Gays against Gaga

May 3, 2013 • 18 notes • hardcorefornerds

Hardcore for Nerds: Punktimism v. Poptimism

I think the question is whether ‘poptimism’ and ‘punktimism’ are really that different from each other (and the latter, much more even than the former, is a thing constructed primarily for the purposes of this discussion): if they’re not, they should naturally overlap; but if they are, and oppose each other, then the proper response is not to triangulate between them as if they were two equally valid but different viewpoints (a process that usually means the more culturally powerful side decides the point of compromise) but to form a new synthesis that replaces them both. Hegelian Dialectics 101.

What I’ve always had a block about understanding in the concept of poptimism is that while supposedly about upholding the genuine quality of music, freed from snobbery and ‘elitism’, by its nature it revolves around whatever music is ‘popular’. So assuming one agrees that artistic merit isn’t actually decided by democracy, or that the commercial process by which that is supposed to happen (VOTE NOW! BUY!) is definitely flawed, what it really ought to be about is critically appreciating the communal experience of music. Which is what punk - or ‘punktimism’ - is about as well, only its communal experience is focused on a particular movement in the political arts (of course there is apolitical punk as well as political pop, but each movement has its general directed oriented in a certain way).

Punks follow the crowd too, although it is a smaller one and they at least tend to feel it has a different purpose. Pop (or mainstream, or mass) culture vs. counter-culture isn’t an entirely bad way of separating the two: despite the well-rehearsed arguments against a ‘counter-culture’ not having a valid existence, I at least think it’s a valuable concept to maintain so as it has a chance to make a more concrete impact. So that’s what I, and others, don’t want to give up about punk - that idea and inspiration of rebellion and rejection - and don’t want to see it subsumed into a pop-optimism that is inherently less confrontational about the culture industry and the various demands of capitalism on social life.*

However, I don’t think that critical side of punk has to be inevitably associated with rockism or elitism: punk has always been a movement that has consciously struggled with -isms both within and without, with varying degrees of success, but those particular descriptions probably apply the least to those creating at the margins of what is traditionally regarded as the ‘punk’ movement, who may not take the label but embody the principles the most (or, to be frank: is it elitist not to command a mass following?) There should be a way of combining counter-cultural principles with cultural openness, and indeed this is what made some of the most creative punk music after the initial anti-everything statements of ‘77. And today, self-identified punk fans embody some of the principles of poptimism within their own genre: the appropriation of the language of tough-guy hardcore for the semi-ironic, semi-sincere ‘Defend Pop-Punk’ slogan, or the burgeoning re-appreciation for 00s pop-punk and post-hardcore that the commercial machine spewed out and then rendered ‘uncool’ in the pursuit of pop novelty. I would call that ’punktimism’, rather than assuming the term refers to a reactionary foil of poptimism’s ostensibly unique progressiveness.

This is super smart, but I think if we’re going to go down the road of coining terms to describe ideological extremes, we could do better than “punktimism” which seems like a contradiction in terms. (Meaning, optimism in punk or about punk is only ever one side of the coin. HC4N advances the notion of the Hegelian dialectic, which is appropriate, as punk has long been a dialectical discourse—a one-two punch of pessimism and optimism, of affirmation and denial, “No Future” and “PMA.” You could also view Hegel through the lens of Adorno and call it “Pegatively Nositive”, after the title of one of our favorite punk records of the last few years.)

Instead, maybe we would benefit from a distinction between punk and punkism. There’s an obvious parallel to rockism, but this distinction borrows the convention from geopolitics to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, or as Andrew Sullivan does, between Christianity and Christianism. (note: this should not be seen as an endorsement of the problematic construct of Islamism, or of Andrew Sullivan, who is a bit daft.)

Punkism could then be ascribed to the subset of punks who hold fast to the illusion of the ultimate superiority of their particular subculture, while punk just means identification with and participation in that subcultural/intellectual tradition. In 2013, most punks ain’t punkists.

Similarly, we could benefit from a distinction between poptimism, a reading of pop music that tends to accent and celebrate pop music’s capacity for pleasure and socially liberatory themes and popism, a system of thinking about music that posits pop values as normative.

Poptimism has brought us some valid and true insights, even as it tends to get a little starry-eyed. It’s when poptimism crosses over into pop-ism that we really get into trouble, because the net effect is to make culture industry critiques inadmissible.

May 1, 2013 • 209 notes • thepeoplesrecord

thepeoplesrecord:

New FCC chairman is “former lobbyist for cable & wireless industries”
April 30, 2013

President Barack Obama will nominate venture capitalist Tom Wheeler to be the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, The Wall Street Journal reported today. Wheeler is “a former top lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries” and will be nominated as soon as tomorrow, the Journal wrote. The Hill reporter Brendan Sasso said the White House has now confirmed that Wheeler will be nominated for the post.

The top FCC post is empty because of the departure of Chairman Julius Genachowski. When Genachowski announced his decision to step down last month, we wrote that he was “lauded by industry” and “blasted by activists” because of moves that benefited corporations instead of consumers. Genachowski won praise from consumer advocates in some instances, but the decision to let wireless operators evade net neutrality rules and his approval of mergers such as Comcast/NBCUniversal were criticized by groups pushing for more competition in communications industries.

Wheeler has been a venture capitalist at Core Capital Partners since 2005. “Tom was President of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1979 to 1984,” his Core Capital biography states. “After several years as CEO of various technology start-ups, including the first company to offer high-speed data to the home and the first digital video delivery service, he was asked to lead the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA), where he was CEO until 2004.”

Wheeler is an “Obama loyalist,” Time reporter Sam Gustin wrote two weeks ago while describing him as the front-runner for the FCC nomination. Wheeler previously received an appointment from Obama to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

“Mr. Wheeler will take over as the commission confronts a changing technology world,” the Journal wrote. “Many of its regulations were crafted for outdated telephone technology. Democrats would like to apply many of these rules to new communications methods, such as wireless technology and broadband Internet. But it isn’t clear whether Mr. Wheeler is on board with that approach.”

Law professor and net neutrality supporter Susan Crawford gained some support from FCC observers hoping the next commission head would be a champion for broadband competition. Crawford, author of “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age,” was never seen as a likely choice for Obama, though. She wasn’t corrupt enough for the current administration.

“Despite that vote of confidence, many in the public interest community remain suspicious of Wheeler—even as they acknowledge that he’s the frontrunner—due to his industry lobbying and the fact that his positions on the major issues facing the FCC remain largely unknown,” Gustin wrote. “In late March, more than two dozen public interest groups wrote to Obama expressing alarm that the president was considering a candidate ‘who was the head of not one but two major industry lobbying groups.’”

Tom’s past history as the head of two industry trade associations should deeply trouble you. Free Press, one of the groups lobbying against Wheeler, issued a telling statement.

“The Federal Communications Commission needs a strong leader—someone who will use this powerful position to stand up to industry giants and protect the public interest,” Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron said. “On paper, Tom Wheeler does not appear to be that person, having headed not one but two major trade associations.”

Source

This is pretty unfair and omits the important fact that Susan Crawford herself has said that Tom Wheeler is a pretty solid candidate for the position.

It also cherry picks sentences from Free Press’s statement, omits the sentence that followed their concerns about Wheeler: “ But he now has the opportunity to prove his critics wrong, clean up the mess left by his predecessor, and be the public servant we so badly need at the FCC.”

Not that Wheeler would be our choice, but to conclude “Barack Obama does not care about you” based on the fact that he appointed this dude to one federal agency is to totally misunderstand how the appointment process works. Obama could try and appoint a left-wing media reformer, but that person would never actually get the job, because whoever Obama appoints still has to get approved by Congress.

Do you know how many presidential appointees are still waiting for approval by Congress?

(via fyeahqueermusic)

April 30, 2013 • 35 notes • nathanjurgenson

It’s offensive to those not in the tiny ultra-privileged world that can be bored with questions of power, domination, inequality, resistance, and so on, because these questions make looking at art “more awkward.” Fuck that, go read a YouTube comment.

More, Better Sociology (via nathanjurgenson)

April 28, 2013 • 61 notes • judyxberman

The punk mentality used to be a default ethos among rock kids, but over the past decade that fell apart; punk-think, which used to feel joyful and liberating, has started to look crabbed and guarded as well. Who, at this point, needs to lob spitballs at a monoculture that anyone with an Internet connection can easily escape? It seems bolder now to embrace things with reckless innocence and delight in artifice — which is exactly what some of the earliest New York punks, and some of the best to follow them, were aiming for.

Nitsuh Abebe, “This Is Punk?” Best sentences of cultural criticism I’ve read this year. (via judyxberman)

——

Love Nitsuh and Judy both, but this isn’t Nitsuh’s strongest work.

The “punk mentality” used to be a “default ethos” among “rock kids”?* I guess this depends on where you grew up, but that’s gonna be news for punk kids who got sneered at for liking The Slits over Zeppelin, treated like space aliens for liking Slant 6 more than the Beatles, for liking Half Japanese or Unrest more than Aerosmith or AC/DC, you know? Nirvana did something to unite punk and rock fans, but the depth of that union may have been pretty surface level for many.

Not sure what “punk-think” is either. But “joyful and liberating” and “guarded” aren’t opposites. Frankly, it makes sense to be protective of the stuff that is the most awesome and precious to you, especially for communities of marginalized folks. You know? You want to keep Taco Bell out of your all-ages DIY festival not because you hate fun, but because you want to create a context where reckless innocence can thrive unimpeded. That’s always been part of the dynamic.

And then this idea that the internet enables “escape” from monoculture; okay but what if the point isn’t to “escape” but to engage and ultimately transform stuff? Is Nitsuh saying that critical readings of and attitudes toward shitty mass culture are obsolete because you can find alternatives easier? Seriously? True, it is the prevalent trend right now, to imagine that mass culture doesn’t actually have any power over people because one can make jokes about it on twitter, or find a alternative consumer identity that fits one’s taste preferences without much friction.

Yes, “delight in artifice” is great, but artifice is one critical tool in a artist’s toolbox. So the question is: to what end? Delight in artifice for the sake of artifice is still frequently a capitalist bummer.

And okay, we’re being a tad strident here (BECAUSE PUNX ARE ALWAYS ANGRY LOL!), but I dunno why it seems suddenly trendy to conceptualize “punk” in 2013 as if it resembled the Maximum Rock N Roll letters page in ‘94; today’s punks are heterogenous and frequently musically omnivorous and doing rad joyful stuff all over. When you see writing like this you wonder how deeply engaged these writers are with the diverse universe of punk kids today. And maybe that’s not Nitsuh’s job as a pop music writer for a major publication, or maybe it’s just descriptive of phenomena endemic to NYC (which we don’t know much about, having never lived there) but it’s kind of disappointing.

Because if the prescription is to nudge punk in the direction of poptimism, that doesn’t seem “bolder”, it just seems trendier and more congruent with late capitalism.

*We apologize for the overuse of scarequotes in this post, but those sentences are full of questionable constructs and abstractions we can’t really get behind.

(via gaysagainstgaga)

Respect to you, too, and I understand why you’d have a problem with the piece. But I think you’re seeing punk as a philosophy or lifestyle — and especially the punks of today — through rose-colored glasses. As someone who has loved punk music for basically my whole life (despite never identifying as “a punk,” which I think is key to having some distance on it), I understand that it’s upsetting to see the movement painted as reactionary.

You reference poptimism, and that is important to this argument. To identify as “a punk” in 2013 is, in large part, to be a rockist. And that comes with some ideological baggage that historically privileges the musical forms approved by straight white men over genres dominated by women, queer people, and people of color. This is what your Slits fans and your Led Zeppelin fans have in common — they both think that a guitar-wielding person singing songs that he or she wrote is the highest form of musical expression. That doesn’t mean that everyone who identifies as “a punk” is so retrograde that they can’t appreciate a great pop song, but it does mean I can’t speak to Nitsuh’s familiarity with punks in 2013, but I’ve definitely seen enough of that world to notice a problem with people who profess to be so radical closing their minds to so much of what our culture has to offer.

There are aspects of this that don’t even have to with rockism. Some of it has to do with how self-evident punk’s anti-artifice argument has become over the past 35 years. No one’s shocked anymore when you point out that most pop stars’ songs are written by committee or that their images are constructed in a boardroom or that they shill for major corporations. (Never mind that plenty of mainstream bands who “write their own songs” and are marketed as “punk” were constructed in a very similar way.) This stuff is just so obvious it’s become naive to say it out loud. This is, in part, a credit to how effective its early critiques of pop culture were. (Never mind that, as Nitsuh notes, the very first punks had much more open and complex relationships to pop culture than subsequent waves.) But since that critique has stayed static as our collective understanding of pop culture has evolved — especially since the turn of the millennium — it’s punk that’s become outmoded.

This is what’s hurting punk, as an identity, a critical stance, and a genre of music. I don’t deny that we need the punk voice, that corrective negation, that insistence that we question the artifice that threatens to make us complacent. But as we become more sophisticated in our understanding of all that, we need punk to become more sophisticated, too — we need it to tell us something about our culture that we don’t already know. And I can’t think of the last time it’s done that.

(via judyxberman)

——

Judy, we appreciate the response here, but we remain deeply puzzled by this:

“To identify as “a punk” in 2013 is, in large part, to be a rockist.”[…]
the ideology they’ve adopted — not by liking punk music as one genre among many but by identifying as “a punk” — values an increasingly shallow definition of authenticity that upholds some troubling received wisdom that reinforces classic-rock norms.

We don’t understand this. Why should this be so? Who gets to decide what someone else’s identity means? This is a bummer for us as queer people who are constantly being told what identifying as queer should mean, instead of allowed to define it for ourselves, or as feminists who are told that feminism means hating men. Assuming we’re using Douglas Wolk’s definition of rockism, which means positing rock values as “normative,” it’s easy to forget that first wave punk can be understood as a criticism of rockism using a rock vocabulary. In 2013, the punk labels we love the most are putting out hip-hop, weird electro noise music, house, dubby-folk, alongside guitar rock. (Yes, dull annoying rockist wankers are still present in punk, just like the rest of the world. But, um, anyone with an internet connection can easily escape them!)

“And that comes with some ideological baggage that historically privileges the musical forms approved by straight white men over genres dominated by women, queer people, and people of color. This is what your Slits fans and your Led Zeppelin fans have in common — they both think that a guitar-wielding person singing songs that he or she wrote is the highest form of musical expression. “

We’ll set aside questions about which genres have offered which kinds of opportunities for diverse kinds of humans, because, OMG huge topic. But we know a lot of punks who love the Slits, and we don’t think we know any that think a “guitar-wielding person singing songs that he or she wrote is the highest form of musical expression”. Frankly, we don’t think most Slits fans even give a shit about what the “highest form of musical expression” is. That isn’t the point. The point is community, possibility, inspiration, not technical skill, not even “great art for the ages”, not virtuosity. And we don’t know any Slits fans in 2013 who aren’t also into like, Dolly Parton, and Salt N’ Pepa and Kate Bush.

To the extent that punk still fixates on guitar rock, it’s not because most punks think guitar rock is the “highest form” of anything, so much as a reflection of the obvious fact that when music is made in a context that is focused on community and traditions, people create stuff they choose the tools and tropes that are available to them based on their immediate cultural context, not because they think those tools are inherently superior to all others.

And this business about punk’s critique remaining static? This is hard to address without getting into the messy business of defining what punk’s fundamental critique actually is (there are multitudes—a topic for another post). And there’s also something to be interrogated about why novelty is so paramount these days, or the false equation of novelty with sophistication—why we’re all more inclined to ask for culture to “tell us something new” instead of “tell us something true” (even as we could point to a lot of bands/artists that are doing both.)

But if you accept that part of the point of the endeavor is some kind of social transformation on individual or collective levels, just because something is obvious and “everyone” knows doesn’t mean there’s a reason to stop saying it! There is endless value in articulating and rearticulating big corny irreducible truths like:

Women and queers should be able to control their bodies and destinies.

An increasingly small handful of corporations control the vast majority of media outlets, and we should fix that.

Authority should be accountable.

We should work to create better and more egalitarian systems that value people over money and privilege.

You have agency and you don’t need permission.

It’s okay to feel how you’re feeling.

Etc.

Punk praxis does this stuff for us; gives us access to a community of shared values and mutual support and critical inquiry and accountability. Obvs not the only place you can access those insights and resources, but it works for us, and that’s why we’re punks, even as most of the music we listen to sounds more like Sade than Minor Threat these days.

(via judyxberman)

April 27, 2013 • 61 notes • judyxberman