Who’s Holding that Remote?
I opined yesterday that “Pop,” as a term of opprobrium, has come to signify an ease of access coupled with an ease of consumption. Ease of consumption: this it would be foolish to deny. But passive consumption, mindless consumption (which, in Is Rock Dead? I connected to the 50s B-movie motif of the zombie)—that’s only half the story. Commentators from the world of high art—even an artist like Barbara Kruger, whose work depends on a knowing manipulation of popular culture images and symbols—are fond of invoking the metaphor of the remote control: “unmoving targets waiting to be turned on and off by the relentless seductions of remote control” is how Kruger describes television’s audience in her 1993 essay collection titled—yes—Remote Control.
But of course, it’s the viewer, or the listener, who is holding the remote: I’ve got a remote, and I know how to use it. Everyday-life theorist Michel de Certeau is famous for arguing that consumption is itself a form of production, and that “the tactics of consumption, the ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong, thus lend a political dimension to everyday practices.” The legal doctrine of fair use describes a category of “transformative use,” in which materials appropriated from another source are made to signify differently in their new surroundings; de Certeau in effect describes a kind transformative consumption. The appropriative use pop musicians make of other sources is, at its best, transformative in just this way; Eric Weisbard describes pop music as “a field that often produces sublime work from suspect beliefs.” And the audiences for that music can practice a transformative consumption every bit as subversive: the entire emergent subgenre of the mash-up is one good example; YouTube lip-synch videos are another.
Leonard Diepeveen, in The Difficulties of Modernism, has carefully documented the process by which difficulty was transvalued from aesthetic fault to the sine qua non of the artistic; I’m interested in how the twentieth-century glorification of difficulty as an aesthetic criterion (perhaps the aesthetic criterion) has conditioned our uneasy acceptance of pop music. In the story Diepeveen tells, Robert Frost becomes the perverse test case for what to do with an artist whose work is not obviously difficult. Frost is literary modernism’s great pop artist: the poetry goes down easy. (His twin in the visual arts is, arguably, Norman Rockwell.) Another term for this, as we talked about yesterday, is the “guilty pleasure”: something we enjoy though we know we shouldn’t. Since modernism, it’s something we enjoy even though it’s “easy” (The Golden Girls, Kraft Easy Cheese, The Monkees). But in pop music, “guilty pleasure” is an oxymoron. And too much pop music criticism has gone off the rails trying to argue, counter-intuitively, that the best pop music is “difficult.” The Beach Boys’s “Good Vibrations” (1966) and Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” (2003) are both complex, even sophisticated, pop songs—but there’s nothing difficult about them. The pop artist puts a musical text into circulation (or repurposes and redeploys prior texts), but cannot hope to control the ways in which that music will be incorporated into the lives of its listeners.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now recognize that much of my popular music writing to date, including the pieces on pop music I’ve done over the past dozen years for the Chronicle of Higher Education, have been on just this topic: how, to paraphrase another theorist (this time, the rhetorician Kenneth Burke), we use pop music as “equipment for living.” I’m endlessly fascinated by the ways that music flows into and out of our everyday lives; the ways that pop music conditions our reactions and expectations, and to some extent ventriloquizes our reactions, to that part of our life we insist on calling “real.” Eric Weisbard, one of my models of a “pop-positive” popular music critic, has provocatively redefined “pop music” as a site of what he calls “commercialized pluralism”—which, in twenty-first century America, is perhaps the most powerful pluralism one could hope for.
I don’t have the sophisticated critical/theoretical tools that you do, Kevin. But if I understand your argument correctly, I basically agree with it. Just because something is complicated or obscure doesn’t mean that it is profound. Similarly, just because something is simple and clear doesn’t mean that it is vapid. One example of this problem is modern classical music, which seems to think that a piece must be unlistenable to normal ears to be interesting. There’s a similar problem in literature, where story-telling is devalued compared to “luminous” prose and other factors.
There is a danger in going too far in the other direction, however. Many individual products of pop culture (songs, TV shows, or whatever) truly are vapid. It’s possible to read way too much into these kinds of things. I remember an old satirical article from the 70′s that lampooned a fictional French critic who had written a book called “Jerry Lewis: The New Moliere.” Along the same lines, I thought much of the stuff written about Madonna in the 80′s was way, way over the top. There seems to be an equivalent Lady GaGa thing happening now.
I guess I would summarize my values by saying that pop culture taken as a whole is very important because it has such a broad impact. Individual products of that culture, on the other hand, are often far less important or interesting. Certainly, the Beatles were important (even Important). Herman’s Hermits, not so much.
I’ll apologize for what isn’t a deeply thought out response, but mostly questions that came up for me.
(Where) does intent – be it actual, assumed or apparent – factor in? Or does it? If you set out to make “serious” music and it is trivial and/or popular, is it appropriately “pop”?
While some might argue that virtually all of rock is pop, it seems to me that some of the invocation of “pop” as a put down accelerated in the latter 60′s and the 70′s as popular music embraced the album as something other than an aggregation of songs, and increasingly as a larger statement even when stopping short of “concept album,” “rock opera,” or “song cycle.” “Song” even became something of a bad word or code word for “pop” and you would often speak of “tracks,” “numbers,” “pieces,” or something. I started to note the unlikely terming of Yes tunes as “songs,” aside from their relatively early single tracks like “Roundabout,” and then realized that their first live album was titled “Yessongs” – irony, or Yes anticipating that I would make the goofy assertion I just made? Please, I don’t need reminded of “The Song Remains The Same” or other such album titles from non-pop artists.
Finally, what about the “Pops” concept in classical music? Does the unimpeachable classic become “pop” by fiat, or is it the packaging, presentation, and marketing of it with the other music that is “pop”?