Pop Conference

Alex Ross attended something called the “Pop Conference” in Seattle and has an interesting piece on pop music and academia in the latest issue of the New Yorker. He’s pretty funny about some of the academic jargon on display:

bq. Some of the presentations, a few too many for comfort, lapsed into the familiar contortions of modern pedagogy. Likewise, in the many pop-music books now in circulation, post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-colonialist, and post-grammatical buzzwords crop up on page after page. There is a whole lot of problematizing, interrogating, and appropriating goin’ on…. At the Pop Conference, I made it a rule to move to a different room the minute I heard someone use the word “interrogate” in a non-detective context or cite any of the theorists of the Frankfurt School.

My sense is that academic philosophers (like me) lapse into this kind of jargon less than members of certain other disciplines, often confused with philosophy. But this may be because we don’t get out as much as others. This is one of the things I like about blogs. I’m new to the blogosphere – new to this side of it, anyway. Here’s hoping I can follow the lead of my colleagues here and combine accessibility with a bit of insight.

One of Ross’s main points, even if he wouldn’t put it quite this way, is how creativity and beauty crop up in mundane and perhaps unexpected places. Seeing it requires paying attention, and jargon-mongers usually don’t have the patience or interest.

bq. Scholars of this type always want to see pop music as the emanation of an entity called popular culture, rather than as music that happens to have become popular. As a result, songs and bands become fungible commodities in the intellectual marketplace.

But Ross reports that at the conference, there were plenty of champions who had found gems that they were eager to share.

bq. Despite minor infestations of Benjaminites, there was no shortage of up-close musical discussion at the Pop Conference. I often had the happy experience of being held hostage by an informed fanatic who convinced me that whatever he or she was discussing was the most important music on earth.

Paying attention often requires overcoming various pop-music myths, such as the myth of authenticity, “according to which only the rudest, rawest music – the primal scream of the outcast – qualifies as ‘real.’” Another myth concerns genius.

bq. What’s bedevilling about pop music is that while we sense greatness in a song we have trouble saying where it comes from. It is often difficult to say who even wrote the thing in the first place. Some performers exert such a powerful presence—Billie Holiday, Sinatra, Elvis—that they seem to become the authors of songs that were actually the work of schlumpy men in the Brill Building. Then there are the rock songs that were written by committee, often in the middle of the night, and under the influence of something other than the muse Euterpe. Composers have the advantage of being shrouded in myth: we can project fantasies of omniscience upon them. Pop stars torment us with their inconvenient humanness—their tax problems, their noisome politics, their pornography collections, their unwanted comebacks. No wonder the greatest legends are the artists who die young.

The point is not to denigrate the artistry of Holiday, Sinatra or Pressley, but to see their talents as human talents – as are those of the schlumpy men in the Brill Building.

I can’t honestly say I get all of the connections he traces, but it’s a thrill even to think about sonic themes common to Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach, Skip James, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, and Led Zeppelin. He even has interesting things to say about Justin Timberlake. Ross tells a funny story about Ellington, but Peter Schickele repeats a different Ellington maxim on his show every week: “If it sounds good, it is good.”