Frank Kogan

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).