Frank Kogan

Stubs of ideas, some of which may turn into future posts:

(1a) A punk votes for a punk (Johnny Rotten says nice things about Trump). Okay, he's not necessarily saying that he did vote for Trump, though from what he said it's a good assumption he did; but anyway, my armchair psychosocial analysis of the Trump win already had been "Punks voted for a punk," my using the word punks in a sorta pre-punk-rock sense, meaning people who compensate for subconsciously feeling weak by scapegoating and bullying and hurting the vulnerable; but such "punks" can include normally nice people too, people who let the punk aspect of themselves do their electoral thinking.



(1b) Only "sorta pre-punk-rock" given that original garage-rock punks such as ? And The Mysterians and the Syndicate Of Sound and the Seeds were indeed punks in the old sense, weak bully-type punks (and sexists as well),† but most of the great punk rockers — I'd start "punk rock" w/ Stones and Dylan, actually, with the caveat that the true punks, the garage rockers, weren't Stones and Dylan but the garage kids who'd dumbed Stones, Dylan, and Yardbirds down into punk, which'd be a fine explanation except that no one limits "punk rock" this way; most critics etc. would also include the Velvet Underground and MC5 and Stooges and Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Rocket From The Tombs and even more would include Ramones and Sex Pistols and the Clash and the Heartbreakers and X-Ray Spex and Black Flag and Nirvana and Hole, generally self-aware nonbully types, and if you're going to do this you've got to go back and count Dylan and the Stones — ...anyway, most of the great punk rockers (as generally defined) were about punk way more than they were punk; nonetheless, being self-aware, they drew the connection between actual inner true punk impulses and the punk rock they were playing, understanding their own weakness and that bullying and scapegoating were in there lurking, sitting dangerously inside. But anyway, of all the great punk rockers, the Sex Pistols, who were maybe the greatest ("They make everyone else sound sick by comparison," said my friend Bill Routt), were the ones who were true nasty punks as much as they were about punk. They were the band that made punk safe for fag-bashers (fortunately only somewhat safe).* None of which explains why Johnny Rotten would shit his brains down the toilet and support Trump (apparently, Johnny can't tell a racist from a hole in the ground). If you want to turn to social affinity and group identification as an explanation, Johnny's loyalty is to real punks, not to punk rock. (Yes, there's no way to come up with a unitary reading of the word "punk" in this paragraph. It'd be a stupider paragraph if you could.) I doubt that many self-identified "punks" — those who embrace the music as part of their social identity — voted for Trump. These people veer left instead. If you go by social category, Trump got many of the rocks and hoods and greasers and grits and burnouts — at least, more than he should have — but few of the punks. (Among whites he got a significant amount of the jocks and middle managers, too, and their psyches are probably as much punk as the hoods' are, but that's not relevant to Johnny Rotten's social identification.) I doubt that many Trump voters had ever bothered to listen to punk rock (not counting the garage hits they heard way back); if they had, the aboutness would've stung them, and they'd have been repelled. Nonetheless, I think I can understand that what makes the Sex Pistols sound true and real to me, the screaming squalling blind attempt to stand against anything acceptable and settled that can get you by, is what makes a lying hollow pathological bully like Trump sound transgressive and therefore real and true and honest and substantial to a lot of his fans.

(1c) Of course Trump doesn't win if he gets only the punks. And my armchair analysis isn't based on any actual research of mine into "the Trump voter." As I said two sentences ago, there's more than one type of Trump voter, and individual voters are multi-faceted in their urges and ideas anyway (so a particular Trump voter can be more than one type). I'm actually doing two questionable things: (i) reading the characteristics of the voter off of the characteristics of what they voted for, rather than actually asking the voters who they are and why they like what they like; (ii) using a psychological model that can apply to an individual person to explain the behavior of a group of people (the punk types who voted for that punk Trump), as if the group were an individual writ large. Obviously I think the analysis kinda sorta works, or I wouldn't have made it. It's a strong hypothesis, punks voted for a punk, strong in my mind anyway, though maybe someone more knowledgeable could beat it down with an alternative. ("Strong" analysis? Seriously? How so? It tells you what most of you already know: (1) that I don't like Trump, (2) that I think many of his voters voted for a lot of what I don't like about him, even if they don't understand the policy implications, and (3) that he's a punk. You already knew that. He's a punk. It's maybe a correct analysis, but not strong, since it doesn't tell you anything you don't already know. Maybe it makes you think harder about punk rock, and what I write below maybe'll help you think harder about social class.)

(1di) ( Trump got more working-class whites than he was expected to )

(1dii) ( The terms hoods, greasers, grits, and burnouts as stand-ins for current social identities )

(1diii) ( The class systems in people's immediate experience are not an exact match for the upper-middle-working class grid )

(1div) ( They voted against Clinton because she's a student-council type )

(1dv) ( Kids who bombed out of the classroom still hurt by it )

(1e) ( Middle class divided )

(1f) ( Want to hurt people and feel good about hurting them )

(2) ( The failure of education )

(3a) ( Duncan Watts criticizes idea of 'representative agent' )

(3b) ( How would we measure 'punks voted for a punk'? )

(4) ( The principle of the inferred et cetera )

(5) ( Top 100 singles of 2016 )

(6) ( A punk votes for a brat )

(7) ( Etc. )

Take a very simple Wittgensteinian language-game, e.g., a bricklayer says "BRICK" and the bricklayer's assistant brings her the brick.* All of this is part of the language-game: not just the utterance "BRICK," but also the assistant bringing the brick — so the actions as well as the sound. You don't have one part being language and another part not. It's all language, and if you leave out the actions it's not complete.**

Of course, at times the assistant could understand that he's to bring a brick, yet he chooses not to, in defiance or as a joke; or he may be prevented from doing so, say by an injury; and that doesn't mean the language-game is incomplete in these instances. As long as the practice is there, the established practice of "BRICK" and an assistant bringing the brick, the language-game is in effect. And defiance and humor are expressible in this language, too, even though the language only contains one word, the command "BRICK." (Suppose, somehow, there's miscommunication in the game. Or some misunderstanding, the assistant incorrectly thinking that it's only when the bricklayer has her arm raised as she's uttering "BRICK" that he's to bring the brick. Or maybe sometimes the bricklayer doesn't mean it, and the assistant has to figure out when. A game doesn't have to be conducted with absolutely certainty to be a game; a language doesn't have to have absolute certainty and consistency to be a language.)

We can define "language-games" as being, more or less, "human social practices." The terms "language-game" and "social practice" are near synonyms, language being so ubiquitous. But let's see what happens if we go further. Let's get rid of "more or less." Let's say that all human social practices are language-games, whether or not any word is actually spoken in the practice, and whether or not all the parties even know a language. Yes, at least one of them — the parent of a baby, for instance — will have to know a language; but the other(s) won't have to. So parental action and baby wails and goos and parental response are all in the category "language-game." A baby being initiated into parent-child social behavior is a baby being initiated into language.***

By this definition, all musical events, including the "nonverbal," are nonetheless in some language-game or other. This doesn't mean "can be made part of a language-game by translating musical sounds into words or by describing the music in words." It means that the language-game includes musical sounds as they are, and we can take the sounds and see their role in particular games — particular social practices — just as we can take the utterances and actions in the "BRICK" language and see their roles in that particular practice. In any event, we refuse to give the social practices we call "music" the special status of being "nonverbal." They aren't.

( Motive here is to tease out what might be usable in Mark's glimmer of an idea )

( Footnotes (as opposed to musical notes?) )

I hate the term "alternative," but that doesn't mean I get to dismiss other people's use of it.

When Christopher Weingarten sent his list of potential acts for Spin's '60s alternative roundup, I wrote back that they should get rid of the Velvets, Stooges, and Leonard Cohen and put Vanilla Fudge, Rare Earth, and Iron Butterfly in their stead. Was trying to rescue both the list and Velvets-Stooges-Cohen from respectability, I guess. Nonetheless I volunteered to write about the Velvets and Stooges, and the Holy Modal Rounders. Got two of the three. [UPDATE: The links below take me to the intro to the list but I can't find a way to get to the list itself or the write-ups – including my write-ups. This makes me angry, though I don't know what went wrong at Spin's end, or what's at fault. Anyhow, at the bottom of this post I've pasted in what I wrote, and I've pasted the entire list in the comments.] [UPDATING THE UPDATE: There is a way to get to the blurbs, as they've been rescued by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. I explain down in the comments. In the meantime, I've put the usable links in brackets right beneath the two failed links below.]

http://www.spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list/?slide=98

http://www.spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list/?slide=64

[UPDATE: Use these instead:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150310090636/http://spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list/?slide=64

https://web.archive.org/web/20130401055230/http://www.spin.com/articles/best-100-albums-1960s-sixties-alternative-list?slide=98 END UPDATE]

"Mobile Line"


I also unsuccessfully proposed the following:

--He 5 Merry Christmas Psychedelic Sound
--Lee Jung Hwa with Shin Joong Hyun and the Donkeys No/Spring Rain
--Shin Joong Hyun Beautiful Rivers And Mountains (but is a compilation that crosses decade boundaries)
--20 Heavy Hits, an advertised-on-TV album put out by Crystal Corporation, with tracks by the Impressions, Tommy James & The Shondells, Strawberry Alarm Clark, Len Barry, Janis Joplin, The Intruders, The Ohio Express, The Who, Ricardo Ray, The 1910 Fruitgum Company, The Turtles, The Amboy Dukes, The Happenings, The Lemon Pipers, and Sonny & Cher
--Nazz
--Nazz Nazz (but I said that Nazz would need some writer other than me)
--The Best Of The Chocolate Watchband
--The Swinging World Of Johnny Rios And The Us 4 Nuevo Boog-A-Loos
--Grace Slick & The Great Society

( Concrete toes and pigeons' feet )

[UPDATE: Don't remember what I embedded below and it's been deleted from YouTube. So I'm choosing one now, one of the two I quote directly in my blurb.]

"Heroin"


[UPDATE: Here are the blurbs:

#37

The Holy Modal Rounders – The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders (Elektra, 1968)
Part of New York City's urban folk bohemia, the Rounders heard in rockabilly and old rural string bands a vision of new music. On this, their fourth album, the styles were still mostly from the rural south of the 1920s, with added garage blues and scraps and bits from rags and barrelhouse and the American songbook (such as the melody but not the words to "Three cheers for the red, white, and blue"). But each instrument played its own accents and unique curlicues, not in direct support of the main melody or the singer (whose mic is always set to "soft"). Imagine a number of people wandering into a room and simultaneously telling their individually varied stories, while never losing touch with what the others are saying. The effect isn't dreamy or diffuse but slightly crazed, as everyone seems to be listening to notes just out of earshot, and every sound can potentially drive the wagon off various cliffs in any direction. FRANK KOGAN

#3

The Velvet Underground & Nico – The Velvet Underground & Nico (Verve, 1967)
It's a convention of drug songs as much as love songs that if you say you don't care, you do care. But a line like, "When the smack begins to flow and I really don't care anymore" does glorify self-destruction, as a rebuke to senators and society, to niceness and complacency. Choose to choose, choose to go. While Simon & Garfunkel hit big with similarly death-obsessed lyrics, the Velvets brought the conversation to eye level, skillfully precise ("up three flights of stairs," "twenty-six dollars in my hand"). The music matches, feels as sick and dirty as the protagonists. But the drones and unison pounding are a frame for cascades of notes and syllables that are as virtuoso as Diddley and doo-wop without announcing themselves as such. So the whole thing's got a lilt and a dance, solace for the broken people. F.K.

Because Spin lost or killed the list, I've posted it in the comments. And while I justifiably chided it in this post for how socially constricted it is, I'll also say that (1) Christopher and I probably have pretty similar nervous systems, and (2) if people – such as me, even now – were to go through and listen to what they didn't know from it, they'd learn a lot.

END UPDATE]

( Footnotes )

Mark informs us, "This is the time of year when I require a POLL OF ALL THE POLLS, to diminish the absurdly extensive 'end of year' music commentary I am almost certainly never going to get round to reading."

[Poll #1813388]

Didn't seem appropriate to bring this up on the comment thread to Mark's Steven Wells tribute, but one advantage my hallway-classroom formulation has over formulations that divide by type of person (Blots versus Swots) or by type of attitude (playfulness versus seriousness) is that hallway versus classroom describes two different behavioral contexts with two different behavioral conventions, albeit contexts/conventions that people internalize and then carry within them as expectations in regard to what's appropriate behavior in various circumstances. What's important to remember is that someone who has internalized the hallway-classroom split has internalized both sets of conventions.

This doesn't mean that someone will perform equally well in both environments, just that "hallway" and "classroom" don't describe different types of people or different temperaments. And of course there can be good reasons to analyze by type or class of person or by role or by temperament etc. But anyhow, I wonder what an analysis of the Sinker-Wells relationship that mentions the hallway-classroom split would reveal. I barely know anything about Wells, by the way.

"In 18xx, Alexis Bouvard hypothesized that deviations in the expected orbit of Uranus could be due to the influence of an as yet unseen planet orbiting farther out."

That's an unproblematic use of the word "influence," one that Mark wouldn't object to. But I'm wondering how we should assign influence when the ideas of the influencing agent are misunderstood.

E.g., suppose that, upon the actual discovery of Neptune in 1846, Uranus feels a sudden sense of liberation. Up 'til then, reasons for its deviations have been hypothesized but never proven. Now the reasons are confirmed as good ones, the deviations given a definitive rationale. Uranus decides to take things further. It reasons that, owing to Neptune's having already knocked it off its expected path, the very existence of Neptune must authorize Uranus to deviate as far as it wants to from any path. Now, this is a total misunderstanding of the significance of Neptune, but Uranus isn't a rigorous thinker. In fact, Uranus had never deviated at all. Its path was set by the constraints of gravitational forces, including Neptune's. The "expected path" had been what was off, not Uranus's actual motion. But Uranus can't see this, no matter how much we try to explain. Uranus takes the existence of Neptune as a license to deviate, and deviate it does.

I think the "influence" of Thomas Kuhn is much like the "influence" of Neptune, an influence that's based on a misunderstanding. If I am to have much influence myself, I fear that my influence will be similarly ill-derived.

( Without the discovery of Neptune, would Uranus have acted as it did? )

( The 'overall' Meltzer (then and now) wants to open up a vector to the Totality, without ever being (mis)taken for that Totality. )

[Mark, do you (1) mind that I've posted this, and (2) mind that it's not under lock and key? (Obv. I think I know the answer, but I'm asking anyway.)]