Why are the left such chumps when it comes to the charts?

[koganbot]

I'm urging dubdobdee to pitch and write a piece that he's long been contemplating: "why are the left such chumps when it comes to the charts?" So to urge him further I'm pasting in a slightly re-worded version of what I wrote on his thread, and I encourage you to contribute your own thoughts here. (I'm not saying anything that I haven't said better and at greater length before, but I think this summary might be useful.)

My thumbnail explanation of why the left are such chumps about the charts is that being "left" has evolved into a cultural identity rather than just a way of analyzing and attempting to change society -- not that being a cultural identity precludes doing analysis and changing society, or that there's anything wrong with having a cultural identity (inevitably when people come together for a common purpose they'll already have a lot in common outside that purpose and will get more in common), but the unstated movement in the left has been towards embracing music, ideas, and actions because they are ours* rather than because the music, ideas, and actions are good -- though of course the music is called good, it's experienced as good, and sometimes reasons are even given, and the reasons are usually terrible: the reasons tend to validate or criticize the music on the basis of whether we* approve of who makes it, how it was (supposedly) made, and whom it was made for rather than on the basis of what the music actually is and does.

Of course, the whole culture, not just the left, tends to do just the same, and the nonleftist analyses often lean left anyway (interestingly enough), though with the "politics" subdued. And my critique of the "left" is pretty much in line with the critique of academia and journalism that I made in my book (this critique could be directed at several hundred other professions as well):

"(i) presentation of self -- creating, maintaining, or modifying one's hairstyle, as it were -- is a way of thinking, but (ii) given a choice between maintaining one's hairstyle and thinking about it, my profession as a whole will choose hairstyle over thought"

*"our" and "us" not necessarily meaning you and me and our buddies anymore, since in this corner of the livejournal we don't particuarly extol liberal-left approved music, but really, there but for the grace of god go you, me, and my buddies, ya know? And the postgrad liberal-left is our political leaning and our cultural neighborhood, even if it's not quite our particular musical street. Also, "our" and "us" don't totally explain why "we on the left" embrace hip-hop and blues and world music -- which is not made by "us" but is the sort of music "we" like, made by the sort of non-"us" that we project our romanticism onto. And there is a tendency for some lefties to validate pop by finding within it "modes of resistance" or by plumping for a "democratic catholocism of taste" or something -- again, not by the actual people in this corner of the livejournal, but by chumps on the left. And of course this sort of lefty can't comprehend that we like Britney because we think she's good rather than because we think our liking makes us anti-elitist.

Comments

What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Who do "the left" actually promote, musicwise? Aside from world music (maybe), I don't think of the audiences of indie rock, say, which are stubbornly casual in their politics (which may be its own issue -- "casual pseudo-left?"), or the audiences of...I dunno, Bruce Springsteen or whatever the heck else as specifically "left." As for the catholic taste bit, I wouldn't consider Carl Wilson or Sasha Frere-Jones particularly "left" either, so maybe the issue is the narrow or uninformed range of my definition (which has something to do with explicitly socialist drive for change).

So to me, what the actual left is doing with music isn't as much of a problem for me as a kind of ambiguity or watering-down of leftist politics itself, maybe for the reasons you're suggesting -- too much easy identification, not enough hard analysis. But to me, music isn't so much the main focus as it is an easy target and a good place to catch people thinking poorly -- it's where bad frameworks, ugly prejudices, and baseless assumptions get floated with the least accountability and the most general acceptability.

Problem is, I don't know who/where the "real left" is (or what I'm suggesting by that), and furthermore I'm not sure where exactly I stand on that spectrum. Simon Reynolds thinks that I seem to be more gung-ho old-skool Marxist in talking about Paris Hilton than he (who has actually read Marx) is, except (1) I don't know what he means by that exactly (haven't read enough Marx!) and (2) I don't think it's fair to credit the general impulse toward understanding how institutions, and people's interaction within them, actually work just to Marxism (or the left). Ditto "what music actually does" -- it's just not a (specifically) political enterprise.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I imagine that's a source of tension for left-leaning thinkers, too -- the fact that aesthetic analysis simply is NOT demonstrably tied up to means of production. I think this becomes clearer, and an unavoidable schism (institutions in which the work is made vs. the work itself) as the means of actually producing _____ get easier. If you can sound exactly like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or Beyonce without capitulating to a whole fucked-up system of production, marketing, and distribution values (and that's even GRANTING that system's validity, which I usually don't, since most people think they know all they need to know about how the system actually works, i.e. next to nothing), there's no particularly convincing political argument to be made against it even from the institutional side.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well to me the schism IS the value -- "culture" is where i get to test the tension between my personal desires and my civic ideals, if you like

music in particular is a coherent aesthetic system (or better a web of mutually contraticity, internally coherent sytems) not shaped by the logic of well-formed words; not systematised the ways words are; not co-opted the way words are -- they may be co-opted in OTHER ways, but the contrasts form spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight, that reduction to political language, or crit-theory jargon, or journalistic promo, render invisible

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

to me the schism IS the value

Totally, and when I'm feeling pompous enough to say things like "my general project," I'd also say that part of that general project is to live in that schism, because people go absolutely batshit in there (and, of more immediate importance to me, completely misrepresent the excellent music that's happening in what they consider to be a wasteland).

This isn't as true in other media worlds I dabble/live in -- the only people I find making salient critiques of Hollywood production, for instance, are pretty hard left, and their primary concerns are with, like, unionizing a global workforce. Talking about Along Came Polly's capitulation to the capitalist blahdyblah just isn't their primary concern (and the examples of possibility used in a book like Global Hollywood, which is pretty clearly a leftist analysis of the global Hollywood film industry) are pan-regional efforts, but no special emphasis is placed on what these pan-regional efforts produce, be it independent films or telenovelas.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

I wish you'd elaborate on what you mean by the schism. Is there a schism between how Ashlee's Autobiography was made and what the resulting music sounds like? You say "the institution in which the work is made" - is there a schism between the institution and the making as well as a schism between the institution and the product?

Obviously, "Better Off" doesn't sound like a pressing plant or a board meeting or a distribution agreement or a commercial tie-in, but what would you say is the schism?

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, I would personally say that the schism is a myth created by the people complaining about board meetings and distribution agreements and commercial tie-ins, most of whom know nothing about those things anyway, and don't care to learn about them. I personally don't any conflict between the fact that music production is an industry and that music production is an art, but it's an implicit "conflict" in a lot of (superficial) dismissals of the music.

By "living in it," I guess I mean I'm trying to live in and jab out my elbows from within other people's perception of that schism, with better analysis and better facts. Operating, as a critic, on the aesthetic side of production while still caring about and understanding the biz side, and (by caring enough to investigate) not seeing any great contradiction in these terms. At least, not in any useful sense ("how good it sounds" versus "the problematic nature of its being made at all" tends not to actually arise, Paris Hilton's album maybe being the most galvanizing but also most obvious recent example). I think I've argued before that music production doesn't work like film production, in that the workforce itself is too specialized to use the same sorts of problematic labor methods that filmmaking does.

So to use a film as an example, if I like The Mexican starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, it's hard for me ("as a leftist"?) to square my possible enjoyment and positive aesthetic analysis with the fact that its production wreaked havoc on a small Mexican village for no discernible reason. Or if I like Titanic, I'm not sure what to do with the Pacific fishing industries just south of the border its production demolished (even ten years later!). Titanic doesn't look like the destruction of a small local fishing industry, yet it is that, too. (Note: I've never actually seen The Mexican, only read about the bizarre water pump that was constructed for the American stars and then left to rot after production was finished, right in the middle of a small village that was using this for clean water until production ended).

But again, music production just doesn't work that way, and these aren't the kinds of arguments that anyone is leveling at Ashlee. And as for my last paragraph above, they also aren't the arguments they're leveling at the films that are actually doing it, even though (if they're actually leftists) they probably should. The music-related social arguments don't sync up with any "leftist" politics I'm aware of in the same way that a critique of Titanic genuinely might. And yet I would be tempted to locate plenty of Ashlee haters somewhere in the area of "left-leaning," i.e. accusing her of "red state" whateverism on that Ashlee thread, for instance (which is totally absurd), or denying her any credibility on principle because she's, like, a "pop tart" or something (the k-runkian line).

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*problematic nature of its being made doesn't arise because it's not actually problematic when you think about its production for two seconds; i.e., isn't any different from any other major label production mode.

Is it worth it? Lemme work it...

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Another way of responding to this would be to say that part of me, when thinking about modes of Hollywood filmmaking (many of the films that result from which I really enjoy), always tends to ask "well, was it worth it?" Meaning, is the system by which this film was made justified by how "good" the movie is? (For me, the answer is pretty much always NO if the question is legit. Which, to be fair, is hardly all the time, and my ready examples are limited -- Titanic is a really easy one to point to, or even something like Fitzcarraldo). It would be pathological, though, to try to use this "test" in all forms of consumerism, particularly in creative fields (as opposed to not buying factory-farm eggs or sweat shop labor-made clothes) -- film is just where abuses seem obvious and avoidable. To me, this is a leftist position; thinking Paris Hilton is a bitch not worth giving any more money is not. (And neither, for that matter, is thinking Mel Gibson is a bitch not worth giving more money -- which is something I strongly believe, and won't give him more money. But I also don't pretend that there is something "politically progressive" in this viewpoint -- my defense of Paris is based on that fact that I don't think most people can articulate very well WHY they think she's a bitch not deserving of any more money, whereas I think I can pretty easily make that claim of Mel...and what's more I can point to arguments in the actual films he's made, whereas when you point to Paris, you get a lot of agreeable dance-pop.)

Re: Is it worth it? Lemme work it...

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

wow first parenthetical is spectacular. Ly awkward. I mean to say I enjoy plenty of Hollywood films, and know next to nothing about how they were made. I reserve the right to sneer at them when I do learn that information, but I also won't dismiss them on principle "because they're Hollywood."

Re: Is it worth it? Lemme work it...

[koganbot]

Met a woman last Saturday - Leanna, wife of Derek, acquisitions editor at University of Georgia Press - who actually saw A Simple Life (season one of the Paris-Nicole reality show) and found it really touching. She said things began to fall apart in Season Two, probably mirroring what was happening in real life between Paris and Nicole.

Re: Is it worth it? Lemme work it...

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I was amazed at how savvy and genuinely funny the show was! It's hilarious -- and now I think twice about anyone using that show as an "excuse" for disliking Paris. You should check out some of the first season online if you can.

Re: Is it worth it? Lemme work it...

[koganbot]

Where would I find it? Are there full episodes? (YouTube only lets segments go for 9 minutes - great for American Idol and for music videos, a problem for many other things.)

Re: Is it worth it? Lemme work it...

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hm, I'm having trouble finding it too. I saw it in a hotel room with free cable -- there was a "Simple Life" marathon and I saw about four or five episodes in the course of two days. (Which must have been about three years ago, now that I think of it.) It's available on Netflix, but they don't have a "Play now" option (in which case I could just give you my username and you could watch it that way). But I'll let you know if I find anything.

Re: Is it worth it? Lemme work it...

[koganbot]

Looking back three years on...

This is an interesting test, but I think it's mostly beside the point. Not that I've immersed myself in the "left" in the last three years, but my impression is still that leftist analyses concentrate - as they mostly should - on what vision of life and what vision of social relations a film or song is likely to contain, rather than on who was harmed or exploited in the making of the product. It's more the hapless consumer that the leftists are imagining themselves looking out for. Of course, a lot of this content analysis is rudimentary or just plain projection - in the extreme case of the Paris Hilton album, few of the Paris criticizers seemed to have gotten around to actually listening to it. (But the left was hardly unique in this failing.) As for the anti-Taylor idiots, they look at the sort of person they think Taylor Swift is and project their ignorant social prejudices about Taylor and about people who dress like Taylor onto her music. Nonetheless, what the music/film/product/artwork is and does is their (the leftist critics') fundamental concern, whereas how the music was made/who made it is merely invoked (by the method of guesswork and prejudice) to explain the bad content, though production and content of course can be melded in analysis ("sounds like typical commercial pop-country"). I don't think what I wrote in this paragraph contradicts what I wrote above ("the reasons are usually terrible: the reasons tend to validate or criticize the music on the basis of whether we* approve of who makes it, how it was (supposedly) made, and whom it was made for rather than on the basis of what the music actually is and does"), since the leftists' target is still what the music actually is and does, but the leftist stumbles on the way there.

There's nothing in any of this that guarantees that the leftist won't make good analyses (and for the purpose of Mark's project you and I and he are not defined as "leftist," though in fact we are left, or at least liberal); if all goes well we'll find under a rock somewhere an actual good analysis from some capital-L Leftist. My explanation for why there aren't more good leftist analyses goes back to what I said in my post: that being "left" as a social identity is superseding being "left" as a means of probing, challenging, and changing, so hanging onto one's social identity (smugly, thoughtlessly, or with trepidation) puts the left on the path to ignorance and stupidity. Though again, it doesn't have to.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

Interestingly, my former editors at the Las Vegas Weekly basically thought of Britney and ilk as pop tarts - I mean, would even the use the term - and I doubt that before my writing for them they knew about the difference in styles between Britney and Ashlee and so on. (I wasn't writing under the music editor, obviously.) But they seemed grateful to have someone who was perceiving what they hadn't perceived.

I don't know what the attitude of my future editors there will be (assuming that there will be any: things are still on hiatus).

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

That's interesting -- I'd think at least Scott Woods would challenge ye olde pop tart formula...

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

Well yeah, but he wasn't one of my editors.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

Passed this over when you first posted it. As I said five years prior, back on the Kuhn thread, I think this is more a glimmer for you than an idea, and I'm not immediately seeing how you'll turn it into an idea. Think you're way overemphasizing the difference between words and music (once you're in language, you can't turn it off), and for instance don't know how you'd classify rhetoric, rhyme, alliteration, meter, etc., all of which seem tied to words.

the contrasts form spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight, that reduction to political language, or crit-theory jargon, or journalistic promo, render invisible

Well, anything that theories etc. don't grasp can be lines of flight away from those theories, but the lines of flight you seem to be envisioning are lines of flight from something else, right - say from being locked into standard social practices? Maybe crit-theory can be a line of flight away from the stultifying social practice we call "music." Or why not say that the contrasts between doing the dishes and balancing your checkbook form spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight? If this is true, that contrasts open up potentially liberatory space, then this ought to apply to contrasts between any two social practices, not just between ones you think of as verbal and ones you think of as less verbal. Whereas, I'd think you're not going to find anything liberatory unless the practice of one inspires new ways of practicing the other, or inspires a new practice that replaces the other. But I guess I don't know what you mean by "freedom," or where you think we'll find it. Are you saying that freedom is already here, in what we're doing already (which includes the tensions/contrasts)? Or that the tensions/contrasts help create the opportunity for a freedom you are envisioning?

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

Okay, trying to put what you wrote in my own words, since I'm not understanding yours:

(1) There is always a contrast between what music* does and what any use of words can do.

(2)(a) Words when they're "well-formed" have a "logic." (Am not doing a good job of coming up with my own words, am I?)

(2)(b) Words are "systematized" in ways applicable (only) to words, as opposed to the different ways some other nonword things (incl. music) might be systematized and/or as opposed to how some other nonword things incl. music are not systematized at all. (Ditto.)

(2)(c) Words are "co-opted" in ways applicable (only) to words, as opposed to the different ways some other nonword things (incl. music) might be co-opted and/or as opposed to how some other nonword things (incl. music) are not co-opted at all. (Ditto.) So (i) There is a difference in kind between how words are co-opted and how music is co-opted. (Btw, are you assuming that co-optation is bad?) (ii) This difference is significant.

(3) It is these contrasts — words do X, music does Y; words have a logic, music either uses different logic(s) or no logic; words are systematized in ways applicable to words, music is systematized in ways not applicable to words (or is not systematized at all); words are co-opted in ways applicable to words, music is co-opted in ways not applicable to words (or perhaps is not co-opted at all [you said "might"]) — that "form spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight."

(4)(intro) Now I'm going to make a leap and assume you think that:

(4)(a) Any use of language (not just political language, crit-theory jargon, or journalistic promo) involves a reduction, at least any use of language that is aimed at music. (If you're not applying your ideas to any use of language but just to political language etc., you're merely saying that you don't think political language, crit-theory jargon, or journalistic promo is very good. But that can be solved by making them better, in which case the invisibility would disappear, as it were. But this isn't what you mean.)

(4)(b) It is the reductiveness of words and/or of language that makes it impossible to use words to "see," state, or comprehend the contrast between words and nonwords, hence to "see," state, or comprehend the spaces for freedom, the gaps for movement, and the lines of flight.

(5) It's the contrasts, not the music itself, that form the spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight. (This is literally what you're saying, even if it's not what you mean.)

In any event: Freedom from what? Movement from and to where? Flight from and to where?

*Any music? All music? Is it always certain when some phenomenon is musical and when it is not? From what I've read (though I haven't confirmed this), some African languages had no word for "music" until the European colonization, beats and melodies etc. being embedded in so many social activities that there were no separate distinct activities individually or collectively called "music."

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

Previous comment continued (which btw, if you're lost, is in response to dubdobdee's comment way up here):

Be that as it may, I don't agree with ANY of this. It's vague and arbitrary. I don't believe music is different in kind from language; even if I did, I don't see why you say "reduction to political language" etc. rather than "expansion to political language" (either wording seems equally valid or invalid); I don't see why different words can't have different logics from other words, can't form different systems from the systems formed by other words, can't get co-opted differently from how other words are co-opted or resist co-option differently from how other words resist, and so on. The difference we're interested in here is between current forms of living and potential alternative forms of living, right? The way one suggests the latter is by suggesting or acting it out. This seems to have nothing to do one way or another with a supposed difference between words on the one hand and music on the other. Rather it has to do with the difference between current social practices (incl. words and music) and alternative social practices (incl. words and music). And if your belief is that current social practices don't all align, and these nonalignments might help suggest or create alternative forms, I don't see where a supposed nonalignment between words and music is special here. There may be a nonalignment between journalism and K-pop (let's say), but that's not a contrast between words and music. Journalism on TV and the Net uses all sorts of music, after all.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Ah, I also see where some confusion came from in my wording here -- by "unavoidable schism," I meant to say something more like "if you see this as an actual schism, you will be forced to deal with the fact that it, like, isn't as soon as you see my awesome presentation on DIY SKYE. So it's not the schism that's unavoidable, it's the confrontation of the idea that there might actually be one, which is usually (but not always, see film stuff below) a trump card being played to avoid lots of smaller, messier, more provocative issues -- issues that are usually coming from the work itself, not its alleged "system."

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think some of the trick here would be to explore what "the left" needs to mean, here and now -- ie why do i think we need an unchumpy left? what's at stake?

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Also, how chumpy or unchumpy are the RIGHT about the charts?

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

And whom were you thinking of when you thought up that title, and how did their chumpiness manifest itself in the recent past?

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

Obviously I've not done a good job of saying what I mean by the left, since I didn't actually do much of a job or thinking about what I mean by the left. It's a bunch of loosely related assemblages, maybe, from people who analyze from a "leftist" perspective and communicate with and sometimes market themselves to others who do the same, people who push for liberal social change, people who push for radical social change (or there many people actively pushing right now?), people like me who are vaguely liberal-left without making enough of an effort to grasp the issues and not doing much other than to vote and make the very occasional blog post about economics. So we stretch from the liberal-leaning reader of the alternative press to the people who work for liberal and left causes (some of whom even accomplish something) to committed organizers to community activists to academic theorists. I'm wondering whom Mark most identifies as his target audience among these, and what forms Mark sees their chumpiness having taken in the recent past.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[koganbot]

job of thinking
are there many people actively pushing right now?