Exist Yesterday.

barthel:

excitablehonky:

George Will, after they showed that other Nike ad:

He’s not just a celebrity of the sort Daniel Boorstin talked about: a celebrity being well known for their well-knownness. That’s Paris Hilton. We tend to forget Tiger Woods is a really good golfer, and people are going to pay to see him do that and people are going to forgive him and they’re going to quit looking at him as an example.

Right, of course!  Instead of just publicly having relationships with other people of interest, Tiger…can bounce a ball on a club for 30 seconds!  (No one else can do that!)  And hits a small ball into a hole, for money!  You know, something worthwhile.  It’s the man argument of “No, sports aren’t like all those girl things.  They’re real.”  No they’re not!  All that matters, George, is their story.  Celebrities are rewarded for having a story we find interesting, and as long as they continue to have an interesting story, they will continue to receive coverage.  But being interesting continuously is hard!  People like atheletes and movie stars have a leg up in that their celebrity is situated within this context that generates a continuous narrative, with rules and standards of success.  Tiger Woods didn’t have to have any public relationships to be interesting because he had gotten to a point where winning or not winning a golf tournament was, in and of itself, interesting.  The only difference between him and Paris Hilton is that Paris didn’t have that.  She had to make up her own story as she went along.  “Because she wasn’t talented!” the George Wills cry.  Sure, right, whatever.  But there are all sorts of very, very talented people in this world that do not have multimillion-dollar endorsement deals.  Clearly, the point of interest for (some of) those sponsors and the tabloids is something beyond that, and that’s their stories.  As long as Tiger Woods continues to play golf well, he will certainly be of interest to the sort of sad shadows of humanity that “follow golf.”  But for the rest of us, there’s a very different standard, and it’s exactly the same one we apply to Paris Hilton.

Sure, let’s use the opposition’s rhetoric against them to drive the point home and all that, but “sad shadows of humanity”? I don’t care for or about golf myself, but it’s one of the most-played leisure activities in the world. People caring about the best practitioner of a challenging but accessible game is just as valid as people caring about someone who has shrewdly managed to play celebrity culture to her advantage.

Which is to say, in my view, kind of sad and dismal (the caring, not the people). Which I guess Mike would say makes me another patriarchal elitist dismissing the tastes of women and gay dudes — but I’m pretty sure it just makes me emotionally stunted. I can only care about people I know, and that’s hard enough.

tomewing:

I find this list - especially the top 40 or so - really fascinating, and not simply because I like about 2/3 of the records in it and adore a good half-dozen.

It’s interesting to me because of the idea - repeated so often I’ve come to lazily accept it without really thinking - that this decade has been particularly fragmented in terms of pop, the music people listen to, and so on.

The reasons why this might be so - changes in access to and distribution of music leading to greater personalisation of music consumption - make a convincing argument. But it’s interesting to me that the decade as measured by Billboard doesn’t seem particularly fragmentary at ALL. It’s been absolutely dominated by R&B and hip-hop.

There are lots of good reasons why this doesn’t contradict the “fragmentation” story - it might well be that fewer people listen to the radio now, or that the industry have circled their wagons around this particular style, or that Billboard’s calculations have built in pro-R&B factors. It might also be that things have always been fragmented and we have the tools to understand that and exploit it better now, so the ways of measuring the mainstream are accurate but irrelevant. From a critical perspective, it might be that because most critics don’t like or have an ear for much of this stuff, they invest more in narratives which downplay its importance. There’s got to be whole iceberg-size racial dimensions which I don’t really ‘get’ as a white Brit guy too. All or none of these things might be so. I just think it’s an interesting list.

Racial to a degree, but only in the way that class issues in the U.S. are always racial. Terrestrial radio, especially now with the rise of (relatively expensive) alternatives, belongs to the working class, and especially to the young — both groups that are disproportionately black/Latino/urban/etc. It’s also worth noting that many of the rare examples of “rock” or “white music” on the top 40 are (at least in the U.S.) coded as poor-white-folks’ music: Nickelback (meathead), OneRepublic (wigger*), Lifehouse (Christian).

And most music writers/critics, even if they belong to the working class in strict economic terms, are by educational and social standards middle-class or higher. There’s small surprise there would be a disconnect. Clearly, the middle class+ has been greatly fragmented as a pop audience — although I would guess that a lot of that fragmentation can be broken down along age, gender, region, subculture, etc. lines — and we have no metric with which to measure the amount of music people listen to without paying for, so the standard narrative has life in it yet.

Also, I think we’ve reached the point at which “dominated by R&B and hip-hop” is kind of over-obvious. What kind of r&b, what kind of hip-hop? It’s like saying 1977 was the high-water mark of rock — Pink Floyd fans and Sex Pistols fans would mean very different things by that. There are a lot of people who would call themselves dedicated hip-hop fans who loathe everything on that chart; we need dedicated terms for this kind of stuff rather than lumping it all together. (This too probably has a lot to do with race/class boundaries. The well-off white nerds who come up with subgenre names have sliced electronic music — and urban British music — into a thousand little pieces, but all hip-hop is just “hip-hop,” with at best a mainstream vs. backpacker narrative.)

One of the most deeply fascinating things about the modern pop landscape is how impoverished our critical language is in dealing with it.

*A morally indefensible term that still gets across an important social point with such concision that it’s hard not to use.

I talked my history professor into letting me write a brief paper on pop music to finish the semester. For those who have even the slightest knowledge of the subject, it’s a lot of really obvious territory gone over in really obvious fashion, but it’s kind of nice to have it all in one place. (And it really only applies to the American scene, because obviously no one else in the world matters or ever has.) Click to read, don’t to not. Youtube links to songs discussed added for the web edition.

(Mostly) written last night to No Pussyfooting on repeat. Faintly avant-garde instrumental albums of the 1970s are my favorite easily-ignorable noise to write by. Care to recommend any?

(via SFJ)

Read the link. Great piece, with even better implications for the potential still extant in Old Music (which is to say pre-1950) to inspire solid research and shrewd unpacking of the many pop-culture narratives at play in our history. There’s a lot that old 78s still have to tell us — maybe even especially the ones that actually sold copies at the time.

The definitive history of American pop before and during the rise of jazz has yet to be written; if I had more leisure for real bare-knuckle research (as opposed to half-assed Google searches) I might be tempted to give it a shot. What’s fascinating about it to me is how much it echoes our current moment — an entertainer had to be multiplatform in order to be a real star, adept at live theater and comedy and studio recordings and dancing and working the publicity machine with new and inventive angles. Technology broke that system down, giving singers the space to be separate from dancers and comedians — but technology has also broken down that system, and now Taylor Swift does better than working actresses on SNL and Eminem participates in conceptual improv and Lady Gaga takes gossip magazines as her performance space and Shakira is the most inventive modernist choreographer at work today.

Vaudeville is now, only YouTube is the stage and no one ever gets the hook.