1. 12:31 20th Feb 2012

    Notes: 21

    The comments under a newspaper article about music, a blog post, a video, whatever— they could turn up the most amazing rockists! Paleo-rockists, caricatures of rockists, grotesques of rockists, a thousand times worse than what any music nerd was imagining when they used the word as an insult. The one fact about music these types had firmly lodged in their minds was that the person who sang Britney Spears songs was not the same person who wrote them, and that this was one of the top 10 worst things that had ever happened on the North American continent. Pop was a glitzy con; rap wasn’t even music; nobody played “real” instruments; everything had been all downhill since Zeppelin, or the Sex Pistols, or Nirvana. You heard this from people of all ages. Most of them seemed to have gone through life seeing themselves as alone, special, and superior— the select few who could spot real talent while everyone else was fooled by mediocrity and fraud. Once Americans really took to typing opinions online, though, there were days when this began to look more like a silent, depressing plurality. As if rockism— a term defined from the get-go as a sort of embarrassing disorder— didn’t look terrible enough already! Now it had bogeymen, too.

    …

    Rockism’s grand problems had become official. At its best, it made you a little hard to talk to. At its worst, it made you deaf, weirdly oblivious to what was happening in most of the music around you.

    — 

    From Nitsuh’s typically excellent column today on rockism, which is worth reading in full; the below is a tangent.

    The thing is, I’d argue that it is a silent, depressing plurality. Yes, most of these arguments fall apart under scrutiny (don’t write your own material? Why, you must be an opera singer! Or a jazz musician! Or a folk artist! Or someone performing centuries ago! Or an actor! The pop industry is a corrupt machine? Congratulations, you’ve discovered the concept of corruption in large companies/organizations. Et cetera.) That doesn’t make them less widely held. Someone (Ian?) talked earlier about how little these ideas filter out to the general public; unless you’re talking to a music writer or someone who follows their conversations (i.e. probably a music writer), the closest you’ll get is something like “yeah, I’ll admit it: I listen to trashy/junky/crappy music, but only as a guilty pleasure.” It’s about taste, which means it’s really about class. It’s about distancing yourself from the sort of people who like pop, or hip-hop, or R&B, or country, or whatever genre you perceive contains people you don’t want to be like. That’s where you get the sexually/racially iffy stuff; a lot of rockist arguments are adopted secondhand to justify it. Yes, this is really obvious stuff, but only to a minority of people. To everyone else, it’s not only not obvious, it’s ludicrous. (Nitsuh does get at this toward the end of his piece; seriously, go read it.)

    And yes, I have a personal stake in this. As someone who writes about pop music, even sometimes critically, it is very difficult to explain to people — even friends! even family! — what I do, what I write about and what I enjoy hearing, and that it doesn’t actually make me a worse person. It’s doubly silly because my tastes are essentially public record, yet there’s still the urge to quietly excise one-third to one-half of my listening, or perform some “oh, I write about this, but it’s not really what I listen to” sleight of hand, or stay off last.fm (which, incidentally, keeps stats on what songs people remove from their public log; they’re exactly what you’d expect), or mumble out the last part of EMP Pop Conference. Sure, this isn’t exactly a horrific problem; sure, you’re judged daily on hundreds of things, of which musical taste is just one. Nevertheless, this seems particularly rampant.

     
    1. imathers said: Yep, that was me! Excellent points here, by you and Nitsuh both.
    2. parklakespeakers said: Since Spotify/Facebook has started transmitting listening ever more widely, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by lack of rockism that I’ve encountered as a result. Maybe people are just doing their judging of me for listening to Cher Lloyd silently.
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