shakahislop
Well-known member
sometimes i'm quite amazed by how much music i listened to from california as a teenager. ideas beamed in from the other side of the world.
California
- Thread starter sus
- Start date
IdleRich
IdleRich
There is one place in Lisbon where you see that... surprising to me that people are openly smoking crack within 50m of one of the biggest police stations.
sus
Moderator
When did you first get into her? What turned you on? Was it just in the water supply?
blissblogger
Well-known member
It was a famous, if infamously opaque, piece by Ian Penman about the Song - written in 1982 i think, the sequel to an early thinkpiece about torch songs. He critiqued the failings of postpunkers turned aspiring writers of Song - eg. ABC, Scritti Politti, etc - and then exalted Pirates as this overlooked mistresspiece.
blissblogger
Well-known member
initially I was a little thrown off by the classy gloss of the sound, that sort of Warner Bros post-Little Feat / Steely Dan session musicianship sound - very far from what I would be listening at that time. By the wonderfully free, born-to-sing way she sang, and the dance of the words, won me over - and then I grew to like "that kind of thing".
sus
Moderator
That's how it always goes, right? You'll have these prejudices against certain gestures, genres, aesthetic markers, formal gestures that stand for ideology. And then you stumble across something you can't help but love *despite* its being in the genre, *despite* its "sound." For reasons that are a deeper than its "sound" (in the sociological, highly symbolic sense of sound). And then pretty soon you realize you've grown a taste for the surface, for all those aesthetic markers. And with people too, right?
sus
Moderator
And sometimes people get so hung up on those markers. I believe in the quintessentially rockist "soundscape as high modernist material metaphor of ideology" idea. But—and obviously this is the canonical example of where that line of thinking errs—see Dylan @ Newport, where nothing really changes when he plugs in except that metaphorical soundscape, the matter of what plugged-in means, semiotically.
luka
Well-known member
i think i sort of know what you are trying to say. these hipster revaluations are always occuring, where new zones of affect are captured and colonised. the yacht rock, high-gloss territory was taken over a long time ago
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luka
Well-known member
usually when you see arguments like this from Gus hes trying to trick you into being a nazi
luka
Well-known member
there is something there obviously and its been talked about here exhaustively. for example, to take the genteel - coarse spectrum
and where you place yourself on it at any given time and in any given situation
you might say, for instance, in your mode of behaviour, i free you, the person im with from the onerous performance-demands of eg
having to be exquisitely delicate and aware in the way you place your bone china tea cup back on the saucer
and you also say, our nerves are not so finely tuned that any loud noise disturbs us and that we flinch at every belch or bodily noise
and that our sensibilites are not so delicate that any crude turn of phrases makes us turn pale. enunciation, posture, deportment
and of course this maps precisely and perfectly onto music and you are also right that we can appreciate and enjoy and admire the
operations of all points on that spectrum, potentially, although there are positions at the extremes we might blanch at and a zone
in then middle which seems dul
and where you place yourself on it at any given time and in any given situation
you might say, for instance, in your mode of behaviour, i free you, the person im with from the onerous performance-demands of eg
having to be exquisitely delicate and aware in the way you place your bone china tea cup back on the saucer
and you also say, our nerves are not so finely tuned that any loud noise disturbs us and that we flinch at every belch or bodily noise
and that our sensibilites are not so delicate that any crude turn of phrases makes us turn pale. enunciation, posture, deportment
and of course this maps precisely and perfectly onto music and you are also right that we can appreciate and enjoy and admire the
operations of all points on that spectrum, potentially, although there are positions at the extremes we might blanch at and a zone
in then middle which seems dul
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sus
Moderator
This makes me sad Luka. I think you should know how sad I feel. I tried to interact with my idol blissblogger of Shock and Awe fame by saying something I thought was mildly clever about rockism and the high modernist soundscape of amplified guitar, and you called me a Nazi in front of him. He probably won't answer any of my fanmail now from fear of being cancelled, even if I say very nice and clever things in it.
sus
Moderator
Where's it been talked about give me a thread to read
luka
Well-known member
all over the place really eg
The TIME Barrier.
the time barrier is the invisble wall you hit when tracing music back through time. the historical point at which any pleasure becomes detached and scholarly, or patronising, or simply impossible to access. for instance whenever i allow woebot's enthusiasm for duke ellington to overcome me and i...
www.dissensus.com
luka
Well-known member
you can see soemthing of the same sort here
If one reads anew one of the meditative books of Anatole France, for instance the Garden of Epicure, then one cannot avoid, in the midst of all thankfulness for the proferred enlightenment, a feeling of embarrassment, which is to be adequately explained neither by that obsolescence, which renegade French irrationalists enthusiastically endorse, nor by personal vanity. By serving as a pretext for envy, because a vain moment necessarily appears in all Spirit [Geist] as soon as it portrays itself, the grounds for the embarrassment becomes clear. It is due to what is contemplative, the giving of time to oneself, the homily, however many times interrupted, the indulgently raised forefinger. The critical content of the thought is denied by the gesture of bandying oneself about, familiar to professors sinecured by the state, and the irony, with which the stage actor of Voltaire confesses on his title page to his membership in the Académie Française [French Academy], recoils back onto the comedian. In his essay, something violent is concealed in all the freighted humanity: one can afford to speak so, because no-one interrupts the master. Something of the usurpation which dwells within all lecturing and indeed all reading aloud, has permeated the lucid construction of the periods, which reserve so much leisure for the most uncomfortable things. An unmistakable sign of latent contempt for human beings in the last advocate of human dignity is the dauntlessness with which he expresses platitudes, as if no-one dared to notice them: “L'artist doit aimer la vie et nous montrer qu'elle est belle. Sans lui, nous en douterions.” [French: Artists should love life and show us that it is beautiful. Without them, we should doubt it.] What steps forwards in the archaically stylized meditations of France, already secretly marks every meditation, which claims the prerogative of withdrawing from the immediacy of purpose. Equanimity as such turns into the same lie, which the haste of immediacy falls victim to anyway. While thought, according to its content, strives against the irresistibly rising tide of horror, the nerves, the sense-organ of historical consciousness, are capable of detecting the trace of understanding with the world, even if it is only that it is permissible to be a thought, which one already concedes in the moment that one steps far enough back from it, in order to turn it into a philosophical object. The sovereignty, without which no thinking could be, hails the privilege which permits one to do so. The aversion against this has well-nigh become the most difficult obstacle to theory: if one follows up on it, then one would have to fall silent, and if one does not follow up on it, then one becomes obtuse and cretinous through trust in one’s own culture. Even the horrid division of speaking into occupational conversations and strictly conventional ones yields an inkling of the impossibility of saying something thought without arrogance, without violating the time of the other. It is the most urgent task of a mode of narration, which ought to hold true at a minimum, that it does not look away from such experiences, but brings them to expression through tempo, compactness, density, and yet also by being non-binding
If one reads anew one of the meditative books of Anatole France, for instance the Garden of Epicure, then one cannot avoid, in the midst of all thankfulness for the proferred enlightenment, a feeling of embarrassment, which is to be adequately explained neither by that obsolescence, which renegade French irrationalists enthusiastically endorse, nor by personal vanity. By serving as a pretext for envy, because a vain moment necessarily appears in all Spirit [Geist] as soon as it portrays itself, the grounds for the embarrassment becomes clear. It is due to what is contemplative, the giving of time to oneself, the homily, however many times interrupted, the indulgently raised forefinger. The critical content of the thought is denied by the gesture of bandying oneself about, familiar to professors sinecured by the state, and the irony, with which the stage actor of Voltaire confesses on his title page to his membership in the Académie Française [French Academy], recoils back onto the comedian. In his essay, something violent is concealed in all the freighted humanity: one can afford to speak so, because no-one interrupts the master. Something of the usurpation which dwells within all lecturing and indeed all reading aloud, has permeated the lucid construction of the periods, which reserve so much leisure for the most uncomfortable things. An unmistakable sign of latent contempt for human beings in the last advocate of human dignity is the dauntlessness with which he expresses platitudes, as if no-one dared to notice them: “L'artist doit aimer la vie et nous montrer qu'elle est belle. Sans lui, nous en douterions.” [French: Artists should love life and show us that it is beautiful. Without them, we should doubt it.] What steps forwards in the archaically stylized meditations of France, already secretly marks every meditation, which claims the prerogative of withdrawing from the immediacy of purpose. Equanimity as such turns into the same lie, which the haste of immediacy falls victim to anyway. While thought, according to its content, strives against the irresistibly rising tide of horror, the nerves, the sense-organ of historical consciousness, are capable of detecting the trace of understanding with the world, even if it is only that it is permissible to be a thought, which one already concedes in the moment that one steps far enough back from it, in order to turn it into a philosophical object. The sovereignty, without which no thinking could be, hails the privilege which permits one to do so. The aversion against this has well-nigh become the most difficult obstacle to theory: if one follows up on it, then one would have to fall silent, and if one does not follow up on it, then one becomes obtuse and cretinous through trust in one’s own culture. Even the horrid division of speaking into occupational conversations and strictly conventional ones yields an inkling of the impossibility of saying something thought without arrogance, without violating the time of the other. It is the most urgent task of a mode of narration, which ought to hold true at a minimum, that it does not look away from such experiences, but brings them to expression through tempo, compactness, density, and yet also by being non-binding