Pop isn't the same as popular (or: Bring on some Lester Bangs-type shit).

Pop isn’t the same as popular (or: Bring on some Lester Bangs-type shit).

That’s a nice cuddly quote — and a part of me agrees with Mr. Wyatt — but I’ve been reading Bakhtin, Laclau and Mouffe and Habermas all day and need to snark. It’s possible that I have something meaningful to say about this, but it’s also quite likely that this is just the first thing that landed in my crosshairs. Bear this in mind if you choose to read on. I’m also kind of hungry (which means “LUKE SMASH!”).
Anyway, the point is FUCK THIS. We don’t need to dig up Zombie Adorno (“must… crush… jazz!”), but the distinction between high and low art (or music, etc.) was a useful one insomuch as it was an antagonistic, political distinction. Wyatt’s generation — and the scholarly projects which underpinned it and arose from it — wasn’t supposed to be about erasing that distinction, but rather inverting it. Whereas Teddy saw only the ruinous machinic logic of capital in low culture, the whole post-Frankfurt School era, which reached its peak in the 1980s before Deleuze-mania took over, was about locating resistance in popular, everyday practices (de Certeau, Bakhtin, Fiske, Hebdige, fuck, most of identity politics, etc.). In a strange twist of colonialism, we still seem willing to look at foreign and indigenous culture(s) this way (remember when we thought MIA was edgy?), but we’ve largely lost sight of the plan at home. I think this is readily apparent in contemporary discussions of Western popular music; it’s why we’ve moved from an ethic of punk rock through grunge and indie (or similarly, the commercialization of hip-hop and rap) into a period where it’s not at all incongruous for Pitchfork to have simultaneous boners for Fucked Up, John Maus, Beyonce, Skrillex and Kanjay-Z-West. We’ve seemingly jettisoned the very distinction (a correlate of antagonism, which requires a “we” and a “they,” a high and a low) which gave popular music its political heft.

This is all a process. Popular music has been thoroughly reterritorialized, and we’ve just kept repeating the same mantras about the importance of the popular without ever stopping to see whether popular culture even looks like the thing so many cultural theorists thought we had to reclaim. The concept of the folk, of the “popular” that Wyatt seems to be referring to was privileged because it was counter-hegemonic; it was the “modern post-industrial folk music” (emphasis on the past tense). Not anymore, it ain’t, that is unless there’s something deeply subversive about aspirational capitalism or seeing the middle finger on television.

I guess that’s why I find Wyatt’s quote so offensive in the contemporary context of my tumblr dashboard. It just doesn’t apply anymore. I’m not all that swayed by reducing the counter-hegemonic potential of the popular into pure affect — that is to say that if the revolution should include dancing, then shouldn’t dancing also include revolution? — so if we’re going to continue defending the virtue of the popular in music, then we should make some effort to redefine what popular music is.

If we don’t, we’re just left watching someone else sit on the throne.

Well, I’m also very hungry right now and I’m also not in school or immersing myself in scholarly texts at the moment - I spend most of my days in shops trying to sell people things — so I’m not exactly at my thinkiest, but I’ll offer a very short and sketchy response based on my understanding of what a typical Poptimist critic might say. It’s not a position I would personally profess, and I have some lingering issues with the way its influenced critical discourse, but generally I have a lot of sympathy for it. No doubt someone more involved in the relevant debates could offer a WAY better answer.

But here goes: I think the Poptimist gesture in criticism is essentially post-political, or at least it shifts the grounds of talking about politics in pop criticism substantially. Some time in the 90’s or early 2000s (when exactly would vary depending on who you talk to) I think it became pretty clear that subcultural resistance was no longer really possible: any counter-culture was bound to be co-opted and packaged immediately. Mark Fisher argues that grunge was the first example of this, or a kind of test case, and the awareness of the dead-end is what killed Kurt Cobain. And around the same time, gangster rap fully embraced the ethos of neoliberalism and basically became its official soundtrack. So pop as resistance falls on pretty hard times, though plenty of critics still want to find it in places.

And then in the 2000s you have the emergence of the modern hipster and the concurrent mainstreaming of indie. As others have discussed interminably elsewhere, the hipster is the first counter-cultural form in which the counter aspect isn’t really operative. While hipsters may skew liberal (and certainly the designation embraces a wide variety of political views, from radical queer to crypto-conservative), I think that’s more a factor of fashion and class/educational bias than a symbol of an actual shared ethos of opposition. Hipsters are the avant-garde of consumerism: the us/them antagonism that persists is one of taste, not one of political commitment. Hip culture can’t sell out today because it has no ethos to betray in the first place: it’s just a niche market. In fact, hip culture is self-commodifying: the typical hip activity is to produce hip music, art, goods, or even food to then sell to other hipsters, or just to cultivate your own personal brand by which to accumulate cultural capital if not actual money. If the hipster is over, as n+1 wants to claim (still too glibly, I think), it’s because this form of entrepreneurial self-commodification and manic drive for distinction-through-consumption is becoming generalized: artisanal everything!

Hence the populism of Poptimism. Instead of the mainstream/mass culture being the enemy, the rockist bogeyman becomes the enemy. Once the idea of one kind of music being more politically legitimate than any other loses currency, punk or rockist or avant-gardist elitism just becomes a way of keeping people out of the discussion, often based on criteria that actually turn out to be kind of racist or sexist or homophobic (i.e. hating disco). So Poptimism is all about dissolving the us/them binary. For this kind of critic, different kinds of music simply offer different kinds of pleasure, and we should seek to understand what any given audience gets out of a kind of music and what it does for/to them rather than just privileging one kind of enjoyment as the “correct” one. Likewise, all music can be treated as more or less equally suspect, ideologically — each in its own way. But nobody gets to claim to be more resistant than anybody else, because there’s simply nothing oppositional about pop music anymore. So why shut anybody out?

Also, if no style of music is inherently more resistant than any other, then any music can potentially be used for whatever. And so we have a pro-Occupy Miley Cyrus video.

(Source: beautravail)