Frank Kogan

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.