaching" it, which really amounts to "bringing for the first time," or for the first time in a certain way) to someone else. We read To Kill a Mockingbird in middle and high school because we had to, not because the teacher (whoever he or she was) thought it was important we did; at least, not important in any other sense than "this is how it is." So there's a mode of analysis lacking in sufficient critical investigation being imposed on others as critical investigation.

A fundamentally critical (or contrarian) thinker might reject this on principle, and might very well throw the baby out with the bathwater as well -- which also suggests that this person hasn't really gotten to a high enough level of critical thinking yet (knee-jerk reaction posing as well-thought-out decision, e.g. my reaction to Dylan, whom I really haven't listened to very much of). A non-critical thinker, even a smart or savvy one (a teacher's pet) has no reason to go beyond what he or she is already doing, depending on which teachers he/she's trying to please. (I think this relates to the sort of "second-level media illiteracy" I'm thinking about when dealing with a lot of savvy but uncritical "critic" outlets, a sort of collapse of the teacher and the teacher's pet that often amounts to a lot of simple nudging and back-patting.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

If things can be rendered lame in the context of our approval, can they also be rendered awesome in the context of our disapproval?

[koganbot]

Offhand I'd say yes, though it's obviously a very contingent awesomeness.

Question for myself (back to the lameness): in some instances can't we say that modern "bohemia" (in scare quotes because I'm not sure it's the right word) isn't rendering something impotent by by embrace it but is merely ratifying that the thing has already lost its potency? I'm thinking of people (maybe even me?) liking '50s lounge or '60s muzak that no self-respecting rock 'n' roller would have countenanced back in the day. But this is long after such lounge music of elevator muzak has lost any kind of promise or threat that would have once been attached to it.

[koganbot]

Let's try this again without the typos:

Question for myself (back to the lameness): In some instances can't we say that modern "bohemia" (in scare quotes because I'm not sure it's the right word), rather than rendering something impotent by embracing it, is merely ratifying that the thing has already lost its potency? I'm thinking of people (maybe even me?) liking '50s lounge or '60s muzak that no self-respecting rock 'n' roller would have countenanced back in the day. But this is long after such lounge music or elevator muzak had lost any kind of promise or threat that would have once been attached to it.