IT'S POPPIN'

HELL YEAH LIL' MAMA HALF A POINT AWAY FROM NICK "NO PUSSY" CAVE!

I really like my blurb this time, too! Maybe I'll actually go into M*A*C today...

Lil' Mama, people.

I'd just like to quickly point out...

...That these are actually the lyrics to "Gypsy Woman" by Hilary Duff.

Was it a face that invaded your mind
A kind that wasn’t hard to find
She lets you think that you found her first
That’s how she works
Her sick and twisted gypsy curse
She can swallow knives
She can swallow lives
Golden black stare
But the night of your demise..

Try to runaway with the gypsy woman
Here today then gone for good
Can’t get away with a gypsy woman
Thought no one would know
Your secrets down below
But you can’t go
Can’t go with her
Can’t go
Can’t go with her
The gypsy woman

This is a favorite game to play
She’s got you stumbling
Talks with a grin
Cause she’s got no shame
Enjoy the fame
Bringing down the family name

Try to runaway with the gypsy woman
Good today then gone for good
Can’t get away with a gypsy woman
Thought no one would know
Your secrets down below
But you can’t go
Can’t go with her
Can’t go
Can’t go with her
The gypsy woman

She can rob you blind with just one look
From those eyes
Out of all the thieves that trained her
None of them could save her

Try to runaway with the gypsy woman
Here today then gone for good
Can’t get away with a gypsy woman
Thought no one would know
Your secrets down below
But you can’t go
Can’t go with her
Can’t go
Can’t go with her
The gypsy woman

ANA TO THREAD. (Ana, that means you have to comment on my blog.)

The World's on Top of Me, Ma!

1. Nah, everything's coming up roses and daffodils, really. Just found out I'll be in Philly for a while longer. But I still don't have a heckuva lot going on headwise in recent...er, days. But one does need to keep up appearances.

2. New column's on HAIR (like on yr head), cribbing/citing a couple of recent convos about Britney, but avoiding that particular example for the most part because I don't really want to get too deep into pointless speculation. More interested in Ashlee's hair as representative of her public woes/why she's stuck/what it all means, maaaaaan (the Hairadox), and baldness as pop-move (distinguishing from punk-move and getting into how P!nk sets us up so that any hair configuration = punk move within pop, like she's me vs. us vs. them where Ashlee, f'rinstance, is basically me vs. me (vs. "him"), and how we're identifying with Ashlee differently than with P!nk, even though for one the hair is obvious and outrageous and the other it's a matter of shade. Also might bring in Vertigo and the significance of the hair above all other modifiable physical traits (and how Ashlee's hair has even more potency in terms of reception than her NOSE, which she went so far as to lob off). And so on. Now if I could just FINISH IT.

3. Marit Larsen is so wonderful. Decent interview at Stylus...the brains are very much on display, but the beauty remains somewhat elusive. I'd love to sit down and talk to her for like four hours.

3. Maybe I'll use my newfound institutional resources to finally tackle THEE boundary-pushing and imminently critically praised to the heavens but otherwise doomed/blessed straight-to-Netflix collab (and I mean it!) doc Skye and I. She seems to be in a transitional period, gotta strike while the iron's cold so it can warm up CELLULOID-STYLE (read: video). Yo, Skye -- how's about some slick HIGH DEF (maybe) fully-f'nanced propaganda FREE OF CHARGE? And they'll call it art, too (cuz it is)! I'm very very very very serious about this, two or so years in the thinking stages. Boardies please relay to Ms. Sly, since her press people are prolly fired or otherwise dead to me at this point.

4. Oh man, Am Idol is a real drag. Enjoying watching it (my first full season). Notes:

♥ Bald Phil must wear hat at all times, stop singing.

♥ Lakisha's not as good as I thought she was, tho she does a good Shirley Bassey and would rock in a Basement Jaxx track or something.

♥ Melinda is great but she should stop pretending that she's not an android superwoman because I love androids and besides it's not like anyone doesn't see through her robo-trickery (oh, little ol' me???) besides the judges (shitty androids).

♥ This is a great blog, h/t FT, and relevant 'cuz of the Am Idol post, which I'm stealing from. ...Hey, I was in a master class once! It was terrifying! Best/worst backhanded compliment I've ever received while walking out the door, feeling ULTRA TERRIBLE for blanking and having that forgot-all-my-lines nightmare in real life, which is funny because I've never even had the dream: "Oh, what a wonderful piece! I used to love playing it when I was thirteen!" Granted I was like sixteen (which is how old Chopin was when he wrote the damn thing) plus I had to follow a(n adorable) ten-year-old prodigy and a (less adorable) BLIND KID prodigy, TOUGH ROOM.

♥ Am I the only one who thinks Jordin is not in control of her voice at all and not a great singer? The No Doubt thing she did last night was hella boring. Emily thinks her dad is blackmailing the judges.

♥ All the guys can go die. The rest of the girls can go. Gina isn't even as good as that one rocker girl on the Pussycat Dolls (which is actually more interesting in the last twenty minutes or so each week than Idol!). Also, Ron Fair needs to replace Randy Jackson and Lil' Kim needs to replace Paula. And maybe Metal Mike could come in and replace Simon.

♥ Oh my god. Gwen. DID YOU SEE HER? SHE WAS SO BEAUTIFUL.

The Skye Friday of My Nightmares

Where do we go now, where do we go?

1. Rumors are circulating that Skye Sweetnam has been dropped from her label after the Capitol/Virgin merger. The silver lining is that these rumors aren't confirmed by Skye herself, whereas several of the artists who were rumored to have been dropped have already announced that they've been dropped. More silver lining: Capitol has spent a ton of money already on producing this thing (which now, if I understand correctly, understands in two versions: a James R/Skye demo version and the glossed-up mega-star producer version) including bringing in Dr. Luke and Max for the first single. (Then again, Dr. L/Max didn't do a whole lot for Megan McCauley.)

Anyway, no need to be pessimistic just yet, even though I can't imagine this situation working out very well for now. Skye, if you're ever out of work and find yourself struggling with Type 1 diabetes, I might have a proposition for you...

2. Since I am sick and not going anywhere (cough cough) I declare this to be CATCH UP WEEKEND. I will listen to music. And possibly review it in blurby fashion.

Dig (roughly in order of digness):

Lil' Mama - Lip Gloss, Linda Sundblad - Lose You, The DBz - Stewy, MIA - Bird Flu, Sophie Ellis Baxter - Catch You, Ciara - Like a Boy, Grinderman - No Pussy Blues, Ashley Tisdale - Not Like That, R. Kelly - Flirt, Natasha - So Sick, Hilary Duff - With Love, Trick Daddy - Tuck Ya Ice, Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend. Heatseeker: Ciara. On the fence: Tashbed - BABIES. Not sure if I should count due to strong '06 associations: Taylor Swift - Teardrops on My Guitar, MCR - I AM NOT AFRAID TO KEEP ON LIVIN': THE SONG (both in the mid-range of this list and probably not top tenners).

3. Since I don't link to either of these places nearly enough, great essays by Ross on soul and Eppy on "recombinant pop" -- which I think I have some issues with.

Basically, I like the ideas that are being explored here without really understanding how the ideas constitute a new generic catch-all. I've also been reading a buncha Eco lately, and his insights into intertextuality, occasionally relating it directly to recent digital/internet technologies, make me suspicious of any theory that claims the internet or digital technology has somehow fundamentally altered how we produce or listen to music historically or "recombinantly." I think a descriptor like "recombinant pop" functions a bit like "postmodernism," in that there's enough ambiguity in it to become retroactive, so that it refuses to be associated with a historical moment and undercuts to a large extent the importance of the tools with which or historical/social/etc. context in which it's created. Or to just quote Eco directly, from his post-script to The Name of the Rose from 1984:

Unfortunately, "postmodern" is a term bon a tout faire. I have the impression that it is applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like. Further, there seems to be an attempt to make it increasingly retroactive: first it was apparently applied to certain writers or artists active in the last twenty years, then gradually it reached the beginning of the century, then still further back. And this reverse procedure continues; soon the postmodern category will include Homer.

Actually, I believe that postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category -- or, better still, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its own mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as a metahistorical category).

He goes on in future essays to discuss the significance of hypertext as a tool, but also relates the tool to concepts that are as old as literature. The fact that people couldn't create music as they do now doesn't necessarily mean that the interaction of referents or influences was somehow essentially different -- and Eppy touches on this discussing James Brown's music. The difference, he says, is that "where before these referential touches were largely filigrees, now they're the crossbeams." I'm not convinced this is true; in fact, I might even argue the opposite. When I hear Girl Talk or Kanye or even Destroyer, I don't (always) hear the "crossbeams" of referents, but what basically amounts to a self-conscious layer of irony. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on what the cumulative effect of the music is: Kanye's use of soul samples certainly doesn't make his music more "soulful," but the music also has something to offer that doesn't need "soulful" as a component of its value. But that does relegate the "soul" part to decoration (but then in pop music, decoration is content).

I think that "recombinant pop" might be a useful catch-all in the same way that postmodernism can be useful, but only by basically undercutting any significance of the word as it relates it to the rest of what Eppy is discussing, e.g. new recording technologies and ways of listening. Which is to say, it's nice to be able to find a way to put Girl Talk and Kanye and Destroyer in one category, but it's not necessarily any more useful than Chuck Eddy's car/train/spaceship genres or Meltzer's heaven-rock or twin-pop or ambiguous-Rapture-pop. In fact, it might be less useful, because it encompasses so much music that we might as well just call it all "pop" or "rock."

(And this relates to another idea: "If a rock band plays a song that consists of four harmonicas playing an hour-long staggered drone, that's not rock music, even if they wrote the piece by getting together in a practice space with drums/guitars/bass and jamming until they came up with something cool." But if Lou Reed records TWO hours LPs of feedback, it not only is rock, but, if you're Lester Bangs, it is one of the most important rock records ever made.)

The stuff that interests me is "recombinant" as a mode of production or a mode of listening -- or, maybe more to the point, a way of thinking. I think one of the main points here might be in using this term to paint common tropes of trad rock crit as non-issues by creating a new context in which they become mercifully irrelevant. Words like "originality" and "authenticity" may have a place in this new conversational context/mode of thought, but if you try to fit them into non-recombinant modes (e.g. believing that a new rock band "transcends" its influences to do something utterly unique and original, unlike so many copycats out there, and should be praised for offering something new and exciting) it just doesn't make sense. Well, sure I can think something is original and exciting, even if it's almost entirely constructed from other songs ("Harder Better Faster Stronger," "My Humpbeat" [is the Girl Talk song actually called this? It should be]). Who's gonna say differently?

In that sense, poptimism and "recombinant pop" are linked, and one of the footnotes addresses this specifically in response to the dismissals of poptimism by guys like Mark K-punk and Simon Reynolds, who both grossly misrepresent what most popimists actually believe. If poptimism is the mode of thought, recombinant pop would simply be the descriptor of something that fits into the mode...except there's already a descriptor for something falling within the mode -- pop! And here "pop" is an incipient Superword, because for the most part the people "fighting over it" are fighting agreeably, strengthening the ideal as a potential future apotheosis before the ideal can be lamented as having been lost somewhere in a historical moment, like "punk." The most satisfying thing about poptimism is that the community is open enough to shift to fit the ideal, to try to keep imagining its potential and push the ideal further, and generic constraints don't particularly enter into it -- meaning, it's not so much about pop as genre as it is about pop as life. It's an evolutionary discussion embraced by people who are willing to evolve, even if it means accepting artists who deny evolution entirely (Aly and AJ).

OK, That's enough on this for now. I'd also like to respond to Ross but maybe I'll take my thoughts over there. (You should, too.)

LONG LIVE THE BEATIES!

From Tommy2:

At a concert for the Diabetes Research Institute’s Carnival for a Cure, Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers publicly acknowledged he has type 1 Diabetes. He was diagnosed while on tour in the fall of 2005 and now hopes his story will encourage others with Diabetes. To read a press release from the event, click here.

LONG LIVE THE BEATIES! (Nick, PLEASE CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY AS SOON AS YOU GOOGLE THIS.)

dmoore1 at gmail dot com.

Power n' solidarity n' all that. (OMG do I share a basal rate with NICK JONAS??!!!)

You have no style and no taste, lady. You suck.

1. ^^Best comment ever? Too bad it wasn't on Haloscan, not even sure which post that was in response to!

2. Congrats to Nia for starting a fab Platinum Weird fansite. Still haven't heard all of either album.

3. I need to respond to the last post now that I'm back, but I want to formulate some ideas first, so maybe I'll just go go go now and then actually respond to some comments (Eppy had more insightful things to say about SR's comments than I did). As for what SR's quote represents to me, I can't say for sure -- I think he just happened to tick me off in the right way at the right time, and that my gripes are largely with myself and "everyone."

I think I've been a lazy critic, and I hate to see lazy criticism from figures I've come to understand have sort of "made it" at this gig. Because it's harder to write well about music than to do anything else I do; it's a challenge in part because it puts me in touch with things I don't always like to confront, which are less apparent in more academic pursuits, or even cinematic ones (which even at their most personal are still somehow distanced by the process itself -- and my only significant work as a filmmaker ever was made from home movies, baby pictures, family interviews, etc.): vanity, fear, ecstasy, shame...value judgments, the question of why anything I do was, is, and continues to be important (to me, to anyone else). One problem I struggled with reviewing indie music, which is part of why I don't review it as much, was that for me it could be a fast track to semi-bohemia, to cool, to "importance." I could pretend. It could be something that signified importance without my needing to really think it was important or about why it was important. In the warped little world I was entering, where I still am, rock critics were rock stars -- all signs pointed to rock star. And I still believe that lots of things (I hesitate to say "anything") can lead one to rock stardom (in academia, on PBS), but what I want from rock star has changed. I'm still working out what it's changed to, but (ironically enough) I think for me being a rock star has a lot to do with earning the distinction. Which isn't to say I give a shit whether or not Paris earned it, but she certainly helps me earn it, so you go girl.

4. I don't think the Arcade Fire were just signifying importance on their first album, and I really connected to it as something that was important. My review of it signified importance from the get-go, but my main contention with it two years later (aside from the score -- duh it was a 10!) is that I didn't really give a sense of how much fun the album was, or how much I enjoyed listening to it, aside from it being some kind of cathartic experience, which I guess it could be occasionally but wasn't primarily.

I do think they're signifying importance on their second album, which isn't to say it's a bad album. But "our parents' bedrooms and the bedrooms of our friends"...call me a sucker but it took me somewhere (like, back to my parents' bedroom). The music was...nice, yeah, pleasant, whatever, but those lines really did it for me! "Spread the ashes of the colors"...well, I heard it as "ashes of our mothers" (which would have been a terrible line) and I was in the mood for some relatable histrionics, I guess, and also projecting, but why shouldn't I have been projecting? So maybe I could have been more honest about that, but I'm guessing it would have been more embarrassing than how it turned out.

To be embarrassed, to be exposed as a fraud, these things obviously get to me, as they do to Aly and AJ and probably the Arcade Fire, and it doesn't help to have my paranoia kindled recently with a couple of these reviews. One specific complaint: despite what Nick Sylvester claims, I didn't stop reviewing after the Funeral review, and his comments are a little strange from someone who had some (not much) contact with me during that time. I reviewed at P4k for about six months after that, but I got worn out trying to juggle two reviews a week that didn't make me cringe (to say nothing of the song reviews, which I still suck at) with the rest of my work, so I stopped and I took a long break. And when I felt a little better, I realized I had a lot more to say about teenpop, and that it had a lot more to say through me, and more things to teach me. I wasn't a fraud here, or at least I didn't feel like one. And for the most part I still don't feel like one -- but I'm sensitive to frauds like me, especially when they're smarter than me, better writers than me, and capable of more. Coasters, bullshitters, Simon Reynolds and Avril Lavigne, making easy choices, taking easy shortcuts.

So if my attacks of SR (or AL) seem arbitrary, if sorta merited, in part it's because they are. (I'm fishing for a good idea, goofing around, which seems similar to but is essentially different from coasting -- coasting is settling for a bad idea, or maybe a boring idea, and pretending its a good one, a vital one -- in a review, a term paper, a book, a blog post. Goofing around is plowing through lots of ideas, many bad, until you get a good one.) It's too easy to say there are few people willing to do hard work to challenge themselves about why and how they're listening/reacting to this music, create knowledge using this music, music that really does change us (how could it not?), but
it's harder to come to grips with the fact that no one's gonna do this work for us (for me), either, and it's even harder to keep doing it.

Simon Reynolds Shaved Britney's Head

I can't prove it, and of course there's documented evidence of Britney doing the job herself, but I think she was just cleaning up what Simon started. And in good spirits, too, she didn't press charges or nuthin.

No, she thought Kelly Clarkson would think it looked sexy.

No, she EFFIN' FELT LIKE IT.

No, it WAS Simon, but more indirect. See, Britney read this thing that he wrote on his blog:

At the height of the pro-pop delirium a couple of years back one proponent declared that “popism is about eliminating barriers to pleasure” while another poptimist argued “importance and relevance is a scam and a trap. Don't bother with it…. Once you stop thinking about things in those terms, all of music and art becomes far more enjoyable.” The trouble with this quasi-virtuous elevation of pleasure/enjoyment to supreme value and sole criteria is that, for critics and the critically-minded (the bloggerati, “serious” fans) enjoyment in itself is not that interesting. It doesn't take you anywhere. Actually it's bloody hard to write about pleasure alone. Go on, try reviewing a record entirely in terms of its pleasurability. I guarantee by the middle of the second paragraph you’ll be reaching for some kind of measure of significance or relevance. So it makes sense that critics, whose job it is to generate thought-provoking words, are being drawn to the harder stuff.

And got real angry and said THAT IS IT I AM MAKING A BIG STATEMENT RIGHT NOW!

And then she shaved her head.

Except the timeline's off for that explanation.

What other celebrity could shave his/her head (ha, "his") and get plastered all over the place with BREAKDOWN etc. etc. DRUGS etc. ROCK BOTTOM? I don't mean to suggest that Britney isn't struggling with addiction or depression or anxiety or whatever the hell else, I'm just posing the question. Because it seems to me that this is being crammed into a sort of "cautionary" narrative by the press that basically makes explicit what's been implicit throughout Britney's career -- "faking" the virgin persona, becoming the slut "we" all suspected her of being, finally falling through the bottom of the barrel.

Y'all are nuts as Britney.

Anyway, to bring this back to what Simon's writing about, my own interest in pop is so far removed from what (I think) Simon's suggesting is a form of rockcrit hedonism (or, less drastically, an essentially anti-critical stance) that those words just burn the back of my eyeballs. (N.B. I also hate fun.)

Has he read anything that any poptimist has really written about the music they're listening to?

In this instance, he's referring to this Dissensus thread (thanx google), where he's (allegedly) quoting Matthew Perpetua, and he later quotes Eppy saying:

Hey, anyone else think that Dizzee's "I Luv U" just sounds like pop now? Which is good, you know, but I remember it being presented as this revelatory and revolutionary thing at the time. Wasn't, really, was it?

And responds:

what struck me about this (apart from the tit for tat aspect!), is that pop-ist impulse to strip away all that the stuff that actually matters and is exciting about the record in question, reducing it to some putative pure pop essence. I mean the record is incredibly catchy and punchy, but A/ that's not everything that's going on even in the song/record, let alone around it. (And when did “pop” have a monopoly on memorability or aesthetic focus?). But the real point is the reductive impulse, with its undercurrent of ressentiment. i see pop-ism working as by reducing the scope of things that you care about. The positive spin on that is a sort of minimalism of affect (perpetua's idea, at a charitable reading), stop thinking about these other factors and then this main thing--the pleasure of the moment/the thing-itself--dramatically expands. The negative spin on it is: i don't give a fuck about anything else but my pleasure.

I mean, this doesn't seem to me to be in the same universe as Eppy's comment (which was inconsequentially tossed-off in its original context and had no surrounding ideas whatsoever to suggest the kind of sweeping claims SR is making). Since when has Mike, on his blog or elsewhere, EVER argued for a "putative pure pop essence" that can be reduced to "the pleasure of the moment"? And since when is it all about "pleasure," anyway? And what does he, or the people he's quoting, even mean by pleasure? I get pleasure of sorts from caring about/worrying about/being moved by Aly and AJ, and pleasure of sorts from knowing that they might believe things that I can never believe, things that terrify me, because they've offered me a connection to them anyway. This is the sort of pleasure that leads to ulcers. Of course, all I'm doing by calling it all pleasure is making "pleasure" a pointless catch-all when I could more articulately convey what I'm feeling by...oh, I dunno...devoting a lot of my time and energy to writing about it at length. Which is what poptimists qua Poptimists are doing.

Obviously this isn't just about SR, who's too smug about all this crap to take too too seriously, although it's kinda shitty to blogroll Frank Kogan and then thoughtlessly sneer at what FK's been writing about (possibly without SR's knowledge, although I don't see how he could be simultaneously THAT out of the loop and also intent on saying this kind of bullshit again and again...I mean, who does he think he's referring to when he talks about Paris Hilton's supporters in a critic's poll whose only Paris supporters have also written extensively -- and intelligently and provocatively -- about her for about eight months?).

Anyway. This is about a lot of things...my own restlessness and my own feelings that I'm not doing enough to carry a conversation forward that I think is absolutely crucial right now -- I want Britney's bald head to say something to other people that they aren't hearing, or don't care to hear; I want it to reveal something about us, not just her, which is what's missing from tabloid covers, from conversations. (Britney's actual head being an image I have at the front of my brain at the moment and, uh, isn't really working for me; I know fairly little about the actual circumstances surrounding it that doesn't seem too speculative to be particularly useful -- so what people are saying about it is more important to me than what might have caused it. In fact, let's move away from Britney altogether for a sec and go to something else.)

I'm hitting a wall here.

I guess I'm saying, in part, that I resent SR for dismissing a fairly incredible group of writers and thinkers by reinforcing an idiotic binary that's pervasive enough to go unquestioned by some of the most incredible of these writers. He's part of a critical community and he's actively cutting himself off from these people without even beginning to engage with what they're actually thinking about, what's actually driving them to say what they say. And his own "examples" validating his stance don't even hold up to a quick google (I still can't even find the Fluxblog quote, but whatever), let alone everything I've come to understand about people who classify themselves as poptimists.

So this is me flailing against the wall, I guess, hoping this doesn't come off as too much of a tantrum...but why not, full-on confessional blog mode: I'm feeling anxious and a little guilty lately writing some of things I've been writing while knowing full well that I'm not putting the time and effort in that I know that I'm capable of, not listening to music very often and generally getting very sour about the conversation itself, not necessarily through any fault of the conversation and without much effort to make it better myself. Which is to say I'm in a funk, comes and goes in waves, and I'm hoping to come out of it soon. But part of the funk comes from thinking...I dunno, that the ideas that really grab me, make me think, make me challenge myself to try to work harder at this...it's like the Rolling-Crit (so that's where the "roll" went) keeps rolling along more like a snowball in hell than a snowball in snow. So it's like Day for Night, we have to make our own snow, which can be a lot of fun. But the environment is fundamentally a problem, when it could be and should be what is nourishing us -- which means, obviously, that Simon Reynolds is ALSO responsible for global warming.

(PS - yesterday I had to fast all day per doc's instructions and when, irritable and weak, I finally reached for my smooshed little sandwich, I realized that our mouse had TAKEN A LARGE BITE OUT OF THE CORNER OF IT. We're about to get Wile E. Coyote on this motherfucker.)

(PPS - I'm leaving for a week w/o internet, so apologies for no further responses on this post.)