Yesterday

[petronia]

Made a couscous (ground meat, onions, potato, pepper) but with quinoa instead of couscous, and blessed Nigella's chocolate-cherry cupcakes, but in little loaves. XD I gave them a couple extra minutes and a lengthy cooldown in our speedy convection oven, they were great. [EDIT -- note for future self: substituted self-raising flour, Double Fruit chunky jam] Quinoa is all right albeit fussy to wash; it's also bland to eat by itself, in a way that even couscous isn't.

(I always meant to mention this: at one point I was sat in Indigo reading a Phaedon coffee table book comprised of a Q&A with Charles Saatchi - he's a notorious recluse, so apparently at one point had loads of questions collected from media/the public/etc. and answered them all at a go, in order not to have to do it anymore. About 15% of the questions were variations on "Soooo what's it like being married to the perfect woman," and as I wended through the answers I very gradually realized that Charles Saatchi's wife was Nigella Lawson. For the record, his take is that he's abjectly grateful she deigned to take notice of him but that he has no tastebuds to appreciate with, due to a post-war English childhood.)

WHEN I HAVE TIME AND ENERGY:

* Nitsuh Abebe's rant on identity erasure in discourse re: Vampire Weekend and their fans (pt1 | pt2 | pt3), with my bonus semi-related rant on how I want Fandom and Music to be one conversation even though they're completely not, particularly when the conversation is about something like this; but the gap is unbridgeable out in (internet, even!) reality even though the synthesis operates in my head, because the 0.1% of ppl with requisite depth of redoubled interest/background/stake in the matter srsly have better shiz to do like draw Scott Pilgrim

(Not as facetiously: in that 0.1% I include U GUYZ eg. Nat, Bing, Janni... Creed, Cis, Fiona, Elfie... this is not saying you have to be interested, it's vaguely wondering why we're not - enough - to post about it; or am I merely the only one for whom the OBSESSIVE COMPARTMENTALIZATION is imploding at least w/r/t intellectual inquiry/fanwank)

* Moar thoughts on Mary Sue, following my stealth contribution(tm) to that particular conversation - borrowing technique from the Music side this time not subject matter

Comments

[starlighter.livejournal.com]

Quinoa on its own is bland, but add some extra virgin olive oil (and some really good balsamic vinegar, the kind that's almost syrup it's so thick) and it becomes A++ would eat for breakfast lunch and dinner! It's some mysterious and wonderful alchemy of quinoa. Can't help with the finicky-to-wash though, I always hated that bit of it :)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'll try this for dinner, I think - we have tons of it left over, since I didn't want to do the washing more than once. XD

[triestine.livejournal.com]

the biggest and most galling issue of “appropriation” I can see in that post is the way it wants to appropriate the imagined indignation of “impoverished black Africans” as another playing piece in this incredibly tiresome game

Excellent series of posts in that Tumblr blog; thank you!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Read my tangentially related followup (http://koganbot.livejournal.com/205383.html?thread=1466439#t1466439) if you like! It needs to be linked somewhere, and does explain this post. XD;

[troisroyaumes]

Not sure if what you want is more critical theory-oriented approach to music in general (Adorno certainly spent a lot of time talking about pop music and its consumption, albeit not in a very complimentary way) or specifically a deconstructionist approach focused on talking about privilege/oppression? Not sure why the former is not more common, given the roots of critical theory. But the latter does exist to some extent in the progressive blogosphere: discussion of music lyrics, images in music videos, cultural appropriation, etc. Though I get the sense that it's not what you're looking for.

I do agree with your general thesis that music is more difficult to critically analyze because the medium is not entirely textual. I always found reading pop music criticism to be a pointless exercise because the language seemed imprecise (to the uninitiated me, in any case), whereas "classical" music criticism has an established canon vocabulary that I'm already familiar with, which in a way retextualizes the music.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Not sure if what you want is more critical theory-oriented approach to music in general (Adorno certainly spent a lot of time talking about pop music and its consumption, albeit not in a very complimentary way) or specifically a deconstructionist approach focused on talking about privilege/oppression?

A few ppl do the former (eg. the Reynolds dude I mentioned - others have grounding in this stuff but don't deploy it, I think), and a lot of ppl will touch on the latter, but kinda badly. And by that I mean "way more badly than the general standard for media fandom meta", which I talk about like it's a high bar but really isn't. I mean. XD;

I'm perhaps not that interested in the deconstructionist approach etc. XD;;; But I'd like to see it addressed well, or not at all.

(My sense is that the "canon vocabulary" of pop music criticism exists in practice and is one of dense context-establishing referentialism - this thing that you may not have heard sounds like this and that which you may have heard and involves this other person whose other work you may be familiar with. But you still need to have heard stuff - a lot of stuff, even.)

[cis.livejournal.com]

I don't think you necessarily do need to have heard a lot of stuff - vocabulary's the right word for it, you don't need to look the word up you just approximate a meaning from the contexts you've seen it in, and refine as you go along.

i'm like a lot of people in that i grew up reading a lot of music criticism without any sense of what the music sounded like, only a web of connections that had been made about it - i still rely on that for a lot of stuff.

e.g. my sense of what 'balearic' meant had to undergo a very quick revision in the past couple of years - it was an adjective associated with dance music when i was a mere bairn in the nineties but i first read it in articles about, like, paul oakenfold or something? So then suddenly in 2006 it's a kind of whooshy pulsing cymbal sound and quite a low bpm and really nothing like what i think of when i think of 'paul oakenfold'.

(basically this is writing-fanfiction-before-you've-read-the-series! but i'd argue it's wayyyy more common in popcrit thinking)

[cis.livejournal.com]

or indeed talking theory w/o reading the primary sources!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

i'm like a lot of people in that i grew up reading a lot of music criticism without any sense of what the music sounded like, only a web of connections that had been made about it - i still rely on that for a lot of stuff.

Me as well - but idk, your Balearic example confuses me cos you did have to hear at least 1x Paul Oakenfold and 1x Lindstrom (or whomever) in order to get 1) what it meant in the 90s and 2) what it meant in '06, even if you could get 3) there was a shift/progression in the meaning/application of the word just from reading reviews? Tari's complaining about imprecision and to anyone who's not heard Oakenfold or Lindstrom 3) is not going to be a concept of great precision. XD; I KNOW THIS BECAUSE I AM DESCRIBING MY EXACT EXPERIENCE WITH "SCHAFFEL".

[cis.livejournal.com]

no no no i mean-- i'm not sure there was a shift/progression? all i know is, i made an assumption about what "balearic" meant and stuck with it until suddenly i heard a bunch of stuff that people called "balearic" and went '...?????? but it is slow and has guitars in? what?'

[troisroyaumes]

Nod, you're probably right that it only sounds imprecise to me because I don't have the right frames of reference. It also probably doesn't help that my sampling of different genres is usually too shallow for me to understand the (usually different) canon vocabulary for each.

I do think that the deconstructionist arguments are taking place out there, just out of view for the (I assume mostly white) world of pop criticism. I was watching a PBS documentary on remixing and sampling in hip hop (which I linked on Twitter a while back), and it was clear that the DJs being interviewed (largely PoC) were extremely aware of the race and class dynamics involved. (It was also equally clear that the documentary felt pretty uncomfortable explicitly exploring it.) I wouldn't be surprised if those conversations are taking place within that community. Incidentally, I thought the documentary was interesting to me for its parallels to the fan community: the same conversations about whether derivative art is still art, who owns ideas, what is transformative, etc.

[koganbot]

(1) I'm curious what you think the term "deconstructionist approach" means. I'd not use the word even when it might be the right one, as it's been applied every which way for this and that and is now utterly hopeless. But also I doubt that there can be a deconstructionist approach to anything that isn't foundationalist philosophy. I take deconstruction to be showing that something that claims to be autonomous is actually crucially dependent on something else that it considers marginal or extraneous or subordinate. Another way of putting this is that everything is contextual, nothing is self-sufficient, no center is 100% central, and so forth. My problem with this is that it's not an insight, it's a platitude, it's always true, it can be used on anything, one size fits all. Except that there's an important way in which it's not even true. E.g., there's the example I frequently return to: "As a philosopher I can say, 'Nothing exists in isolation,' and two hours later say, 'I grew up in an isolated village,' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with "isolation," so with "autonomy," "independence," "stability," "center," "presence," etc. So whether a construct is rigid rather than flexible, stable rather than unstable, is a matter for research, and theory has nothing to say on the matter (since "theory" sets the standard for stability at a pathological extreme and then tells us nothing is stable, making "unstable" useless for distinguishing anything from anything else). As for popular and semipopular music, it has never claimed that records and artists stand alone. Go two seconds into any conversation and people are pitting this song against that, this genre against some other, with a never-ending debate about what's pertinent and what's extraneous. The reason rock criticism used to be focused so much on album reviews wasn't because critics thought albums were stand-alone autonomous objects but because albums were the chief economic unit of consumption. (None of what I've said means that we shouldn't point out when something crucial has been shunted off to the margins or is left out of the conversation altogether. But, e.g., if I say "We need to pay more attention to 'adult contemporary' music and to ballads," I'd just be posturing if I were to add, "And I'm deconstructing the discourse by doing so.")

(2) "My sense is that the 'canon vocabulary' of pop music criticism exists in practice and is one of dense context-establishing referentialism - this thing that you may not have heard sounds like this and that which you may have heard and involves this other person whose other work you may be familiar with." This is especially true in music criticism because music is difficult to describe and impossible to convey, and critics are generally asked to review new releases or at least new repackagings of old material. I don't think "canon" is the word we're looking for, however, since so many references are derogatory - can there be a canon of stuff we hate? - or at least merely descriptive. And the fact that you need to have heard a lot of stuff is a good indication that there isn't really a functioning canon. I mean, if a critic says, "this is a pisstake on Khaled braggadocio," he's probably relying on "pisstake" and "braggadocio" to do the work, with "Khaled" there as a bonus, a way to focus the description for those who get the reference (and you hope they realize which Khaled you mean). The critic who just relies on the reference to get across isn't a very good critic. "Sounds like the Stones" could mean a whole lot of different things unless we include in what way something sounds like the Stones.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

1) I'd have to bounce this one up to Tari as you're right, I was parroting her term without really assigning it a meaning. XD; Or rather, I assume with a fair bit of confidence we both mean "making explicit and discussing the dynamics of privilege/oppression as expressed via and around art (music)", but I don't know why that's "deconstructionist". In the case of Vampire Weekend, I mean, it's just there.

2) There is definitely a canon of stuff we hate. (But it may not be have the longevity of the canon of stuff we love; reading reviews from years past, the referential plaudits tend to make more sense than the referential disses. After some time it turns into either stuff we love or stuff we forget, I suspect.) But I didn't mean canon in the way we talk about "pop canon", i.e. the actual music/acts, but "canon vocabulary" of criticism/review - set of words and verbal constructions - analogous to that used in classical music (what Tari was talking about). So in your example, the canon I mean isn't "Khaled" but the "this is a ____ on [ref. artist] ____" phrase.

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

Moar thoughts on Mary Sue - borrowing technique from the Music side this time not subject matter

INTRIGUING. Ahaha now I'm trying to imagine what this would entail.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Just stealing methods of analysis from ppl who're smarter than me! Usual stuff. XD

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

What I usually find disconcerting in rl is that music is such a universally liked topic that the thought of talking critically & extensively about something unpleasant immediately turns people off. I'm talking about just saying the phrase, "Adam Young sounds exactly like Ben Gibbard" can (an does) incite knee-jerk reactions of "Wow, what a groupie," never mind if I actually have a positive/negative music opinion on either Adam Young or Ben Gibbard. Bringing up the Vampire Weekend controversy with a preface of "I don't care if you like the music or not" would totally be met with blank faces and replies of, "If I don't like the music, why care? And if I do, good music is good music." I've since stopped trying to treat music as a viable conversation topic beyond its superficial means (of weeding out pretentious good taste & pedestrian bad taste, naturally /:)).