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In an egregious breach of self-discipline, I posted on an Ann Powers facebook thread* whose subject was "rockism." Given that the thread was mainly stupidity and floundering, and it didn't jostle anything loose in my own thinking, I fear that there was little useful I achieved. My justification, if there is one, is that the stupidity I refer to is relative, and I genuinely believe that if someone somewhere takes in and masters my ideas regarding the "authenticity" thing it would save her several years of wheel-spinning.

Antirockists have never had the slightest actual interest in the people they call "rockists" or in the phenomena they call "rockism." So the conversation has been about defeating phantom enemies rather than about understanding the world.** This makes antirockists frustrating but it doesn't always make them boring, since their beating up on "rockism" is an attempt to use a crowbar or pole vault to get out from under something — even if they won't figure out what it is in themselves and their world they're trying to surmount.

This is what I wrote. I do urge you to click the two Rules Of The Game columns I link down at the bottom of my third comment. Might help your wheelbarrow gain traction.

Antirockism is just rockism with a few of the words changed )
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Crayon Pop seem to be occupying a social space that doesn't exist in America: not of the mainstream but with no apparent estrangement from the mainstream either, not even to the extent that the mainstream itself is estranged from the mainstream (being estranged from the mainstream is a mainstream attitude). And while Crayon Pop gathered a fanatic core audience before they hit big — people who traveled miles to the Crayon Pop appearances and chanted along with the guerrilla street performances — that audience seemed to be doting-uncle types, not connoisseur types. But then, what counts as "connoisseur" isn't set in stone. For instance, Sunday evenings are an unofficial car show in the parking lots along Federal Blvd. on Denver's Hispanic west side, people hopping into their vehicles and finding spots to show off. There are many venues for discerning eyes.

In any event, Crayon Pop seem to be into music more for the art of it and the process than for fame and fortune or even a career.* Going "trot" this year with "Uh-ee" (and dressing like aunties) fits this: the attitude is "What can we try next?" Makes me think of the otherwise very different "Gentleman," by Psy: not a followup to "Gangnam Style" so much as "What can I do to shift around and fake you out?" But Psy is coming from a well-trod social territory, the outsider hip-hop guy who breaks big but still wants to set the terms of discussion. Whereas with Crayon Pop it's more like, "What color should we paint our house now?" At least that's how Crayon Pop come across. So even if they are secret bohemians (Way did got to art school, for instance), that's not where they live in the public landscape.

Whether or not you think I'm right about Crayon Pop, and even if you don't pay attention to K-pop, I have this question:

Who else — anywhere, present or past — seems to be occupying a social space similar to the one I describe for Crayon Pop?

I'm thinking that certain potential stuff wouldn't count, the reason being it has too much of a chip on its shoulder and too much outsider status: early hip-hop dj's in the Seventies, for instance, or the custom car shows and stock-car races and demolition derbies of the early Sixties that Tom Wolfe analyzed and celebrated in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Or maybe I'm wrong, and we should count these things.

Anyway, bohemia from nowhere near bohemia.

Also, we need a new term. "Bohemia" is played out. Care to coin one?

As delinquent lollipop girls in "Bing Bing," five months before fame [EDIT: Had embedded the Feb. 15 show at Music Bank but it's no longer on YouTube, so substituting Music Core from a couple weeks earlier, Crayon Pop dismayingly without lollipops; RE-EDIT but here's a link to Show Champion on Feb. 27 where they've got the lollipop, though the presentation is not quite as slinky and delinquent as I remember Feb. 15's being]:


Disco trot Hey Mister )

Opening for Gaga in Milwaukee )
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While searching "Oscar song meanings," I incidentally found this thread where non-Koreans talk about how they discovered K-pop and why they love it.

"I'm just wondering...... I see many people who aren't Korean listening to Kpop.

"How did you find out and learn about kpop?
"Why do you love it?
"What is your ethnicity/nationality?
"What are your favorite groups and why? What are your favorite songs and why?"
"Do you prefer boy groups over girl groups or both?"

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120412182534AAbtXrF

I don't think nationality matters at all because puppies of all countries listen to kpop. A norwegian puppy or a belizean puppy - they all love it! I'm central european, now living in Phnom Penh where local khmer kids dance to kpop in parks. Few nights ago they were swaying their hips to Abracadabra :D
Three people like that the groups don't have to sing about sex, money, and drugs.

Favorite meta, best food reference, most emblematic authenticity argument )
Anyone reading this can answer in the comments, if you'd like, even if you are Korean. How does one define "Non-Korean" anyway? I'd say that I'm non-Ukrainian, non-Belarussian, non-Russian, non-Polish, non-Austrian, nonshtetl, non-European, non-Yiddish, etc., though I could claim all those ethnicities (or whatever) under certain circumstances. By the way, the first-released (though unauthorized) version of "Tell Me Your Wish (Genie)" was not by SNSD but by an Uzbek. Not that Uzbekistan is anywhere near the Ukraine. But it's closer to the Ukraine than to Korea.

Sadness

Jun. 15th, 2012 09:32 pm
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Trevor says, in his writeup about JJ Project's "Bounce," that:

"For me, there's nothing sadder than, say, a couple of self-described 'punks' arguing about what 'real punk rock' is and is not."
Guess you have to count me among the sad, then, since that's exactly what I was doing the other day when talking about Screeching Weasel and Britney in my "Are We NOT MEN?" post. (Ctrl-F "Screeching Weasel" and don't neglect to click the link to my 2007 Blackout ballot.)

I don't dislike "Bounce" (especially not outraged by any genre busting), though the track doesn't drive me, either. But the more abstract Trevor gets in his reasoning, the more I want to argue with it. Except what I'd rather do is prod him to argue with himself. So what I'd say to Trevor is: Ask yourself what questions would be most troublesome for your argument, and what counterarguments would be the strongest, richest, and deepest. I'll say as an aside — and this is an observation, not a criticism — that at least some of the terms you use to praise JJ Project feel very Sixties, very rock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0eTeKT44mc [This video is age restricted and only watchable on YouTube, so click the link.]
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For the many people* who ask me "Why Korea?" my answer is love. Yes, and there are plenty of other answers too, one being that people who know more than I do come to my lj and talk to me about K-pop, providing sociability and mindwork, and another being that K-pop is creating a hip-hop, r&b, dance-pop amalgam far better than the Billboard Hot 100's, and so on and so forth. But there's always got to be love. With rock there was Jagger**, with glitter the Dolls, with punk the Stooges, with disco Donna, with hip-hop Spoonie Gee, with freestyle Debbie Deb (both the real Debbie Deb and the imposter), with hair-metal Axl, with teenpop Ashlee, etc.***



In this instance****, though, especially given the cultural distance, my not knowing Korea or Korean, I really can't say what's going on; this has inspired me to actually read some books about Korea. Not that what I learn will tell me what I want to know here, which is whether the E.via I've fallen in love with, whom I basically constructed in my mind out of scraps and song bits*****, has anything to do with any kind of reality. Did the Jagger? Pretty much everyone on my love list above has got some Jagger in her or him, or has me projecting the Jagger, anyway, Jagger Jagger burning bright, a combination of Jagger and Miss Lonely, my believing that the world is continually picking up the baton that the Stones and Dylan dropped, and dropping and picking up again.



E.via's attitude towards cute like Ray Davies' attitude towards sunny afternoons )

video for Hey!, plus commentary )
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My first ever Tumblr reblog, in which I say (among other things): So I don't buy into this pop vs. rockism thing, since most of the great teenpop since 2001 or so, from Michelle through to Taylor and Demi, is saturated in rock virtues: hard guitars, strong beats, vocal anguish, ambitious, meaningful lyrics, a romantic quest for self by way of busted relations with boys

My second ever Tumblr reblog, in which I say: You make me wanna reblog, in the kitchen on the floor.
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Ann Powers (All you need is the Beatles? Maybe not.): The Beatles also taught me that pop could be a serious thing. Following the group's evolution across the tracks of the Red and Blue collections, I got an inkling of what artistic evolution sounded like. Little did I know that the story of the Beatles' transformation from a fun bunch of lads imitating Little Richard and Ronnie Spector to a serious quartet influenced by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Andy Warhol would become the foundation for a whole system of defining popular music's worth, which would become known as "rockism," and which favored the more "artistic" kind of rock on the second collection. Or that, decades later, a new gang of artists and thinkers, sometimes called "poptimists," would battle that legacy -- arguing for mop-top red over granny-glasses blue.

There are just so many zillions of things I want to dispute here, I don't know where to begin. But the one that bugs me the most is the progressive narrative about rock criticism that claims that the old generation of criticism was "rockist" - still a BULLSHIT word, and please please please read this column and this column by me, thank you* - and that only years later did some newbie "poptimists" come along to combat that legacy.

I'm sorry, but Richard Goldstein and Nik Cohn (who panned Sgt. Pepper's and The White Album respectively in the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section; Goldstein was wrong and Cohn was right) are not a new gang of writers and thinkers, and they weren't just blips, either. Read Charlie Gillett's Sound Of The City (I think it's 1970, though the ppbk I've got is '72). Read Greil Marcus on the Beatles in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll (first edition was 1976), and those are not just blips either, they're part of something like... well, not critical consensus but a particular strain in criticism, a strong one, the name of which... well, it didn't have a universal name, but there was one name that kept popping up, and obviously the strain wasn't particularly aimed at the Beatles' narrative but rather at the "progressive" narrative as a whole; but I was reading voices from that strain in Fusion starting in '69 and in Creem which also dates back to then but I didn't start reading it until early '74. The strain wasn't the only one in those magazines and probably wasn't the only one in any particular critic's head either, just as there isn't only a single strain in my head, but I'd say the strain is in rock criticism from the get-go, Goldstein's got it in '66 when he's praising the Shangri-Las for their lack of cool and for sounding desperately and hopelessly involved.

Look, there is no poptimism, unless by poptimism you mean every interesting rock critic ever )
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In relation to Episode Three of the Resonance FM series A Bite Of Stars, A Slug Of Time, And Thou:

(1) Results 1 - 10 of about 1,940 for "margaret berger" "robot song". (0.04 seconds)

(2) How would you compare Mark's and Alan's accents as to class, geography, and personality?

(3) Mark mentioned that the field of science fiction has been and to some extent still is anxious about its quality in relation to supposed real literature. (Frank: And well it should be.) Two questions:

(3a) Does this anxiety manifest itself in an attempt to raise the genre (say by infusing more literary or social elements) or just to do it better? (The field of mystery stories probably suffers from a similar anxiety, but back in its great days there were some writers - G.K. Chesterton and Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout come to mind - whom I'd put into the "do it better" category in that they had writers chops but didn't think they had to monkey with the conventions they were given, so they didn't come across as adding "superior" elements [except maybe when Chandler got to The Long Goodbye, which is his most overrated novel anyway].)

(3b) Does popular and semipopular music (incl. indie and alternative and noise) feel a similar anxiety, and if so, how does it act out the anxiety? I think it's shot through with anxiety, but unlike science fiction, it doesn't have an established "real music" that's equivalent to "real literature" to compare itself to, given the abandonment by so much of the intelligentsia of "classical" and "serious" music as the measure of quality. So pop and rock can be obsessive about their search for the real, but the real always remains provisional, because you don't know where to locate it.
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Here's the latest column, once again about antirockism.

The Rules Of The Game #32: Where The Real Wild Things Are

I agonized for about ten seconds as to whether I was being fair in the sentence "the antirockists put defeating an enemy ahead of trying to understand him, so in effect were seeking stupidity in others rather than trying to strengthen their own comprehension." Then I figured if I was being unfair, you'd tell me. It doesn't seem to me that those of you who used the word on ilX weren't trying to understand Patrick Hould or Dave Q or Sundar Subramanian or Glenn McDonald or Alex In NYC, but then I don't think the first three had anything to do with "rockism" as you guys seemed to be using it (though I think that Patrick was confused enough by your usage to think he might be a "rockist") or that your use of the term had anything to do with your actual attempts to interact with and understand these guys.

Was rockism valid in the '60s? )

Links to my other Rules Of The Game columns )
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Here's my latest, in which I reveal myself to be a rockist, unless that's not what I'm revealing. I also don't come to a conclusion about what rockism is. Stay tuned for the exciting sequel.

The Rules Of The Game #31: Rockism And Antirockism Rise From The Dead

Links to my other Rules Of The Game columns )

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Frank Kogan

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