the impulse to group-historicise vs the causes of bad writing

[dubdobdee]

follow-up to:
(a) a post i made on freakytigger's thread
and
(b) the part of my EMP paper which i actually pussied out of and didn't explore (as requested by dickmalone(a) i was wondering about the social context "ver kidz" are downloading all this material INTO, and suggested that the impulse to group-historicise what's shared is going to catch up with every new

Comments

[dubdobdee]

first, i think there is a shift, from "chain of influences" as a matter-of-fact minor locationary point to make (among many): and "chain of influences"as establishing-quality

second, i think in the 60s and 70s, there was (if anything) a tendency to assume that boomer music was doing stuff so new and important that the pre-boomer bedrock just wasn't that important (non-derailing exceptions = the blues as a root; prog as a child-of-the-classics) --- xyz was good bcz it ROCKED (and if it "was influenced by sam & dave" this was of minor historical matter; besides, basically EVERYTHING was "influenced by stones/elvis/beatles", so the point wasn't worth making)

so i think the analytical argument kicked in abt the time it became necessary to argue -- within rock -- that we were going back to RESCUE the genre from where vit went wrong, and to cite (as roots of quality) elements OVERLOOKED AT THE TIME; generally meaning the VELVET UNDERGROUND obv

"chains of influence" had a similar, longer-encrusted function in other musics (eg jazz) and art-forms -- so there's an element of rockwrite borrowing from the critical language of "more grown-up discourse" to professionalise itself, an authority-seeking tic which after a while becomes a distorting shortcut, churned out in industiral volumes

also of course with punk and post-punk there was a huge outreach to artforms other than rock to shore up rock against the kinds of political crit that punk brought into the dicussion

i think it's a leap out into a bogus objectivity, pandering to an idea of history and historical importance which very much misses what WAS new to rock as a cultural project

[thomppw]

so uh wasn't that an account of a chain of influences which then stops at the point of explaining what is in fact important and new about rock as a cultural project?

admittedly this is a bit snide of me, sorry :(

[dubdobdee]

uh, yes, that's exactly what i'm saying, thom: the attempt to explain or explore what was special about rock as a (no longer quite) new thing went through a massive crisis of confidence, and ended up routinely defining its "true" self against itself by weirdly uncritical outreach to all kinds of other "non-rock" things -- "influence" being a touchstone word in this evasion; that once you've said it, you apparently don't have to say anything else

[thomppw]

no, i meant - isn't this an account of 'influence' on rockwrite? - it's humbug of me, though, cuz it isn't, plus now having gone and looked at your abstract i gather that the "what were the chain of things that led to rockwrite going wrong" isn't the center of it in the way i took it to be from this post. (wasn't at EMP.)