I've been thinking for a while about how to phrase this... First up, I really like your blog! And secondly, I would be really interested to know your thoughts on the modernist ideal, that generalised idea among artists in the, let's say, 1920s through to the 1960s (ish) that high-art concepts could actually be transmitted to the masses through a combination of both high art and mass media. I think that stuff like TV, music, and fiction was seen as the tool of societal transformation throughout that entire period, and taken really seriously – in other words, that art which was interesting and excellent was *also* assumed to be popular. There was no differentiation. "Difficult" art was to be transmitted to the masses. In Europe and the USA at that point, there was serious government funding for the arts because they were seen as "bettering" somehow; it was a public service. So, say, Picasso, or Joyce/Woolf/Beckett, or composers like Shostakovich – they all trusted the public to keep up with very academic ideas that were interwoven in their art, which (to me) is something that the arts have abandoned.
So art now is either popular (the MCU, stan culture, whatever), or "good" (Oscar winners that no one sees, winners of stuffy art prizes or, say, world cinema which shows in thirty art-house cinemas across the nation). But not both at once. Right? Or – do you think there are serious, respected and successful artists in any medium who combine those difficult and groundbreaking ideas with art that is genuinely consumed on a mass scale?
I'm definitely gonna be thinking about this more, but first thoughts: "there was serious government funding for the arts" I believe this is still a thing in Canada (though how serious/extensive is a question one might ask) I believe it's partly the reason for the early 2000s indie music boom, or so journos have said. This culminated in Arcade Fire's Grammy win. This type of "for the common good"-funding is something I think about a lot, but even in Canada it's very criticized by free market totalists. And that's what makes it difficult for arts to reach the masses through the controlled/traditional mediums of today. A lot of the challenges with giving public space seems very tied to the infrastructure at hand and the incentives at hand. There is a corrupting quality to the system that is incredibly hard to avoid as it's primarily a business (the film The TV Set did a great job showing how this works with TV.)
On whether any serious/respected/successful acts with a mass audience: I think it depends on your definition of "mass scale" and "success"-- I do think there's far more invisible consumers/enjoyers out there but they are not necessarily easy to monetize or measure, which is also why I think the spread in traditional ways is diminished. There is so much data out there and what gets reported on is not everything. I also think the more easily digestible media has served as a gateway to more challenging stuff for those who want it, but they have to want it and be actively engaged.
(The one example I can think of is Swedish rock band Kent was the most successful, respected and challenging when they were active...I did find that impressive. Though I'm not sure I'd call them high art!)
This is a great piece! And relevant to me right now since I've been reading Edward Bernays lol. I'm honestly still trying to wrap my mind around that quote. There's something funny about how, in all the back and forth about poptimism, the original proponent of it just comes out and asks "can music really be interesting if it's not popular?" How convenient for major labels that having a healthy marketing budget is more important!
I love this piece (and all the posts on your blog as of late) but I must belatedly-yet-strenuously object to one tangential thing here: Live it Out? A 10/10 no skips album? For real? "Poster of a Girl" is a bop but the median track on the record is sludgy unstructured punk crud where Emily Haines sings lyrics off a marginally clever bumper sticker. ("I fought the war and the war won" - ha! ha! Etc.)
I'm maybe being too harsh here because IMO Old World Underground... *is* a perfect album! Sooo good. I think part of the brilliance here - and I might be talking out my ass here - is that the album is both of its era but also broadly contemptuous of that era and the way so many post-9/11 indie bands were larping past countercultures. "All we get is dead disco." Etc. I've listened to both of these records a gazillion times since they came out and have strong opinions about them. But only those two, not their later stuff. Apparently Metric have put out SIX records since the Scott Pilgrim movie came out?? Jeez!!
I actually rank Fantasies (2009) and Synthetica (2012) above Live It Out -- those two albums have been on rotation with much more regularity, and I don't think I can pick a favourite. They are very different from LIO, but yes, the brashness of that album was exactly what I wanted at the time! Unpolished in the same way I'd classify some Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel and Of Montreal. Sometimes it just hits the spot.
That said, I'm definitely someone who loves a lot of debuts only to lose interest/respect as albums come out, so I certainly get where you're coming from.
Every so often I brush up against something that makes me realize people engage with the world in a completely different way than I do, and that Kelefa Sanneh excerpt was one of those for me.
Like...don't you want to write about music that's interesting? To LISTEN to music that's interesting? Don't we have enough history and data to understand that popularity has (at least in the short run) nothing to do with artistic quality? That in fact there's often a negative correlation between quality and mass appeal?
Fans of yore who complained about their favorite artists selling out weren't just mad because they now had to share with a whole crop of new fans, they were mad because selling out usually meant the music was less interesting. And of course it was! If you want to capture a mass audience, you have to make something that everybody, no matter what their individual taste is, thinks is basically fine. It's possible to do that and still maintain a strong creative vision, but it's really hard! More often, the idiosyncrasies that make your art vital and unique and interesting get sanded off in order to make the product digestible to the largest possible audience.
I'm not saying we need a return to a hegemony of sneering hipsterism (if such attitudes were ever actually hegemonic, which...ain't how I remember it), but we've got to at least stop pretending that the most accessible, best marketed music is necessarily the most worthy of consideration. Call me a snob, but I actually do think it's bad if you only listen to (or watch or read or think about) things that are massively popular. It's lazy, incurious, and above all boring — you miss out on a lot of greater pleasures that are more rewarding for the fact that they demand more of you. It's like, there's nothing wrong with liking McDonald's, but if that's all you eat, you'll starve your body for things it needs, and you'll miss out on a lot of things that are also good but are harder to mass produce. Hell, at least go to the locally-owned burger place once in a while. It may not be better than McDonald's (though it probably is), but it needs your business a lot more than McDonald's does.
That's exactly why I was concerned about "selling out" myself-- the inevitable changes. I've always figured that's why I'm partial to debut albums, plenty of big mainstream acts now I don't pay attention to at all but still revisit their debuts because it was before they were corrupted by the system. The book Sellout by Dan Ozzi did a good job of documenting the difficulty for some artists of figuring out how to navigate the major label demands/requirements.
I often use an analogy similar to your McDonald's one! It's so strange to me that people treat entertainment as if it's the one instance where consumption/popularity = best quality, and us particularly notable when comparing it to those types of corporations.
I think also there's an element of "this is the system we have for distributing music and it's not going to change, so we must believe it that is good and just, because the alternative is too grim to imagine."
This post (https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/the-war-on-genius) from Ross Barkan is arguing against something similar in the literary world. "Corporate gatekeeping of and control over art is good actually and anyone who thinks otherwise is naive!"
Which just sounds like cope to me. And I resent it, because it allows you to not to bother discovering and championing those artists who are never going to be massively popular but could absolutely find and sustain an audience if given the chance.
Great piece (and I agree with all my snobbishness). Just a tiny observation: I suspect the link to the footnote is misplaced, it appears before Kate Nash is mentioned
I've been thinking for a while about how to phrase this... First up, I really like your blog! And secondly, I would be really interested to know your thoughts on the modernist ideal, that generalised idea among artists in the, let's say, 1920s through to the 1960s (ish) that high-art concepts could actually be transmitted to the masses through a combination of both high art and mass media. I think that stuff like TV, music, and fiction was seen as the tool of societal transformation throughout that entire period, and taken really seriously – in other words, that art which was interesting and excellent was *also* assumed to be popular. There was no differentiation. "Difficult" art was to be transmitted to the masses. In Europe and the USA at that point, there was serious government funding for the arts because they were seen as "bettering" somehow; it was a public service. So, say, Picasso, or Joyce/Woolf/Beckett, or composers like Shostakovich – they all trusted the public to keep up with very academic ideas that were interwoven in their art, which (to me) is something that the arts have abandoned.
So art now is either popular (the MCU, stan culture, whatever), or "good" (Oscar winners that no one sees, winners of stuffy art prizes or, say, world cinema which shows in thirty art-house cinemas across the nation). But not both at once. Right? Or – do you think there are serious, respected and successful artists in any medium who combine those difficult and groundbreaking ideas with art that is genuinely consumed on a mass scale?
I'm definitely gonna be thinking about this more, but first thoughts: "there was serious government funding for the arts" I believe this is still a thing in Canada (though how serious/extensive is a question one might ask) I believe it's partly the reason for the early 2000s indie music boom, or so journos have said. This culminated in Arcade Fire's Grammy win. This type of "for the common good"-funding is something I think about a lot, but even in Canada it's very criticized by free market totalists. And that's what makes it difficult for arts to reach the masses through the controlled/traditional mediums of today. A lot of the challenges with giving public space seems very tied to the infrastructure at hand and the incentives at hand. There is a corrupting quality to the system that is incredibly hard to avoid as it's primarily a business (the film The TV Set did a great job showing how this works with TV.)
On whether any serious/respected/successful acts with a mass audience: I think it depends on your definition of "mass scale" and "success"-- I do think there's far more invisible consumers/enjoyers out there but they are not necessarily easy to monetize or measure, which is also why I think the spread in traditional ways is diminished. There is so much data out there and what gets reported on is not everything. I also think the more easily digestible media has served as a gateway to more challenging stuff for those who want it, but they have to want it and be actively engaged.
(The one example I can think of is Swedish rock band Kent was the most successful, respected and challenging when they were active...I did find that impressive. Though I'm not sure I'd call them high art!)
This is a great piece! And relevant to me right now since I've been reading Edward Bernays lol. I'm honestly still trying to wrap my mind around that quote. There's something funny about how, in all the back and forth about poptimism, the original proponent of it just comes out and asks "can music really be interesting if it's not popular?" How convenient for major labels that having a healthy marketing budget is more important!
Still thinking about it, myself. It's been added to my long list of people in the industry telling on themselves.
I love this piece (and all the posts on your blog as of late) but I must belatedly-yet-strenuously object to one tangential thing here: Live it Out? A 10/10 no skips album? For real? "Poster of a Girl" is a bop but the median track on the record is sludgy unstructured punk crud where Emily Haines sings lyrics off a marginally clever bumper sticker. ("I fought the war and the war won" - ha! ha! Etc.)
I'm maybe being too harsh here because IMO Old World Underground... *is* a perfect album! Sooo good. I think part of the brilliance here - and I might be talking out my ass here - is that the album is both of its era but also broadly contemptuous of that era and the way so many post-9/11 indie bands were larping past countercultures. "All we get is dead disco." Etc. I've listened to both of these records a gazillion times since they came out and have strong opinions about them. But only those two, not their later stuff. Apparently Metric have put out SIX records since the Scott Pilgrim movie came out?? Jeez!!
I actually rank Fantasies (2009) and Synthetica (2012) above Live It Out -- those two albums have been on rotation with much more regularity, and I don't think I can pick a favourite. They are very different from LIO, but yes, the brashness of that album was exactly what I wanted at the time! Unpolished in the same way I'd classify some Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel and Of Montreal. Sometimes it just hits the spot.
That said, I'm definitely someone who loves a lot of debuts only to lose interest/respect as albums come out, so I certainly get where you're coming from.
Super interesting piece! Kate Nash's album was one of my faves when it came out. Have to watch that documentary!
Yes, please do! I find her incredibly inspirational.
Every so often I brush up against something that makes me realize people engage with the world in a completely different way than I do, and that Kelefa Sanneh excerpt was one of those for me.
Like...don't you want to write about music that's interesting? To LISTEN to music that's interesting? Don't we have enough history and data to understand that popularity has (at least in the short run) nothing to do with artistic quality? That in fact there's often a negative correlation between quality and mass appeal?
Fans of yore who complained about their favorite artists selling out weren't just mad because they now had to share with a whole crop of new fans, they were mad because selling out usually meant the music was less interesting. And of course it was! If you want to capture a mass audience, you have to make something that everybody, no matter what their individual taste is, thinks is basically fine. It's possible to do that and still maintain a strong creative vision, but it's really hard! More often, the idiosyncrasies that make your art vital and unique and interesting get sanded off in order to make the product digestible to the largest possible audience.
I'm not saying we need a return to a hegemony of sneering hipsterism (if such attitudes were ever actually hegemonic, which...ain't how I remember it), but we've got to at least stop pretending that the most accessible, best marketed music is necessarily the most worthy of consideration. Call me a snob, but I actually do think it's bad if you only listen to (or watch or read or think about) things that are massively popular. It's lazy, incurious, and above all boring — you miss out on a lot of greater pleasures that are more rewarding for the fact that they demand more of you. It's like, there's nothing wrong with liking McDonald's, but if that's all you eat, you'll starve your body for things it needs, and you'll miss out on a lot of things that are also good but are harder to mass produce. Hell, at least go to the locally-owned burger place once in a while. It may not be better than McDonald's (though it probably is), but it needs your business a lot more than McDonald's does.
That's exactly why I was concerned about "selling out" myself-- the inevitable changes. I've always figured that's why I'm partial to debut albums, plenty of big mainstream acts now I don't pay attention to at all but still revisit their debuts because it was before they were corrupted by the system. The book Sellout by Dan Ozzi did a good job of documenting the difficulty for some artists of figuring out how to navigate the major label demands/requirements.
I often use an analogy similar to your McDonald's one! It's so strange to me that people treat entertainment as if it's the one instance where consumption/popularity = best quality, and us particularly notable when comparing it to those types of corporations.
I think also there's an element of "this is the system we have for distributing music and it's not going to change, so we must believe it that is good and just, because the alternative is too grim to imagine."
This post (https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/the-war-on-genius) from Ross Barkan is arguing against something similar in the literary world. "Corporate gatekeeping of and control over art is good actually and anyone who thinks otherwise is naive!"
Which just sounds like cope to me. And I resent it, because it allows you to not to bother discovering and championing those artists who are never going to be massively popular but could absolutely find and sustain an audience if given the chance.
Great piece (and I agree with all my snobbishness). Just a tiny observation: I suspect the link to the footnote is misplaced, it appears before Kate Nash is mentioned
Yes I just fixed it! Is it even a real substack post unless something has to be edited after publishing? 🧐 (Not in my case!)
Thanks for the heads up though I really appreciate it. I always end up missing something.