The rockism/popism debate produces my longest cultural critical rant yet!
Many people here probably saw the Slate article about Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields supposedly being a racist. There was another article in the same edition about the ongoing debate between "rockism" and "popism."
For those who don't know, "rockists" would include the "first wave" of 60s and 70s journalists like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, who turned their incredibly dorky love of rock music into hipster insider status. These are the people who, despite their differences, would probably agree that Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Neil Young, Dylan, the Velvets, and Bruce Springsteen belong to some sort of immortal pantheon, that guitar-slinging songwriters are far superior to commercialized pop hit-makers, that solos can be cool, that vinyl beats anything else, that live shows trump radio singles and music videos, and so on ad infinitum. If you continue to dig deeper with these types, you would probably find that they point to albums like Television's Marquee Moon, Wire's Ping Flag, the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, Husker Du's Zen Arcade, the Fall's Hex Enduction Hour, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and Radiohead's OK Computer as some of the greatest albums of the last 25 years. In other words, lots and lots and lots of white dudes.
The thing about rockists is that despite all this amor of all things alba, they love them some "colored music" too. I mean Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Coltrane, anyone on Blue Note records in the late 50s/early 60s, Stevie Wonder, the whole Motown crew, Otis Redding, Al Green, Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly Stone, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince, Public Enemy, Outkast, up to Kanye West (perhaps with some reservations). So where's the beef?
"Popists" would argue that such music either isn't good in and of itself but must "measure up" to white rock standards or that it has simply become part of the same hipster elitist altar at which rockists worship. Sure, a rockist might go for Stevie Wonder, but what about huge-selling black pop artists like Whitney Houston, Alexander O'Neal, Bell Biv Devoe, or Boyz II Men? "Well," the rockist would answer (and I would probably second them), "now you're talking about some soulless, prefab crap that isn't fit to wipe Stevie's blind ol' ass." Busted: you're a rockist asshole.
I still haven't exactly figured out what popism's "positive" program looks like, when it's done deconstructing the rockist temple. I'm afraid it looks something like VH1. (Just as a side note, if you think about it, Vh1 and MTV are like the Master Blaster of the entertainment industry. If you don't recall, Master Blaster was the duo from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome that consisted of a big retarded dude with all the strength and a midget with all the brainpower. In the present inquiry, MTV is obviously the monster, spewing out all the product, and VH1 is the smarter but weaker one who tells you how to interpret the product. Thus "Best Week Ever," "I Love the [Decades]", etc. [Interestingly, when MTV stops showing videos--which is often--it usually tells you how to run your social life, not your musical life, with shows like "Date My Mom," "My Super Sweet 16," "The Real World," et al.]) To continue, VH1 is heavily entrenched in the business of kitsch and ephemera. They figure (and probably with some good reason), Hey, people have been talking about Elvis and the Beatles and Michael Jackson for years, let's talk about how great the "Welcome Back Kotter" theme was and how disco was super cool. And so on.
So far as I can tell, "popism" is basically the postmodern, postcolonial answer to the liberal tradition of "rockism." Critics in the 60s and 70s thought they had found the true, honest way hiding beneath all the bullshit of shiney happy Vietnam/Johnson/Nixon America. Later, when the New Left didn't really pan out, rock critics thought that if rock 'n' roll didn't bring the revolution, listening to it at least made you a Better Person. Popism, on the other hand, is a typical sign of the late capitalist times (by the way, I'm not just saying this, I actually sorta kinda mean it). Pop music, in all its fleeting, 15-minutes-of-fame, easily digestible and more easily forgotten glory, is to be celebrated. We are now supposed to consume music for the love of the consumption, listening to it through our iPods as we sip a tall latte, schedule our lives on our blackberrys, talk on our cell phones, etc. It is the stuff of yupsters, people wearing Chuck T's and faux-retro clothing to investment banking jobs and profitable dot-coms.
Popism is postcolonial insofar as it recognizes the rockist, no matter how liberal or turned on to black music, as a misguided white ideologue who can't see past his own soft-liberal racism. This is nowhere more apparent than in the case of Stephin Merritt. The guy dared to question the popularity of Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, and Outkast and he is declared a hater of women, people of color, and people...who...like the music of people of color...? The underlying assumption is that all of the four above named artists must be doing something artistic or worthwhile. Racism must be the true cause behind Merritt's dislike of them, not their musical merit. (Jesus Christ I used the term merit. I must be against affirmative action or something.) And if it were a question of merit, Merritt (ha!) would be guilty of subscribing to rockist notions of it. Who's to say Beyonce doesn't make good music? Doesn't it have a good beat, and you can dance to it? (This air-headed teeniebopper disco phrase, once the mocking putdown of rockists, has been turned into some popist's rallying cry.)
I've seen the downsides of rockism, to be sure. I've worked at a music store where there could be four guys on the job who all know the second solo record put out by the lead singer of Thin Lizzy, but not know last year's American Idol winner. But the extreme opposite is to suppose that we should abandon all the obscure music collected and hierarchized by the rockists and lose ourselves in the mindless pop of the present. Please note that these are half-finished and incomplete thoughts, intended to start discussion. I don't go for the reactionary rockist backlash found especially here, which tries to use the argument as an excuse to pan hip-hop wholesale and say how low and depraved (i.e. how black) it is. ("How boring is hip-hop?" asks Andrew Sullivan. Just like those Muslims are so sex-crazed...) My point is that the extreme of popism is dumbness masquerading as hip, clued in savvy. It's learning to love your masters.
For those who don't know, "rockists" would include the "first wave" of 60s and 70s journalists like Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs, who turned their incredibly dorky love of rock music into hipster insider status. These are the people who, despite their differences, would probably agree that Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Neil Young, Dylan, the Velvets, and Bruce Springsteen belong to some sort of immortal pantheon, that guitar-slinging songwriters are far superior to commercialized pop hit-makers, that solos can be cool, that vinyl beats anything else, that live shows trump radio singles and music videos, and so on ad infinitum. If you continue to dig deeper with these types, you would probably find that they point to albums like Television's Marquee Moon, Wire's Ping Flag, the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime, Husker Du's Zen Arcade, the Fall's Hex Enduction Hour, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and Radiohead's OK Computer as some of the greatest albums of the last 25 years. In other words, lots and lots and lots of white dudes.
The thing about rockists is that despite all this amor of all things alba, they love them some "colored music" too. I mean Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Coltrane, anyone on Blue Note records in the late 50s/early 60s, Stevie Wonder, the whole Motown crew, Otis Redding, Al Green, Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly Stone, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Prince, Public Enemy, Outkast, up to Kanye West (perhaps with some reservations). So where's the beef?
"Popists" would argue that such music either isn't good in and of itself but must "measure up" to white rock standards or that it has simply become part of the same hipster elitist altar at which rockists worship. Sure, a rockist might go for Stevie Wonder, but what about huge-selling black pop artists like Whitney Houston, Alexander O'Neal, Bell Biv Devoe, or Boyz II Men? "Well," the rockist would answer (and I would probably second them), "now you're talking about some soulless, prefab crap that isn't fit to wipe Stevie's blind ol' ass." Busted: you're a rockist asshole.
I still haven't exactly figured out what popism's "positive" program looks like, when it's done deconstructing the rockist temple. I'm afraid it looks something like VH1. (Just as a side note, if you think about it, Vh1 and MTV are like the Master Blaster of the entertainment industry. If you don't recall, Master Blaster was the duo from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome that consisted of a big retarded dude with all the strength and a midget with all the brainpower. In the present inquiry, MTV is obviously the monster, spewing out all the product, and VH1 is the smarter but weaker one who tells you how to interpret the product. Thus "Best Week Ever," "I Love the [Decades]", etc. [Interestingly, when MTV stops showing videos--which is often--it usually tells you how to run your social life, not your musical life, with shows like "Date My Mom," "My Super Sweet 16," "The Real World," et al.]) To continue, VH1 is heavily entrenched in the business of kitsch and ephemera. They figure (and probably with some good reason), Hey, people have been talking about Elvis and the Beatles and Michael Jackson for years, let's talk about how great the "Welcome Back Kotter" theme was and how disco was super cool. And so on.
So far as I can tell, "popism" is basically the postmodern, postcolonial answer to the liberal tradition of "rockism." Critics in the 60s and 70s thought they had found the true, honest way hiding beneath all the bullshit of shiney happy Vietnam/Johnson/Nixon America. Later, when the New Left didn't really pan out, rock critics thought that if rock 'n' roll didn't bring the revolution, listening to it at least made you a Better Person. Popism, on the other hand, is a typical sign of the late capitalist times (by the way, I'm not just saying this, I actually sorta kinda mean it). Pop music, in all its fleeting, 15-minutes-of-fame, easily digestible and more easily forgotten glory, is to be celebrated. We are now supposed to consume music for the love of the consumption, listening to it through our iPods as we sip a tall latte, schedule our lives on our blackberrys, talk on our cell phones, etc. It is the stuff of yupsters, people wearing Chuck T's and faux-retro clothing to investment banking jobs and profitable dot-coms.
Popism is postcolonial insofar as it recognizes the rockist, no matter how liberal or turned on to black music, as a misguided white ideologue who can't see past his own soft-liberal racism. This is nowhere more apparent than in the case of Stephin Merritt. The guy dared to question the popularity of Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, and Outkast and he is declared a hater of women, people of color, and people...who...like the music of people of color...? The underlying assumption is that all of the four above named artists must be doing something artistic or worthwhile. Racism must be the true cause behind Merritt's dislike of them, not their musical merit. (Jesus Christ I used the term merit. I must be against affirmative action or something.) And if it were a question of merit, Merritt (ha!) would be guilty of subscribing to rockist notions of it. Who's to say Beyonce doesn't make good music? Doesn't it have a good beat, and you can dance to it? (This air-headed teeniebopper disco phrase, once the mocking putdown of rockists, has been turned into some popist's rallying cry.)
I've seen the downsides of rockism, to be sure. I've worked at a music store where there could be four guys on the job who all know the second solo record put out by the lead singer of Thin Lizzy, but not know last year's American Idol winner. But the extreme opposite is to suppose that we should abandon all the obscure music collected and hierarchized by the rockists and lose ourselves in the mindless pop of the present. Please note that these are half-finished and incomplete thoughts, intended to start discussion. I don't go for the reactionary rockist backlash found especially here, which tries to use the argument as an excuse to pan hip-hop wholesale and say how low and depraved (i.e. how black) it is. ("How boring is hip-hop?" asks Andrew Sullivan. Just like those Muslims are so sex-crazed...) My point is that the extreme of popism is dumbness masquerading as hip, clued in savvy. It's learning to love your masters.
posted by to scranton at 12:41 PM
2 Comments:
You couldn't have done this once a week for Cadenza? I have very little to add as I think you're right on the mark. One should never lose sight of merit in art, although the rockist should surely not close his or her ears to all new pop music (which you acknowledge is a fault of some of your co-workers). By and large, I think music (pop and rock) has done a good job of incorporating each other in a dialectical fashion. Where would rock be without blues? Where would pop and hip-hop be without Steely Dan?
"Where are the obligatory niggers?"
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