does this distinction hold? in other words, can you be thinking “history be my judge” AND “fuck history” at the same time?

i’m not sure you can AT THE SAME TIME — but i think the same person can be ruled be contrary passions at DIFFERENT TIMES (even when working on the SAME SONG)

so where does that leave us eh?

and while any given art practice presumably contains ppl in both camps, i guess i’m arguing that a business where yr paycheck depends on grabbing many ears THIS WEEK is more likely to fall towards the latter…

some of my reason for implying eg that chart pop is better at this than paintings or movies or novels or operas — not that the latter can’t do it, just that chart pop is better — is formal and structural and contextual: two hours vs three minutes; a palladian gallery invoking the entire history of culture vs the dansette in yr bedroom or the car radio; density and weight vs lightnness and fleetness

“why is not thinking it matters more conducive to flashes?” — i think what i’m getting at is that (i feel) costello, and the “serious considered artist”, is more likely to censor himself, or rewrite and rework, or generally select-and-discard after the fact, with regard to HOW THE AGES WILL SEE ME, than going untidily with “awesome! wtf! print it now!”… and that this regard to the view of the ages and the angels pushes you away from intuitive motile work which you aren’t sure you understand yet, towards stuff which (with a day’s rest) makes sense to you; or fits in with yr idea of who you ought to be and want to be

(evidently there’s a more complex dynamic at work — hence we got talkin abt professional improvisers, where a lifetimes’ experience “producing the surprise” is brought into play)

(”who you ought to be and want to be”: one of the things i guess i like about chart-pop is that this is a complex negotiation, very much up for grabs: m.mclaren wanted to be j.rotten’s svengali and/or fagin, and rotten’s laugh is the richer and more “idiot pop flashy” for the ambiguity of rotten’s control over who he is in this context

(so “considered art” wd here also imply a greater measure of artistic autonomy — and argue that this is not necessarily a good thing, in regard to “pop flash”…: the complexity of the potential nexus of passions within a boy-band, say, pulled several ways between manager and stylist and songwiorters and producer and label, may supply a heightened tension of context in which “pop flash” is the inspired coping mechanism, to satisfy the contradictory demands)

if it’s true that rock before say 1979 delivered pop flash better than rock after 1979, then the delcaration by the clash that they had “complete control” is the point where artistic autonomy pushed the artists into too comfy a territory (they had control of the context of appreciation and thus rendered themselves lame?)

and frank said: “Seems arbitrary to say “considered art” rather than “considered pop” or “considered craft.” Also, don’t see any reason to think that Johnny’s scornful laugh and Mel and Kim’s hair weren’t “considered,” or why you’d think that flashes of energy and insight (what’s “idiot” doing modifying that phrase?) aren’t there due to someone constructing song or situation so as to put them there.”

i. “Considered art” is larger than and contains “considered pop” and “considered craft” — it would have been more arbitrary to say either of the latter two. (I accept this somewhat depends on usage of word “art”)
ii. As I said nefore, I think Frank’s “Don’t see any reason flashes of energy and insight … aren’t there due to someone constructing song or situation so as to put them there” is just a really strange thing to say. Of course they CAN be — hence i said “much less good at and” not eg “no good at” (jeez!) — but the point is, i’m drawing attention to the situations where they AREN”T, as that’s the area that’s germane to my worry. Hence when Frank pushes back against this possibility, i have to assume that — despite his parenthesis and its italics — he secretly doesn’t really believe what he’s ceding, that flashes and insight can sometimes arise without pre-construction. Hence pushback against pushback (bcz I don’t understand what it is he’s worried I’m omitting to discuss)

1. All of these, though, have a certain level of reportage about them - viz. “I killed the Kennedys” came out a couple of months after a Kennedy had been killed and you can tell that Billy J is indulging in SEE WHAT I DID THEREism when he manages to crowbar “China’s under martial law” into his world-history-is-me self-encomium - which again leads to the Moebiusism of history turning into a mirror even though its primary aim is to run a marker pen over the individual involved, whether to prove their supremacy (”Devil”) or powerlessness (”Oliver’s”). If we see Britpop as Drabble’s Ice Age then “Oliver’s Army” sits midway on the anti-exponential curve between “Say It Ain’t So” and “Two Tribes.”*

2. Only in Britain, I suspect, would that happen; cleverness as an illegal drug to be smuggled past Customs officers of Hornbyism and other manifestations of grey standardisation masquerading as masses-inclusive socialism.

3. I don’t think EC is very pop, except when (at his best) he reacts in a vinegary avant-gardey way against what’s surrounding him in the best sellers; that’s why “Watching The Detectives” worked so blatantly OTHERly in the context of Ruby Winters and Barron Knights and “Pills And Soap” could only have worked in the decimated post-New Pop lists of ‘83. Note how in ‘82 when everyone else caught onto/bettered what he was trying to get up to in metapop terms he released six singles, all of which peaked between 41 and 60, when really he should have walked it if he was going to talk it.

Add to that the regret that EC hasn’t had more hits with his songs sung by other voices; listening to POTP yesterday (July ‘79) Dave Edmunds doing “Girls Talk” (and Nick L again producing) and I knew that had EC been singing it would have been insufferable, yet astute old trouper Edmunds somehow managed to sound bang up to date in a Numan/Dooleys/Chic universe (and immediately followed by Janet Kay’s beyond-sublime “Silly Games,” which reminded me of what EC might have and still could achieve if he just LET GO of history and allowed himself to feel and breathe, esp. when the probable truth was that “Silly Games” was one of maybe a dozen sides which would have been routinely cut at whatever JA studio it was recorded at in the space of one day…pop which feels before it thinks > pop which has to think about how it should feel).

4. I too spent a long time working out how to write about Good Girl Gone Bad until Lena pointed out a trope which proved so logical that I immediately realised the best way to approach it (go and look it up on CoM; it won’t be too difficult to work out how I did it)…

5. Got a link to that EW piece? In his defence, Nick L has always been like this, viz. thinks/interviews negatively but acts positively, as per his new album which is every bit as good as Laughing Lenny’s recent stuff.

6. Stock and partially inaccurate but serviceable for now snap answer: Patti Smith…longer answer: unexpectedly but comprehensively and succinctly summed up by CSM somewhere in Crosstown Traffic.

7. Interesting that the two examples you give began life as very EC-like period protest songs, so it’s a progressive conduit towards neutralisation (if that’s not being oxymoronic), i.e. kids won’t understand it and that nullifies any threat but what THEY forget is that kids ABSORB it before they understand about understanding (see also Van Morrison passim about turning back liturgy into polite damn-the-brimstone carnality).

8. The attendant irony of Travolta having already been knocked off all senses of balance at the end of Grease by a real woman in the context of carnivalised disruption need not be underlined here.

9. Actual “idiots” as classically defined above or perceived idiots in the John Clare vs Lord Liverpool sense?

10. To quote 10cc (original, or as sampled by J Dilla): we’re working on it…

*The Ice Age seems particularly relevant here and not just because Lester B dug it or because it predicated Thatcherism to such a painfully accurate and minute degree but because in its final reluctant upward arc it is only too aware that this pattern is going to be repeated forever.

Music is a different game from physics, of course.

(1) The flashes we get can be the result of forethought on the part of the people making the music or film or hairstyle etc. (right, there’s no guarantee that the forethought will result in our getting flashes; not every arrow hits its target; duh! and jeez again). You’re the one who set up a distinction between considered art and chart pop, not me, and you haven’t said why flashes are more likely to be unplanned than planned (and how do you know what’s planned and what isn’t anyway?).

(2) You haven’t said why the flashes are more likely to happen in pop than in art (”maybe this is bcz their makers didn’t think it mattered, or bcz they only thought it mattered to amuse themselves and their friends”; all right, (1) why is not thinking it matters more conducive to flashes [obv., given what I wrote in the early Why Music Suckses, I'm sympathetic to this line of thinking; but e.g., I think that right when rockers figured out how much rock did matter and that rock was art, 1963-1967, was when it produced the most flashes], and (2) why is not thinking it matters more a feature of pop than of art [supposed timelessness of art on the one hand, but money invested in pop on the other]) - and you haven’t said why you attached the adjective “considered” to “art” but not “pop,” especially given that you’re talking about a pop singer. So what you’re making seem mystical is CHART POP, not the flashes (”you’re making chart pop seem something mystical”). Right, there’s always something mysterious, and I can’t totally explain why a joke is funny; nor can I justify to someone who doesn’t get my sense of humor that a gag has to be set up just this way (nor explain why my choice of notes makes a melody beautiful, etc.). But surely you’re not saying that Costello went on to make art that he could thoroughly explain and justify in advance. (Or if you are, you’re making a much narrower point, which doesn’t really have to do with art and pop but just with Costello going on to attempt pathological control over his craft.) And, once again, why would chart pop be freer than art of the need to explain and justify (especially given all the money invested in pop)?

Seems to me that flashes can be planned and considered, and conversely that flashes can be serendipitous. Seems to me that flashes can be in art and flashes can be in pop, not to mention that flashes can be in a lot of other places. (I think that exhausts the universe of possibilities; and my point about Ashlee and Joyce is that I don’t see the two inherently functioning in different ways; not to mention that I consider Ashlee and her co-creators artists.)

None of this necessarily means that you’re wrong to say that the flashes occur more frequently in chart pop. But - to repeat myself - there’s no “poppiness” that guarantees the flashes, so if the flashes are more frequent, we have to say when, where, and why.

1) the barely linked, random historical infulences where ordinary people have no real control is a genere, isnt it? is olivers army fit somewhere b/w sympathy for the devil and we didnt start the fire.
2) does the word clever suggest you got away with something…(ie the duplicity of using “pop” to convey ideas of “art”
3) elvis costello doesnt really seem like pop to me, though i cant quite figure out why.
4) I am in the middle of reviewing Rhianna’s new album for left hip, and its pleasures are difficult to pin down, to analyze, to write about–its so slick, so musical, so anti-logophillic, like much pop, so the critique of it comes from singing along or dancing along, and doesnt come from writing about it.
5) speaking of costello and cleverness, nick lowes interview in this weeks ew is so bitchy, and so pure rock and roll bile. i have been listening to lowe a lot recently, because of his balance of earnestness and toxic irony.
6) i wonder, if words lead to words. if the rockist/mid 70s writers who wrote about rockism, were lead into thinking about the wordiness of it all. why we get girl pop talked about in terms of gender as opposed to musical innovation is that lots of girl pop was not about words. why the canon we have, is the literary refences, an the poetic tropes as opposed to anything corperal (possible exceptions: tosches on lewis, but he makes it a theological tract, bang on anything, but bang still got all goopy about how language was used)
7) just b/c its me, two theological thots
a) i keep maintaing that the catholic churches refusal to engage in lirtugical dance, or the violence it comes down on it with, is related to the body doing the minds work
b) when i was a wee guffin, in church, we used to sing these action songs, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0u3-yyn-w0) in order to keep us calm for the lesson, and i wonder if things like ring around the rosie or london bridge, were intended for vaguely the same purpose? maybe thats why we assume pop songs are for children?
8) speaking of dancing, hairspray is all about this, all about how dancing (as a metyonomy of fucking) allowed for the intergration of pleasures, sexualities, gender, size and races, one of the reasons it was so good to have divine in that role, was that she destabilized and introduced the notion of gender, its weird to see john travolata and queen latifah, with something hidden about both of them, in this sanitized musical about non sanitized things. its even weirder to listen to the travolota interviews about edna turbold, and have him think that she was a real woman, as opposed to a carnivesque disruption (i think lane or denby make this point in a recent new yorker) (and the musical had firestien, who was always kind of safe and kind of dangerous at the same time, but who was always in control of his body, and often other people’s bodies)
9) i wonder how the discussion of idiots relate to the romantic obsessions with them in england and france, like the picnics in bedlam or the gericualt drawings of idiots in the instutions around paris.
10) i hope this connects to somethnig

Crikey, you people are still going, after all these years.

I hoped Mark S might say something about FW.

i don’t even know what the insight is that mel and kim’s hair imparts, and nor do they! but i know that there is one — which also means that i know that, if i (or someone) thought about it clearly enough, we COULD get it into shareable words (at which point it would become craft)

(i assume there are haircut theorists who could help here — but i am also more than sure that there are haircut theorists who would only hinder)

i think i’m hunting for a manny-farberish point, that in particular eras, particular zones of pop were free to be much less “white elephant art” than other artforms (or else had holes in them where the non-elephant elements could poke through): maybe this is bcz their makers didn’t think it mattered, or bcz they only thought it mattered to amuse themselves and their friends, or bcz they were going all out for full-on white elephantism but weren’t any good at it, or _____, or _______, or _________

(Here is Manny, in the essay “White Elephant Art vs.Termite Art”: “Masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidor and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago, has come to dominate the overpopulated arts of TV and movies. The the sins of white elephant art (1) frame the action with an overall pattern, (2) install every event, chracter, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.”

the word “idiot” is there to push the continuum of possibility out beyond anything that can be called “considered” — i mean it to mean not just unthought or unthinking, but done in a way that the doer couldn’t (convincingly) justify or explain in terms of their grasp of their own craft skills as they understand them: in the sense it’s used in this sentence — “idiot love will spark the fusion”

you’re right that it’s entirely possible to use the word “considered” for a much wider range of things than the habits of any given discipline are comfy with; you’re wrong if you’re arguing that everything anyone does ever is “considered”; and you’re wrong if you’re arguing that everything that’s GOOD is “considered”

this seems a very weird thing to say, to me: “why you’d think that flashes of energy and insight … aren’t there due* to someone constructing song or situation so as to put them there?” —
the joke “[insert joke here]” would have no meaning if it weren’t the case that the flash DOESN’T always happen, and CAN’T just be assumed reliably to be along when needed and inserted at will. “Here’s the song Johnny, but you will need a flash of inspiration to kick it off” “OK Malcy will do!”

i don’t think this idea’s remotely mystical — it happens all the time, as when a possible joke (say) hits someone as they’re saying something — but yes, i do think the difference between when it’s exactly right and when it’s inspired is mysterious sometimes, and when it is, the word i appear to reach for is “idiot”, meaning a capability common to all of us — ourselves when ordinary — which expressively trumps the power of crafted expression (i didn’t reach for it in a considered way, it just fell out of my fingers, but on the other hand, i can “justify” it acc.the laws of my craft heehee)

from the greek: idiotes
1. a private person as opposed to a magistrate, ruler, king
2. a common soldier, as opposed to a military officer
3. a writer of prose as opposed to a poet
4. in the New Testament, an unlearned, illiterate, man as opposed to the learned and educated: one who is unskilled in any art

in shakespearian english, people later called idiots were often called “naturals”, interestingly enough — as if to argue that ALL intelligence was cultivated: i don’t think it is, we develop some of it by other means than schooling, such as how we sound when we laugh (obviously you can teach yrself to laugh another way, or fake the sound — equally obviously rotten isn’t doing either, but it ISN’T his natural laugh either, it’s acted but there’s more than just imitation there)

*[shd be OWING there, acc.my mum]

If chart pop does do this especially well, you have to say why. It seems to me that disco ‘75 to ‘80 did this especially well, and that Cleveland-New York punk-no-wave-whatever did this especially well ‘75 to ‘80 but that nondisco chart pop was generally mediocre in this period. And New York post-punk-no-wave-whatever was blah in ‘85. So good environments, like good Joyces and Ashlees, can create rich worlds that help everyone to insight and energy - grow rich in association with each other - but that chart pop at a particular time isn’t guaranteed to be this good environment. Specific musical events have to happen, that other musical events can feed off of.

I think you guys have all discussed what is problematic about this sentence pretty well. Seems arbitrary to say “considered art” rather than “considered pop” or “considered craft.” Also, don’t see any reason to think that Johnny’s scornful laugh and Mel and Kim’s hair weren’t “considered,” or why you’d think that flashes of energy and insight (what’s “idiot” doing modifying that phrase?) aren’t there due to someone constructing song or situation so as to put them there. (Not that they have to arise from forethought, but they can.) And getting the flash often depends on knowledge on the part of the flashee. That is, the flash I got from “I look pretty young but I’m just backdated” in the Who’s “Substitute” came from my having previously heard “Hope I die before I get old” in “My Generation.” And the shocks from the Stones’ “Lady Jane” and “Back Street Girl” come from knowing the genre conventions that Jagger’s using and simultaneously defying (the sound is of a sentimental ballad, and “I don’t want you to be high/I don’t want you to be down/Don’t want to tell you no lies…” could be the setup for a romantic declaration of love, or, though less romantic, a happily rambunctious “I don’t want you ’cause I’m sad and blue/I just wanna make love to you”; so the shock comes from the dawning realization that what we’re listening to is a rich married man telling his mistress where she needs to curtail her behavior if their financial relationship is to continue). The reason I still get a lot of insight and energy from Ashlee Simpson is that I’ve listened to a lot of Ashlee Simpson: “I spilled my coffee/It went all over your clothes/I gotta wear mine now” tells you a lot about the relationship in a very few words, and the song’s about how her bad days prove her life and love are going well. But it also then associates the bright and happy line from her introductory song - “Got stains on my T-shirt/And I’m the biggest flirt” - with the hazy density of a good-bad day. The thing is, I don’t see how knowing these things, making these associations - getting these flashes of energy and insight - is different in kind from getting flashes of energy and insight from Finnegans Wake (which I’ve never tried to read, but I assume those who’ve read it profitably are getting similar buzzes, and those buzzes are not a different species from the buzzes in pop).

It makes an unsubtle companion piece to this tho. :)