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I think media literacy is a very good term for it, Vincennes. It's a very specific sort of media literacy, I guess, and it's not entirely disconnected from some (but not all) of the values that Allecto is talking about when he says 'rockism'. I actually think the way Lily Allen communicates (and is communicated about) is much more mediated and affected than, say, the Spice Girls, but it's also considerable more sophisticated. Allen knows how highly the concept of authenticity is currently valued and so makes a point of claiming in interviews that her popularity is in some ways more democratic, less contrived by record companies, more 'real' than other pop stars. This gives her a sort of credibility that makes her somehow palatable to people who would never have given the Spice Girls the time of day (and yes, the music is different, too, but I think in some ways less importantly so). What fascinates me is that the idea that Allen's success is a result of the democratic application of MySpace is one of those, to invoke a favourite phrase, big lies that become believed through frequent enough retelling. The idea that the privileged daughter of a well-known actor might not be the best authority on telling the real story of real 'LDN' like it really is becomes scandalous, something that one should just not say... It's very odd.
A really interesting comparison here is the Arctic Monkeys, who I've read saying in interviews that they really hate the whole myth that they're a "MySpace band" - and yet this doesn't stop it being repeated constantly by the media. What this indicates, I think, is that you can't necessarily blame the artist for the pernicious myths that are generated about them - although I think in Allen's case I could dig up some verbatim quotations that show that we can.
But where things really get complicated these days is, I think, if you consider an example like The Gossip. The Gossip served their time as a post-riot grrl punk rock group, very highly thought of in smallish circles, not that well-known outside the USA - and then suddenly they became a pop band in the UK, and Beth Ditto has been on the cover of Heat. (Except it wasn't sudden at all, and involved a strange alignment of Soulwax remixes, the TV show Skins and Jonathan Ross.) Now, this in itself is interesting. But what is really relevant to my original objection to Allecto's use of the term 'rockist' is that given their history, their 'credentials', The Gossip ought to be a band supported by people with 'rockist' values. And The Kooks, a pretty, celebrity-dating boy band from stage school who are highly commercially successful (and crucially also deliberately commerical in their sound given what is currently popular) might, one imagine, be championned by people with 'popist' values. But that's not the way it works. Okay, there might be some people who prefer The Gossip to The Kooks because they think they're more 'real'. There might be others who like the mainstream appeal of The Kooks and don't like The Gossip. But my own experience is that the majority of the people who were fighting on the 'pro-pop' side a few years ago are far more likely to like The Gossip. And while strawmen are dangerous, I don't think it's too far off the mark to conceive of NME readers who are more receptive to The Kooks. Because it turns out that what people were actually disagreeing about was a package of other more specific issues - like, say, gender. It feels to me that those issues have sort of fragmented, or reorganised themselves, so now they come in slightly different packages.
Stop me, oh-ho-ho, stop me if none of this rings true at all whatsoever... |
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