![]() At best, we may refer to it as "bad" (a kind of scare-quote cowardice), but at the risk of falling into condescension towards the music and its admirers: falling into a serious slough of very bad faith. An extensive section of the pop music repertory still seems resistant to the praise of critics and intellectuals. ![]() It has often seemed that, even though popular music has acquired a significant measure of scholarly respectability, this measure is extremely selective. I have often noted a disparity between the songs and styles many people seem to love to listen to-those they play in the privacy of their own homes, the ones that send them into paroxysms of delighted recollection, those they remember in remarkably detailed fashion-and the songs and styles that tend to get written about in vigorous, critically engaged terms. The situation has been arguably better and worse with respect to music. And it's worth noting that, whatever the reservations that greeted his admittedly extravagant claims, his insistence on the recovery of the beautiful gained increasing attention into the 2000s. iįor Hickey, writing near the beginning of the decade, only a full-blooded acknowledgement of the pleasure and sociality that intersect in disputatious experiences of beauty could rescue the academic art world from its arid purism. ![]() Beauty, in their domain, is altogether elsewhere, and we are left counting the beads and muttering the texts of academic sincerity. The route from the image to the beholder now detours through an alternate institution ostensibly distinct from church and state.The priests of the new church are not so generous. Now, it seems, that lost generosity, like Banquo's ghost, is doomed to haunt our discourse about contemporary art-no longer required to recommend images to our attention or to insinuate them into the vernacular-and no longer even welcome to try. The art critic Dave Hickey, for instance, began his brilliant little book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty with a description of the ills of the academic art world and the potential balm to be found in pleasure and beauty:įor more than four centuries, the idea of "making it beautiful" has been the keystone of our cultural vernacular-the lover's machine-gun and the prisoner's joy-the last redoubt of the disenfranchised and the single direct route from the image to the individual without a detour through church or state. I think that all of these shifts in critical taste were present in writings about music, but they also covered a lot more ground. The timing matters for a several reasons-a vaguely discernible 20-year cycle of rubbishing and rehabilitation in much post-War popular culture, for instance, discussed further below the generational and technological shifts that enabled the appearance of a broader range of values and investments amongst critics, whether professional, amateur, or somewhere in between or for that matter, a gradual shift in academic writing about popular music from a largely defensive, morally and aesthetically engagé style of scholarship to one more willing to give itself up to enjoyment. I first began looking for ways to write about the artists discussed in this book in the late 1990s, a far over a decade ago.
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