So, Mark, where do you place you and me in this?
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 ( Read more... )
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 ( Read more... )
i) you don't cite authorities much to establish quality, do you? it seems to me the discussions get kept separate -- when you're talking about greil marcus you talk about greil marcus, when you're talkin about debbie deb you talk about debbie deb
ii) i am very conscious in my own writing of interweaving levels -- it's why i work in short blocks of text -- of "types of engagement"; so that the effect -- i hesitate to call it an "argument"*, usually, arisies out the the crackle or smooch of discursive styles and sensibilities... this means i need a fairly clear sense of the "cartoon response to [x] in discourse B", because this cartoon response (in someone else's head) is precisely what i want to play with...
*indeed i 'm actually quite bad at backtracking and casting these move in the form of rational argument, because it would generally require an atypically non-speedread study of some area of intellectual enquiry that i haven't yet made, which would take me a long time to carry out to my own satisfaction
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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?).
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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."
There is no need to feel revolted: American culture has never permitted itself to be exemplified by Elvis Presley, and it never will. But certain Americans (and of course people from all parts of the world) have recognized themselves, and selves they would not have otherwise known, in Elvis Presley: Americans whose culture had taken shape long before Elvis Presley appeared, and those whose culture would have had no shape, would have been in no ways theirs, had Elvis Presley been willing to keep to the place allotted to him.
He wasn't willing to keep to his place, and now he is being returned to it. It is altogether fitting and proper that this be so, because as a redneck, a hillbilly, as a white boy who sang like a nigger, Elvis Presley was never permitted to join the American culture that has never permitted itself to be exemplified by what he made of it.
--Greil Marcus, "Lies About Elvis, Lies About Us," the Village Voice Literary Supplement, December 1981.
it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of a project, and that's sad - even tho projects do usually end (and final acts are usually bloody)
(no chuck in the voice in the 80s, no "my" wire)
(wire after me is a lesson in the possibilities and problems of a medium circulated among obsessives only: i think this "oddness" is the heart of said project actually -- an interface between two worlds that want to separate and mustn't be allowed to)
--Mark Sinker, poptimists, 2006-04-19 11:29 am UTC, in " Badnuss (caution contains Other Place content)" (commentary on Chuck Eddy being fired as editor of the Village Voice's music section)
Like Elvis before him, like Ashlee Simpson now, Dylan simply did not know his place - meaning both that he was uppity ("How much do I know / To talk out of turn / You might say that I'm young / You might say I'm unlearned") and that he was lost, that he had no place. He stretched and he twisted every song form he touched. This is because no form felt like home, and he had to expand them so that he could pile in content that hadn't previously been welcome. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" elongates to 18 bars and for practical purposes feels like one long vamp, a never-ending groove. It contains a critique and contains a party. The album notes say, "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine." Dylan pulled together worlds that want to remain separate but mustn't be allowed to: carney trash hucksters, self-serious ruminators, glamour pusses, street scrappers. And since Dylan didn't know who he was, he became all of them.
Frank Kogan, "Bob Dylan," Paste magazine, June 2006
(though I did ask Mark's permission to lift his line for the Dylan bit)
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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.
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(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?)
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