Well yeah, Kloserman himself doesn’t even live by these dictates anymore, given his increasingly bitter attitude toward the Internet. The main problem with his argument is the idea that “culture is just there.” It’s not! It’s something we shape and create, and that’s what I think we’re really arguing over. And I think that’s a legitimate thing to argue over, or even a rational one. Your preferred brand of culture being triumphant doesn’t merely mean that you “won,” it also means that more culture like yours will be produced, and the cultural values embedded therein will gain more approval and have more say in the wider culture. It’s especially weird to expect that critics shouldn’t take the direction of culture seriously. Who becomes a critic without thinking that significant numbers of people are wrong? Who would become a critic if no one became irrationally offended about the popularity of Nickelback?
The real problem here, I think, it a misunderstanding of politics. In the article, Klosterman uses as his primary example Gina Arnold’s claim about “how allegedly awesome it was that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was on the radio, and how this was almost akin to America electing a new president.” Klosterman thinks this is stupid, and that we shouldn’t think about culture like we think about politics. But maybe we should. And to do that, we’d need to think about politics in a different way, too. We would have to be aware that people who don’t agree with us exist, but also that they are just another group like ours, and that there are many groups, and sometimes they happen to all come together around a shared issue/song, but that doesn’t mean they agree on everything. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” got “elected” because it appealed to more than punk fans, reaching out to metal and hard rock fans too, which allowed its values to be spread to, say, me, by alerting me to the associated discussion around Nirvana and causing me to listen to the Pixies.) Tolerance in politics requires taking it precisely as seriously as it deserves: being aware that issues are important, but that they are never black and white, and that there are many competing perspectives. For the average person, politics is nowhere near as serious as we tend to think it is, and our influence on it is about as important as it is in culture.
But for people like Chuck Klosterman—and at least some of the people reading this right now, I’d wager—we are the pundits of culture, or at least of music. We are actually precisely the ones that need to not take Klosterman’s advice. Because our opinion does matter and can have an effect on the shape of culture in some small way, even if we generally can’t see that. Klosterman’s value-neutral approach to culture is only possible because he is, you know, a straight white dude. Those are the “neutral” values of culture. And if we want to change that, those people with louder voices need to not simply accept culture as it is.
"(via barthel)
Well, it’s always good (if sometimes confusing) to have a case against that I can see as tenable as the case for, though maybe my specific problem is the noise-to-signal ratio that starts getting out of whack when the attempted culture-shaping really gets rolling, i.e. what we get instead of “being aware that issues are important, but that they are never black and white, and that there are many competing perspectives”. To continue the political metaphor, it seems to me that too many music writers, possibly for brevity’s and/or attention’s sake, are pulling the equivalent of carrying signs reading “NO TO OBAMAHITLER SOCIALEST MEDACARE”. I’m talking about when things get to the point where all one has to even do to dismiss a person or a movement is to point out their interests on some “‘nuff said” business: stripping away all the background and nuance and problems and benefits of a cultural phenomenon and reducing the name of the thing itself (“indie”; “geek”; “wigger”) into a monolithic signifier that people can sweepingly dismiss without even bringing empathy into account. It’s not even like politics, where the stakes involve the well-being of an entire population and whether people get severely screwed over or not, and where it’s pretty clear that the dude grousing about “government takeovers” is a clear antecedent of the same people who threw rocks at equal-housing marchers 44 years ago. We’re literally talking about entertainment, as though a person’s MP3 or DVD or comics collection is a better judge of their identity and philosophy than the things they actually do in the outside world (or inside a voting booth).
And aside from a few fortunate corners, I don’t necessarily see people making a habit of deeply examining the root causes of their dislikes, maybe because they don’t have time or space or inclination, which means that we just get useless objections that shoot more for zing status than any actual engagement. It’s glib shorthand without any real depth, and when that starts dominating the discourse it only amplifies this feeling of embattled cultural alienation on both sides of the line that makes enjoying pop culture this weird exercise in constant defensiveness and aggression. Frankly, I don’t give a shit if you want your culture to win and someone else’s culture to lose unless you can give some real human insight into what the actual stakes are besides the joy of seeing a strawman’s button eyes getting pecked out.
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always good (if sometimes confusing)...have a case against
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