More opining about Doughty

More opining about Doughty: There’s nothing good I can say about him other than that he made a really cool font once and that thing with Roni Size was intermittently enjoyable.

I’ve got my qualms about lists and charts and polls myself. They can be fun and provocative, but as practiced by the likes of Rolling Stone or Mojo, they’re an especially lazy form of rock journalism. But I think Doughty mischaracterizes the purpose of Pazz & Jop; I think what the poll tries to quantify is not the quality of records so much as their critical esteem. You might think he’d nail the incestuous self-regard this might imply — that this is a poll by critics about critical trends for critics and their followers - but alas, he doesn’t.

I think general complaints about the very act of rock criticism are in fact a hidden urge to absolve music from any kind of criticism at all, to preserve its airy, childlike “specialness” against those who wish to make it relate to the rest of the world, to give it responsibility. Scratch a boho and you’ll find a Romantic underneath. And if you scratch a Romantic, you’ll find a neo-Platonist, as his mush-mouth about “real stuff” makes hideously apparent.

Other points: Doughty comes out as yet another anti-Napsterite musician who’s never produced anyhing worth downloading, and his snippy rejoinder to Jane Dark is maybe a mere two notches away from a spelling flame on the petty-o-meter. Baby.

Good Evans!

Good Evans!: my celeb-in-pub sighting, documented on the Pumpkin Pubs site you will find linked on the left, is of course my double-barrelled Chris Evans encounter. To briefly summarise: i) encountered in The Crown in Soho, offered seat next to him to Fran, who would now have a free Ferrari if she had taken it, the fool. Mind you, though, Chris Evans. ii) encountered in Bar Metro, with the bloke who played the bloke who got framed on EastEnders by the bloke from Spandau Ballet, and someone called Mel who was apparently also famous. You can see why I don’t spot celebrities more often, I think.

Also Herring out of Lee and Herring, chatting up a crusty girl in the Prince Albert, Notting Hill.

Ask Dr Pop

Ask Dr Pop: Dr.Pop this week tackles two problems of concern to us all - to wit, the Middle East situation, and Toploader.

Artists Don’t Like Critics

Artists Don’t Like Critics, what a surprise. M.Doughty of Soul Coughing goes off on one about the Pazz And Jopp poll, in an entertaining but ultimately silly rant. His comments aren’t quite on the David Eggers rabid anti-criticism tip (Critics should i) know their place, ii) never say anything bad about anyone ever ever) but centre on a passionate exhortation that critics should write about real life, man.

This is kind of odd, because it suggests that music and appreciating it is somehow off to the side of real life. It’s that old romantic idea that worships creating art but then belittles the people who experience the art and try to articulate what it means to them. I might write about meeting a person on a bus: I might write about listening to a record. Both are experiences, both are me responding to stimuli - why might one be more ‘real’ than the other?

Or to put it another way, I would rather write or read one excellent piece of music criticism than a hundred shit short stories.

Or to put it yet another way: music criticism - good music criticism - is about life and people and meaning. It just happens to be about music too.

On a more specific level, Doughty’s comments assume that everyone who writes about music is getting it for free. This is not true. I’ve received about four records free in the mail in my life, and only written about one of them. A lot of people who write about music do it for love, just like a lot of people who make music do it for love.

Unpop

Unpop is a newish indie-rock zine. There’s no mission statement or manifesto in sight, of course, since like most indie-rock zines the critical primacy of the music is taken for granted. But there are reviews and a few features: if you like this kind of thing it will seem cosily familiar, and cosy familiarity is what it’s all about, right?

Thousand

Thousand is still going, it may astonish readers to know.

Americana In Pieces

HANNAH MARCUS - Black Hole Sun

INTRODUCTION

I was attracted to this album by a clever letter that Ms. Marcus wrote to Pitchfork, in response to a reviewer who was clearly trying to emulate Richard Meltzer and review albums only by their covers — except that this was hardly a “fuck you” to the major labels, as he was doing it with good product from small, quality, indie labels. Anyway, I knew that I was dealing with a smart and self-aware character, which meant that the album would be interesting if nothing else. But what Black Hole Heaven did was remind me of a genre of music I had given up on, and lend it a new lease on life.

This genre being Americana. And this project, then tying in with the coincidence of much recent thought on “America” (or as Mailer called it, “The Great Bitch” — he called lots of things that, though) also helps me get together my thoughts in a period where I’ve watched numerous westerns, listened to all sorts of early folk, country, and blues, and then just seen Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou, all in a relatively short span of time. (The last, as with all Coen brothers films, telling me nothing new, but throwing all the old stuff into an entertaining mix. Folk culture - social basis + the emptiness of smug artists = epic which is not in past, but rather outside time and meaning altogether?)

And anyway, this is an exercise in methodology — of throwing concepts at an album and seeing which stick, seeing whether I learn about the album, about the concepts, both, or neither.

GENRE

In a general sense, Marcus seems to be approaching post-punk music from a folkie background. This is meant in the sense of adopting an ethos, but using an existing toolset to capture this ethos. Distinct and contrary is the Ani diFranco approach of adopting stylistic measures (hello ska! goodbye contents of my stomach!) while leaving the ethos to rot. Punk is perhaps too limiting a term. We approach what Bakhtin would term “novelization” which is the remaking of genre (in this case folk) and incorporative spirit. Which had at a certain point been the point of all alt-country for me.

As a side note, the term Americana is perhaps more appropriate, because what we are encountering is not counter-Nashville, but almost parallel to Nashville, and perhaps would carry on as it does had Nashville never existed. Americana is more general as well, because it seems to encompass an ethos and attitude towards America, and a self-consciousness of this attitude. DeLillo’s first novel was aptly named Americana for just this reason, as a reworking of traditional narrative device (in this case the search for the self — bildungsroman) over a fragmented and hollow (modernized) social reality.

Returning to topic, at a certain point I felt that the innovative spirit of Americana, dealt with below, had departed for other climes. That there were a certain number of tropes which could be resurrected and reborn, but the general abandonment of forward looking work in favor of endless rehash and reification of tradition had killed the genre. This was compounded by the tendency of this genre to disguise its innovation behind a reclamation of tradition, which left the ever-present danger of tradition swallowing the whole thing back up.

MORE GENERALLY

The nature of art is in constant formal innovation and incorporativity, because the role of art is to challenge abstractions which have been socially reified. In other words, art must move, like a shark, or die. We face in this incorporativity an evolution driven by the relation between structural form and elemental composition. Changes in one drive changes in the other — overall subordinated by the relationship of the work to itself, which is defined by its form. Form in turn is what Bakhtin would term “chronotope” — the resolution of narrative with sequence of time and place — and Bakhtin argues that “chronotope” is the basis of genre. Which would just be a fancy way of saying that art defies genre, except that the deeper analysis lets us describe a particular genre.

So Hannah Marcus’ songs have the structure of folk songs, in the way they capture place and time as static, with the movement of language driving an event already unfolded — retrospective rather than immediate, and with lyrics driving song structure itself, song peaks coinciding with emotionally affective rather than narratively significant points. This chronotopic structure remains in place, thus far. However, the production and stylistic innovations lead to an album-wide arc and cohesion which, if Marcus continues along this path, will have to be reflected on the level of individual songs. This has already begun, approaching dissolution, in the most produced songs, into ambience.

Because a work of art is, by nature, viewed as a unity, the point of innovation is whether the work’s attitude towards itself calls into question the unity of the world it seeks to represent, or whether it, by representing a particular subset of the world, reifies that false unity. Deconstruction fails by asserting the disunity of a work, neglecting the subordination of disjoint elements into an artistic whole, with a consistent overall attitude towards itself, and thus denying the very existence of art as a meaningful term — by bringing disjoint art into a disjoint world, all abstractions cease to be useful.

Fred insisted I link to this

Fred insisted I link to this, his essay on his list of favourite ever songs. But put that out of your mind and read on as it’s got some nice thoughts on radio and self-conscious listmaking. Not thoughts I much agree with but then I’m not Fred. The list itself is interestingly skewed towards one aspect of his tastes, the aspect that was very manifest when I first knew him actually. Whether that represents an actual ‘core’ of taste or is a reflection of a current emotional state, I’m not sure.

Dancing About Architecture

Dancing About Architecture: has a Greil Marcus endorsement now, something FT is unlikely to win no matter how many negative Ja Rule reviews we run. All the rock critics love us anyway, yeah, they’re just too cool to say so. Or we are. Or something. Anyway, issue 41 of DAA has a piece on Cocksucker Blues and a review of those controversial Le Tigre people.

My Fifteen Minutes

My Fifteen Minutes: the last word on the AICON controversy, I rather think.