Unambitious

April 8, 2010

But there’s also some slippage in the punk-rock politics of the thing that’s always an issue. There’s this sense — a valid sense, in a few ways — that the punk/indie ethos surrounding this conversation was part of the point: the do-it-yourself ethic, the community-building, the dovetailing of feminist dissent and punk dissent. But obviously that becomes a problem if you start feeling like the actual sound and style and speech of the music back then has the only real claim to empowerment, anger, or independence. I don’t know a ton about the convoluted and controversial history of the Rock Camp for Girls, but I seem to remember this being an issue there, for a moment: the goal was to get girls to dive in, pick up instruments, and learn the confidence to do everything themselves, but as far as I heard, it required shrugging off a couple last ideas about authenticity to decide that working a sampler did that job ever bit as much as picking up a bass. I think part of what Hopper’s pointing to is that slippage in reverse — this idea that singing, say, electronic pop automatically means taking up a disempowered, manufactured, pandering role, even if the woman in question is creating everything herself. This slippage involves being more interested in what the music seems to represent, socially, than the actual relationship between the female artist and the art she’s making.

Wait but what music represents socially just is more important than the relationship between the artist and the art that she (or he) is making. We’re really supposed to call it a win if people of all genders/races/orientations can control the production of shitty music? Equal opportunity in the professional sphere is important, but if that is your main priority than you’re not doing music criticism anymore. That’s like saying that the future shitty New Jersey Nets stadium is actually not shitty just because Jay-Z was there with a shovel at the groundbreaking.

It’s not nostalgic to say that pop music in the 90s was culturally disruptive in ways that no pop music has been for the last ten years. That’s just factual.

11:04pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZFXQTyUEt-_

(Notes: 22)