So, Mark, where do you place you and me in this?

[koganbot]

dubdobdee over on the poptimists answer record/fanfic thread:

some of the prob with "theory-dependent" crit -- not just music crit either -- is that there's a deferred fandom going on: viz yr "allowed" to be critical of tarantino but you have to treat eg foucault [but basically insrt guru of choice]* as if it's a different level of thinking; there's a very

Comments

[dubdobdee]

less drunkly (hence not being merely cheeky in order to get a rise

[koganbot]

In the one minute I have before having to go meet some friends:

My complaint about the hallway-classroom split is that it is mutually impoverishing, that it truncates both conversations terribly and makes each dishonest. So if you're hallway and I'm classroom, we're in trouble.

The classroom relies a lot on authority: of a teacher (do it my way or you will get a poor grade) and of the subject matter (we will claim that the subject matter organizes the discussion for us and decides what is relevant and irrelevant. The two "authorities" reinforce each other. There's nothing inherently bad about this. Sometimes challenging authority is just another filibuster, other times it's genuinely questioning what needs to be questioned (are we doing this out of mere habit and deference, or is there good reason for having this discussion in this way?).

[koganbot]

I don't think that Greil Marcus and Debbie Deb are different in kind, so if I haven't discussed them together, that's mere coincidence. I discussed Robert Warshow and Disco Tex together.

[koganbot]

I often don't cite sources to establish credit, either, not because I'm a schnook but because of word limits or because it would kill the flow of the prose, and footnotes often aren't allowed.

While Goldman's Elvis is not a serious biography, it is a very serious book, if only for what it seeks to accomplish: to exclude Elvis Presley, and the culture of the white working-class South, and the people of that culture, and the culture of rock & roll, and the people of that culture, from any serious consideration of American culture. And the bait is being taken: in the New York Times review that will be syndicated all over the United States, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that after reading Goldman's book "one feels revolted by American culture for permitting itself to be exemplified by the career of Elvis Presley

[koganbot]

So note that Bob Dylan is seen as similar to the Voice music section, and vice versa.

I wouldn't say that Tarantino and Foucault are seen as on different levels; they are assigned different roles; we see Tarantino through the lens of Foucault but not vice versa, supposedly - whereas rockwrite refuses that assumption, that only Foucault types can be lenses while Tarantino or Elvis or Crazy Frog, etc. cannot. And I would say that Dylan consciously, and Jagger sort of by being Jagger, refused that assumption as well; they were Foucault types who became rock 'n' rollers, maybe, and were willing to use Elvis and Chuck as their intellectual predecessors, even though they wouldn't have expressed it to themselves like that.

So I don't get where you are "interweaving levels... of 'types of engagement,'" given that you don't buy into Foucault/Crazy Frog being two separate types of engagement. You may interweave different styles and tendencies, but not levels.

[dubdobdee]

except it gains some of its energy -- when it works, when it has any -- from apparent incongruity: ie depends on the level-think of others, to be funny or pertinent or whatever... the fact that i don't believe in something doesn't mean i don't co-opt the forcefield of the beliefs of others to gin up surprises or slippy turns or just gags

(this is generally an interesting territory, with pointed comedy: does satire attack the foibles of society in such a way as to remove them? or does it actually excuse and buttress them? if you constantly make jokes about all politicians being corrupt, do you challenge the corruption or enable it?)