luka

Well-known member
you're conflating low/mid/high brow too easily with their class equivalents. It's true that you use bourgeois as an exact synonym for middlebrow, but that confuses the issue a little.
 

version

Well-known member
BDSM seems to be something which can be either high or lowbrow, but which I struggle to picture as middlebrow.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
you're conflating low/mid/high brow too easily with their class equivalents. It's true that you use bourgeois as an exact synonym for middlebrow, but that confuses the issue a little.

nah, broken beat is middlebrow but it isn't unsound conceptronica which just reappropriates the lowbrow (gabba, jungle, trance, hard techno etc etc) for a highbrow crowd. broken beat is precisely middlebrow because it's trying to be bourgeois but can't. the proper aristos these days don't much care for art given that such approaches have been subsumed into the unis.

same with soulful house. it has a predominantly working class crowd but it is generally middlebrow music (obvs there are exceptions.)

I'd say the likes of metalheadz are failed middlebrow/liminal brow. they certainly tried to appeal to the readers of the face/ID/todays RA etc but ultimately they had to go back underground again.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
sweet female attitude is successful middlebrow from a lowbrow scene. goldie was failed middlebrow with his timeless album.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
poppy uk garage is the pinnacle of superb middlebrow. probably because of its rnb fetish compared to other genres. sufficiently hooky to be enjoyed with the lads at home, stuff you'd hardly want to hear out when you're speeding though in a dark basement with strangers at 6 AM wondering why you are even there.

middlebrow stuff can be weird, just not *that weird.*

lowbrow is proper weird:

 

blissblogger

Well-known member
and yet early Ian McEwan is great - the macabre, twisted short stories and the novellas like The Cement Garden. In those days, some talked of him as a 'punk novelist'
after that he does go 'mature' and definitely m-brow

(although On Chesil Beach is actually a great little book (movie is poor though))

most things dissed as middlebrow are good as far they go

there are three avoidance strategies used by those who social and educational background would naturally consign them to middlebrow taste (meaning in music, Radiohead / Chemical Brothers / Kendrick)

- the avant path (anything extreme or uncompromised or challenging or dense or unpalatable - Henry Cow / Morton Feldman / power electronics / Derek Bailey)

- the lumpen path (h-core, ragga, uk drill, trap, street beats of every kind etc etc), not slumming exactly because you venerate this stuff as the true art-not-art of its time.

- the pop path (embracing the mass produced, Hollywood / Tin Pan Alley / TV voice contests etc, disposable, manipulative / exploitative, - the ultimate power move here in recent years would be K-pop but there are many gradations up to that including Nashville, Stock Aitken Waterman, that swedish producer dude etc). Again this can be done camply and kitschly, or the non-slumming, this is actually better, it's true popular art, it's streets ahead on the production etc etc

these are all strategies for disidentifying from a weak idea of "art" / "literary" with its correlated notions of well-made, improving, virtuous, that those of the same class background as oneself fall into line behind

you get those moves in nearly all zones of art/entertainment

e.g. Stewart Home had that whole thing about pulp novels and Richard Allen's skinhead books
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
thinking of the anti-middlebrow position, and the lumpen-identification, and how it might apply to film

reminded me of this friend and writing colleague of mine in the 80s, Frank Owen - a great writer on hip hop, early house, black music of all kinds, also did one of the only Arthur Russell interviews ever -

when it came to film though he despised all that costume drama, middle class fare - all that stuff i think of as "Time Out movies" eg. Betty Blue, Jesus of Montreal, charming little Eric Roehmer tasteful French jobs.

Frank would always always go for the trash stuff, pulp Hollywood, right down to outright video nasties as they called them then.

I remember one time going round his gaff in Stockwell, we were writing a piece together, but first he got a takeway curry in and wanted to watch some movies. So he pulls out this Chuck Norris Viet veteran revenge type piece of trash - which he'd seen several times already. And he actually fast-forwarded through it to all the violent bits, e.g. Chuck hung upside down from a tree, a sack over his head with two starving rats in it. Lots of thrashing about and then he goes limp and you think 'ah that's it, poor old Chuck' - but they take the sack off and he's got two dead rats hanging out of each side of his mouth.

i was struck by Frank's depraved yet cutting-edge use of film as a non-narrative series of horror / violence 'hits' - very drug-like

But that seems like a pretty anti-middlebrow statement from a guy who had a Phd in cultural studies

meanwhile i would have been happier watching a Merchant-Ivory
.
 

luka

Well-known member
Craner is like that. He made me and Jim watch a film with a naked woman impaled pn a stake in the jungle and we had to go turn this shit off you fucking creep
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I'd say I'm fairly yobnik in my tastes.

the beatyob fucking sucks though. that's all the kids in my generation who grew up with fucking pitchfork and have to read something pseudo-intellectual into marketed anguish deliberately designed to tug on their puny heartstrings.

are you a beatnik or an avant-yob. I think Luke's a beatnik in denial.
 

luka

Well-known member
I'd say I'm fairly yobnik in my tastes.

the beatyob fucking sucks though. that's all the kids in my generation who grew up with fucking pitchfork and have to read something pseudo-intellectual into marketed anguish deliberately designed to tug on their puny heartstrings.

are you a beatnik or an avant-yob. I think Luke's a beatnik in denial.

I'm both. It keeps people off balance.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
BDSM seems to be something which can be either high or lowbrow, but which I struggle to picture as middlebrow.
that is definitely not the case, as you'll know if you've been to an open to the public (as opposed to invite-only), dungeon, sex party, etc

they're not really my thing but I have, through people I was seeing, and yeah. exceedingly tedious, and as middlebrow as married suburbanites swinging in the 70s.

is there anything more middlebrow than the idea of staidly transgressing middle-class mores?
 

version

Well-known member
that is definitely not the case, as you'll know if you've been to an open to the public (as opposed to invite-only), dungeon, sex party, etc

they're not really my thing but I have, through people I was seeing, and yeah. exceedingly tedious, and as middlebrow as married suburbanites swinging in the 70s.

is there anything more middlebrow than the idea of staidly transgressing middle-class mores?

It's always struck me as either really grubby or very exotic, exquisite rich people's stuff. I can't really imagine like the BDSM equivalent of Radiohead.
 

luka

Well-known member
that is definitely not the case, as you'll know if you've been to an open to the public (as opposed to invite-only), dungeon, sex party, etc

they're not really my thing but I have, through people I was seeing, and yeah. exceedingly tedious, and as middlebrow as married suburbanites swinging in the 70s.

is there anything more middlebrow than the idea of staidly transgressing middle-class mores?

Barty said he went to one and all his old dinner ladies from school were there :)
 
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