Guess I’m Dumb
I keep returning to pop. Pop music. Returning to loving pop music. It’s been declared dead myriad times, I know. But.
Diedrich Diederichsen, in Berlin a couple of months ago, gave a lecture that presented the Hegelian case on the matter. It was entitled: ‘Art – the uncomical end of pop’. I hope I’m not distorting his argument by describing it as this: due to the technological and economical changes connected to the boom years of neoliberalism/neoconservatism, incl. the demise of the music industry due to Internet downloading (and possibly due to a kind of Hegelian, teleological exhaustion), pop has come to an end in the sense that has ceased to serve as a reservoir of counter-cultural concepts, aesthetic innovation, and as a defining means of social connecting – whether for teenagers or bohemians or both. Instead – according to Diederichsen – pop has either turned into retro conservatism, a kind of Biedermeier (as he called it) of pop pastiche (say, an Oregon band of 25 year olds trying to sound exactly like the Gang of Four crossed with Joy Division); or, simply, into avant-garde, or Art capital letter, in that it ceases to speak to a broader audience and instead concentrates on aesthetical innovation.
So far so good. Jens Balzer of Berliner Zeitung argued: but what about Animal Collective? What about Antony & the Johnsons? For me that was beside the point. What I felt was the problem was not so much finding counter examples of current ‘good’, ‘cutting-edge’ pop, but to question the structure of the argument itself in regard to its Hegelian historical perspective (does pop still exist? And are we the ones to decide?). Which for me was to imagine myself delivering the message to my 14-year-old niece who is into Beyoncé and Lily Allen, and PlayStation SingStar: hey, did you know, as I just learned from an expert, pop is over.
After the talk people kept making remarks about my niece, with a kind of weird mixture of approval and contempt; approval because I had questioned the argument by bringing up the concrete experience of someone who is actually sort of at the receiving end of it; and of contempt because if you admit to having a niece, you’re suddenly an ‘uncle’, which is always a tricky position in pop ( – actually, thinking about it: fuck all you phony non-uncles). Anyway, Beyoncé and Lily Allen (and Antony, for that matter) are indeed kinds of pop-stars that virtually didn’t exist ten years ago. Talking about female and queer role models in the mainstream, talking about that being combined with a high level of musical acuteness and ‘executive’ control (all these are not just ‘products’ of a production team behind them); and then to call that the end of pop reminded me of white, male post-structuralists moaning ‘didn’t you know the author is dead?’ when in the 1980s for example black feminists promoted and claimed authorship in the name of identity politics.
That said, I do agree with Diederichsen’s point made in his article in the April issue of frieze (Polyphilo’s Dream) that something fundamental is changing about the culture industry that pop is a part of. But to come to my actual point: the question is whether we need to understand pop as a medium for avant-garde innovation to start with. Of course it’s fantastic when the avant-garde suddenly turns up in mainstream culture (Barbra Streisand in a Cage mood); but it’s not a compulsion. Maybe there is an innovational (and emancipatory) aspect to pop – vulgo ‘mainstream’ – that is specific to it, rather than just derivative of avant-garde, or vice versa, feeding towards avant-garde (that seldom beast of ‘cutting-edge’ pop which makes people wet themselves with praise for Animal Collective etc.). Therefore to me the problem with Sonic Youth for example – to refer to K-Punk’s blog, by way of Dan Fox’s discussion of Sonic Youth apropos Simon Reynolds – is not, as K-punk argues, that Sonic Youth are not really avant-garde anymore (therefore what he calls avant-conservatism), while actually having become part of the mainstream – but that they haven’t dared to be mainstream enough, or rather: pop, enough.
It’s easy to sit on, or bang on about, your laurels of underground credentials – from Mike Kelley to Burroughs etc – indeed, and be marketed precisely with that in the ‘established’ culture (the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle exhibition failed to change that impression). But it’s really really hard to translate your stuff into something that changes pop from ‘within’. This is why Daydream Nation remains the most important (and not the most overvalued) Sonic Youth record: because here for at least two or three songs (especially ‘Candle’ and ‘Silver Rocket’), there was a weird vision of a new kind of pop developed out of a very ordinary rock set up, changing what could be considered bouncy, energetic and catchy not by adjusting to reigning standards but by working through, for years, ‘experiment’ to a point where suddenly it ‘falls into place’, i.e. acquires an appealing, even sex-appealing form.
It’s always harder to make the case for pop than to insist on its corruptedness, and drop of a few names of credibility as counter example (Pop Group…; ha, now take Fire Engines as my riposte!!); especially if you say what you actually like. Inevitably there’ll be the hipster who’ll groan.
Guess I’m dumb but I don’t care.
For example I have to laugh when I read all the stuff about whether Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)’ is conservative because it suggests single women should get married, while few dare to say that it might have either a more allegorical, or a more blunt meaning (not all rings are wedding rings; check out the discussion here, and don’t miss the hip-hop Bob Fosse routine below:
In any case, to wrap this slightly sprawling thing up, my favourite song since weeks is Röyksopp’s’ Happy Up Here’, and it’s my silly guess at a slowburner that will continue to stay with us throughout the summer. Ironically, Röyksopp have released a brass version online that is very similar to Swedish artist Annika Eriksson’s Stockholm-postman-orchestra-playing-Portishead piece from 1996 (which is where I guess I shoot myself, i.e. my argument in the foot, because then they are just derivative of avant-garde; which they are not, just because they are good at recontextualising things in the cheesy world of provincial discos and YouTube – but to argue that would go all the way into musicology and Röyksoppian harmonics…):
And the original:
I keep returning to pop. Pop music. Returning to loving pop music. It’s been declared dead myriad times, I know. But.
Diedrich Diederichsen, in Berlin a couple of months ago, gave a lecture that presented the Hegelian case on the matter. It was entitled: ‘Art – the uncomical end of pop’. I hope I’m not distorting his argument by describing it as this: due to the technological and economical changes connected to the boom years of neoliberalism/neoconservatism, incl. the demise of the music industry due to Internet downloading (and possibly due to a kind of Hegelian, teleological exhaustion), pop has come to an end in the sense that has ceased to serve as a reservoir of counter-cultural concepts, aesthetic innovation, and as a defining means of social connecting – whether for teenagers or bohemians or both. Instead – according to Diederichsen – pop has either turned into retro conservatism, a kind of Biedermeier (as he called it) of pop pastiche (say, an Oregon band of 25 year olds trying to sound exactly like the Gang of Four crossed with Joy Division); or, simply, into avant-garde, or Art capital letter, in that it ceases to speak to a broader audience and instead concentrates on aesthetical innovation.
So far so good. Jens Balzer of Berliner Zeitung argued: but what about Animal Collective? What about Antony & the Johnsons? For me that was beside the point. What I felt was the problem was not so much finding counter examples of current ‘good’, ‘cutting-edge’ pop, but to question the structure of the argument itself in regard to its Hegelian historical perspective (does pop still exist? And are we the ones to decide?). Which for me was to imagine myself delivering the message to my 14-year-old niece who is into Beyoncé and Lily Allen, and PlayStation SingStar: hey, did you know, as I just learned from an expert, pop is over.
After the talk people kept making remarks about my niece, with a kind of weird mixture of approval and contempt; approval because I had questioned the argument by bringing up the concrete experience of someone who is actually sort of at the receiving end of it; and of contempt because if you admit to having a niece, you’re suddenly an ‘uncle’, which is always a tricky position in pop ( – actually, thinking about it: fuck all you phony non-uncles). Anyway, Beyoncé and Lily Allen (and Antony, for that matter) are indeed kinds of pop-stars that virtually didn’t exist ten years ago. Talking about female and queer role models in the mainstream, talking about that being combined with a high level of musical acuteness and ‘executive’ control (all these are not just ‘products’ of a production team behind them); and then to call that the end of pop reminded me of white, male post-structuralists moaning ‘didn’t you know the author is dead?’ when in the 1980s for example black feminists promoted and claimed authorship in the name of identity politics.
That said, I do agree with Diederichsen’s point made in his article in the April issue of frieze (Polyphilo’s Dream) that something fundamental is changing about the culture industry that pop is a part of. But to come to my actual point: the question is whether we need to understand pop as a medium for avant-garde innovation to start with. Of course it’s fantastic when the avant-garde suddenly turns up in mainstream culture (Barbra Streisand in a Cage mood); but it’s not a compulsion. Maybe there is an innovational (and emancipatory) aspect to pop – vulgo ‘mainstream’ – that is specific to it, rather than just derivative of avant-garde, or vice versa, feeding towards avant-garde (that seldom beast of ‘cutting-edge’ pop which makes people wet themselves with praise for Animal Collective etc.). Therefore to me the problem with Sonic Youth for example – to refer to K-Punk’s blog, by way of Dan Fox’s discussion of Sonic Youth apropos Simon Reynolds – is not, as K-punk argues, that Sonic Youth are not really avant-garde anymore (therefore what he calls avant-conservatism), while actually having become part of the mainstream – but that they haven’t dared to be mainstream enough, or rather: pop, enough.
It’s easy to sit on, or bang on about, your laurels of underground credentials – from Mike Kelley to Burroughs etc – indeed, and be marketed precisely with that in the ‘established’ culture (the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle exhibition failed to change that impression). But it’s really really hard to translate your stuff into something that changes pop from ‘within’. This is why Daydream Nation remains the most important (and not the most overvalued) Sonic Youth record: because here for at least two or three songs (especially ‘Candle’ and ‘Silver Rocket’), there was a weird vision of a new kind of pop developed out of a very ordinary rock set up, changing what could be considered bouncy, energetic and catchy not by adjusting to reigning standards but by working through, for years, ‘experiment’ to a point where suddenly it ‘falls into place’, i.e. acquires an appealing, even sex-appealing form.
It’s always harder to make the case for pop than to insist on its corruptedness, and drop of a few names of credibility as counter example (Pop Group…; ha, now take Fire Engines as my riposte!!); especially if you say what you actually like. Inevitably there’ll be the hipster who’ll groan.
Guess I’m dumb but I don’t care.
For example I have to laugh when I read all the stuff about whether Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)’ is conservative because it suggests single women should get married, while few dare to say that it might have either a more allegorical, or a more blunt meaning (not all rings are wedding rings; check out the discussion here, and don’t miss the hip-hop Bob Fosse routine below:
In any case, to wrap this slightly sprawling thing up, my favourite song since weeks is Röyksopp’s’ Happy Up Here’, and it’s my silly guess at a slowburner that will continue to stay with us throughout the summer. Ironically, Röyksopp have released a brass version online that is very similar to Swedish artist Annika Eriksson’s Stockholm-postman-orchestra-playing-Portishead piece from 1996 (which is where I guess I shoot myself, i.e. my argument in the foot, because then they are just derivative of avant-garde; which they are not, just because they are good at recontextualising things in the cheesy world of provincial discos and YouTube – but to argue that would go all the way into musicology and Röyksoppian harmonics…):
And the original:
