(guest post - a reply to the previous post on poptimism and the culinary style of criticism)

but...the problem with any sort of firm, exclusionary commitment is not so much that single-mindedness bores or narrows the soul but rather that it's usually successful to the point of being self-undermining. because in fashioning a hard outline, clear definition for the thing you affirm, you seem to necessarily do the same for the thing you want to negate as its opposite: that other becomes so well delineated in its turn, so vivid as other, that you're ultimately, irresistibly drawn towards it. you cannot help falling for its singularity, now. and then looking back on your first commitment externally also seems to be to know it for the first time, and to be drawn back to it transformed.

so 'portfolios' or not there's a drift there towards more and more 'appreciation', but it can be thrilling, troubling and decentering, an involuntary process almost where you can lose yourself deliciously, rather than just a shrewd way of hedging bets.

and there's the dunked-in-the-deep-end exhilaration of sudden lurches: buying Cuban Linx cos the NME gave it a 9 and falling for it, but before that it was all Beach Boys, Buckley and Nick Drake; fishing Tres Hombres out the bins and all the air rushing into the room when u first play it; going on a huge excursion into classical precisely because it seems so forbidding and alien; ditching yr half-way-house country-rock classics and getting deep into Waylon, Tompall and Hag. it can become overly 'culinary' yeah, but you still produce yr own canons within each genre, each space of fandom ('cherry picking' but we all do!), and curiosity can be a powerful drive.

- the Ig

 I think for a lot of people, they don't want music to give them something more.

poptimism is agnostic hedonism - music isn't a cause, something to believe in, or even something to motivate you to action or get really obsessed about - it's just about enjoyment, pleasure, pleasantness. the thinking is that by diversifying your portfolio of taste, you a/ increase the total sum of pleasure in your life b/ you guard against disappointment, because if you're in multiple genres then if one goes off the boil, you can just shift to another genre. you can cream off the best bits of all genres.

poptimism as an initiative in the early 2000s was a deliberate attempt to take down the temperature of music discourse, literally to make it less feverish and fervour-ish. it was a move to remove the quasi-moralistic tone to pronouncements about music -  to instigate a strict separation of aesthetics and ethics

now that of course encouraged me to adopt a counter-stance - which was essentially my bi-polar, hot-cold instinctive / neurological approach to music, now defined as an articulated set of precepts. essentially rockism without guitars (or necessarily any relationship to rock as music). (except, except, that the resemblances between hard techno / jungle / crunk / whatever and rock are amply abundant and audibly obvious - Stooges, punk, many kinds of metal.,,, it's just the means of producing those intensities is different from the band set up.)

Breton had this line about the danger of art degenerating into the merely "culinary" and I do think that there's a lot of parallels between poptimist criticism (essentially a post-adolescent mode aka middle aged way of relating to music) and food writing. You wouldn't and couldn't moralize about food really - a meal is either enjoyable or it's interestingly bold / dissonant in its flavor profiles and techniques, or  it's a case of the dish fails. A lot of music writing of this era (2000s) largely consisted of spotting ingredients and assessing how successfully they are combined, the balance of textures and flavors.

Indeed there are all kinds of parallels between what happened with music in the 2000s and the whole rise of artisanal food (and other things - fragrances, soaps, all kinds of boutique 'finer things in life'), foodie-ism, food blogs, all the programs about cooking and baking, or equally, about interior design etc. I can remember the shock I got when I noticed that Whole Foods had started stocking vinyl, and then  almost immediately it was like, "oh, oh that makes perfect sense. Overpriced records / gourmet foods"

Another way of looking at poptimism its pleasure without desire (or at least without the burning libidinal drive of the adolescent, which is then sublimated into or conflated with music-lust). 

That 2000s phase of "culinary criticism" began to be eclipsed in the 2010s by a different approach - a kind of covert rockism concealed within an ostensibly ecumenical eclecticism and open-ness to all (not the nu-rockism I dreamed of about intensities, raptures, ruptures, etc - searched for and found all over the genrescape). This was not the pleasure-first poptimism either though, the solipsistic consumer ego reigning over its hedonic universe. This was pro-pop rockism: a worst of all worlds case, where you treat pop with the same solemn seriousness, left-liberal anxious guilt, and worthy wistful projected hopes that an earlier generation of (mostly American) rock critics went in for when writing about Springsteen or whoever ...  So that would entail taking a release by Beyonce, or Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, as a primarily a  text to be interpreted and morally evaluated: a set of political positions, persona shifts or career moves, or as a literary creation (characters, stories, statements, life wisdom)....  The drear business of  masterpiece-spotting.   

So people have gone back to wanting something more out of music than pleasure or thrills or intensities - they are looking for encouraging signs of the times, hope-ful resonances, an indexing of music to politics, or to a construable level of  Importance (i.e. artistic values that replicate the metrics by which literature or serious films have been judged).  

  “If one assumes -- as I do -- that in the future every home will become like a TV studio in which one is simultaneously writer, director and star of our own show… what is life? What is our existence except our own show? That home movie that we all live inside… it’s already started to some extent. It won’t be like ‘Crossroads’”  -- his smooth features produce a startlingly wolfish smile -– “it’ll be more like ‘Eraserhead’."

JG Ballard, interviewed by Charles Shaar Murray, 1983

 “Ageing is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been” 

- David Bowie.

There's a certain strain of argument being touted in which the extremities (global as well as musical) are where it's all happening--from freeform improv to Jap-core noise, from NZ drone-scapes to quirked out neo-Krautrock to Skullflower-style fuzzadelia. Apart from the insufferable cooler-than-thou attitude that often seems intrinsic to this stance, my aesthetic objection to all these initiatives is their tendency to end up as pure abstraction. And pure abstraction isn't really that interesting. You can't do anything with it, or to it--apart from just lie back and take it (in).

"A scribble effacing all lines" is how Deleuze & Guattari put in A Thousand Plateaux, talking of the tendency of avant-garde artists to reterritorialise around "the child, the mad, noise"--the aesthetic equivalent to such "fascist or suicidal" lifestyle choices as heroin addiction, terrorism or joining a cult. Musically, the quest for chaos can easily end up as a black hole of undifferentiated, maelstromic miasma--as vast as the cosmos maybe, but in the absence of any figure-ground perspective, it's effectively as claustrophobic as a cubby-hole.

I subscribe to the D&G/Manuel Delanda line that the most interesting work happens "on the edge of chaos". I'm interested in abstraction where it works as a component of a groove ('ardkore, darkside, techstep) or an element within an architectonics of audio-space (Chain Reaction). It's the thresholds, the intermediary zones, that are really magical -- melody bleeding into noise, songcraft struggling with psychedelics (My Bloody Valentine, Husker Du); distortion + raunch (Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic", Royal Trux's Cats and Dogs); the Bataillean excess and surplus-to-requirements extravagance working within and against the funktional minimalism (Prince, swingbeat); space + groove + timbre (Can, Neu!, Miles Davis, Seventies dub). Punk to funk, the ethos is the same: "restriction is the mother of all invention" (Holger Czukay). Extremism? Well, on what scale are we measuring here? Very little out-rock, avant-jazz, left-field electronica, etc. being perpetrated today really ranks with, let alone exceeds, the outer limits probed by the Sixties freeform brigades, electro-acousticians, and so forth. There's also the question of ego: so much out-rock or avant-improv seems to partake of the Expressionistic Fallacy (e.g. Caspar Brotzmann's scrofulously self-preening theatre of pain). This interferes with the listener's ability to derive machinic use-value from it. You just have to sit there and gasp in awe. It's about marveling at the Artist's depth and intensity of feeling, rather than using the music to trigger sensations and intensities in yourself. The impersonal, "objective" approach to constructing rhythmic engines or kinaesthetic audio-sculptures can create just as powerful feelings in the listener as the "subjective" school of Romantic outpouring creativity. The idea that the former is mere artisanship whereas the latter is true Art is, like, half a century out of date, at least. This is the age of the engineer-poet, the imagineer.

Although drum & bass can make some preposterous claims about its experimentalist reach, the truth is that its radicalism is always constrained with a quite rigid set of parameters: at any given season, certain kinds of bass-sound, certain kinds of breaks, and a specific tempo, are required by DJ's and dancers; invention takes place within and against those constraints. The resulting friction creates sparks. In hardcore dance scenes, constraints are a strength, not a liability. At the very least, these parameters are no less likely to produce strikingly listenable and intensity-productive results than the total absence of constraints. Extremism can be as fruitless as any musical stance; simply embarking with an experimental mindset does not guarantee results. Leaving the rhetoric of extremity for those still interested in playing the cool game (the fun wears off about a decade or so, lemme warn ya; there's always something more marginal and listener-unfriendly than whatever outer limit you set up shop upon) is a tremendous release. I can now confess that the song-oriented Faust IV is my favourite of their albums rather than the hipper Faust Tapes, that I prefer the boogie-fied crossover stab Clear Spot to Trout Mask Replica, that the almost-funky Strange Celestial Roads is my fave Sun Ra, that the Sly-and-Jimi influenced Seventies Miles pleasures me more than Ayler or AMM screeching to the converted. I can consign those Merzbow CD's to that cupboard marked "possibly someday, probably never".

 "When you’re researching, following up leads and tangents every-which-way, a strange hovering exultation can grip you. Trawling for data, marshaling the knowledge, pattern-recognizing and connection-making, there can be a sensation of heading towards a supreme moment of comprehension, in both the gathering-everything-together and breakthrough-to-higher-understanding sense: where the forest and the trees can both be apprehended clearly.  More often than not, though,  fusion reverts to confusion: that feeling of imminent omniscience collapses, leaving just a clutter of knowledge-scraps, like an unfinished or gone-too-far collage"-- 

Olga Teer, from Datapanik in the Year 3000: Euphoria, Overload, and Modalities of Self in Networked Culture, ed. Mosi Drensloyn (Routledge, 2005)

" I don't want to be king, I want to be real."

- John Lennon 

"The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main program of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalize us in a way, like being put in a corner. 

"[Change will come] only by making the workers aware of the really unhappy position they are in, breaking the dream they are surrounded by. They think they are in a wonderful, free-speaking country. They've got cars and tellies and they don't want to think there's anything more to life. They are prepared to let the bosses run them, to see their children fucked up in school. They're dreaming someone else's dream, it's not even their own."

- John Lennon