Important Issues

[twoheaded_boy]

I haven't bothered linking to any of it til now, since I assumed that if you were interested, you'd already be following it, but the debate about race, class, and bohemia in indie rock that started with Sasha Frere Jones' piece for the New Yorker (and really took off with Carl Wilson's response piece for Slate) just keeps getting better

Comments

[martropolitan]

As somebody (maybe Kogan) said, it's good to see these issues being brought together. It's really about commodification, isn't it - professionalization and middleclassing of the sound still roughly and wrongly known as indie certainly is: "This can be my career

[martropolitan]

On the other hand, maybe I just need to stop working for the gubmint, and going out to shows again, and thinking about real things instead of bureaucracy things, and then downloading music and eating hardboiled eggs until your stomach ruptures and preparing Minister's letters and reading my friends page compulsive handwashing and that thing in the cliche mental hospital where someone is pouring tea over the side of the cup will stop seeming so terrifyingly like the exact same activity.

[twoheaded_boy]

I was just about to say: you okay? You sound rather dispirited.

but thanks for caring

[martropolitan]

Naaaaaaaw, shit yo. Just livin' in incredibly complex times right now and sometimes it gets you down at 3 AM after some hard drinkin'. Then other times, morning times, you get on with the work of change.

I think what actually put a fine point on it all for me was this passage (from The Dictionary of Critical Theory, of all places):

"reification: From the Latin res ('thing') and facere ('to make'); to make a thing, or to make into a thing . . . According to Lukacs, the nature of a modern capitalist society is such that commodity fetishism extends to all fields of human activity, including consciousness itself. As labour and the commodities in which it is embodied take on an illusory autonomy, human activity becomes passive or contemplative in the face of the apparently autonomous exchange of commodities that appear to have been divorced from the social relations in which they are produced. The only form of consciousness that can escape and transcend reification is the active collective consciousness that is embodied in the

[racan]

I thought the new Destroyer tuneage was fabulous. I'm glad one of your friends liked my speech too!

[kid_eh]

your speech was ace! i also found it ironically hilarious that the crowd got particularly unruly and inattentive during one of the parts about Scratch staff tolerating the unwashed masses.

[racan]

Thanks! Keith Parry told me there was a guy behind me who kept yelling, "stop preaching, man, pick up your guitar!" Pretty much as can be expected, I suppose. I'm glad a few people understood what I was hoping to get across.

[vertigomorts]

Every time you mention Momus favourably, another year falls off the end of our friendship.

[vertigomorts]

Also, I read that SFJ piece awhile ago and forgot to recommend it to you, which is the first thing I had in mind. Shoulda known you'd find it on your own. Do you want to come to the Unicorn tonight to watch Jon play?

[twoheaded_boy]

i would come down, except that i'm going to see mia tonight.