DeLaWho? DeLaWhat? DeLaWhere?

To my former professor Dave G., once of Polueides now of ORG COMM, for his appearance in NYT about a podcasting project he has done with his students at Marymount Manhattan College. It's nice to see his work with students acknowledged, I enjoyed his Public Speaking Class here at Denison and it is the reason that this blog even exists...so my hat is tipped to you Dave, nice work.

via the NYT

May 28, 2005
With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour
By RANDY KENNEDY

If you soak up the Jackson Pollocks at the Museum of Modern Art while listening to the museum's official rented $5 audio guide, you will hear informative but slightly dry quotations from the artist and commentary from a renowned curator. ("The grand scale and apparently reckless approach seem wholly American.")

But the other day, a college student, Malena Negrao, stood in front of Pollock's "Echo Number 25," and her audio guide featured something a little more lively. "Now, let's talk about this painting sexually," a man's deep voice said. "What do you see in this painting?"

A woman, giggling, responded on the audio track: "Oh my God! You're such a pervert. I can't even say what that - am I allowed to say what that looks like?"

The exchange sounded a lot more like MTV than Modern Art 101, but for Ms. Negrao it had a few things to recommend it. It was free. It didn't involve the museum's audio device, which resembles a cellphone crossed with a nightstick. And best of all, it was slightly subversive: an unofficial, homemade and thoroughly irreverent audio guide to MoMA, downloaded onto her own iPod.

The creators of this guide, David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College, and a group of his students, describe it on their Web site as a way to "hack the gallery experience" or "remix MoMa," which they do with a distinctly collegiate blend of irony, pop music and heavy breathing. It is one of the newest adaptations in the world of podcasting - downloading radio shows, music and kitchen-sink audio to an MP3 player.

Specifically, these museum guides are an outgrowth of a recent podcasting trend called "sound seeing," in which people record narrations of their travels - walking on the beach, wandering through the French Quarter - and upload them onto the Internet for others to enjoy. In that spirit, the creators of the unauthorized guides to the Modern have also invited anyone interested to submit his or her own tour for inclusion on the project's Web site, mod.blogs.com/art_mobs. (Instructions are on the Web site.)

In the museum world, where the popularity of audio tours has grown tremendously over the last decade, the use of commercial MP3 players seems to be catching on. Officials at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis have discussed putting their new audio guide material on the Web for downloading to portable players. Last year, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo lent viewers iPods to use as audio guides for one exhibition, and Apple Computer has helped the Château de Chenonceau in the Loire Valley of France do the same thing, using the sonorous voice of the actor Michael Lonsdale.

But the rise of podcasting is now enabling museumgoers not simply to enjoy audio guides on a sleeker-looking device but also to concoct their own guides and tours. A New York art Web site, woostercollective.com, recently made a sound-seeing tour of the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, which the Web site's creators made in hushed tones while wandering through the show, sometimes quoting from the museum's official audio guide, which they listened to as they chatted.

At Marymount, on the Upper East Side, Dr. Gilbert said he was partly inspired to create the unofficial guides after listening to the museum's audio tours for children, which he found much more entertaining and engaging than the new ones recently introduced for grown-ups.

But Dr. Gilbert said his larger point was to try to teach his students to stop being passive information consumers - whether through television, radio or an official audio guide - and to take more control, using as his model the guru of so-called remix culture, Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School.

"It's not incumbent on us to, you know, praise the art necessarily," Dr. Gilbert said recently at the museum, wearing neon-green sunglasses and leading a group of students through the underground tour. "That's part of the playfulness and fun of this project. If we want to say something irreverent or something scathing about the art, that can come out." (In the name of politeness, the project's Web site does tip its hat to the Modern: "Apologia: We love MoMA. Hackers hack a platform out of respect for it.") Informed about the project last week, museum officials declined to reciprocate with their opinions, but also made no comments about instituting an iPod ban.

Not the actual living part, but the transportable life that is associated with living AKA your stuff or things...depending on what you define as valuable. The ritual associated with stuffing your things into a small place than driving to and from school and home is something that I find very amusing. I may have more "thuff" than your average college student as my interest in music consumes space, but the act of packing your life up and moving it back and forth between college and school is such a funny thing. After a brief stint back in Delawhere, I drove back out to Ohio to begin my summer research focusing on constraining the time period during which a pro-glacial lake was present here in Licking County during the last ice age. Anywho, on my way out, I drove through a cloud of papers and paper clips. Shortly after passing through the cloud of office supplies, I drove past a ford taurus on the side of the road whose trunk had been packed so tightly that the entire trunk was being held together by bungee cords and the trunk door was blocking any possible lines of sight that the driver had in his rear view mirror. I would venture to say that the man had stuffed 15 large duffel bags in his trunk. Needless to say, my stuffed car (whose doors were all closed) didnt seem that ridiculous after all.

That we here at DeLaWhere? DeLaWhat? DeLaWho? are very excited about and have already launched our sloganometer into high gear for the May 23rd due date.

from delawareonline.com/The News Journal

It's good being first. Unless that's your state slogan designed to attract tourists and business. Delaware Tourism officials have grumbled about lackluster response to the slogan, which replaced "Small Wonder." So we're serving up a first-rate challenge for the talented populace of the First State: Create a better slogan for our beloved state. It can be funny or serious, but send it to us by Monday. E-mail suggestions to features@delawareonline.com (please put "slogan" in the header). Mail suggestions to Slogan, The News Journal Features Department, Box 15505, Wilmington, DE 19850. Please include day and evening contact numbers.

I found out about this contest, in which a large library of George Bush audio has been made available for download, while reading an old copy of Remix magazine. And it seems to tempting to pass up. Here is the website's description.

Think you're pretty good with audio editing? Do you have some original music that you can make Bush rap along to? Are you ready to go toe to toe with The Bots Fuzzy Math and demonstrate your mixing and parody prowess? Do you want to win some incredible audio software prizes? Then The Bush Raps (Re)Mix Contest is for you!

The Bots are having a contest in the next few months to see who can come up with the most interesting use of the database. Think of it as a remix contest if you want, but the idea is, we'd like to see what you can do with the George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive. We're giving you the tools to make the president rap, even tell the truth. The database is optimized to inspire creative word mangling. The only limit is your imagination. If you come up with something good, send a link to it(we cannot host your files, if you have a problem hosting files, contact the bots). We will setup a vote on this page, and we will be offering some awesome prizes to the best mixes, including:

* 2 copies of Phatmatic Pro from Bitshift Audio
* 1 copy of Unison / Micron from ConcreteFx
* 1 copy of Orion Pro from Synapse Audio

More prizes may be announced soon. How to get started? Download some Bush samples. Make Bush rap on top of your original music, and post an mp3 of the mix on your website. Then submit a link to your creation to the bots. We will post the links on this page, and let people vote on the best ones. The winners will get the prizes listed above. You are encouraged to make some original music to mix with the samples. Even if you aren't very musically inclined, there are a lot of tools out there that will allow you to mix the Bush samples with some sort of original music.

I suppose I might be a little late to the scene in reference to this debate about rockism...however, I find this issue to be a very intriging one. Many definitions have been used for the term rockism:
1) Robert Christgau wrote in 1990 about "the 'rockism' debate that raged through the U.K. music press in the early '80s": Rockism in the early 80's, meant putting stock in rock's "capacity to change lives or express truth"—as opposed to the kinds of pop that (a rockist would say) have more of a capacity to express pretty lies.

OR

2) For Kelefa Sanneh, rockism is the aesthetic that defines itself by building barriers against what rock isn't. It means, he says, "idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video."

OR

3) Rockism, let's say, is treating rock as normative. In the rockist view, rock is the standard state of popular music: the kind to which everything else is compared, explicitly or implicitly.

A rockist would find pre-stereo blues or country interesting only as it pertains to the growth the the rock genre.

I find that when defending rap or hip-hop, most recently against some of my geology profs, that I am dealing with the notion that because rap and hip-hop samples previous recordings that it is a lesser artform and is vastly inferior to their jam bands and rock n' roll. I am not a rockist, however, I may be a bluesist or jazzist. I find rock interesting in two different contexts: as it related to pre-stereo blues (opposite of a rockist view), and in the context of itself. This idea that rock is the pinnacle of music is a curious one. Check out these articles and leave a comment. (These articles discuss pop artists like Ashlee Simpson, Ciara, Justin Timberlake...and it just so happens that my roommate enjoys much of their work as they are easily accessible on his favorite top fourty station. There are many times that I am disgusted by his tastes in music (by the way, he is elated about the Backstreet Boys comeback). But, not because he listens to top fourty, but because all he listens to is top fourty and if he has never heard a song before he shuts it off and doesnt listen to it. I despise his close minded approach to music, but not necessarily some of his tastes in music...i enjoyed JT's album which was produced by the Neptunes and Timberland as well as many of Ciara's singles...i can't say the same for A. Simp. though)

from Seattle Weekly

Smallmouth: Thinking About Rockism


by Douglas Wolk

The topic that's lingered most from last month's Pop Music Studies Conference at Experience Music Project is one that's been going around for a while: the idea of " rockism." It's a loaded word, partly because it means a bunch of different things in practice—it's yay close to "racism" the way it's sometimes used. For various people, it's a term of praise for avoiding artifice or a description of unadventurous musical tastes or a word for just liking rock a whole lot. But it's also a potentially useful concept for thinking about the way people write about popular music, and the way people experience it. The trick is to figure out exactly what it means.

Robert Christgau wrote in 1990 about "the 'rockism' debate that raged through the U.K. music press in the early '80s": Rockism, at that point, meant putting stock in rock's "capacity to change lives or express truth"—as opposed to the kinds of pop that (a rockist would say) have more of a capacity to express pretty lies. To be a rockist, then and there, was to demand a perception of honesty in pop music, no matter how much artifice that honesty involved (and when you're standing on a stage, playing an instrument and singing words you've memorized, there's no getting around artifice, but that's a whole other discussion).

This past October, Kelefa Sanneh threw "rockism" back onto the coals in a widely discussed New York Times article. For him, rockism is the aesthetic that defines itself by building barriers against what rock isn't. It means, he says, "idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video." And Daphne Brooks gave a fascinating talk at the EMP conference, "Guided by Voices: Some Thoughts About Raging Against Rockism," wondering what "a black feminist rock criticism" would be.

Still, there hasn't beena clear definition of rockism, and I'd like to propose one—a very narrow one, to keep its meaning from bleeding too far out. Rockism, let's say, is treating rock as normative. In the rockist view, rock is the standard state of popular music: the kind to which everything else is compared, explicitly or implicitly. So, for instance, it's a rockist opinion that pre-stereo-era blues and country are interesting less in their own right than because they anticipated rock, or that Run-D.M.C. and Alison Krauss are notable because their virtues are also the virtues of rock, or that Ciara's Goodies isn't interesting because it fails to act like rock.

Now, the interesting thing about that formulation of "rockism" is that it's not intrinsically rockist to love rock, or to write about it; you can also mostly care about R&B or norteño or bubblegum pop but discuss them in a rockist way. It's hard to get around rockism, though, because it's built into the way people talk informally about whatever kinds of popular music interest them. (If Usher or Eliza Carthy or Autechre do something amazing, it rocks.)

Most of all, rockism is programmed into the way people write about music. The basic DNA of popular-music criticism came from the people who wrote for Rolling Stone and Creem in the '60s and '70s. They were the first to write about pop interestingly and at length; they loved rock of that pop-historical moment's Beatles/Stones/Dylan school more than anything else; and their language and perspective and taste have been internalized by pretty much everybody who's followed them, even people who've never actually read their stuff. That's the foundation for our house. Note, for instance, that anybody who writes about popular music is a "rock critic."....(cont.)

From New York Times

October 31, 2004

The Rap Against Rockism
By KELEFA SANNEH

Correction Appended

BAD news travels fast, and an embarrassing video travels even faster. By last Sunday morning, one of the Internet's most popular downloads was the hours-old 60-second .wmv file of Ashlee Simpson on "Saturday Night Live." As she and her band stood onstage, her own prerecorded vocals - from the wrong song - came blaring through the speakers, and it was too late to start mouthing the words. So she performed a now-infamous little jig, then skulked offstage, while the band (were a few members smirking?) played on. One of 2004's most popular new stars had been exposed as. ...

As what, exactly? The online verdict came fast and harsh, the way online verdicts usually do. A typical post on her Web site bore the headline, "Ashlee you are a no talent fraud!" After that night, everyone knew that Jessica Simpson's telegenic sister was no rock 'n' roll hero - she wasn't even a rock 'n' roll also-ran. She was merely a lip-synching pop star.

Music critics have a word for this kind of verdict, this knee-jerk backlash against producer-powered idols who didn't spend years touring dive bars. Not a very elegant word, but a useful one. The word is rockism, and among the small but extraordinarily pesky group of people who obsess over this stuff, rockism is a word meant to start fights. The rockism debate began in earnest in the early 1980's, but over the past few years it has heated up, and today, in certain impassioned circles, there is simply nothing worse than a rockist.

A rockist isn't just someone who loves rock 'n' roll, who goes on and on about Bruce Springsteen, who champions ragged-voiced singer-songwriters no one has ever heard of. A rockist is someone who reduces rock 'n' roll to a caricature, then uses that caricature as a weapon. Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star; lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher....cont.

From Okayplayer.com Lesson Board

To quote The Damaja

the rock reviewer can't actually say anything useful, other than add or detract from collective praise
- they can't compare to other interpretations of the work, like in classical. they can't provide interesting historical context. they can't discuss music theory. they don't even have the comfort that the composition is already an accepted masterpiece
- they can't name the samples, scratches and quotations like in hiphop, and discuss "the beat" in a technical sense that's still acessable to the audience. the extent to which anyone gives a fuck about the lyrics is also quite limited
- they can't really talk about the instrumental skills of the band, because they know that even in "classic rock" this is a very mixed bag
- they don't really know more than their audience. and their qualifications don't matter much
so basically, they take their very personal likings and dislikings, broadcast them so that they are perceived as impersonal, and pad the article out with musings about trends and influences and other stuff that they're basically making up as they go along (such as the cannon of classic rock albums). then other reviewers disagree and this meta-debate about "rockism" and similar things arises. man on the street just doesn't care
this is inevitable. it would happen if hiphop reviews were as widely read (hiphopism).
some of the things he attributed to rockism, there's nothing wrong with. Singing IS better than lip-synching, live performances ARE better than videos. Touring experience IS healthy. It is true that they view rock as the norm, as the 1st article said, but I repeat that's just an inevitable consequence of their views being broadcast.
edit: oh and what this boils down to is that "rockists" never really agree with eachother anyway. Some will call Oasis a "guilty pleasure" others hail them as the saviours of British music; some will praise Coldplay, others can't see them as anything other than a shadow of great bands of the past; some love Radiohead, other ridicule them; some like obscure, some like more obscure, some like more more more obscure....
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Anyway, rock fans always look for apologetic hiphop albums like 3 Feet High, Nation of Millions. I always get the impression that they don't really like RAPPING, if you know what I mean. One of the refreshing things about rap is that its sufficiently different not to be appropriately judged by the same standards. Ditto with folk music. With pop and rnb and rock they're always going to be talking about the melody, the performance.
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ANYway... for criticism unaffected by other music, i find the reviews at epinions.com quite good. there's no tiresome references to punk rock or whatever, the reviewers are just hiphop heads who're addicted to writing reviews.
For "general criticism"... I don't know. I quite like those little books like A-Z of Hiphop, they provide an overall, yet inside, view of hiphop. For specific articles? hmmmm, can't think of any. But then i've been avoiding journalism since the 90s

ADDITIONAL LINKS
When Critics Meet Pop
Douglas Wolk, clearheaded, on rockism
Robert Johnson, Rockism, and Hip-Hop Crate-Diggers
Search for yourself on Google Search

In honor of our ever-loving mothers and mamas, I submit to you a track done by Kanye West called "Hey Mama". This was not included on his last album but would have been a welcome addition. Give this song a chance to grow on you, its a great song.

As finals approach and I commence my studying, I will listen to a wide variety of music. Now, if you want to know what I am playing from my rather massive collection of music, then check out my audioscrobbler site. After downloading a plug-in into my music library, the site will track what I listen to. Some might say that it is slightly intrusive...and it may be. But in the long term it will be interesting to see what i listen to the most. Check the site out for yourself.