AN OBLIQUE AND I HOPE NON-RANCOROUS RESPONSE TO BLISSBLOG’s LONG NON-RANCOROUS RESPONSE to etc (zzz)
While tidying up at Stone Lanes, I reread Teach Mark S a Lesson: Louis Prima. As it’s set long ago, it doesn’t strictly speaking answer any argt which says “yes yes back in the 60s this situation obtained but now it doesn’t”; but I think it shd cast a doubt at least on the certainty that now it doesn’t/can’t (bcz there were underground-oriented tastemakers who were ‘but now it doesn’t” back then too, and they were WRONG, and not just abt rock etc).
Actually I’ve only had time to skim SR’s v.long and detailed reply (it’s Trig Brother in an hour!!) but this is at least to pick up on the idea that the “pop” free-lunch REQUIRES cutting-edge technologies/techniques. Old abandoned highpop techniques (= the technologies we no longer consider technologies) (technics is a good, more-general word) can often also deliver: is late 50s Las Vegas Cabaret an “underground”, a SOACA? Well, yes, maybe it IS in a way; but if so, then you have to admit that there are endless pockets of potential SOACA scattered all over the Corporate Machinery, now more than ever (and not just in cutting-edge communities: as marcello noted, repetition is NOT an utter cultural-capitalist evil; it may in fact be a major overlooked nurturing ground; the retreat from the hip as the escape from the demands of planned cultural obsolescence). And thrown up at (quasi)random they will have MORE power than if they reappear after being hunted down via the habits and cliches of any specific given critical microcommunity, no matter how smart or learned (in fact the smartness and learning may constitute a problem) (ie Prima encountered out of “nowhere” trumps most of the perhaps not-dissimilar stuff unearthed in the Incredibly Strange Music books); which is notoriously defanged by the semblance of “ironic appreciation” that project cloaked itself in) (possibly misleadingly, possibly a bit scaredycattily).
(All this depends on the assumption that market forces can deliver things at random: that they’re not just a mask for the 12-ft-lizard supercontrol of a ruling cabal: but justifying this will take us out of NYPLM and into PBS and besides i have a bus to catch and evictions to cheer)