MetaChat - cultural critique is hard

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17 January 2012

cultural critique is hard I've been trying to articulate an argument lately, and maybe will even write this up, about a class of reviewers having a particular 'stance' towards a genre.→[More:]

Specifically I am getting really annoyed at edgy reviewers' takes on hip hop. I think there is a 'hipster' class among them that really embraces wack stuff and rejects meaty stuff for cool points. And it's easy for my current respondents to pin me down essentially in appeals to empiricism. It's true, empirically when you say "X class of people are into Y", it's imprecise and conspiratorial. ("who is in X class exactly?")

But my feelings about these issues are birthed by experiential recognition. By seeing a distinction happen repeatedly and thus seem like a pattern. And whenever you make an argument based on that it's slippery but not necessarily invalid. I mean, I don't know why this example is the first my neurons coughed up but take David Foster Wallace's rant on Updike et al. It's all based on things like:

I’m guessing that for the young educated adults of the sixties and seventies, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Updike’s evection of the libidinous self appeared refreshing and even heroic.

You could tie this down in a hundred knots: which adults? Some people never liked Updike you know, even back in the 60s & 70s. Updike's appreciation is not based on his protagonists' sexuality. The sort of "show me some data" response.

And, coming back around to my argument, I can't. I can't run a poll among reviewers, map out their psychology, make a chart of their social network, then pit it against their reviews. All I can do is put a narrative together with examples. And it doesn't prove anything but the 'soft patterns' one notices are still valid conceptualizations.

post by: Firas at: 10:35 | 8 comments

It seems to me what you're missing is a theory. Not a "X people do Y and here's my data to prove it" theory but a proper theory that would explain this trend that you've noticed. "X people do Y for cool points" is not a good explanation, since a) you're making assumptions about their motives that they might not agree with and b) 'cool points' is at once too loaded a term and too ambiguous. A better idea would be to try and explain what the appeal of the wackier style might be for them. Even better if you can show the specific circumstances in which these things arise and then link them to some more general trends in the society.

posted by Daniel Charms 17 January | 17:22

Thanks for the response. I don't do any real long form writing and I'm pretty interested in giving this a go to get in the groove. My thesis is concisely summed up by this quote from a rapper called Childish Gambino: "But Pitchfork only likes rappers who crazy or hood, man." They like REALLY ignorant gangster / drug rap, and they like REALLY crazy/weird rappers who are almost unserious comics. It's almost like both are attempts to get street cred (cause something is 'hot') and then they rank established , serious rappers with much less excitement and a lot more prevarication.

Now Pitchfork annoys everyone in every genre of course but there's a constellation of NYC focused media, especially with heavy online presence, that seems to do this a lot in hip hop. Their 'cool meter' is really trend driven and they all seem to be either really white or essentially black hipsters

You're right it's tied into longer trends in society in a way (the fall of the old industry record system and magazines, the rise of web based snark as commentary, etc.) I guess what I need to do is, instead of just being annoyed by 'them', essentially put together a dossier of here's the people, this is their aesthetic background ('this guy reviews arcade fire and hip hop at the same time, is he really an authority on rap?') here's there reviews, here's the trend... put together the examples and make that carry a narrative

posted by Firas 17 January | 17:57

They also have some rappers who are established who're almost diefied within this scene: Jay-Z, Kanye, etc. And I can see how Jay & Ye have long 'hopped over' out of hip hop into Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and things like that. My claim I guess is leveling a charge of aesthetic insincerity and 'outsiderness' against the pitchfork etc. types

posted by Firas 17 January | 18:00

I just randomly googled "pitchfork doesn't understand rap" and this person takes them on in their own writing style:

it’s mostly because Pitchfork is a taste-making rock-publication on the internet; the type of site that really only pushes rap that’s either heavily influenced by white music (the skinny jean wearers), or is highly ironic (the coke pushers).
[...]
These are not the type of people that hip-hop heads usually want to share air with, let alone share their musical tastes with. I myself get upset sometimes when Pitchfork covers what we, as hip-hop afficionados, refer to as our music, because it creates a bandwagon that usually ends up going full-circle, and then you have the Lil’ Wayne effect. Also, sometimes, Pitchfork just doesn’t understand rap music.

Something this style of writer tends to do (both pitchfork and this critic) is use hyphen-stuffed phrases as adjectives ("Neptunes-meets-DOOM inspired production and Wu-Tang-esque tactics") I was reading a pitchfork sentence the other day that went "his stone-faced tough-talk speeding through rock-hard beats with a Rutger-Hauer-in-The-Hitcher intensity" Like, what? What does this movie The Hitcher have to do with the track? It's like people writing just for the sake of writing.

posted by Firas 17 January | 18:21

Prevarication?

I think what Daniel Charms says about a theory is a good thing, but also, if you're undertaking cultural criticism, there's a certain amount of knowledge or understanding that's common enough in the broad field that you can just reference it. Nobody needs to be told there was a countercultural revolt against conformity by the youth of the 60s and 70s - it happened, it's common knowledge. Of course not every adult then was part of this movement, but the movement existed.

Similarly, not every reviewer may be part of whatever movement you decry, but chances are if you are perceiving a pattern, the movement exists, or the blind spot exists, or the shared viewpoint exists. I think you just have to define WHAT you see happening, WHO you see doing it, and maybe your ideas as to WHY they are doing it (the theory part). You don't need to prove it mathematically - you can leave your opponents to offer counterevidence, if there is some to offer. But keep in mind that even showing some evidence that doesn't fit the pattern doesn't prove you're wrong in identifying a pattern.

posted by Miko 17 January | 18:26

Miko:

chances are if you are perceiving a pattern, the movement exists, or the blind spot exists, or the shared viewpoint exists.

Really?

How do you figure?

posted by LogicalDash 18 January | 11:53

LogicalDash, why not? Cultural signals are essentially qualitative, perceived attributes. If I look at circa-2004 Gawker, Wonkette et al I can easily say "Nick Denton has a bunch of snarky blog properties". I can just read the tone and tell! A few years ago I heard Jonathan Lethem say James Thurber's writings give one a "misogynistic hangover" which I thought was a great turn of phrase cause it's neither an indictment nor a whitewash but just a sense that "I feel an edge about this topic from this writer." A perception based claim is a legit claim about the effect of something

posted by Firas 18 January | 22:23

I don't know, man. If the "perception" in question is an interpreted quality like "snarkiness," then a perception based claim is as reflective of the biases of the perceiver as anything else.

Maybe if you isolate your response to one particular post, and try to pull apart all the biases you find relevant to that post? But at that point you're essentially doing a review. If you want to deal with broader trends than the causes and effects of a particular blog post you'll have to consider a bunch of other people's reactions to it, preferably people who are representative of the culture you're studying. This is usually accomplished using focus groups, which might be out of the OP's budget.

Failing that, just use a lot of tertiary sources, I guess. Other people's reactions to the thing you're studying kind of are what you're actually studying.

posted by LogicalDash 22 January | 18:44

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