I AM LIVE

OMG.

1. ASHLEE/ASHLEY IN T MINUS A BUNCH OF HOURS. My first concert since...jeez, ever, it feels like. Of course, there's a chance I'll miss this one, too, depending on the ticket situation, but apparently Ashlee's shows have been getting less than 50% attendance. Insert frowny talking smiley. (HEY, WAIT A MINUTE, YOU GIRLS ARE SO MEAN!) I'll report back if everything goes well, or goes.

2. In response to something that someone (Dom Passantino?) said on an ILM thread that I can't find now...what to call people who are quick to assert their love of The Pop so long as it's indie-approved (he was referring to the Pipettes or Lily Allen or both). Well, I know people who like both acts regardless of indie acceptance, but I still think he has a point. I think the term might be "good indie rockists," after Ghassan Hage's critique of "good white nationalists" and Australia's multicultural policy, which defines all non-whites as welcomed "others" fit to "share" an implicitly white space. The good indie rockists want to be musically all-inclusive, provided that "indie" is not disturbed from the center of the music universe or discourse or whatever.

"Good indie rockists" have replaced "evil indie rockists" (I'm only using it to match Hage's term...but it's probably unfair to compare pop hatas to right-wing extremists, so [/grain of salt]) by creating a pseudo-inclusive musical fantasy that doesn't challenge the "indie" category. Instead, everyone can be indie; indie can encompass all varieties of music (I've said this myself to illustrate that using, say, Michael Azerrad's definition of indie, almost all Myspace teenpoppers are "indie." Most of them say so on their pages, but in part that's because it's pretty much their only option -- so Myspace perpetuates the language of the good indie rockists!).

OK, no need to follow this too much further (yet). I dwell on it because a friend of a roommate was over for dinner the other night and, upon seeing the Britney poster I put on our fridge, said something to the effect of "oh, loving pop music...that's kind of 'in' now, right?" Well...yeah. But a stamp of approval isn't the same thing as a structural shift in the ways in which pop music is actually discussed or written about. Good indie rockists allow the stamp to substitute the shift because there's no way to call bullshit on a particular good indie rockist paragon without including plenty of people who love Lily Allen and the Pipettes without caring whatsoever about their relationship to indieness -- and that's valid. Since there's no way to tell the difference anyway, people "calling out" Lily Allen or the Pipettes not for being [insert neutral aesthetic judgment: boring comes to mind] but for actually being EVIL sound rash and conspiratorial. And paranoid, which is something I'm just going to have to deal with.

3. So is it a good idea to write a paper with Laura on High School Musical and try to get it into the EMP conference? Hmmmm.

4. TWIN-POP INFILTRATES POLAND!

From NYT:

Already weakened by coalition squabbles and disagreements with the European Union, President Lech Kaczynski of Poland announced over the weekend that on Monday he would appoint his twin brother and longtime political partner, Jaroslaw, to succeed Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, according to the Polish news agency PAP.

Move over Sammy and Sasha...