Actually it’s a post I made on a brobdignagian R-Thread on ILM with the Wedge-related part in bold:
“In Seattle Dave Q said that ‘ordinary people’ are mostly rockist. I think this is true once you’ve started self-identifying as a “music fan”. Proponents of a nonrockist criticism have to face the fact that rockism is enormously powerful as a way of defining oneself and ones taste, of separating oneself ideologically and morally from other people who don’t like music so much*. Other fandoms – comics, film, TV, videogames, sci-fi, beanie babies, scrapbooking, etc – almost certainly have “rockism”s of their own, though whether these are successful or not within the fandoms surely varies.** I wonder actually whether the acceptability of a fandom within society is proportionate to how successfully it manages to create and sustain an equivalent of “rockism”!
*(This is the crux of a lot of things. I buy a lot of music. My neighbour buys little. He seems entertained and satisfied by what he buys, though. So there must be something more that I get out of music which explains – to me, to him – why I buy so much more of it, otherwise I’m nothing but a glutton. And that something more must be located in the music that I buy and that people like him don’t, otherwise I’m nothing but a sucker. So maybe the definition of “rockism” I’m looking for is something like religious apologies.)
**(I actually think Douglas’ super-reader piece has MORE to do with how I understand “rockism” than his r-word piece!)”
Nobody really discussed this on the thread so I’ve put it here as a sort of placeholder in case I want to come back to these ideas.