text:
urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot Frank Kogan Frank Kogan email@example.com Frank Kogan 2016-09-25T22:26:30Z urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:361658 Way To Go 2016-09-25T22:11:46Z 2016-09-25T22:26:30Z Crayon Pop "Vroom Vroom" New Crayon Pop.

Advance single "Vroom Vroom"
<lj-embed id="949" />

About perfect: Light splashy Italodisco, a boat ride past small islands. Writer and (I think) lead singer Way adds enough ache to give this a promise of passion, a hint of adventure.

Album teaser, Evolution Vol. 1
<lj-embed id="950" />

First 8 tracks, I guess; 17 are due, 10 all new. Track 2 has interesting promise, as if it's early-mid Sixties girl group morphing into soul, or early Eighties Britain burnishing up that sound so that it glistens. Or something different; it's only several seconds. Track 6 is on a different Sixties borderline, like the Animals grabbing at teen tragedy and creating a venomous adult wail — not that I expect Crayon Pop to get close to venom, or to full slaughterhouse wailing. Probably will just be nice woman dancing into the distance, leaving small pangs of dust to glint in the sunlight.

Title Track Single "Doo Doom Chit"
<lj-embed id="951" />

Track gallops and kicks right out of the gate. So much for my impression from the teaser that it'd go down a tad too easy.* In fact it's so pushy and crowded I'm having trouble disentangling it. The beat seems to be battling the atmospherics, while Crayon Pop prance steadfastly forward. Strong, but I don't know if I know how to hear it.

Anyone want to tell me how you're hearing it?

h/t David Frazer for the alert, and the post title.

*"There's a powerful monomaniacal repetition at 9 seconds in that lasts for two-and-a-half seconds ('Shaky shaky shaky HAH!' or something like that) which potentially upends or punks up the song in a good way. The rest at first listen goes down a tad too easy, though I like the flimsy discarded-cardboard drum-like sound that propels the track." urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:361404 I Knew My Tribe Was Something To Do With Music (Stop Using The Word "Tribal," Pt. 2) 2016-09-11T21:32:56Z 2016-09-14T08:59:16Z The Slits "Newtown" Have this and at least another post to add to my previous discussion of "tribal." I'll reiterate right now that the term "tribal" when used for modern social identity is very wrong, and you shouldn't use it unless you're referring to actual tribes or clans.* But I do want to take better stock of the positive appeal of the term, why people reach for it and aren't readily coming up with alternatives.

One quick answer is that, especially for those who apply it to themselves, "tribe" is a much warmer term than "class" is, is much warmer than any other available term except for "family," in fact is in use precisely because it suggests a family-like bond but can be used for groups larger than the family, can be used for strangers with whom one might nonetheless sense a strong attachment, a feeling of being potentially at home with them — but "tribe" also carries the potential of leaving you alone and apart and under threat when you're not with your tribe or family but are instead dumped into what feels like someone else's, or in a shack in that family's back yard, or you're born into the wrong one.

So "tribe" here feels more emotionally apt than the other available terms and doesn't have the negative connotations that adhere to words like "clan" or "caste" or "ethnic group" or "religion" or "nation."

Prior to reading my first post, Mark Sinker, who was busy celebrating his birthday instead, emailed me this comment based on the title and the first few sentences:

On Friday I was interviewing and filming my old friend Liz Naylor... She was describing how the rock press in the 70s — and the free press and the alt press and the zine press — were her substitute for going to university, basically. She came from a suffocatingly cloistered working-class home in Hyde, which is a small satellite town of Manchester (also world capital of serial killers: the Moors Murderers and Harold Shipman). She grew up in a house with no books; no access to "culture" in the sense of films or music or art or anything. School was no help: it just amplified the announcement that if any of this stuff exists — books or films or music or art — it is NOT FOR THE LIKE OF YOU, LIZ. In desperation, she set off for libraries, independent bookshops and record shops, Fall gigs etc. The rock press, she says, is "how I located my tribe" — meaning (at first bite) other feminist lesbians of mischievous punky bent, committed to a lifelong battle with self-destructive urges, and (at second) always somewhat in truculent contention with any group she appears to be declaring herself part of.

If she'd said "The rock press is how I located my class," it would immediately have necessitated a second level of explanation: because surely (or anyway at first listen) her "class" is what she was ESCAPING from.
My immediate response to Mark, unsurprisingly, was that her family is what Liz was escaping from as well, and also "This is how I located my tribe" is akin to "This is how I located my self" (via locating my true kin in opposition to my mere biological kin), this is where I live, this is true vibrancy. Whereas, "This is how I located my class," would've missed this resonance, that she'd found her home, her people, "class" being too obviously contingent, being somewhere she's stuck, maybe, or something she might leave or lose — contingent of course being EXACTLY WHERE SHE IS, imo. (Her "truculent opposition" might be precisely because she feels a familial bond, hence somewhat trapped again, but (also) might be because she's not in a class but in class systems, which give us the background feeling that we're behaving out of continual choice and that locations are precarious.) "Tribe" is false here, but it is in use precisely because it seems to explain the socioemotional pull of the group.

Fwiw, this is one way social mobility happens, through the leaving and finding of cultures.

One thing about actual tribes is that they're fundamentally not a choice. Maybe in some instances you could defect from one tribe to another, or one tribe could split off from another; but my assumption is that mostly you were either born into one or you married into it, with occasional people being kidnapped into it.

Liz made a heartfelt choice, almost a romantic one, like modern marriage — but in a sense by calling it a tribe she cast it as not a choice: perhaps the tribe she discovered would have been her one-and-only tribe even had she not discovered it. Without it, she'd have wandered in the wilderness. Those were her people, even if she hadn't found them. Of course, like modern romantic marriage, she could actually go through a break up, and likely will, likely did. But when she found it, it felt like forever.

Actually, in a clip that went up on Mark's Kickstarter site, what she says is, "there was just this real sense of survival, of needing to kind of go out in the world and find my tribe, find my people," which is a bit different from saying "how I located my tribe": the first makes it a search, puts the tribe in her future, with perhaps a sense of creativity, not just looking for her tribe but helping to bring one into existence. (This makes my riff above on the "one-and-only" even more questionable than it already was, since Liz may never have exactly found her "tribe." Mark says, "i'd have to check if elsewhere she says she found her tribe — i think she did mention it more than once." Also, "she's using the word slightly flippantly anyway (to mean, 'it's absurd to imagine such a thing could exist but what else do i call it?')."**

* * *

The next post will return to what got me going last time, the use of the term "tribal" by  Krugman, Klein,  DeLong et al. to identify problems, "tribe" not being altogether a pejorative, but "tribal" being used to connote an impediment, something that prevents people from seeing clearly and acting for the overall public or general benefit.***

But in the meantime I'm pasting in the rest of my email convo with my buddies Mark Sinker, Luc Sante, Don Allred, and John Wójtowicz:

LUC SANTE (referring to my urging people not to use the word "tribal"): Right on, Frank. Note that the trope will soon be celebrating its 50th birthday.

[Inserts "Gathering of the Tribes" poster from 1966]

DON ALLRED: I've always dug Dick Dale's album title Tribal Thunder, and probably used it in a review or preview, but only when totally justified (I hope)

MARK SINKER: [See above for the start of what he wrote about Liz. This follows.] Now maybe we do indeed need to remove a word from the language to engender this discussion: to properly explore the difference between the social group you're born into and the social group you discover affinity with and move away towards as a teenager (or possibly earlier, but absent books etc you don't have the means physically to move out and about at a pre-teen age). The difference between the class you seem to belong to before you can read, and the class you feel you belong to afterwards (the role of literacy in class formation/recognition is very large, and very under-discussed in my opinion). But I was filming Liz for quick words on-screen that everyone would understand — she knew that "located my tribe" with a rueful twinkle would, given what she'd already been saying and the context of the film, be immediately apprehendable in a way that other words likely weren't. (Not least bcz this was a reference to a particular time in located social history = the late 70s in the UK, when the notion of "subcultural tribes" was widespread, and that too had to be got across quickly and effectively.)

In other words, the context was not one where proper deep exploration was being called for. The joke use — semi-joke use — of "tribe" was a signal that yes, we both know we're taking shortcuts here.

I can't really push back too strongly against the "delete a word from the lexicon" tactic, since it's exactly what I argued for re "influence": stop using it, say what you're saying another way. Obviously to me the more simpatico subject-head for this email is "In modern political and social groupings, there's NO SUCH THING AS A TRIBE"

I am seeing Adam Ant on Friday, recreating KINGS OF THE WILD FRONTIER, to write abt same for maura mag and for my book. "Tribal" was quite specifically a term that Adam (and also Bow Wow Wow) were playing with in the early 80s, picked up from Malcolm McLaren, probably. McLaren had zero interest in sociological precision, of course — he wanted to fuck things up.

Currently my title for the Adam book is WILD FRONTIERS: ADAM ANT AND THE WAR OF POP ON ROCK

so all of this is germane

FRANK: Interestingly, Luc and Don and Mark all immediately lit on positive uses of "tribe," whereas I was fundamentally addressing the pejorative, the attempt to use "tribal" as an explanation for why WE believe in global warming and THEY don't and why they won't listen to reason, etc,, cause their tribe forbids it and this tribalism colonizes or cannibalizes their brain. So I'm aiming my broadside at the Kleins and the Krugmans, who are struggling against this so-called tribalism and who need to understand better what they're actually struggling against. That said, the positive use has flaws that are complementary to the negative. [This followed by a lot of the stuff I printed above.]

DON: I'll read it all, but already thinking of the wry, wistful, prob provisional way Liz is using it (maybe thinking of the Slits cavorting in "native" gear for photogs, re the punky feminist mischief Mark references re what young Liz was going for) vs. the more literal way it can be used by political commentators (left and right), which tends to reduce and harden and dismiss — "They're just Different, whattayagonnado." Saw a book at library yesterday: Neurotribes. Will take a look.

Oh yeah, and review-wise especially, would be good to get away "tribe," "niche," etc. and directly specify which affinity group etc (also, as much as word count will allow, away from gen ref to other artist—— for instance, being seeing Prince mentioned a lot, starting way before he died, but with no indication of how the reviewed music/muso actually pertains to any Princely elements, individually or in config, or Princely vibe) (Maybe worse: the mention of Prince etc. to give added value/significance) (I've done it both ways, must cut back)

LUC: It seems to me there are many strands here — too many divergent (sometimes convergent) uses of the word. The identification with Native Ams etc. (from Human Be-In to the Slits) looks embarrassing now in the era of callouts for cultural appropriation (I have a young friend who attends ultra-PC Hampshire, where a kid on his floor was officially reprimanded for c.a. for looking like a wigga). And I agree that "class" is very often what is actually meant. But often in my own life I've used "tribe" in a way that is similar but not identical to Liz's use, not just as a sociocultural grouping but as something like non-blood family. When I say, as I have (not recently), that I didn't find my "tribe" until I went to college, I'm not referring merely to tastes and beliefs and inclinations but to something deeper than that — to people who gave me a feeling of belonging that I never got from my family or friends or classmates in earlier years. And I find myself (wordlessly) still thinking that way about a dozen or so people at the core of my life. Okay, I guess I say "my people."

MARK: Wild frontier-era adam is going to be fun to write abt in "cult app" terms, tho I have a line developing

I have seen young ppl furiously angry abt the "gang of four" for example

FRANK (regarding Liz): But damn it, it's a class, even if it's a somewhat ad hoc one, and her choosing it was partly owing to the way her parents cast her choices. They couldn't have been merely working class but rather a particular antiintellectual take on working class that consciously or subconsciously rejected the British and European tradition of working-class intellectualism (I don't know how strong it is, but it's certainly stronger than any equivalent in the U.S., where it is near nonexistent) and I'm guessing were afeared of cultural diversity as well. And she consciously chose mobility, and found an alternative class that she could culturally master, a class that actually wielded power and had relations to other classes. It sounds like she found a variant on what in 1987 I was calling a musical marginal intelligentsia, one without much income but with a lot of influence nonetheless, enough to push music in a PBS direction, I was claiming then; and a question I was starting to ask myself was from where in the culture at large did this musical marginal intelligentsia derive its authority: a question that the word "tribal" is totally unhelpful in answering.

[Regarding the wigga kid: Inserting this now, not part of the original email chain. Don't want to go too much into what Hampshire did to that kid, 'cause this'd detour our conversation; but on its face it seems vastly more embarrassing and fucked-up than the Slits or Be-Ins, which were naïve and are now horrifically dated but were never attempts to bully or scapegoat people. Not that I know that that's what Hampshire was doing, as I'm getting this from a brief parenthetical sentence at third remove and don't know the event at all. But to my jerking knee it sure feels like Hampshire was bullying that kid.

Why are the academic left such chumps when it comes to politics? Do they even want to be politically effective? Do they have a clue?

If Hampshire were serious, the "obvious" solution would not be to suppress the wigga but to recruit and accept 15 or so Rick Ross hip-hop types — Ross's core fans (the black ones, at any rate) — in each of the next four freshman classes. For all I know the Hampshire admissions people have been doing exactly that already — what do I know about Hampshire these days? — except I believe I know they haven't: even with Hampshire's nontraditional mandate, Rick Ross types aren't being recruited; and no guidance people anywhere in any high school are directing them towards Hampshire; and if the admissions people guaranteed acceptance they couldn't find fifteen who would go, anyway.

(Luc said "wigga," so I'm assuming Rick Ross is more relevant here than, say, backpack, if "backpack" is still a term. But what do I know about backpack these days? Or Rick Ross? According to Wikip, he went to college on a football scholarship at Albany State University in Georgia. Also worked as a corrections officer for 18 months, a fact that Wikip says he tried to suppress. And maybe Ross is passé compared to any hip-hop guy our college kid might be listening to.)]

[EDIT: Of course, the school I work at (ECE through 8th grade) suppresses gang insignia, so maybe Hampshire is doing something similar — okay, that's a gag, ha ha ha, but maybe it isn't. Again, I don't know anything about the actual incident. E.g., it could be "concern about cultural appropriation" functioning as a mask for somewhat different class and cultural conflicts, but I don't know this; and anyway, that's probably too coherent an analysis.]

DON: Discussion of choosing/changing one's sense of class reminds me of a song on the Rave-Ups' expanded reissue, Town and Country: "Class Tramp" starts like a cheerful, Kinksy sneer at Mr. Middle Class Salary Whore, but then the singer takes a look in the mirror, looking like Dad, he's a Class Tramp too. Still cheerful, he doesn't say "hipster," not in '86, but he's got hip tastes, maybe hipper than Dad's, and doing whatever it takes to feed the tweed: he's a high Class Tramp, strutting his stuff.

DON (again): Fairly amazing presentation of new Dave H. collection, preceded by brisk, though sometimes amazed, backstory of controversy:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-inside-outsider-on-dave-hickeys-criticism

JOHN WÓJTOWICZ: "Art exists for a world in which people are essentially different from each other, especially from those they are supposed to resemble because of social category or identity group."

Thanks a lot. That's led me to this:
http://www.tribes.org/web/2006/10/01/interveiw-with-david-hickey

DON (in regard to my June "tribal" post): So far, most struck by this:My concern again is that "tribe" and "tribal identity" are being used as explanations rather than being treated as the phenomena that need to be explained

Which goes w my prev. email response
the more literal way it can be used by political commentators (left and right), which tends to reduce and harden and dismiss——"They're just Different, whattayagonnado.

Also, your comments on how choice can lead to restraint reminds me of Frith writing something to the effect that leisure can become work, though not labor — not a paid job, for inst, but a paid-for pursuit, the anxiety of collecting, leisure with a minimum of pleasure, in some cases documented in some of the more anxious ILM posts (for instance)

But "class" would be problematic as a replacement for "tribe" in gen discourse, because it immediately brings up associations with economic issues, incl. effects of status; when drunk, a Film major once confided to me: "My Daddy ran a garage and your Daddy was white collar; I find myself thinking about that, can't help it sometimes." Even though his Daddy quite probably out-earned my Daddy at least some of the time (running a garage is trickier now; mechanics keep having to learn more about computers). And he was a Film major, so (though this partially explained some murky alibis for anxious and shady behavior) he was presumably not too cowed by practical working class considerations.

Which could def fit w Liz wanting to push past received constraints, 'til she's set free to find a new illusion, in Frankian trajectory, I take it, but still "class" gets used/taken reductively (as does "tribe"): for a while, "It's not race, it's class — raise incomes, create jobs" — ignoring instances of arrested for driving expensive cars while black, for inst.

MARK: more thoughts (based on writing abt adam ant):

the self-identifying template for UK punk and its multi-genre aftermath = d.bowie's line from diamond dogs: "and ten thousand peoploids split into small tribes"

a book i haven't read (but i suppose should) = dick hebdige's SUBCULTURE AND THE MEANING OF STYLE (1979)

my one-sentence review (based on not having read it) is that he is deploying "subculture" to mean what "tribe" does in the bowie line

the splitting — and more to the point the yearning to be seen as part of such a splitting — is the thing that needs explanation: my guess is that hebdige doesn't adequately provide this explanation, since a lot of people read this book in the early 80s and yet no such explanation entered the collective discourse these people were contributing to.

DON: The Film major mention was intended as an example of self-reduction, along w the glib use of "class not race" by neo-etc; also, anyone who said, "Me and my class like to do this" (replacing "tribe") might be taken as inflating status-y awareness/hipness/placement, re social mapping and so on.

MARK: adding (re hebdige) that i did read his book on reggae, which was kind of terrible

LUC: I tried reading both books (still possess Cut 'n' Mix), but my theory dictionary seems to never have arrived from the publisher, so I open a page and the wordlike glyphs just slide down.

DON: "and the yearning to be seen as part of such a splitting": this seems key! Mitosis and mutation rah-rah. I like "subculture," though seems a bit hefty and old school (60s campusy) for vernacular use now — hell I still like "counterculture," or "counter" something—— "my counterlife," we all need one. But I like to use "clique" too, with high school connotation — but do the kids get that nowadays? Can't leave out the kids! Hey kids—? Eh?

MARK: i like claque: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claque

LUC: It was a paid job! Today we call such people rebloggers.

DON: "my subcult"?

FRANK (upon finding an actual Liz Naylor quotation): Interesting that, at least in this segment of the interview, she's speaking not of having located her tribe, as Mark remembered it (perhaps she says that elsewhere, not streamed), but of needing to go out in the world and find her tribe, so the tribe being foreseen and somewhat conceptualized by her prior to being located. (I wonder if "tribe" and "people" were terms she had originally, or ones she got to later in life.)

I also remember the word "community" somewhere in her clips.

Regarding "needing to go out in the world and find my tribe," there's an interesting analogy to be drawn to my idea — sent it in Notes On Social Class to Dave and Mark sometime in 2011 — that prior to Elvis the overall culture was already somewhat opening up a space for someone like him. And a related question from some followup notes — where did the '60s freaks get their authority? — is conceptualized along the same lines: Freaks (and beatniks etc.) embodied what had been "impulses" and "urges" (scare quotes) that were already incipient prior to them among the socs and the hoods, tendencies both illicit and valorized — as representing deviance and independence, screwing-up and integrity, failure and freedom, the authority coming from the latter term in each pair but accruing to the former as well.**** I'm surmising that for Liz the implicit message (in Mark's words), "Not for the likes of you," when it comes to books and ideas, worked as a proscription to becoming an Oxford don, but in pop the Beatles and freaks and later the glamsters etc. had already breached that proscription and opened up the idea of alternative pathways. And by the time she got to high school (or whatever they call it there*****) the cultural "impulses" and "urges" were hypothesizing a social space that was more "thoughtful" and "realistic" than that occupied by the freaks, some of the freaks themselves hypothesizing a smarter freakdom than the one they were stuck in. So her inkling of something out there matches up with inklings in the broader culture of what should be out there, a space that's getting explored by Roxy Music and NME (and, where available, Village Voice and Creem and Stooges and defunct but feted Velvets) and all that's rushing in afterwards.

MARK: knowing her as i have for 30-odd years the answer would (at best) be "yes-but-no" i think, and she's using the word slightly flippantly anyway (to mean, "it's absurd to imagine such a thing could exist but what else do i call it?")
<lj-embed id="948" />

*Is "tribe" even the right word for tribes? That'll also be briefly taken up in a future post, the potential lumping together of disparate social forms and social groups in one category — not just "tribe," but "Latino" and so on. —"Cultural appropriation," though, isn't my beef with the word "tribal." The word's mainly being used as a metaphor, anyway; the problem is that it's the wrong metaphor. See the June "tribal" post for part one of my beef.

**Longer quote:

I had this sense somehow that there was this, loads of information out there, there was loads of interesting things in the world, and, you know, I kind of didn't know how to get to it. I think I sort of knew my own world was, felt a bit impoverished... I think there was just this real sense of survival, of needing to kind of go out in the world and find my tribe, find my people. That's easier said than done in Hyde, because it really was, there was one shop that stocked music press.
Later in the clip:

"I knew my tribe was something to do with music."

***I am hoping this post will inform that one, the sense that "familial" or "tribal" bonds feel harder to break than do "class" ones, that families and tribes claim more allegiance — even though these aren't actual familial or tribal bonds, we're not as attached or forced into them, and they're continually broken, though without this breakage necessarily helping us to move onward from the world they give us: the social systems tend to hold us even though the group identifications don't.

****E.g. Bob Dylan "She knows there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."

*****She mentions "grammar school," which in England is a type of secondary school, whereas in American usage the term refers to elementary school (roughly ages 6 through 11), the term now fading out. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:361201 Imagine a room when you stretch a rod diagonally up to the opposite ceiling corner (Miles and Pete) 2016-09-05T14:57:05Z 2016-09-05T15:02:00Z Muddy Waters "Herbert Harper's Free Press News" Hoisted from lj comments, a couple of paragraphs I'd forgotten I'd written, 4 years ago, upon the death of Pete Cosey:

To me mid-'70s Miles caused as much a revolution in my idea of what sound could be as anything did short of James Brown and Richard Meltzer; so it's on the order of dub or hip-hop in making me rethink. Don't have good words for the rethink, it dating from around 1978. But let's say that one was previously thinking of music as made of rhythms and melodies (not necessarily how I thought of it in my life, but as a musician I was trying to get good with rhythms and melodies), and maybe chord progressions and harmony, though I was never all that competent with those. And "call-and-response," which in my mind symbolized the idea of notes in interaction, musicians in interaction. But with Miles I was getting an expanse of "space," though since music unfolds in time this space is mostly temporal. But imagine a room, and what happens when you stretch a rod from a floor corner diagonally up to the opposite ceiling corner and then start hanging cloth from the rod. The room is divided differently, it could be several rooms now. Anyway, I think of Miles as creating a space and then in a couple of seconds reorganizing it with a horn blast here and a wah-wah squiggle there, so there's constant reorganization even while the funk rumbles on. I also had in my mind the image of the sound running forward and then suddenly halting, leaving kinetic energy in the silent space that follows (and rarely would the sounds stop all at once; a particular instrument would stop unexpectedly, and this absence would help shape our perception of how the rest of the sound seemed).

From Donald Creamer (On The Corner) and Pete Cosey I could hear something that wasn't limiting its sense of possibilities to what the chords and the melodies seemed to invite; so we'd get notes or riffs that could feel like streamers, or like jets of paint...
I'd say it was Davis far more than Cosey who was responsible for this reorganization, but Pete Cosey's on my mind because of an article in Premier Guitar (Tzvi Gluckin, "Forgotten Heroes: Pete Cosey"). Among other things, it sent me to these performances. I hadn't known that Cosey was the lead guitarist on Electric Mud, an album I'd passed over when it came out. I'd assumed, possibly correctly, that it was a sound that Chess had forced on Muddy.* So, hearing this for the first time; some of it's stunning.

<lj-embed id="945" />

<lj-embed id="946" />

And here's a link to Melvin Gibbs' "Canto por Odudua" near the end of Cosey's life.

http://music.melvin-gibbs.com/track/canto-por-odudua-feat-pedrito-martinez-and-pete-cosey

h/t Andrew Klimeyk.

*At age 14, I think I conflated Chess's campaign for Electric Mud with one at the same time for Howlin' Wolf's This Is Howlin' Wolf's New Album. He Doesn't Like It. He Didn't Like His Electric Guitar At First Either. Cosey's on that one as well, which I also need to listen to. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:360841 Days Of Future Posts 2016-08-16T00:07:08Z 2016-08-16T16:02:41Z HyunA "How's This?" So many days, so few posts.

Look, I'm really a comment-thread guy more than a blog guy, but making supposedly correct triage decisions not to engage in various Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, etc. convos has left me w/out much public presence, while creating a lot of "notes" for posts here I should "write."

Not in the order they will, could, might, or won't appear:

--Grand opening for the hallway-classroom link and tag. I created them several months ago but have so far never properly introduced or promoted them. Perhaps there will be a banner and balloons.

--Tribal 2, the strong reasons people probably have for using the term "tribal" in a positive sense, like, regarding themselves even (which still doesn't mean you should use the word if you intend to engage in actual for real smart thinking, esp. pertaining to current political and social grouping(s)).

--Tribal 3, the strong reasons people like Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Ezra Klein, and a vast ever-multiplying et al. including probably you use the term "tribal" as a pejorative to denote one of the many things that fuck up and make stupid the current political etc. discourse (which still doesn't mean you or Krugman, DeLong, Klein, et al. should use the word if you intend to engage in actual for real smart thinking regarding current political and social grouping(s)). Paraphrases Upton Sinclair.

--Dead Lester 3. Yes, everyone is clamoring for this. </sarcasm>

--Dead Lester 4. One of the Dead Lester posts will be about why I think Paul Nelson never adequately responded to Irwin Silber. This post will be better received than the other one.

--Replication, in regard to understanding the utterances etc. of human beings other than oneself and perhaps other than yourself, too. This will be fun, I hope. It may refer back to the Mark Sinker adjunct thread that for a couple of years now I've been promising to add more to. The post may or may not refer to The Crisis Of Replication in the so-called social sciences, though that part of the post may be less fun.

--HyunA.

--Oh My Girl wtf. ("Windy Day.")

--Cahiers du Cinema, Manny Farber. This post will not be as interesting as you were anticipating.

--Who is our most distant animal relative? This post will not answer the posed question, instead will be a meta meditation on taking sides, developing a rooting interest, etc., in which I will try to endeavor not to take sides or root for anything, except maybe will root for rooting and for taking sides, despite my failure to take sides, or root, in the post, unless I do take sides.

--That political discourse appears to batter through, demolish, and utterly flatten the wall between hallway and classroom while being the stupidest, most screwed-up, and destructive discourse in the world would seem to create a challenge to my assertion that (e.g.) rockcrits are being audacious and intellectually strong in not honoring the boundary between hallway and classroom. (The previous sentence leans heavily on the phrases "appears to" and "would seem to.")

--Is there a way for mathematics to finally click for me so that I might someday actually get it and enjoy it? (See the middle of Dave's post, here.)

--Yardbirds raveups.

--Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm." (Inspired by Edd Hurt's excellent comments on the "Antirockism Is Rockism" thread.)

--Interesting that Mark says "even the Ramones" (all bands being coalitions) given that the Ramones may be the epitome of a Bowie-Roxy-like "Oh oh oh, look look look, see the disparate elements we are combining," e.g., "See us do power chords with Ronettes melodies" and "Watch us do Dylan existential angst as if it's standard teen heartbreak" or "Watch us do Stones confronting-the-inner-fascist as dumb three-chord la-la-la" etc. etc. (This is a passage from a 4,000-word, rambling, very poorly integrated email I wrote and never sent because I hadn't finished it or remotely come close to figuring out what I was saying; perhaps a readable 1,500 words can be extracted from this. Potentially featuring Earth, Wind & Fire and the Pointer Sisters, who actually appear on a Kantner-Slick song.)

--Is "Only The Good Bits" as bad as "Too Many Bad Bits"? (Perhaps in regard to Paul Morley, and perhaps a continuation of PBS Revisited.)

--Why do we remember the past but not the future?

--Truffaut and Kogan (more of PBS Revisited).

--Wittgenstein doesn't buy into the dichotomy between particulars and universals. (This probably can be applied to the replication thing, now that I think about it.)

--Copernicus.

--I'm a comment-thread guy. I practically invented the comment thread. So why are even the good comment threads so killingly mediocre? Why is the Internet such a disappointment? urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:360659 Quick Before It Vanishes (discovering Paul Morley) 2016-07-24T15:11:17Z 2016-07-24T15:46:49Z Tight Fit "Fantasy Island" Trying to drum up interest in Mark's UK rockwrite anthology (which needs to happen, Kickstarter here, quick, only 3 days left) by reengaging controversies from last year's Freaky Trigger thread on the Overground/Underground conference. Posted comments on Paul Morley (here, here, and here), whose work I'm now just starting to explore. Excerpts from my comments:

Okay, Morley's 1982 "Quick Before They Vanish" piece, let's see how it operates. It courts and uses our response, e.g. wants us to balk at his claim to like everything (no one likes everything; that's not what liking is about) and wants us to compare ourselves to those people who are into only the Pop Group, one side of a Roland Kirk LP, and just the best bits of Sandinista. Also, while the specificity, Pop Group–half-Kirk–bits o' Sandinista, bring such people to life, we're to recognize that they're a type and they're hyperbole, so it can be similar artists not those three in particular and there might be five not three, or 105 or 505, the important attribute being the progressive discernment and diminishment, from a group down to a side down to only the good bits.

Morley's tone has a certain uncertainty; there's no hesitance, it's a strong commanding voice that relies on us to amplify its doubts.

He starts, "when people ask me what music I like… I say 'everything.'" I think he's trying to imply that, whatever their restrictions, the charts, for at least the moment, carry a message of everything, that they are somehow open to more than they'll ever contain, and you can't ever be sure what they'll contain. In any event he likes everything, but then of course he immediately, deliberately contradicts this: it turns out not only doesn't he like everything, here off the bat is this Genesis song at #10 that he can't stand. So now that's the challenge, does his "I like everything" manage to prosper nonetheless? Morley hates the next song too, Charlene's "I've Never Been To Me." "It's a great feeling, isn't it, to hate things?" He's performing a quick martial arts wrist flick, so it's not "I like Genesis and Charlene after all" but I like hate and I like that Genesis's and Charlene's presence here gives me the opportunity to hate them. By implication, this could also be standing on behalf of the bad bits of Sandinista. If Sandinista were all good would it be as good?

(Okay, here's something the piece isn't stating, and if it's implying it this may be inadvertent: but, if we'd be diminished without the opportunity to hate Genesis, we're also diminished without the opportunity to put the Pop Group–Kirk–Sandinista Bits people in their place. They broaden Morley's story just as much as Genesis and Charlene do. So we can say that — obviously — Morley includes these people in the story. But I don't think we can meaningfully say the charts include them in their story.)

Going forward, the Charts are a genre "in a world of its own, pleasured by its own making, but not a deceitful alternative to reality." So, he's anticipating that possibly in my mind — possibly in his own — anyway, in someone's — there is the idea of the charts as a deceitful alternative to reality. But rather, he's saying, it's a fantastical reordering of the world, "a strange arrangement of facts and fictions," neither a fake picture of the world nor an evasion of it, just its own playpen and odds-and-ends store, maybe. (But are these the only choices, and can't it include elements of all these things, great inventions and hurtful lies, harmful escapism and daring escapes?)

He makes the brief point that he "wouldn't want a chart oozing with Haircut 100s, but certainly they can get their 1/30th of it." This point seems unnecessary, because he's already told us the chart's an everything, not a one thing. But the point turns out necessary after all, since it sets up Morley's concern over Duran Duran taking up 1/30th of the chart — so finally, though it's a bare hint between the lines, and not nearly enough of a hint, we've arrived at the question of whether and how what's on the charts is freezing out what isn't. And Morley is hinting a potential affinity with the Pop Group–half-Kirk–Sandinista people after all. Maybe we should get rid of some bad bits.

To refute this, Morley, and the charts, next give us Tight Fit, whose "Fantasy Island" with its range and variety (that's how Morley hears it) compensates for Duran Duran. This is a pretty weak retort, actually. A stronger argument is made via assonance: "Duran Duran are ridiculously bland… Tight fit are a ridiculous blend." So Duran Duran have made a useful contribution after all, at least to this piece. (But this doesn't come close to relieving the discord in my mind. I'm sure Morley's fine with letting such discord stand — discord's a thing, too — but he should have given the discord a way louder voice.)

Question: He claims the 12-inch of "Fantasy Island" is actually better than Led Zeppelin III. Is this a straight-up compliment, that he likes Led Zeppelin III but thinks "Fantasy Island" outdoes it? But what is the comparison? That Led Zeppelin are a ridiculous blend (which is kind of true), but Tight Fit are even more ridiculous, or more audacious? Zep was one of the weirdest great groups not to be known for their weirdness, Zep III perhaps the foremost flowering of their unemphasized strangeness. "Fantasy Island" has a great matter-of-fact camp overstatement, but it hardly ranks with Zeppelin's perpetual extravagant overstatement, not to mention Zeppelin's out-and-out offensiveness.

Question 2: Was there a radio format in the UK in which radio stations would be playing all these songs? If not, and if the songs therefore are not rubbing shoulders and butting heads sonically, that undercuts the claim that the Charts constitute a world. If my memory is right Top 40 in the U.S. was fading as a format, playlists being more narrowcast. (MTV was coalescing into a kind of Top 40, but wasn't close to there yet.)

That's where I'll leave it, at least for now. What I like is the insistence that all chart songs are speaking to one another. Where this piece has a weakness it's in choosing weak adversaries. Every time Morley uses the word "cool" the piece clanks, because he's not interested in facing a cool that's challenging and smart. No one in 1982 who was listening to the Pop Group and Roland Kirk and Sandinista was using that music to impose limits on themselves; such people were at least glancing at the charts, some were listening as hard as Morley, and those who veered away believed that their everything was way bigger than the Charts'. Their song of 1981 might have been "Double Dutch Bus," and they were likely scarfing up import 12-inches by Taana Gardner and Afrika Bambaataa, and working out whether Marshall Crenshaw or Elvis Costello was the more interesting pop formalist. In NY, a friend of mine who was plumping for Sandinista was eagerly making me tapes of Chris Conner and Rosemary Clooney and Jerry Lee Lewis's country years. A sax player I jammed with, a Lee Morgan fan, said if we were to form a band we should get someone like Teena Marie to sing lead. The people who did pull back into their fortresses, the hardcore punks and (in Britain) the oi kids, had more interesting and strong reasons than just dourness, ditto the people who'd rather hear something hard than something fun. All these people were due a critique, and in a few years they got one, from me, from the inside because I was one of them and to some extent still am. In this piece, at least, Morley didn't get within miles of it — to a genuine critique — but he was trying out dance steps, to a beat he heard in his head, dancing out of a tomb, and I do think "everything" is a good word for it.

<lj-embed id="941" />
(But this is pretty great.) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:360407 Floating Fields Of Tough (Singles First Half 2016) 2016-07-02T23:49:25Z 2016-07-03T02:01:22Z 4minute "Canvas" 1. 4minute "Canvas"
2. FAMM'IN "Circle"
3. Aommy "Shake"
4. Tiffany ft. Simon Dominic "Heartbreak Hotel"
5. NCT U "The 7th Sense"
6. Tiggs Da Author ft. Lady Leshurr "Run"
7. BTS "Save Me"

For some reason I'm picking mood pieces here (tracks 1, 2, 5), sound that's atmospheric but with its sleeves up and muscles flexed, floating fields of toughness. Tiffany, tall and lithe (track 4), is in a mood too, ol' r&b sadness, integrity in heartbreak.

Tiggs isn't playing tough. He'd rather do fear, if it's got speed and a beat.

Aommy is cute and hot and fiery, seems working class to me: in the video, power is kicking the people who can kick you, and imagining (imaging it as if) they'll take it as just hard flirting, and so will the viewers — 'cause the woman doing the workout still needs to flirt, her boundaries not really protected, and maybe she wants to flirt as well, or works it well, anyway, and isn't really seeking an alternative. At least, it feels to me as if the video wants to have its cake and eat it too. Or maybe it's just a workout vid with fantasy advice for women getting by in what remains primarily men's space. The coda is good-naturedly inclusive. I don't know Thailand, so these are distant guesses.

Not keeping up, obviously; four of these I scarfed up only this week.

And 4minute are no more, by disagreement, not choice, it seems (reading between lines of the public reportage).

<lj-embed id="939" />

<lj-embed id="940" /> urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:359980 Help Kickstart my friend Mark Sinker's "A Hidden Landscape" (UK rockcrit anthology) 2016-06-28T14:23:56Z 2016-06-28T15:05:37Z The Damned "New Rose" Help kickstart my friend Mark Sinker's A Hidden Landscape anthology, which is a spinoff of the Underground/Overground rock press festival/conference* he curated last year in re UK music press 1968-1985. Here's the Kickstarter link, if you're curious or want to make a pledge.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/253164519/a-hidden-landscape-once-a-week-an-anthology

Key word in his writeup is Tumult, also Serendipity, "unexpected stuff you were unlikely to find side-by-side anywhere else on such a scale." My word would be Encounter, and my question would be, "Encounter what?" On the three panels I've heard from the streams, I thought that (the so-far-unread-by-me) Paul Morley was especially slamming. Defended the Pistols' and the Damned's sartorial showbiz tendencies by saying they were the types — as opposed to bloated '70s superstars — who were actually embodying the glamorous cape of Little Richard (I think it was fellow panelist Barney Hoskyns' sneering at the Clash's cut-offs that moved Morley to rise in defense of the secret glamour of the boy punks). Looking at my sketchy notes, I see Morley saying that the writing then was ideological life or death, believed it could be experimental, that it represented extraordinary times. He repeated the word "Momentum." I get the image of a gigantic boulder rumbling from past to future, a rolling body of work "that you can try to copy or distort or change into something else."

You might ask, how is that different from what we've got now every day on the Internet? The answer could be, "It isn't," but maybe there was a smarter tumult then, and in any event it would've had its own flavors of surprise and so might surprise you — or is likely to surprise me, anyway, given that sitting here in America I never really absorbed these people in depth (Simon Frith being the major exception). I'll say sourly that my current rockwrite/musicwrite world has become adept at sidestepping the Encounter, and sure doesn't feel like Momentum, or a tumult of experiment. And U.S. rockcrit has always sucked at follow-through, from the early '60s get-go. My understanding is that these are going to be all new essays (sprinkled through with conference excerpts), from people old as me who will be new to me nonetheless. We'll see what I encounter, if hidden in the prose is a cape of glamour.

(In the meantime, any suggestions as to where to start with Morley?)

<lj-embed id="938" />
I AM ALL OF IT, I HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK MYSELF, I AM A WRITER.

*Lots of it was streamed, and I've just checked and the streams still flow. I've linked them here, where I commented on the commentary, too. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:359879 Frank Kogan "Wreck Of The John B" 2016-06-26T14:45:30Z 2016-06-26T15:01:54Z Frank Kogan "Wreck Of The John B" Ha! I have no memory whatsoever of recording this. I like it. I'm guessing it was 1985, which would confirm my hypothesis that my singing got a lot better during the year after Stars Vomit Coffee Shop. Had assumed my singing voice would forever be intolerable to me, but this is not always the case. I like how my guitar only partially accommodates the melody, so there's a kind of zinging tightrope wire of tension between rhythm chords and the prettiness. Keeps the thing alive 31 years later.

<lj-embed id="936" />

I suspect this track was solicited by Al Margolis, but it might have been someone else and Al was the person who put it out. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:359564 Stop using the word "tribal" for modern political or social groupings 2016-06-06T15:29:26Z 2016-09-11T21:24:47Z The Rolling Stones "High And Dry" Stop using the word "tribal" for modern political and social groupings.

1. The groupings in question actually act much more like classes than like tribes. (Yes, I'm putting the matter crudely and confusedly.)

2. Setting aside its potential racism towards Native Americans — "clan" or "family" would be just as wrong conceptually — the term mislabels a part as a whole. That is, a tribe is a society with an internal social structure, whereas groups like "lower-middle-class whites" and "college-educated blacks" and "Republicans" and "Democrats" and so on are subgroups within a society, subgroups that relate to one another to form social structures.

Not that tribes themselves never had relations with one another. (I can't say I know much about it, either the structure of, say, the different Native (North) American tribes and Amazonian tribes, etc., or the structure of the interplay between tribes.) "Inside" and "outside" are never absolute social distinctions. But caveats such as this one shouldn't be used to obscure the basic mistake built into the metaphor "tribal."

3. The deep basic mistake that concerns me most is the idea that we have social class, here, as one kind of social relation, but that then there's this other stuff, "culture," there, that works differently from class. In fact, instead, class and culture are so deeply intertwined that "intertwined" itself is much too weak a word.

Obviously, all my points here are what on Wikipedia they call "stubs." This one has the most stubble of all. To say briefly what needs several hundred thousand words: what we tend to call "economic class" must have a cultural component or else class mobility both up and down would be too easy and desirable. Embedded in this idea is that e.g. those "in" the "lower" classes get positive status, and meaning, and love and excitement and a feeling of at least being somewhat "at home," right where they are, even though where and who "they are" is actually always necessarily slippery and at risk and even though they don't necessarily conceive where "they are" as belonging to or inside a class. ("In" got scare quotes above for being a problematic word.) The classes nonetheless make up the landscape in which people find (or look for) themselves. So a class isn't altogether unlike an ethnic group. But it is fundamentally different nonetheless in that to be in (or near) a class is to be part of a social structure that relates you to those who are in or near other classes.

That is, people don't fit snugly within a class. That's not how modern class works. They live instead within class systems, social structures, some of which are fairly ad hoc. But it's within these systems that they work out who they are, their creativity and their loves as well as conflicts and oppression and resentments. And they don't find movement all that easy, or inviting.

(To add another circular or elliptical twist or tangle to all this, as the world gets ever more cosmopolitan, ethnic groups themselves are more and more acting like classes (even more than they always did), so are in relation to other groups as part of a structure, rather than as separate structures in themselves, but paradoxically appear more and more as a choice, with at least some leeway, much greater than in the past, as to whether or how much one deploys one's ethnic identity (of course depending on circumstances).)

4. But most crucially and controversially I'll say that, while upper-middle-working class or some near variant on that is probably "right," i.e., is the basic structure of modern "advanced" societies, such classes often aren't the classes of our most immediate experience, and often aren't the classes that are in most immediate effect. So e.g. being a "freak" or a "feminist" or a "progressive" or a "leftist" or "indie" or "intellectual" may not just feel more crucial and more like an identity than being precariously "middle class" does, it puts you in everyday relation to other social groupings. For example, back in my high school, freaks were in relation to normies, to liberals, and to greasers so were part of a social structure that included these other groups. (And yes, I'm claiming such groupings really do structure a good deal of social life, as do the everyday adult groupings that are much vaguer and more ad hoc than the ones in high school.) Again, it's not that you feel at home in your particular class or group — most students felt estranged and many were unaffiliated — it's that such groupings constitute the social landscape and affect and direct your social choices. (If you're an "outsider" you're nonetheless in this social structure, which tells you you're outside the available groups, but nearer to some than to others, and influenced by all.) My basic point here is that to understand such groups, e.g. "freaks," you have to think of them as CLASSES not TRIBES.

5. Although most members of those groupings I listed in scare quotes in the previous paragraph are from what I call the sideways middle class, not all of those people were of middle-class origin. But all those groupings (I'm going to argue someday, when I get the chance) are generated by the upper-middle-working class structure. At least, somewhat generated by it. (Yes, conversely, we can have culture generating structure too, not just structure generating culture, though here I'm talking about structures generating structures anyway, maybe in a kind of feedback loop, with some uncertainty as to how much a particular structure is "economic" or not, and how hierarchical it is. And again, maybe there's a similar but better description than "upper-middle-working class.")

6. I think most of you would rebel against calling freaks etc. "classes," as it would confuse matters, and people wouldn't understand you. I think that's exactly why you should call them classes, since the confusion might force you to think, and anyway people don't understand you. Nonetheless, getting back to the impetus of this post, calling such groupings "tribes" and their relations "tribal" is just drastically wrong and simply wipes out what you need to be thinking about.

If you must, admit that you don't have a word. You've been using "tribal" by default and it's time to stop.

7. Especially, stop using "tribal" as an explanation. The word doesn't explain much. It's more a conversation stopper.

8. Yes, people tend to vote their hairstyle, and feel safer when surrounded by those with similar styles; but this doesn't explain at all where the hairstyles come from, or how the consensus happens.

9. The paradox of class, whether you limit the concept to upper-middle-working or go wild with it as I do, is that your apparent freedom of choice and freedom of association, to work for whom you want and to befriend whom you want, unfettered by kinship or caste, are what throw you unwillingly into these social structures, which actually constrain where you hang out within them, and — even if you're fairly mobile — limit the number of choices offered to anyone.

10. A commentator who reaches for the word "tribal" is more or less trying to signal, correctly, that people are exercising less choice than they're aware of in what they believe, how they dress, whom they run with, what they do, that in effect they're letting their social affiliation constrain their thought.

I'm not really plumping for you to plug in the word "class" everywhere you'd have said "tribal." Rather, just don't use "tribal." There doesn't have to be an all-purpose word. But "class" is better here than "tribal" for suggesting not just that you exercise less choice but that you have less choice. Maybe a better way to put it is that to create choice for yourself requires way more thought and social effort and risk than you realize. (Even if I realize it in principle, I forget in my day-to-day how much my consciousness is directed rather than chosen.) Now "tribal," if taken literally, would imply even less choice than "class" does: you don't choose your kin, your tribe; you're born into it or marry into it. But we're not using "tribal" literally. That our use of it is so obviously metaphoric is one thing that makes it so pernicious. That is, since we know we're not literally in a tribe, we — those who tend to use the word "tribal" — believe that both we and others ought to be able to snap out of it, simply switch off our parochial, prejudiced, "tribal" perspective. Whereas with "class" you at least know you're not going to flip the switch and take a new view.

11. The paradox of class — that choice leads to constraint — occurs exactly where you appear most free, not just in what you do, where we acknowledge that there are constraints imposed by the job market, by customers, by supervisors, but in your apparent ability to invent who you are, in your hobbies, your friendship groupings, your leisure pursuits, your social markers, your hairstyle, your colloquialisms, your everyday speech,. —Yes, this "freedom" will be greater or lesser depending on whether the group in question is something like "evangelical Christian" or whether it's something like "black." Obv. the former is way more of a choice than the latter. But these days the range of things like the former — "evangelical Christian," "math geek," and on and on — is expanding in comparison to the latter. E.g., almost no one notices or cares if you're Irish. There really seems to be a lot of choice as to which part of the "self" to make a big deal of, to put into play as "social identity."

12. But then it turns out that you've chosen constraints, not freedom, or that you're thrown into situations (high school is an example) where a structure is imposed on you, and you have to wend your way through the structural features even if the choices they offer seem limited and dumb. (E.g., you can choose to enter politics, but once you do...)

13. And this is just what the word "tribal" doesn't explain, though it's offered as an explanation. ("Why doesn't she believe in global warming?" "Oh, that's tribal. The people she identifies with don't believe it either.") It doesn't explain why your free choices run into unexpected limits, and doesn't explain why, even where you're most free — what movies you see, what videogames you play, whom you friend on Facebook — your choices seem to be accompanied by locks and bolts on how you think, or on what everybody else thinks, anyway.

14. And here's where the word "tribal" is worse than useless. I imagine that in actual traditionalist cultures — I wouldn't know, I've never lived in one — when queried as to why you think or do things in a particular way, you can answer, legitimately, "because this is the way of my people." But in my world that's a justification that just doesn't cut it. I raised this issue back when I got an LVW column: Since people like the music they like for reasons that are largely visceral and individual, how come musical taste clusters by social class? (Of course, for this question to work, I needed to expand the def'n of class.) "I like this song because to do so helps me maintain my social identity" doesn't fly as a reason, either when spoken to others or spoken to oneself. And it doesn't fly any better as a justification for one's ideas and one's politics.

And it isn't that one is simply failing to admit one's conformity. If there's a conflict between your tastes and your group's tastes, or your ideas and your group's ideas, and your politics and your group's politics, you'll go with your own tastes, ideas, and politics every time. Whether or how you make your ideas public is a different matter. But still, as I wrote in that LVW piece (in regard to music), "How is it that individual visceral responses align — or realign — so that members of the same social group respond similarly to music? And how is it that individual visceral responses further deviate a bit, so that individuals will be enough at odds with other members of their social group so that they will be individuals?" "Tribal" is no answer whatsoever here.

15. Yes, regarding many — most — of my beliefs and ideas, I recognize that I haven't seen with my own eyes and worked through with my own mind; rather, I'm trusting some source, who may well be trusting some other source, or I'm following some thinker who seems to know what she's talking about. But again, "Seems to know what she's talking about" or "is thoughtful and self-questioning on subjects I at least half understand, so is likely to be trustworthy on the ones I don't much understand at all" isn't another way of saying "tribal." In fact, "seems to know" and "is thoughtful and self-questioning" will always outvote, "Is the sort of person I identify with," will outvote it every time. So deploying my trust is pretty much the same operation as deploying my tastes or deploying my brain. It's still my judgment. And my judgment won't bow to my friends' judgment, where there's a difference. Which leaves totally open the question why there aren't more differences, and why my tastes, attitudes, and ideas tend to resemble that of my group(s), my class(es), as if I have chosen my class over my brain.*

So the word "tribal" again offers no insight into the question: Why do individual judgments cluster by social class?

16. The word "tribal" offers no good explanation for how the groups form in the first place, or take the form that they do (which isn't remotely tribal), or arrive at their group characteristics, their collective ideas and assumptions and styles, and their internal disagreements and tensions, or how authority and influence within a group work — nor does "tribal" explain how the groups relate to one another, wield power and influence over each other, shape each other, are forced into relation with one another.

----

That's where I'll leave it for this post, with questions rather than answers. I was inspired here partly by running across an old Ezra Klein column that half-assedly attempted some answers; Klein is usually sensible and intelligent; here he was bordering on hysteria. I do love the title, "How politics makes us stupid." And I'm not really going to go into a full-scale critique. The experimental results Klein cites by Dan Kahan and crew are not surprising: people have trouble taking in information and ideas that run counter to what they expect, especially when the info etc. require mental work; and when the information and ideas run counter to people's political identity they have even more trouble taking them in.

These are dog-bites-man results that shouldn't lead anyone to the nihilism that Klein fears might be lurking there. E.g., the experiments don't show that people can't take in unexpected or unwanted information or ideas, or that conversation with someone willing both to respect and challenge your logic won't cause you to notice when your own logic has gone astray. So the actual effect of actual information and discussion wasn't being tested by Kahan's experiments. (But such criticisms can also wait for another post.)

The Klein piece brings up (1) genuinely appalling and destructively consequential behavior that (2) needs to be explained. I'm not kidding when I say I like the phrase "politics makes you stupid" in Klein's title. My concern again is that "tribe" and "tribal identity" are being used as explanations rather than being treated as the phenomena that need to be explained. There's an entirely speculative and evidence-free account of the dire social consequences that would befall Sean Hannity if he were to decide "that climate change was the central threat to the planet." But the account just takes people to be the cowards and bores I don't think they are.** It also incorrectly assumes that political activists are typical members of their "tribes."

Which doesn't mean I don't think a lot of the activists are fucked-up and are capitulating to fucked-up social dynamics.

*I don't mean to imply in all this that e.g. because language is social, language constrains us. Compared to what? Language and society make thought possible. But the struggle to think is social, in that communities have to genuinely value counter evidence and the understanding of alternative viewpoints if they want to produce them much less learn from them, and few communities do.

**Not sure if it's Klein or Kahan who concocted the account; and to be fair to Kahan, he is trying to weave a theory in which — in my words — it's subconsciously rational to subconsciously be highly motivated not to take in counter evidence and not to understand alternative ideas. My double use of "subconsciously" indicates that I don't think Kahan's really got a grip on the issue, but I don't think he's wrong to try for one. (I think my description in my old Paris/Vietnam piece might be useful, of how at age 12 I became primed to switch from supporting to opposing the Vietnam War, this being before my having good reason for either. Now, the case here was more my being prior to taking in info and ideas than my making myself unable to, but my piece shows reasons that are deeper and more real and positive and compelling for wanting to take a particular side than just fearing ostracism or wanting to stick with a social identity.) And Klein's use of the word "structures" in the final sentence of his article suggests he has various social theories that might be worth seeing. He'd be less likely to fall into glibness if he'd drop the words "tribe" and "tribal." urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:359404 Antirockism is just rockism with a few of the words changed 2016-05-14T13:28:33Z 2016-05-15T08:08:45Z Destiny's Child "Bills, Bills, Bills" In an egregious breach of self-discipline, I posted on an Ann Powers facebook thread* whose subject was "rockism." Given that the thread was mainly stupidity and floundering, and it didn't jostle anything loose in my own thinking, I fear that there was little useful I achieved. My justification, if there is one, is that the stupidity I refer to is relative, and I genuinely believe that if someone somewhere takes in and masters my ideas regarding the "authenticity" thing it would save her several years of wheel-spinning.

Antirockists have never had the slightest actual interest in the people they call "rockists" or in the phenomena they call "rockism." So the conversation has been about defeating phantom enemies rather than about understanding the world.** This makes antirockists frustrating but it doesn't always make them boring, since their beating up on "rockism" is an attempt to use a crowbar or pole vault to get out from under something — even if they won't figure out what it is in themselves and their world they're trying to surmount.

This is what I wrote. I do urge you to click the two Rules Of The Game columns I link down at the bottom of my third comment. Might help your wheelbarrow gain traction.

Frank Kogan Posting to say "Hi" to a bunch of friends I've been mostly out of touch with, though given what I'm going to say you might have wished I'd stayed silent. Also posting so that I can keep seeing this thread as it or if it continues to unwind. (I'm only seeing it 'cause my one and only Facebook friend posted on it, and via Facebook's algorithm or something it'll disappear from my view shortly if I don't. I'm trying to not really be on Facebook so don't try to friend me, or feel offended if I don't friend you back.)

I'm somewhat dismayed that there are only a few names on here I DON'T recognize. I don't know if I've run into Eric Johnson before, but from what he's written on this thread I'd like to read more of him now. (Doesn't mean I wouldn't want to read more of the rest of you, too.)

Like RJ I think the term "rockist" is hopeless, but contra that, I doubt that this thread would have gotten much attention if Ann had used another term. Anyway, if we're stuck with it, I'll say this:

I'm more rockist than I am antirockist, and I strongly doubt that Beyoncé has finally and fully defeated me, okay? And what I mean is that I think a lot of life, culture, social systems, etc. are phony, false, dishonest, corrupt, boring, etc. even or especially on their own terms. Intentionally or no on the performers' part, a lot of '60s music had embedded in its ideals (and by association in its sound) that it was stepping outside or around or at least putting itself at odds with the boredom and the corruption, and implicit in this was the worldview or suspicion or feeling or fear that anyone including me, including you could be and probably was contaminated by the lameness, corruption, etc. A lot of the music was full of posturing in its claim to this worldview and these ideals, but that's not the point. Almost all attempts at musical "authenticity" in the last 50 years draw on this sort of worldview and these ideals. amd tjat
Like · Reply · May 8 at 10:51am

Frank Kogan ...And they draw a lot of their strength from this (as argument if not as music, anyway). Anyway, you can say, sputteringly, "But... but... rockism is when people say that only rock embodies these ideals," or something, but (1) I doubt that anyone says this,*** and (2) if you don't like it when rock makes such claims, or rock fans make such claims, why is it okay for YOU to make such claims on behalf of nonrock, or yourselves? (Assuming that you do.) Anyway, I think these ideals — authenticity ideals — and this worldview are basically right, at least a lot of the time I think so, and I think you think they are too. And it seems arbitrary and wrong to say, "Well, when stupid people do this with bad results it's rockism, but when WE do it in opposition to these stupid people it's antirockism." Antirockism is just rockism with a few of the words changed.

("Authenticity" is almost as hopeless a term as "rockism" is, but it, or something like it, "real," for instance, is essential, at least as an adjective, "authentic.")

Anyway, I've learned nothing new from this thread so far, and I've said nothing I haven't said before (and better elsewhere). I think you all are capable of way better, and I don't get the praise for a discourse where no one learns anything or changes in the course of the conversation. Yes, Chuck, I sound like a broken record, don't I? —But Ann, how could you NOT know that Chuck and Simon R. and John D. etc. weren't going to show up and say what they did? And why didn't you take their ideas into account when you made your initial post?
Like · Reply · May 8 at 11:14am

Frank Kogan I think I had too many canceling negatives in that final sentence (but anyway, how could you not KNOW they were going to say what they said, and how come you didn't anticipate their ideas in advance?).

My laziness: I haven't heard LEMONADE yet. I like Beyoncé but haven't gotten around to her in years. Is there something new and unexpected on the record? (Not that "new" and "unexpected" mean "good"; they are kind of rock ideals, though, the delivering-us-from-days-of-old thing, and are more likely to get my attention than their opposites.)

Continuing my laziness: I didn't click the links to reread the Sanneh or the Wolk. I like 'em both as writers but thought each of those pieces was dumb (recognizing that for some people those pieces may have introduced them to a subject they'd known nothing about). Yeah, my memory may be wrong and ungenerous. But, if you think their arguments are good, don't just link the arguments. State the arguments. Arguing by links is a drag.

That said, here are a couple of old pieces of mine, not about rockism but about antirockism, and about why I'm not — that's n-o-t — an antirockist. I'm sure I'm being insufferable, but I really think you need not only to read them but to master what's in them. (Not that I can claim a lot originality. It's basically Romanticism 101.)

But if your time is short, I recommend the second one more than the first, and the second half of the second one more than the first half:

The Rules Of The Game No. 31: Rockism And Antirockism Rise From The Dead

The Rules Of The Game No. 32: Where The Real Wild Things Are
Like · Reply · May 8 at 11:42am

Frank Kogan Maybe to clarify things: the most interesting statement in this thread is this from Eric W.: "the white male counterculture went out of its way to transcommodify and coopt the role of outsider, rebel, disruptor." Now I think there's a lot that's strong and a lot that's wrong about that statement, much worth exploring; but for the purposes of this thread the point to make is that the statement is totally, overwhelmingly, MASSIVELY rockist. I'd point to it as embodying the essence of rockism. Now, I'm using "rockist" as a descriptive here, not a pejorative. But the fact that I'm seeing a statement as obviously, screamingly rockist, whereas Eric, who made the statement, thinks he's being antirockist, just underlines RJ's point: we shouldn't use the words "rockist" and "rockism." They're a barrier to thought. They encompass too much and end up vacuous.

What I find prototypically and stereotypically rockist in Eric's statement is that it calls out a phenomenon (the "counterculture") for being phony and white and pandering and commercial in relation to truer phenomena that are the real deal, more genuinely out and rebellious and disruptive (and possibly darker skinned, as well). This basically IS the rockist argument against pop, though in Eric's case the type of pop that's getting called out as fake is called "rock." That there's some merit in Eric's statement just underlines that there's some merit in the rockist distrust of pop, too. —Contra Chuck and Simon, I don't think that "if rockism means anything it's This is a Significant Piece of Work by One Of The Most Important Artists of Our Time." Rockism is about who's real and who's fake, and who's got integrity and who's been compromised. That's why rockist statements keep recurring and have cultural force, because people feel compromised.

I'm not claiming, by the way, that people who make the sort of statements that jump out at me as "rockist" are evidencing some sort of ideological commitment and thought-out critique. It's usually just people spouting off, having some preference and reaching into the culture for words supporting the preference, words that feel strong and true when you say them even if they contradict what you said 10 minutes ago and are going to say 10 minutes later.
Like · Reply · May 12 at 12:58am

Frank Kogan One thing I find extremely problematic in Eric's statement is that it seems to conflate "outsider" and "disruptor." Then again, that's one thing that's problematic about a lot of rock and pop and disco (etc.) too. It's something people like Bob Dylan found problematic about themselves, I'm sure.
Like · Reply · May 12 at 1:09am
*Ann's thread-starting post went, "I'm overwhelmed by the hyperbole surrounding Lemonade, yet I do think Beyonce might be the one to have finally and fully defeated rockism." I downloaded the whole thread and can email it to you if you'd rather read it that way, with the "See More"s clicked and the nested threads expanded. Or you can click the link. As I said, that the thread is stupid and floundering doesn't necessarily make it boring.

I'm trying not to really be on Facebook. I joined Facebook and friended Tina LaConte (who's now dropped me or cut herself loose) so that she could give me an invite to the Campus Restaurant Revisited community (the Campus Restaurant was the freak hangout across from my high school). I friended David Cooper Moore because that was the only way he could get me onto Turntable FM, which no longer exists. Besides Dave and CRR, the only things that ever appear on my Facebook feed are Montgomery Gentry and the Kinks, whom I'd listed in my music interests. (But how come Tymee and T-ara and Ashlee never show up?) Ann's thread came into sight when Dave posted on it.

**Btw. I don't think that this is a tradeoff you have to make. You can both defeat an enemy and understand her. In fact the latter ought to help you do the former. But my rockwrite/musicwrite world's failure to even try to understand just highlights my contention that it's pretty thoroughly capitulated to what I've been calling the "hallway," to the need to position oneself in relation to other people at the expense of understanding the world. (Again, that shouldn't be a tradeoff. Doing one well ought to make you better at the other.)

***Says that only rock embodies these ideals, that is. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:359107 Wedding music 2016-04-24T07:57:46Z 2016-04-24T14:50:46Z Debbie Deb "When I Hear Music" Fatboy Slim "Praise You" I chose Debbie Deb, Clare chose Fatboy Slim.

<lj-embed id="932" />

<lj-embed id="933" /> urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:358711 Cute Butch People w/ Sparklers (Top 60 Singles, 2015) 2016-03-27T05:25:08Z 2016-03-27T19:58:27Z Silentó "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)" Those enticed here by the promise of butch and sparklers may be disappointed that the title pretty much only applies to the Dev vid — though I've not looked so thoroughly as to guarantee you won't find butch and sparkle throughout.

"Born To Wub" was another prospective title; it too only really goes with the Dev track.

Next year I'll just post my favorite Dev song, and announce, "Dev Contains Everything."

Was also thinking of calling this, "You Already Know Who It Is"; I've made this list into a YouTube playlist, and those are the words Silentó introduces himself with, on the first track.

<lj-embed id="929" />

And after all, you already knew I was gonna give you Dev, and T-ara, and K-pop. In 2012 I simply called my half-year list, "More Songs From K-pop, Dev, and Cassie." A year earlier I'd called it "Dev Like Cassie."

But there's also wub in Vince Staples' "Norf Norf": wobble that's disembodied from a beat. And there's wub deep in Ash-B's larynx.

1. Silentó "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)"
2. Ash-B "매일"
3. The Seeya with Le "The Song Of Love"
4. Azin "Delete"
5. HyunA ft. Jung Ilhoon "Roll Deep (Because I'm The Best)"
6. Dev "Parade"

<lj-embed id="923" />

7. Rihanna "Bitch Better Have My Money"
8. Crayon Pop "FM"
9. ZZBEst "랄랄라"
10. Red Velvet "Ice Cream Cake"
11. Titica "Você Manda Fogo"
12. Ash-B "What's Real"
13. Daphne And Celeste "You And I Alone"
14. SHINee "View"
15. Ash-B "누구야"
16. 4minute "Crazy"
17. Jason Derulo "Cheyenne"

<lj-embed id="924" />

18. Lil Mama "Sausage"
19. The-Dream "Cedes Benz"
20. BiSH "BiSH: On A Night When Stars Are Twinkling"
21. Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina"
22. Romeo Santos "Hilito"
23. Kendrick Lamar "King Kunta"
24. Pungdeng-E "Ppippippappa"

<lj-embed id="925" />

25. MC Doni ft. Натали "Ты такой"
26. BiSH "OTNK"
27. Jason Aldean "Just Gettin' Started"
28. Christine and the Queens "Christine"
29. Sofi De La Torre "What People Do"
30. Vince Staples "Norf Norf"
31. Feder "Goodbye"
32. Caro Emerald "Quicksand"
33. Exid "Ah Yeah"
34. Lyrical School "Wonder Ground"

<lj-embed id="926" />

35. Lizzy "Not An Easy Girl"
36. Ash-B "달라"
37. Uhuru ft. Wizkid "Duze"
38. All Time Low "Something's Gotta Give"
39. The Weeknd "Can't Feel My Face"
40. Brigitte "J'sais pas"
41. A$AP Rocky ft. Miguel, Rod Stewart & Mark Ronson "Everyday"
42. Kelela "A Message"
43. Drake "Hotline Bling"
44. Demi Lovato "Cool For The Summer"
45. T-ara "So Crazy"

<lj-embed id="927" />

46. Lila Downs ft. Juanes "La Patria Madrina"
47. Maitre Gims "Est-ce Que Tu m'Aimes"
48. Wonder Girls "I Feel You"
49. Serebro "Pereputala"
50. Maliibu N Helene "Figure 8"
51. Young Thug "Best Friend"
52. Richie Homie Quan "Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh)"
53. Young Thug "Check"
54. iLoveMemphis "Hit The Quan"

<lj-embed id="928" />

55. GFriend "Glass Bead"
56. AronChupa "I'm An Albatraoz"
57. Ash-B "I'm Filled"
58. The-Dream "That's My Shit"
59. Vince Staples "Señorita"
60. Oh My Girl "Closer"

I've scattered Ash-B tracks all through the list, like dandelion seeds. Can't find English translations, so the adventure for me is her voice. She begins "매일" with darkly insistent eighth notes, then she's pushing the main beat hard, then she's relaxing into the conversational, which she's then pushing into even more insistence.

There were no Cassie singles, so Sofi De La Torre was awarded the Cassie Ventura Honorary Remote-Achiness Fellowship for 2015.

"Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)" at number 1 demonstrates the influence on this list of the elementary-school gym class. See also "Hit The Quan" at number 54.

See also the fact that this list is three months late.

Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" also scores high in the gym and should be here too, except the single edit adds pointless, chantless Kendrick Lamar verses that undercut the elementary-school incantations.

In his own "King Kunta," Kendrick creates beautiful, perfectly at ease low-impact funk — unless "beautiful, perfectly at ease low-impact" is a euphemism for "boring." So maybe I'm overrating it at 23. Unless I'm underrating it.

Pungdeng-E are no surprise on this list; I put them on last year's too. But Wikipedia tells me that "one of their original concepts was the use of different regional satoori (dialects) where each member uses her own local dialect," a fact that had passed non-Korean-speaking me by. They'd simply seemed like kiddie hip-hop. In this year's vid, though, they go appropriately misshapen and rustic, until going all technological and op art at the end.

I still don't "get" Japanese idol music, but fake idol does well on this list. (See numbers 20 and 26. I don't know what to call numbers 21 and 34.)

The real surprise for me was Jason Derulo's "Cheyenne." He'd always seemed the equivalent of a reserve basketball player who knows how to position himself to get the rebound, score the layup, make the outlet pass, but has trouble actually doing it. I can't say what he's doing that's so different here. It's not that his voice is any more pliable. Maybe it's just that the songwriters, this time, really, you know, get him the ball in the right spot. Or they go back to an old style that touches me. Anyway, plaintive tune, the right swoops and falsetto, managing to deliver some of the echoing anguish and terror of the "Dirty Diana"/"Smooth Criminal" close-out of MJ's Bad. (But for some reason it wasn't "Cheyenne" that hit big for Derulo this year.)

On "King Kunta," Kendrick Lamar re-sings words from "Smooth Criminal." That's according to Wikip, anyway: I don't feel the Jackson in it the way I feel it in "Cheyenne," which is maybe why I never concentrated on the "Kunta" lyrics enough to see for myself. (Not to say that such concentration couldn't flip me, if I get to it.)

SHINee's "View": Light top, deep bottom. Even the first time I heard it, the chorus sounded classic and inevitable. I don't have any insight as to why, though. (From what I can tell, it was written by two Brits, two Americans, and a Korean.)

The producer of my number 45 is teaming up with the artist of my number 1; the worlds here enrich one another. Or consume one another. Or dilute one another. Or still manage to pass one another by. (The teaser seems kind of meh.)

<lj-embed id="931" /> urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:358608 The James Brown problematic 2016-03-13T17:23:43Z 2016-03-23T13:31:15Z The Kinks "Situation Vacant" I posted this in response to Mat and AG at the SNSD Free For All, their sense that, at the moment, Japanese pop music is allowed more chord changes than American is. (dubdobdee has pointed out to me via email that "Death Rock 2000" wrestles* with some of the integration-coalition-collage-disparity-collision ideas I was juggling in the air in my previous two posts.)

I barely know anything about Japanese pop, and not all that much about current American pop either, actually. But I think the James Brown problematic that I set forth back at the start of "Death Rock 2000" may be relevant: the more syncopated your supposed "background" parts are (drums, bass, rhythm guitar), the more your supposed "foreground" (vocals, leads, melodies) has to adapt to and intertwine with the background; this lessens or gets rid of the distinction between foreground and background.** To be a bit simplistic here, when you truncate or cancel the melody, you tend to be getting rid of chord changes as well.

It isn't that James Brown wasn't interested in melody — all the evidence is just the opposite! — but that he was also trying to do other things, and these other things limited his options.

I don't know if "syncopated" was the right word above, but anyway: funk. But funk isn't the only relevant melody suppressor: Brown also pushed his songs towards call-and-response. You can hear in this live version of the melody-rich "Prisoner Of Love" how, at about the two-minute mark, after lovingly taking care of the melody, James abandons it to go call-and-response over a single chord. Really, what he does is to take the couplet "I'm just a prisoner, don't let me be a prisoner" and use it as a wormhole, crawling into another world. You can hear this in incipient form at the end of the single version, which fades out into an implied never-ending groove.

This is one "solution" to the "problem," to segregate the melody sections and the groove sections, or the melody sections and the call-and-response sections. This was done in Cuba in the development of forms like the mambo; in American pop, it's become kind of standard to have a chorus-length call-and-response towards a track's end. Of course you can put things into separate songs, melody song here, groove song there.

There are other interesting analogues to the James Brown problematic. E.g., Bob Dylan would take a line in a song and vamp on it, making the vamp longer in each consecutive verse. (As with "syncopated," I don't know if "vamp" is the right word.) Fascinating are the Kinks, who in the mid-Sixties were inspired by the Beatles to go more melodic and by the Yardbirds to go towards drones and rave-ups, which tended to be less melodic, more groove, and so the Kinks tried to do both at once — or at least tried to be less segregated into "melody part" and "rave-up part": in "Situation Vacant," you can hear at 1:12-1:20 how there seems to be a hard-rock groove that wants to explode out of the song but is held in check, then at 1:57 it actually does get the bit between its teeth, and it's off and running into a full rave-up at 2:20, fading out into a false ending and then returning at 2:55 as if to say "This could go on forever," as poor lead character Johnny falls perpetually downwards.

I'm curious what else is going on in Japanese music. I can't imagine that all Japanese dance tracks or rap tracks are chock full of chord changes.

I think in America the tendency isn't so much anti-melody or anti-chord changes, but just that the prominence of hip-hop and dance tends to suppress melody in favor of beats. But it isn't because audiences are going, "Oh, there's too much melody and too many chord changes." I assume they'd be fine with lots of melody and changes. It's that they're drawn to the interesting rhythms, which throws us into the problematic. E.g., where's the room for melody and changes in "Hit The Quan"?

<lj-embed id="922" />

From "Death Rock 2000":

So even the hard funk of Funkadelic and Kool and the Gang had a somewhat straighter groove, and in hip-hop and r&b you always—until recently—had a loud drum nailing down the backbeat, or even a one-two-three-four (the more discofied r&b), with the song or rap back on top and most of the funk relegated to the bass guitar or bass keyboard. With the backbeat/one-two-three-four anchoring whatever was on top, some of JB's propulsive tumble was lost. So I think the tension in much of the world's music in the next century will be: "We don't want to give up song form or the Euromelody tradition, or we don't want to give up an out-front rap, or an out-front guitar solo, or an out-front wall of noise, or an out-front dance collage, or _________ (from whatever music tradition), yet we also want to have the tumbling funk and never-ending groove, so what do we do?" I hope it stays a problem. I can't imagine it being "solved."
But I don't think U.S. pop is more into the rhythm-and-melody problematic now than it was in 2000. In fact, I'd say I was hearing more rhythm risks then than I am now, though I was paying more intense attention then than now, too.

*I'd say my Disco Tex Essay wrestles with 'em even more, especially the "Bob Dylan plays mambo" ruminations.

**Btw, it was JYP joking around w/ James Brown poses and foreground-background that inspired my first K-pop post. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:358396 Unity in kaboom! 2016-02-06T16:11:49Z 2016-02-06T22:08:09Z Jefferson Airplane "Crown Of Creation" I'm implying at the start of my last post that at least some of the Airplane's visceral excitement comes from how the different personalities/musical elements often sound on the verge of falling apart or exploding into conflict. If you put them too close they annihilate each other, too far apart they're inert.

Don't want to make this Airplane versus Bowie and Roxy, given that most observers never notice the many similarities. But with Bowie, I get an emotional kick from his intentions more than his songs (bear in mind, though, that I know his intentions only through the songs, so obv. the latter deserve some of the credit — cf. my liking Springsteen the person more than his music, but of course most of what I know of the person is through the music). He's got a potentially exciting choice of musical elements. Where I'm claiming (not very clearly) that Jefferson Airplane's parts were better "integrated," this is based on my feeling that in Bowie and Roxy the pieces-parts have a clumsy fit but while bumping one another don't generate sparks. They coexist too peacefully.

You shouldn't infer here that aesthetically I prefer confrontation to coexistence. The former is easier to write about, though.

Really, the Airplane's visceral superiority may just be owing to Jack Casady's being a smart, powerful player who takes the bass on convoluted journeys while never losing the groove. But when the Airplane splintered, his and Jorma's particular post-Airplane shard, lifeboat, new craft (my metaphor is splintering too), Hot Tuna, was dull dull dull. (At least the first two albums. I didn't stick with 'em, so they're due a reevaluation.) It's as if they need the challenge of Paul's and Marty's and Grace's chord patterns, rather than Jorma's own more traditionalist and blah ones. (How many soul bass players get to run a slalom course as novel as Paul's "Crown Of Creation"?)

These are all quasi-germs of quasi-ideas that I doubt I'll be able to develop usefully. To continue on half-assedly, an interesting way of looking at Jefferson Airplane is as a precursor to Whitfield's work w/ the Temptations when the latter went "psychedelic," e.g., soul bottom, psychedelic guitar (though I also think of Whitfield as an accidental forerunner of dub, whereas I never heard any "dub space" in Jefferson Airplane). And to Funkadelic, of course. Roxy's Phil Manzanera deserves mention here too, his psychedelic guitar wending its way interestingly through Roxy's architecture.**

*"Spare Chaynge" and "Bear Melt" may be total refutations of my hypothesis, since the former is a pure improvisation centering on Jack and Jorma, and the latter something of an improvisation, and both tracks are great. (I'm overlooking drummer Spencer Dryden here: I haven't really come to any assessment of the guy's work; note that it's his departure after "Mexico" that marks the border between previous Airplane greatness and later Airplane-Starship mediocrity (though "borders" are never so simple and I actually like the post-Dryden Long John Silver more than I dislike it). Also note that I have zero albums by New Riders Of The Purple Sage, whom Dryden joined in 1971.) Subjects for further research are too numerous to detail here, but surely should include KBC Band and SVT (Wikip: "During his SVT tenure, Casady actually taped his fingers together to force himself to simplify his highly articulated playing style"), not to mention three decades' worth of Hot Tuna.

<lj-embed id="911" />

**And let us not forget Rare Earth and He 6! urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:358115 We Can Be Together 2016-01-30T19:45:37Z 2016-02-20T14:45:08Z Jefferson Airplane "The Ballad Of You And Me and Pooneil" Jefferson Airplane were as much a coalition as a band, and at moments they could be the most exciting and poignant coalition/band/group in music. And at moments they were breaking in pieces, and sometimes those moments coincided.

Paul Kantner, as one of their weaker singers, the guy who wrote harmony songs, not just leads, was the one who tried to get everybody singing and playing at the same time, if not always in sync. "We Can Be Together" sounds too ferocious and has too much desperate posturing for a we-should-be-together song, which is appropriate, as neither band nor scene is going to hold together much longer.* Kantner's the one who tries hardest and longest to keep the ideals real.

<lj-embed id="910" />

*That's why I'm embedding it. Of the Kantner-only writing credits, I like "The Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil" and "Crown Of Creation" just as much, but the latter is too focused for what I'm trying to say, and too much of a take-down of a "them" rather than a wrestling with a difficult "us." The former has too much optimism. Its "You and me we go walking south, and we see all the world around us" changes in a few months ("House At Pooneil Corners," co-written with Marty Balin) to "You and me we keep walking around/And we see all the bullshit around us." "We are leaving, you don't need us," on "Wooden Ships" comes a few months after that (by Kantner and Steve Stills and David Crosby), same alb as "We Can Be Together" and is just as much posturing and just as desperate. Backs against the wall so we retreat to fantasy, 'cause the wall's not coming down.

"I can carry my friends and I do when I can, we get by however we can."

Paul Kantner, March 17, 1941 – January 28, 2016.

(I didn't stay listening to Kantner and crews much beyond 1972, if any of you would like to point me towards what's most interesting in what came after.) urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:357846 "I've never been referred to as 'cold steel' and I certainly don't hate it" 2016-01-11T13:16:31Z 2016-01-17T14:33:03Z Brie Larson "Life After You" Brie Larson just won "Best Actress In A Drama" at the Golden Globes. I haven't seen the movie,* but this makes me happy because she'd impressed me a lot as a writer and singer back in the teenpop days; I'd subscribed to her semi-fanzine and regularly read her witty MySpace. She was personable and very smart in an interview by my buddy David Cooper Moore in Stylus in 2007.

Bunnies, Traps, and Slip 'n' Slides: An Interview with Brie Larson

*Room, playing at the Chez Artiste if you happen to live in Denver. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:357504 I once got one of these right, but no one noticed 2015-12-29T13:23:18Z 2015-12-29T13:23:18Z Tom Lehrer "Lobachevsky" Regarding wiki-illiam, I once got one of the questions right, but no one noticed.

Anyway, he's doing the quiz again:

http://dubdobdee.livejournal.com/tag/wiki-illiam urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:357129 Psy back catalogue 2015-12-11T23:09:15Z 2015-12-11T23:11:57Z Psy "Dead Poets Society" Some not-so-recent Psy. He's consistently good. Couldn't find English translations for most of these, and don't know if irony is new with him or has been central all along. The various times he says "bitch" don't sound good-humored. Then again, his humor isn't always pleasant, anyway.

"2-Year-Old Wife" ("2세의처") ft. R.Jay, Digital Masta, Small. Title has also been translated as "The Rich Heir's Wife." 2001.
<lj-embed id="903" />

"Yes, I Am." 2002.
<lj-embed id="904" />

"Intro" ft. Ray. 2002.
<lj-embed id="905" />

"Ragpicker" ("양아치"). Title also translated as "Gangster" and as "Rebel." Google Translate gives us "Punk" or "Thugs." 2006.
<lj-embed id="906" />

"Dead Poets Society" ("죽은 시인의 사회") ft. Dynamic Duo, Drunken Tiger, Tasha. 2006.
<lj-embed id="907" />

"Mr. Ssa" ("싸군"). 2010.
<lj-embed id="908" /> urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:356873 Waiting for HyunA (singles as of December 6) 2015-12-06T11:18:26Z 2015-12-06T18:56:11Z HyunA "Roll Deep (Because I'm The Best)" Saw Ash-B's first appearance on Unpretty Rapstar and went, "Oh, no, they're making her/she's making herself sound tough and real and it won't work and she'll lose," so I averted my ears and avoided the show.

To my barely informed mind HyunA is now the dominant rapper in K-pop in that whenever anyone in Exid or 4minute who is not HyunA starts to rap or sing, I go, "This sort of sounds like HyunA but now I'm waiting for HyunA herself to show up." "Red" last year established this for me. (The wait is longer in Exid than in 4minute, obviously.)

Crayon Pop continue to score by ignoring past achievements; SHINee and Wonder Girls explicitly wallow in a past that's of course been implicit all along throughout the genre; most interesting freestylish moment, though, is "Delete," which casually pairs old NY-Philly-Miami riffs with cool autonomous vocals that you'd never ever have heard on an actual vintage freestyle track.

Since spring I've barely listened to anything that isn't medium-old jazz (Lee Konitz, Miles Davis).* So this list suffers, esp. in its dearth of No Tiers discoveries.** I've basically been relying on YouTube-generated playlists for K-pop and on random looks at the Singles Jukebox for everything else. I found Lila Downs via her "Cuando Me Tocas Tú" linked on Jonathan Bogart's Tumblr. (That track and Wonder Girls' "One Black Night" are candidates for my Freaky Trigger ballot, which allows album tracks.)

So, what have you been listening to?

1. Ash-B "매일"
2. The Seeya "The Song Of Love"
3. Azin "Delete"
4. Rihanna "Bitch Better Have My Money"
5. HyunA ft. Jung Ilhoon "Roll Deep (Because I'm The Best)"
<lj-embed id="900" />

6. Crayon Pop "FM"
7. ZZBEst "랄랄라"
8. Titica "Você Manda Fogo"
9. Momoiro Clover Z vs KISS "Yumeno Ukiyoni Saitemina"
10. Red Velvet "Ice Cream Cake"
11. Daphne And Celeste "You And I Alone"
12. Lil Mama "Sausage"
13. Romeo Santos "Hilito"
14. 4minute "Crazy"
<lj-embed id="901" />

15. Jason Aldean "Just Gettin' Started"
16. Christine and the Queens "Christine"
17. Feder "Goodbye"
18. Caro Emerald "Quicksand"
19. Exid "Ah Yeah"
20. T-ara "So Crazy"
21. SHINee "View"
22. Lizzy "Not An Easy Girl"
23. Uhuru ft. Wizkid "Duze"
<lj-embed id="902" />

24. All Time Low "Something's Gotta Give"
25. The Weeknd "Can't Feel My Face"
26. A$AP Rocky ft. Miguel, Rod Stewart & Mark Ronson "Everyday"
27. Kelela "A Message"
28. Brigitte "J'sais pas"
29. Lila Downs ft. Juanes "La Patria Madrina"
30. Maitre Gims "Est-ce Que Tu m'Aimes"
31. Wonder Girls "I Feel You"
32. BTS "Dope"
33. GFriend "Glass Bead"

*In jazz, I didn't like what I heard this year from previous fave Matana Roberts. Sounded like a parody of a 1950s bohemian séance.

**But let me reiterate my liking for the missed-by-me-last-year "Babomba" from the impressively overlooked (and now personnel-shifted) Badkiz. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:356847 The cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away (part 17) 2015-11-21T16:58:21Z 2015-11-21T17:19:03Z Beyoncé "Move Your Body" There's still an island of boxes in the middle of my living room, so this post is another little placeholder until I create time for a "good" one.

ImageShack took my picture links hostage and threatened to kill 'em all unless I paid money. I said, "Go ahead, commit murder," so presumably most photos on my lj and elsewhere are kaput. (E.g., this one here, Emil Jannings in The Last Command.) Maybe I'll go through and repost a few via Photobucket or some other nonhomicidal enterprise.

 urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:356457 Jazz in the last 25 years... 2015-10-05T05:58:54Z 2015-10-05T06:14:35Z Sonny Fortune "In Waves Of Dreams" Just checking in so you won't think I've died or cut off my hands. I'm in the midst of another move, from Denver's west side to Denver's east.* Have ideas for posts but I want them to, you know, be good. In the meantime...

Jazz made in the last 25 years barely exists, if you go by the Wikipedia jazz overview — also if you go by my listening, which almost never includes it, or at least only includes music by people who had already made a substantial contribution prior to 1990 (though I did put Matana Roberts in my top 10 a couple years ago).

So, how wrong am I? I barely know what's there, if there's a there.

<lj-embed id="894" />

*Actually, we are inadvertently moving a couple hundred yards into unincorporated Arapahoe County, owing to our not realizing when we rented the place that there's a bit part of Arapahoe that juts east all the way to South Quebec Street. I'd just assumed that the border was Yosemite all the way down. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:356181 Adventures Embed 2015-08-14T23:42:29Z 2015-11-21T12:11:54Z Wonder Girls "I Feel You" I discovered by blocking Shockwave Flash — which I highly recommend you also block* — that, when I embedded videos using the LiveJournal video template, the video playback employed Shockwave Flash (it wasn't part of the visible code, so I didn't know). If you've got an old CPU, this may have caused your computer to labor. In any event, blocking is easy (see footnote). So is unblocking: all you have to do is click on the red icon the blocker provides, and the video that's blocked comes into view. But from now on, I'll use something other than the lj template when I can.

This is the lj template, which works for YouTube but I'm not sure about anything else:

<lj-template name="video">URL</lj-template>

For example, here's DJ Leandro's "Montagem das Antigas, Volt Mix":

<lj-template name="video">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj7T71vH-mo</lj-template>

<lj-template name="video">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj7T71vH-mo</lj-template>

Note that, when using the lj template, if the url begins with "https://" as YouTube's do, you have to get rid of the "s" for the embed to work. But I'm recommending you not use the template, given the Shockwave Flash. And when you're not using the lj template, you don't have to eliminate the s. And if you still like the lj template's ratio, I've worked out that it's approximately 428 width, 345 height. So you can just take a video site's embed code and insert those numbers. Here they are with the YouTube code (DJ Battery Brain's "808 Volt"):

<iframe width="428" height="345" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1Al_J8GnWqM?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

<lj-embed id="882" />

For a reason I don't know, the embed codes provided by some sites other than YouTube don't work on lj. But fortunately embed codes from the old days do. So, for those interested, here they are:

Dailymotion's old code, which uses Shockwave Flash (Wonder Girls "I Feel You" live):

<object width="428" height="345"><param name="movie" value="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/video/x307wr3"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/x307wr3" width="428" height="345" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></object>

I got x307wr3 from the URL:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x307wr3_wonder-girls-i-feel-you-live-832015_music

<lj-embed id="883" />

So, you can use that as a model and plug in the appropriate video. But since it too uses the slow-loading, high bandwidth Shockwave Flash, you might want to use a newer Dailymotion code instead (though for all I know it also uses Shockwave Flash [EDIT: indeed, it does]). This is the one for Wonder Girls' live "Rewind" (x307uyf):

<lj-embed id="884" />

Here's a Youku code for Fat Cat's "My Love Bad Boy":

<embed src="http://player.youku.com/player.php/sid/XMzA5NTc3NTU2/v.swf" allowfullscreen="true" quality="high" width="428" height="345" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>

<lj-embed id="885" />

It uses Shockwave Flash too, though. I couldn't find a Youku coded that worked on lj but that didn't use Shockwave Flash.

And here we are on Toudu, again needing Shockwave Flash (track is T-ara's "T-aratic Magic Music"), and I guess the ratio takes care of itself:

<embed src="http://www.tudou.com/v/VymxI5qT1j8/&resourceId=0_04_05_99/v.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>

<lj-embed id="886" />

Speaking of Wonder Girls, they've pulled off a conceptual coup of sorts** by coming back as a four-piece band — playing instruments as they perform, all songs with co-writing credits from one or another of the performers. What's amusing/intriguing about the concept is, as I said to Mat, they're using it on styles of music that were originally created by and for preprogrammed beats and studio synths: the basic Hi-NRG, freestyle, Italodisco, synthpop panoply that was my favorite music of the '80s. And as Mat points out, the word "freestyle" is now, finally, appearing in actual promo copy. ("I Feel You is Park Jin Young's creation. It is inspired by the freestyle music that came out of the Latin American community in New York in the '80s, featuring synth instruments and a syncopated base rhythm.") And David clues me in to the fact that fans are noticing too.

"I Feel You" rides a freestyle riff without going full-steam into the dolorous vocals and delirious beats that NY freestyle found its way to, nor into the wild passion of Miami. It's more on the frothy early '80s Madonna cusp. As I've been saying relentlessly, South Korea has been pulling this aspect or that from freestyle for years, using them all over, though never combining all the parts at once. Nor should it, necessarily. There's plenty else to combine with.

While the Wonder Girls album, Reboot, doesn't have any truly dominant, enthralling melody, the sound is warm and pretty, and gentle for all its energy.

<iframe width="428" height="345" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_KMyql7K98o?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

<lj-embed id="895" />

In further admin news, I've killed the k-pop tag, because about half my posts since 2011 took the tag, which was therefore overwhelming and subduing all other names on my tag display to the right. After I killed the tag, I realized that what I should have done was simply change the tag to go year by year (e.g., "k-pop 2012"), so you could follow the story. Oh well. I've kept tags on my first two K-pop posts ever, where anhh, Sabina, Mat, and Tari jumped into the comments to school me in the music. I still return to those lessons. Meanwhile, if you click "t-ara" and "snsd" and "no tiers for the creatures of the night" you get a lot of the tale.

*Shockwave Flash is used on a lot of videos and ads; it eats up time loading and monopolizes your CPU if the CPU is old, or even not so old. Causes my girlfriend's computer to limp and to freeze. Also, apparently, there are security vulnerabilities on non-updated versions of Shockwave Flash. I'm linking Vox's article on where to get the Flashcontrol app (article contains links for various browsers). It's easy to implement, and if there's something you want to see that Flashcontrol disables, you can view it simply by clicking on the red Flashcontrol icon. I do wonder what blocking Shockwave Flash does to the LiveJournal and NY Times and Sports Illustrated etc. business models, given that so many of their ads use Shockwave Flash. But look, it's not our fault their advertisers' software causes problems.

**that I hope doesn't eventually turn into a cul-de-sac. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:355909 Keep Nagging At Your Mom When You're Little (Orange Caramel/After School: Artists Of The Year, 2014) 2015-07-24T16:54:50Z 2015-08-03T18:59:17Z Orange Caramel "Catallena" Lizzy's advice on how to acquire the voice she uses for Orange Caramel and for trot (but not for After School):

Keep nagging at your mom when you're little.
Demonstrated here, with variants here (happy) and here (annoyed)* (h/t David Frazer).

I'm even more behind than usual (mid-year list to come, once again w/ Lizzy). I keep promising research on After School, never get there. So just several adjectives for you:

After School, who were kinda all over in their early years, have settled into smooth vocals, effortlessly poignant, when required, but holding rough rhythms under their hood. One of the few K-pop groups to sound as good in Japanese as Korean. Meanwhile, Orange Caramel's** rampaging cuteness conquers all, style atop style. No social insights from me. Cuteness doesn't play in North America, probably for good reason, but that doesn't mean we're living our lives better than South Koreans are living theirs.

After School "Triangle"
<lj-embed id="867" />

Orange Caramel "Catallena"
<lj-embed id="857" />

*The hashtag is #twang_Lizzy.

**Orange Caramel is a subunit, consisting of three members of After School: Nana, Raina, and Lizzy. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:355641 Confirmation 2015-07-12T06:12:13Z 2015-07-12T07:08:48Z Seo Taiji and Boys "Nan Arayo" Our friend Nichol was visiting and in the background I was playing the first Seo Taiji and Boys album and Nichol stopped midsentence and asked, "Who are you playing?" Hearing the ricochet electro beats, she said, "This is freestyle!" The mournful vocals entered as if to confirm this, and she added, "This sounds like the barrio."

Seo Taiji and Boys "이밤이 깊어 가지만" translated variously as "Deep Into The Night" and "Through Tonight Growing Late," 1992
<lj-template name="video">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFvyCwhZ_bo</lj-template>

Seo Taiji and Boys "난 알아요" "Nan Arayo" ("I Know"), 1992
<lj-template name="video">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8bGWS50YRc</lj-template>

So, someone who isn't me, without prodding, hears the freestyle connection too! You know, I keep pointing this out, how much K-pop draws on freestyle, and I wonder why more isn't made of it. "Nan Arayo," the second of the tracks I embedded, is often credited (on Wikip, anyway) as the song that created K-pop. Obviously, freestyle isn't the song's only source: there's hip-hop, new jack swing, metal. Then again, in the music press of the '80s, the northeast version of freestyle (New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia) was called "Latin hip-hop" at least as much as it was called "freestyle," as being to Hispanic culture what hip-hop was to black.* The freestyle beats themselves were frequently an elaboration on the electro hip-hop that Arthur Baker and John Robie created for DJ Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock." What's interesting is that, while in early '90s America freestyle was basically knocked off the radio and out of popular music by new jack swing and hip-hop and r&b, in Korea freestyle mixed together with new jack swing and hip-hop and r&b to form K-pop, and, while never separating out as a substyle, it's in K-pop songs to this day.**

Anyway, to be precise, Seo Taiji's melody starting at 1:13 of "Nan Arayo," and especially at 1:29 is total freestyle, and the backup there has the sort of flourishes that Elvin Molina and Mickey Garcia could have put on a Judy Torres record in 1987, and dreamy plinks that Tony Butler might have put on a Debbie Deb track in 1983. (You can hear them best at 1:56 of the album version.)

Listening now to this first Seo Taiji album, the rhythm feels more loose-limbed and free yet also actually far more precise than current K-pop does. This may just mean that Taiji and crew got the African American feel better than most of his progeny did. But there is almost a live sense, the music potentially careening all over, despite the use of preprogrammed beats and the aforementioned precision. So this is psychological, something I also remarked on back when embedding DJ DOC's quasi-Caribbean "Murphy's Law." K-pop back then felt as if it could draw on anything and go anywhere. Of course, with the Internet and all, music today draws easily on a much broader anything, while not feeling like it's moving anywhere much at all.*** (But, especially given my limited listening this year, of the many genres and nations I know nothing about, there ought to be some for which what I just said is exactly wrong.) Genres when young feel full of worlds of promise that actually actualized genres usually lack.

*Which is a gross oversimplification, of course. And anyway there were Hispanics in hip-hop itself from the get-go, in NYC.

**This is a simplification too. Not long after "Nan Arayo," Korean dance-pop duo Chuli and Miae sampled "Because Of You" by NY freestyle act the Cover Girls on their freestyle-Eurohouse amalgam "Why You," westernized dance pop already being a part of Korean popular music. I can't tell you if "Why You" was considered part of the same phenomenon as Seo Taiji or not. Seo Taiji and Boys abandoned freestyle by their third album, so I can't speak for freestyle's ongoing presence in South Korean pop music of the '90s, about which I know almost nothing. But if freestyle was ever gone, it certainly was back by the time I started listening to K-pop in the late '00s.

***I mean, Crayon Pop and ilk definitely have a fun sense of adventure, but it doesn't feel like an adventure that will actually take us to new lands or invent new topography. urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:koganbot:355376 Tiny, tiny people 2015-07-10T00:16:19Z 2015-07-10T16:46:39Z The Kinks "Did You See His Name?" This long post by Steve Randy Waldman has been getting attention in the econ blogosphere and is a slamming bit of writing that's also clear and coherent and seems to explain a lot.

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html

The two money quotes, so to speak:

With respect to Greece, the precise thing that European elites did to set the current chain of events in motion was to replace private debt with public during the 2010 first "bailout of Greece." Prior to that event, it was obvious that blame was multipolar. Here are the banks, in France, in Germany, that foolishly lent. Not just to Greece, but to Goldman's synthetic CDOs and every other piece of idiot paper they could carry with low risk-weights. In 2010, the EU, ECB, and IMF laundered a bailout of mostly French and German banks through the Greek fisc. Cash flowed into Greece only so it could flow out to rickety banks. Now, suddenly, the banks were absolved. There were very few bad loans left on the books of European lenders, everyone was clean, no bad actors at all. Except one. There were the institutions, the "troika," clearly the good guys, so "helpful" with their generous offer of funds. And then there was Greece. What had been a mudwrestling match, everybody dirty, was transformed into mass of powdered wigs accusing a single filthy penitent (or, when the people with their savings in just-rescued banks decide to be generous, a petulant misbehaving child).
And

For the record, my sophisticated hard-working elite European interlocutors, the term moral hazard traditionally applies to creditors. It describes the hazard to the real economy that might result if investors fail to discriminate between valuable and not-so-valuable projects when they allocate society's scarce resources as proxied by money claims. Lending to a corrupt, clientelist Greek state that squanders resources on activities unlikely to yield growth from which the debt could be serviced? That is precisely, exactly, what the term "moral hazard" exists to discourage. You did that. Yes, the Greek state was an unworthy and sometimes unscrupulous debtor. Newsflash: The world is full of unworthy and unscrupulous entities willing to take your money and call the transaction a "loan." It always will be. That is why responsibility for, and the consequences of, extending credit badly must fall upon creditors, not debtors. There is one morality tale that says the debtor must repay, or she has sinned and must be punished. There is another morality tale that says the creditor must invest wisely, or she has stewarded resources poorly and must be punished. We get to choose which morality tale we most use to make sense of the world. We do, and surely should, use both to some degree. But if we emphasize the first story, we end up in a world full of bad loans, wasted resources, and people trapped in debtors' prison, metaphorical or literal. If we emphasize the second story, we end up in a world where dumb expenditures are never financed in the first place.
There were several comments challenging his contention that "In 2010, the EU, ECB, and IMF laundered a bailout of mostly French and German banks through the Greek fisc. Cash flowed into Greece only so it could flow out to rickety banks." Here is his response:

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6013.html

Of course, as I've said often, I'm not an economist and don't have the knowledge or ability to truly evaluate such arguments. That Waldman's explanations resonate with me is actually not a good reason to think they're right, in fact is a warning light. Not that it's a reason to think his explanations are wrong, either. But one of the things that resonates is that the villains in Waldman's story, the European policy and business elites, created and chose a story that resonated with them and that gave them a villain and scapegoat and simultaneously absolved themselves of the responsibility for examining what they themselves had done and for changing what they're now doing. The psychology behind their story choice isn't unlike mine, though I'm not an actor in this story and my self-interest is purely psychological. I'll also quickly point out that Waldman is emphatically not saying there were no other bad actors, or, for that matter, that there was never any idealism or genuine concern mixed into the elite behavior. The sin he identifies in the elites is their refusing to acknowledge that there was a Europe-wide failure that involved many parties, and that there was a system that encouraged it.

More links:

Paul Krugman has been blogging daily about Greece. Maybe his two most crucial posts are:

Breaking Greece

Austerity Arithmetic

First one in brief (my words): The creditors are dictating that the Greeks adopt supply-side policy (spending cuts rather than tax hikes), but these are fantasy proposals that will not help an economy that's running 20 percent below capacity.

Second one in brief (my words): Let's say we try to raise the primary surplus by 1 percent. At best this will take decades to reduce the debt ratio, but it may well never reduce the debt ratio, in fact may raise it, forever.

(I myself don't pretend to understand the calculations in the second one.)

One from Simon Wren-Lewis, like the Waldman but in a measured tone of voice.

The Greek people have paid for their governments' mistakes — and for the errors of the Troika

Nate Silver has a  fascinating though speculative post about not just why the opinion polls were so wrong on the Greek referendum ("no" winning by only 3 or 4 percentage points, not the 22 it actually won by), but why at the end they all pretty much agreed with one another, so were all more or less equally — and drastically — wrong. Given the volatility of opinion and the chaos brought on by the snap referendum and the bank defaults, opinion polls should have wildly disagreed with one another. So Silver suspects "herding," which means that towards the end, when a pollster got results that were out of line with most other pollsters' published results, the pollster either suppressed the findings or altered them. Basically, pollsters didn't trust their own numbers and didn't want to look like fools (safer to be wrong along with everyone else than risk being the only one who's wrong). But also, respectable opinion/conventional wisdom (whatever you want to call it: pundits and journalists and financial markets and banks and brokers etc.) overwhelmingly supported "Yes" and assumed the public would too, and this influenced both the pollsters and the betting markets, the latter uncharacteristically being even more wrong than the opinion polls.

Basic takeaway: polling is getting harder for a number of reasons, and pollsters are adapting or fudging their numbers to compensate, without really knowing what they're doing.

An article from Alison Swale and Andrew Higgins at the New York Times is interesting because it quotes two experts who, though they appear to be saying the same thing, are actually making points that are almost completely at odds.

Angela Merkel Faces Monumental Test of Leadership After Greek Vote

Each expert seems to be saying that politics is transcending or superseding economics, but actually expert number one (Techau) is saying that, while Germany's tough stance has been dictated by economics, Merkel now may be softening the stance to accommodate the political need for European integration and solidarity. Meanwhile expert number two (Ruparel) says that, while the economics always supported the Greek position against austerity, this issue has never been just about economics; it is also about accommodating politics throughout the Eurozone, especially German politics, which pushes for toughness against the Greeks.

And here, a piece in the Telegraph by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that I just don't know what to make of. Its kicker goes,

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras never expected to win Sunday's referendum. He is now trapped and hurtling towards Grexit

One of the commenters over at Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism said it "reads like the kind of story you'd see at the supermarket checkout." But Smith claims Pritchard's article is sourced, with rock star former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis one of the sources. (She doesn't say how she knows this.)*

Finally, today, from Liz Alderman and James Kanter in the NY Times, Tsipras seems to have caved (which I was pretty sure would happen), though you never can tell. I'll wait till someone who knows a lot tells me what to think.

Greece Submits 11th-Hour Bailout Proposal to Creditors

As details of the new offer emerged, it appeared the Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was capitulating to demands that he urged his countrymen to reject in the referendum last Sunday, like tax hikes and various measures to cut the costs of pensions.

But Mr. Tsipras seemed to have gained ground on debt relief, his one bedrock demand. Germany's truculent finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, finally gave a little on that Thursday, admitting that "debt sustainability is not feasible without a haircut," or writedown of debt, even if he then appeared to backtrack.
I don't know. Greece got blasted. Syriza doesn't have a mandate for Grexit. Maybe the Syriza group and their coalition partners figured that even if Greece could hack an exit from the euro and eventually prosper, the short run is far too hard. Or maybe I'm reacting too soon, and this isn't close to over.

*Well, Varoufakis is quoted in the piece, but not in regard to any of its sensationalistic claims.