Why are the left such chumps when it comes to the charts?

[koganbot]

I'm urging dubdobdee to pitch and write a piece that he's long been contemplating: "why are the left such chumps when it comes to the charts?" So to urge him further I'm pasting in a slightly re-worded version of what I wrote on his thread, and I encourage you to contribute your own thoughts here. (I'm not saying anything that I haven't said better and at

Comments

What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain]

Who do "the left" actually promote, musicwise? Aside from world music (maybe), I don't think of the audiences of indie rock, say, which are stubbornly casual in their politics (which may be its own issue -- "casual pseudo-left?"), or the audiences of...I dunno, Bruce Springsteen or whatever the heck else as specifically "left." As for the catholic taste bit, I wouldn't consider Carl Wilson or Sasha Frere-Jones particularly "left" either, so maybe the issue is the narrow or uninformed range of my definition (which has something to do with explicitly socialist drive for change).

So to me, what the actual left is doing with music isn't as much of a problem for me as a kind of ambiguity or watering-down of leftist politics itself, maybe for the reasons you're suggesting -- too much easy identification, not enough hard analysis. But to me, music isn't so much the main focus as it is an easy target and a good place to catch people thinking poorly -- it's where bad frameworks, ugly prejudices, and baseless assumptions get floated with the

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain]

I imagine that's a source of tension for left-leaning thinkers, too -- the fact that aesthetic analysis simply is NOT demonstrably tied up to means of production. I think this becomes clearer, and an unavoidable schism (institutions in which the work is made vs. the work itself) as the means of actually producing _____ get easier. If you can sound exactly like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or Beyonce without capitulating to a whole fucked-up system of production, marketing, and distribution values (and that's even GRANTING that system's validity, which I usually don't, since most people think they know all they need to know about how the system actually works, i.e. next to nothing), there's no particularly convincing political argument to be made against it even from the institutional side.

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[dubdobdee]

well to me the schism IS the value -- "culture" is where i get to test the tension between my personal desires and my civic ideals, if you like

music in particular is a coherent aesthetic system (or better a web of mutually contraticity, internally coherent sytems) not shaped by the logic of well-formed words; not systematised the ways words are; not co-opted the way words are -- they may be co-opted in OTHER ways, but the contrasts form spaces for freedom, gaps for movement, lines of flight, that reduction to political language, or crit-theory jargon, or journalistic promo, render invisible

Re: What *aren't* the left chumps about?

[skyecaptain]

to me the schism IS the value

Totally, and when I'm feeling pompous enough to say things like "my general project," I'd also say that part of that general project is to live in that schism, because people go absolutely batshit in there (and, of more immediate importance to me, completely misrepresent the excellent music that's happening in what they consider to be a wasteland).

This isn't as true in other media worlds I dabble/live in -- the only people I find making salient critiques of Hollywood production, for instance, are pretty hard left, and their primary concerns are with, like, unionizing a global workforce. Talking about Along Came Polly's capitulation to the capitalist blahdyblah just isn't their primary concern (and the examples of possibility used in a book like Global Hollywood, which is pretty clearly a leftist analysis of the global Hollywood film industry) are pan-regional efforts, but no special emphasis is placed on what these pan-regional efforts produce, be it independent films or telenovelas.