Anyway, I think it's for the best, but it got me thinking about my own relationship to ILM, and the relationship of the thread to ILM, as a way of thinking through some ideas on TROLLS I've had recently.
I should start out by saying that my thoughts here are PRO-TROLL, with reservations, and the reservations are serious, but not serious enough to turn me anti-troll. I consider myself to be a troll in a lot of online places, sometimes productively and sometimes less so, and I've certainly trolled more than one person on my blogroll. Which still needs updating, and will probably then reflect MORE trolling on my part.
Difference between a troll and a bully, to expand on a few ideas that I think Frank is dealing with in his Poptimists post on this subject, is kind of subtle. It's basically the difference between provocation and harassment, but provocation involves some element of harassment and harassment -- maybe "badgering" in a less loaded word -- itself is sometimes the only way to engage an oppositional viewpoint, or feels that way. The basic premise here is that rational conversation, especially online, can only go so far, and it can go sour for a million reasons -- acquiescence to shared, but often simply received or unexplored, ideas, dwindling general interest, formatting issues -- and trolling incites people to positions, figuring out their own and disputing another one. Trolling doesn't have to be dialectic in nature -- just about anything can incite a response. Maybe the best troll/thoughtful moment in teenpop history was this exchange, never really taken up by anyone but Frank (it was directed to him), which resonates with some of the unspoken unease with (not necessarily direct critique of, but probably a factor in its eventual hermetic vibe) the thread among what I might call "bystanders," people who genuinely weren't interested in the music but might have chatted about it if there had been NO baggage in the thread (if they liked a particular song, which happened all the time in 2006 and the beginning of 2007).
i dont know how to ask this without being offensive, and i mean it with real and genuine respect, and while actually liking ashlee--how much of yr love of teen pop is connected to yr dick frank?
-- anthony easton (anthony), Tuesday, 9 May 2006 10:59 (1 year ago) Link
Not a dumb question, Anthony, though not all love is genital, and I'd say that current teenpop is far from being the most sexualized music out there (compared to Europop and dance and r&b or even the teenpop of seven years ago). And also remember that I don't have a lot of access to the visuals - which isn't to say that the aurals can't be enticing. (Strangely enough, Ashlee's videos tend to fall flat for me.) But then, I definitely feel an emotional warmth towards the personas/bodies/human beings I hear in Ashlee's and Lindsay's and Kelly's sound - and from the words and the minds that those words reveal (or invent or construct or whatever). But my favorite Ashlee song is "La La," which isn't as sexy as it's trying to be, even if it's all about sexual role playing; and another favorite is "I Am Me," which hits me in the way that Courtney Love singing "Violet" and Grace Slick singing "White Rabbit" hit me, neither of which particularly convey "warm, wet, inviting pussy." In fact, the person who's singing really feels sexy to me is Lily Allen (whom I wouldn't call teenpop, though I'm glad to write about her on this thread, and she's in the teengirl's age group): the way her tone is almost deadpan but falls lazily from her lips. But I don't yet have the warm feeling towards her that I have towards Ashlee, Kelly, and Lindsay, which is certainly a feeling of love towards a feminized something. (Well, it's three distinct feelings: the Ashlee feeling towards Ashlee, the Kelly feeling towards Kelly, the Lindsay feeling towards Lindsay.) But then, I rate the Veronicas "4ever" as the song of the year so far, and though it has a very sexualized sound, it's not pulling that response from me. The feeling is more like being doused in sugar.
But then also, a lot of great music that I'd call "sexual" - Amber's "Sexual," for instance, and a lot of stuff by t.A.T.u., and "Don't Say Goodbye" by Paulina Rubio - might as well be performed by someone called Anonymous. I'm not feeling love (or much of anything one way or another) for the people who perform them. And it's great sexual music anyway. But then, it's wrong to think of musical sexiness necessarily pertaining to the relation between the hearer and the performer. Really, what we do with sexy music in our lives may be more crucial, even if it's easier to talk about the relationship to the performer.
Don't know if I'm answering your question. Over the years, most of my hero-frontman-performers have been guys: Jagger and Dylan and Iggy and David and Johnny and Eminem. This isn't to say there can't be anything sensuous in my feeling towards them, but since I'm not gay, it's not warm in the way that it is towards a feminized someone like Ashlee. But Ashlee is definitely in a Jagger and Dylan rock category for me - as opposed to being in the Cover Girls sexy dance-pop category, though those categories need not be mutually exclusive and in fact there's something in all my heroes' music that pulls in a Cover Girls sensuality at least somewhere. Or something.
So I've just written a lot of words without quite figuring out my answer to your question. I tend not to have sex fantasies about people I don't actually know in real life, which is why girlie mags don't do anything for me. But that doesn't mean sex isn't a part of my feelings towards a singer.
-- Frank Kogan (Frank Kogan), Tuesday, 9 May 2006 19:48 (1 year ago) Link
The question could have just as easily been asked without the first qualifier, and it might have seemed more negative. But it was a legitimate question that the thread, for a lot of reasons, was dancing around, in part because I (for instance) don't tend to think about this music with my dick (I'd rather fight about not being funny than being a lech, will probably get more upset by the former accusation in part because I'm a lot more concerned with it!), but also because there are certain questions that, for whatever reason, just don't come up. So they need to be brought up -- what I think happened was that a lot of eyebrow-narrowing built up for a long period of time, some justifiably, some coming from possibly justifiable places that betrayed a deep ignorance of what was actually going on. E.g., Zach Baron's lazy and transparent paraphrase of the 2006 thread and at least one early Sugar Shock column in his Meg and Dia review for Pitchfork does make me, incidentally the only person who has publicly admitted to commenting on Brie Larson's MySpace page [you can read the article I subsequently wrote about it here, and a later interview I did with her via MySpace comment is on my sidebar], sound like a creep. But what he says about me is also completely inaccurate -- one possibly valid critique of what I was doing is that there's a contrarian impulse behind trotting out Brie Larson's precocious intellect all the time as if there aren't other bright teenagers out there. But what made (and still makes) Brie interesting is the negotiation between fairly indie- and bohemian-centric intellectual development and the role that she plays (not sure where her career stands right this second, but I'm talking about 2006 here) in the wider culture. In contrast to common children in media tropes -- manipulation, sexualization, prompt disposal past a distressingly young "sell-by" date, all of which can and often do happen -- here was a girl who was vocally, adamantly, funny and smart. Skye Sweetnam affected me in the same way -- I may go overboard occasionally in praise, but it's compensatory, and I genuinely do not think that Skye and Brie are exceptions to the rule, that teens in media -- ones with a platform to reach the widest audience -- must at least be smarter than they're frequently given credit for, and beyond that, I'm honestly attracted to a lot of their music, for a lot of different reasons.
So dick's not it. Or at least not all there is -- though it seems to me that what I've argued most insistently about sex in teenpop is that it tends to be explicit in content and strange (and powerful) in overall message and effect, often in pretty stark contrast to sex elsewhere in pop music. This has nothing to do with my attraction to the performers, and it definitely doesn't lead me to comfortably endorse hyper-sexualized marketing (though it's another extremely complex issue that deserved to be teased out by an outsider or troll and was never effectively done in two+ of the thread's existence). It really has to do with how I think about a song like "Better Off," a song like "Blush," a song like "Touch of My Hand," even, eventually, rethinking a song like Aaliyah's "Try Again," the lyrics of which I'd always taken for granted as fairly superficial (I take most lyrics for granted; I tend to put a lot, sometimes too much, emphasis on words-on-the-page rather than words-as-performed, but usually I enjoy a song without feeling compelled to write a 10th grade English paper on it).
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I started lurking at ILM in 2003, when a friend of mine told me it was where a bunch of rock critics hung out during their day jobs. I lurked for a while, was too intimidated to post anything substantial. When I started writing for Pitchfork in 2004, I posted there a little bit more frequently without having much impact. Then I went back to lurking, figuring out where identities matched up writers I read or had heard of, learning a lot. When I stumbled onto Skye Sweetnam's Noise in the Basement (I'm pretty sure on first listen I wrote a message to my friend Ross saying "she's like Avril Lavigne, but she seems to have a sense of irony about it") through Pitchfork (which might make that the weirdest and most significant thing that happened to me writing there, contrary opinions notwithstanding) I read about her through a pretty batshit thread on ILM, then read a lot (read: all) of what Metal Mike had written for the Village Voice, etc. etc. etc.
I didn't really know who Frank Kogan was, except as an occasional and memorable ILM pontificator and occasional Voice contributor, until 2005 when I was unthinkably allowed to vote again in Pazz and Jop and decided to troll.
It wasn't dishonest trolling -- aside from picking a Bratz track at #10, I stand behind every selection I made...Lindsay, Ashlee, Skye, Mountain Goats, Sharon Jones, Busdriver, whatever -- but it was also clearly eliciting a specific response from a specific audience. I was basically trolling the Ashlee Simpson: Emo or Oh No! Thread, which was another one getting me interested in writing more conversationally about the stuff I'd been immersing myself in, partly arbitrarily (it was cheap music and I was broke but liked buying albums) and partly in contrarian response to where the music conversations were happening. But I did invest myself in the music in the same all-consuming way I Got Into Music (which surprises me now to remember was 2001) and the excitement toward it was real, as was the glee of throwing monkey wrenches in conversations with friends (most of whom, being pretty good friends and generally open-minded people, didn't really bat an eyelash, so the "pleasures" of this sort of confrontation were fleeting from the start). I was figuring out modes of authorship that didn't correspond to my understanding of how the biz worked (and, it turns out, it was fairly unique authorship, possibly waning again after a relatively short run) and I was finding stuff like M2M, a good Ashlee Simpson gateway drug if you need one (or was it the other way around?). M2M often demanded I consider them seriously. Irony, except for the internal dramatic ironies of their stories, was not a luxury I could have as comfortably with M2M as I could with Britney or Skye or Lindsay Lohan or the boybands or the Veronicas' nu-teenpop (even when any of them were being serious). I'm pretty sure Breakaway and Autobiography and M!sundaztood came after I'd really started to click with Shades of Purple. And it was this strain, which was in the first sentence of the first post of the teenpop thread (and was ostensibly one of its main purposes for existing), that ultimately sparked conversation and sealed a lot of the thread off. One thing I think a lot of casual fans don't understand is that a ton of the music by Ashlee and M2M and Kelly is not supposed to be fun. It wants to be taken seriously, and it often deserves to be taken seriously -- and often when it doesn't quite deserve to be taken seriously (P!nk is a good example here) there are a lot of interesting contradictions bubbling under the surface. My dad constantly uses the phrase, "deep on the surface but superficial underneath," and I can't help but want to reverse it, make it totally redundant, to describe a lot of confessional teenpop -- which kind of, like, kills the joke. That ultimately might have been the message -- beyond any suspicions I have of the extent to which people by and large just don't want to talk about children's media in a wider cultural context -- that led to the thread sealing itself off: THIS IS NOT A JOKE.
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But I think it would be unfair to say that the discussion was humorless, and I think the blend of voices in 2006 in particular helped it from becoming too tedious or too heavy -- not all analysis has to SOUND heavy, and a lot of it didn't. This was part of the function of tabloid gossip flung up on occasion, a reminder that there is a lot that's funny and strange (and sad, but no less funny) stuff going on around the music. But the fact that there wasn't much funny going on IN a lot of the music just doesn't gibe with the epic black comedy that is tabloid culture, which most of the artists we were discussing were either thrown into (not unwillingly) or maybe even came from.
And to get back onto the subject of trolling, trolls can be really funny. It's the Lester Bangs pie-in-the-face theory about Alice Cooper, which has a lot to do with his humor (in contrast to Richie Havens' humorlessness). Rolling Teenpop had a lot of Alice Cooper in it (some literally, like the Hilary-with-flu gag) but it didn't get a lot of very good pies. One reason, and one that was somewhat lost as the thread went on, is that the thread itself was for trolling -- provoking ideas, pushing buttons -- and the object of trolling was the rest of the board. But it became a side-thread in the same manner of the other genre categories, which might be like having a "Rolling 2008 Music by Assholes" thread that was seen primarily as a genre overview. Rolling Teenpop was a centralized space for people who were sometimes attacked but more frequently just ignored on their own threads (Skye Sweetnam is a good example), but more than that, and beyond that, it was noticing a strong but impressionistic network within a whole morass of sensibilities and aesthetics and personalities -- orbiting around the social interaction between outside-audiences (teenpop threaders included, at least in the beginning) and the music that seemed to be "for" others but speaking to "us." (The music might have been easier to deal with when it was flirting or providing a dance beat or a hook, but there was a conversation happening through a lot of the music that, like M2M, demanded a certain matching earnestness.)
Rolling Teenpop was noticing, to try this idea on for size, a hermeneutics of a critical blind spot. I don't think that teenpop's casual but significant overlap with contemporary Christian music is at all a coincidence, and that similar resistant impulses to "keep it niche" (i.e. not attempt to understand with any depth or honesty or critical investment OR distance) come from a fundamentally similar place: most people are more comfortable not engaging with it. And that's their prerogative. The question I've now been asking with a greater sense of purpose in the past two years (and will hopefully ask directly in the context of Christian music itself when I write about Daniel Radosh's new Christian pop culture book, Rapture Ready!, soon) is what we gain by engaging. In Christian pop culture, the gains are general and evident; Radosh is essentially advocating CULTURE LUBE, which is an appropriate after-image after the sections on abstinence education and "sex after marriage." And I think it also has something to do with Frank's notion of PBS, the organization of media and ideas in a community that, while preserving them (possibly by preserving them) "renders them lame in our appreciation." A little bit of PBS, like a little bit of lube, is necessary to reduce friction -- counter/sub-mainstream versus mainstream, Christian versus secular -- and I think Frank is, in part, identifying the tricky aspect of PLEASURE we take in having cultural frictions to begin with. In the case of Christian culture, cultural friction has almost no pleasurable element -- it's not abstract enough. It segregates and isolates communities, encourages cultural ignorance on both sides, and leads to a "parallel universe" -- a sub-mainstream of its own -- that is getting big enough to lose its "sub-" status and become something more like "para-mainstream."
Here's the thing, though, and yes it will require me to stretch a few mixed metaphors to mind-boggling proportions so bear with me and we can sort it out in the comments: CULTURAL LUBE IS REALLY LAME. PBS is lame, despite the communities it can open up and the knowledge it can share; culture-lube is lame because it's based on compromise over passion, understanding over fighting, withholding judgment over...well, judging the SHIT out of people, who tend to be harder to judge when you know them a little better.
But being lame isn't the worst thing in the world, almost by definition. Lameness, in this context, is the middle of the road, a stasis point. The Christian/secular split needs healing, and it needs stasis in a healed middleground position -- it's a community thing, a shared interest in the betterment of human kind thing. Teenpop, the way Rolling Teenpop wanted it, was a lame-world exit clause, and of course it required some lube to get airing at all. I don't think the thread itself made much of an impact, but I do know that Skye Sweetnam made it into Da Capo Best Music Writing and some way and somehow a few young music-lovers are going to grow up thinking that Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography is ACTUALLY, NO FOOLING in the top tier of someone's critical canon. (She probably won't come after Sgt. Pepper's, but she'll come sooner than never.)
Another idea here, which I may not even totally agree with, is that "cool" has lost much of its cachet since it had any, as a concept, as a sustainable cultural way of life (maybe as the result of cultural pluralization but I guess I can stay offa that armchair for the moment) -- but that "lame" hasn't, because lame is for "other people" and cool is for YOU; it requires an effort that lameness doesn't, and can lose incentives if it goes out of style culturally -- for one thing, the bar is lower for lameness than coolness because you can just MAKE SHIT UP.
We can question taste in one direction (cooler-than-thou -- and I think I should positively invoke Carl Wilson's Celine Dion book here, because, despite my trolling, he is effectively questioning remnants of elitism that are more pervasive than my internet thought-bubble indicates on any given Thursday) but there's something appealing about it in the other direction. Sometimes it sits there as an escape to the boredom that sets in when there's been a new cultural paradigm shift and no one's rocking the boat. Importantly, though, I don't think that there has been a significant cultural paradigm shift, armchair digital utopias notwithstanding, in how music is really discussed -- and in very basic ways. We're not past debates about responsibilities (and/or just tendencies) as critical listeners to be democratic in our listening -- and by "not past," I mean it's not yet just part of the territory (even more downloading armchair blah blah notwithstanding); it's not yet widely recognized as a condition rather than a position. And in even more obvious ways, we're not past the Christian "them," and we're not past the children "them" -- often hypothetical in the latter case (most of the music we discussed on Rolling Teenpop was created for and marketed to teens-and-older, Radio Disney being a bizarre and atypical, but fascinating, barometer of less comfy demographic waters) usually overblown and narrowminded, if not quite flat-out hypothetical, in both cases.
So Rolling Teenpop was trolling certain widespread attitudes (not universal ones), not in what music we listen to, but how and why. How can you write about unironic music that moves you without the internet mask of knowing sarcasm that seems to permeate all musical conversation, even about music that we return to for our deepest emotional experiences? How can you write about funny or silly music in a way that doesn't deflate it (that's a huge problem generally, and not just for Rolling Teenpop, which could deflate silliness with the best of 'em). What happens when no one else (at least not critically) seems to be having these experiences with the music that's moving you most at all? When I posted Fefe Dobson's "Unforgiven" to a blogroll peer, making my case for its emotional resonance and its complicated analysis of a daughter-father relationship, we finally had to agree to disagree -- he just didn't hear it. It felt like a major loss (in this sense I occasionally empathized with the failure of some evangelicals in Rapture Ready! of getting their message across, even when the goal wasn't conversion -- anyway I maintain that Rolling Teenpop, for all its occasional overheated talk, wasn't in the conversion business) because on paper those lyrics remain to just plain LOOK like some really challenging, really great lyrics, even without the music (which I think adds to their power):
And I want you to know that I didn’t need you anyway
And this rope that we walk on is swaying
And the ties that bind us they will never ever fray
But I want for you to know
You are, You are, Unforgiven
There's falling down and skinning my knee and other clunkers, but the heart of that lyric just seriously knocks me out every single time I listen to it, or even read it.
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I'm wandering a little. Anyway, I don't mean to write this as a "look at how a message board can fall apart" observation, because (1) I don't necessarily think it's true, (2) if I DID, saying so would be hugely presumptuous, and I've gotten in hot enough water for jabbing my elbows out without developing a more visible, less specialized relationship with the board. Board culture is still a culture, and there are a lot of casual get-to-know-you conventions that I was aware of but didn't do enough work to follow -- I don't think I had much of a presence lately anyway, even just via the teenpop thread (which I assume most people didn't read).
These are just thoughts I'm having now that the teenpop board isn't a potential avenue for my thoughts -- I'm interested in trolling, f'rinstance, based on a few ideas that have been floating around the ether lately, and in trying to understand why I can't bring myself to condemn the behavior. I've been a little down about my actual thought output lately -- I've lost a lot of avenues, and there are more that I don't use but should. But not having Rolling Teenpop is frankly more of a relief than anything else. Some of its criticisms, in troll or bully or friend form, were accurate -- it had clearly become a kind of sectarian fringe group of stubborn but content-enough devotees, and it had lost the spirit that kept other people coming to the board. But I'm having trouble figuring out where I want to see the conversation go, where I'd want to follow it even if I didn't feel some responsibility to keep throwing ideas out. It's not the kind of friction that leads to a fight, or even to the introduction of some PBS salve, it's more like perpetual, cyclical exhaustion, like what I'm doing, though immensely gratifying personally, is a not-yet-articulated cause (I'm not even sure I've gotten to a main point in however many words I've typed so far) that's teetering too close to LOST all of the time.
I can't give up on this stuff, obviously, because it's not in me. But I also need some time to figure out what it is exactly I'm doing -- who I'm reaching out to or lashing out at or looking for, and the only way to do it is to continue to write and wait. And this doesn't even begin to address the fact that I don't think I can name a single teenpop album that has COME OUT this year, let alone been any good (Ashlee is closest and I'm wary but hopeful). So maybe this stagnant vibe, to a large degree, is being motivated as much by the outside as the inside, by a need to reach farther out of an "uncomfortable" bubble that's become TOO comfortable, as much as by the insiders' need to push things along. It's very frustrating.
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