Art Would Go On Better if the Search for Celine Dion Sank

by Ari Abramowitz
15 June 2006

At the Experience Music Project (EMP) Conference in late April, CARL WILSON gave a paper regarding his ongoing efforts to write a book examining the phenomenon of CELINE DION. The phenomenon being that Dion is an artist who Wilson and virtually every other critic despises, yet who is also beloved by millions of people. Why this gaping disconnect between Wilson, the critic, and the popular masses?

Making the situation more complicated is that it stems largely from the ongoing (largely manufactured) ‘rockism’ vs. ‘popism’ argument, with rockism being accused of valuing only the myths of individual creativity and and ‘authenticity’ and popism (sometimes referred to as ‘anti-rockism’ or ‘poptimism’) allegedly believing that ‘guilty pleasures’ and ‘classics’ should be impossible to separate.

The rub is that Wilson often refers to himself as a poptimist, so theoretically, he shouldn’t feel antipathy to anything except for rockism and its engrained, perhaps morally suspect, ways of thinking. If anything, he should be feeling a strong kinship to Celine and her fans, as poptimism purports to valorize pop. Indeed, JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE and CHRISTINA AGUILERA have been cited as poptimist favorites, along with “overnight celebrities, one-hit-wonders and lip-synchers” as artists that should conceivably be given more critical credibility.

Wilson’s goal is a noble one: to basically explore and uncover his own, deep-seated biases and -isms. Maybe he is racist/sexist/rockist in ways he doesn’t realize. Maybe, if we all did the same sort of self-exploration, we’d segregate ourselves from each other to a lesser degree and have a more understanding, less racist/sexist/prejudiced world. As Wilson states in the abstract to his EMP paper: “There may be some parallel prejudice lurking in my distaste for vanilla power ballads, most likely one of class, the question of who rides steerage in the Titanic.” Cultural background is one of the many forces that socially constructs our musical tastes and must be examined.

While personalizing the battle somewhat, Wilson’s endeavor brings up a couple of questions in my head. First, this soul-searching is to be done to what end? Let’s say that strains of racism/sexism/rockism (or, more likely, culturalism) are uncovered. Then what? Should one be strapped to a chair and forced to listen to more 50 CENT or LE TIGRE or BEYONCE? Would that ‘right the wrong’? Would it re-educate you? Would it give you sufficient exposure to the cultures you’ve been ignoring? Would it show enough penitence for your sins of omission? As SIMON REYNOLDS writes, there is more than a hint of a Maoist self-criticism session about the popist stance in general, and Wilson’s project in particular.

Wilson is conscious of this: “Yet how much is this like searching for my inner Republican? If there no point where you draw the line, no music that is beyond the pale, how is criticism even possible? Perhaps, if hating Celine is wrong, I really don’t want to be right.” That admission leads to a second, more over-arching question: considering the way Wilson has set up his quest/ion, is there only one possible (allowable) conclusion? Can he possibly come away from his endeavor with any conclusion other than the popist one: that the pop masses must be right and that I must be imposing my own prejudices if I’m out of step with them?

At its heart, the popist/rockist argument, to the extent that it actually exists, is an identity-politics one. As KELEFAH SANNEH, whose 2004 New York Times piece is one of the current discussion’s touchstones, wrote, “Could it really be a coincidence that rockist complaints often pit straight white men against the rest of the world? Like the anti-disco backlash of 25 years ago, the current rockist consensus seems to reflect not just an idea of how music should be made but also an idea about who should be making it.”

SASHA FRERE-JONES, another one of the major voices in the political side of this discussion, put it more succinctly when explaining why DESTINY’S CHILD wasn’t taken more seriously: “Round up the usual suspects: racism, sexism and disco-sucks rockism.” This faux dichotomy resembles the largely manufactured rock vs punk battles in the late 70s, but replaces class with race and gender (yes, the entire STEPHIN MERRITT spiral is inextricably connected to all of this). As if blacks, hispanics, gays, and women are incapable of rockist thought and all straight white men are incapable of embracing studio-created, commercial, one-hit wonders. As if strains of all don’t exist in everyone.

Either way, the goal seems to be to control the discussion of music, and, therefore, in the mind of the combatants, to control the thinking of society (reality not required). I haven’t seen anyone question whether power and politics have, or should have, anything to do with art, as much as exclaim, “I want my person in charge, writing the rules my way.” (JODY ROSEN at Slate does a superb job in this article articulating how easily this issue can devolve into flip sides of the same coin. It’s probably the most even-handed discussion of rockism and popism I’ve read.)

As someone who experiences music more personally and internally, rather than politically (that goes for disco and death metal), I find the socio-political discussions to miss the point, even if they’re entertaining. The point being that the thrill of music often comes through its ability to arouse wonder and amazement, to enable a glimpse or even a brush with the sublime, to make your eyes roll back or to make you bop around your room. It seems much more difficult to reach those peaks when concerned primarily with doctrine and policy. Arguments like the rockist/popist one can be important in expanding listeners’ horizons, by letting them know about music that might not be reaching them. But these arguments also represent an intellectualization of music, in the sense that music isn’t allowed to ‘be’ as much as it can only be about (whether about mounting the Revolution or about signifying the breakdown of straight white male privilege).

And that’s ironic if part of the popist viewpoint is to embrace the ephemeral, the here-and-now, the pop-as-pop. Can you just enjoy the pop for the catchy, repeating chorus or is that chorus only enjoyable to the extent that it subverts the assumed hegemony of the (straw) rockist, white man? This is the social self-segregation that Wilson was talking about bridging, but in a different form. Then again, is this ‘fighting the oppression of the Man’ the purpose of the music, or simply an erected justification to give popists official permission to enjoy music that would otherwise be considered uncool and lacking in critical and peer approval?

It doesn’t really even matter, because, in this discourse, claims to rebellion and revolution (a la THE CLASH or BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN) are branded as rockist tropes. So we’re going round and round in circles. The theoretical rockists were castigated for only venerating artists that made claims to ‘importance.’ Meanwhile, the popists reacted against that veneration by venerating commercial hip hop and boy bands, i.e. artists that supposedly stake no claims on importance. However, the popists then use those ‘unimportant’ artists to make their own claims to importance, i.e. that the unimportant pure pop artists are important for being the real revolutionaries, overturning the existing patriarchal system of racism/sexism/homophobia, etc. So which one is it: should music, whether rock or pop, prog, teen pop, or hip-hop, be valued for its aesthetics or for its ‘meaning’?

Wilson’s book on Celine could potentially cut that endless circle of generation after generation chasing the power of the generation before it. But only if he realizes that he can dislike Celine and not be racist/sexist/classist/rockist at the same time. If he ends up liking Celine, it will probably be because he just “didn’t understand her art and fans well enough. But after spending some time with both, now he gets it.” He will no longer be socially segregated from Celine’s fans and will not be able to dismiss her music on the grounds that her fans (in his head) are unworthy/undesirable people. If her fans aren’t so bad, then maybe Celine’s not so bad, either. It’s warm and fuzzy, but it’s the same identity politics issue all over again: you gravitate to what you listen to because of what it says about you and shapes how you are perceived by others and by yourself. The personal remains political.

But if he concludes that he dislikes Celine, even after hanging out with and befriending some of her fans, and even after all possible measures of soul-searching for unexplored prejudices, then things could get interesting. Not only would it throw a wrench in the overly reductive, “if I like it, it’s good” popist stance (just as boring as the “if I play my own guitar and sing my own songs, I must be good” rockist stance), it would also force discourse back to more solidly aesthetic ground, perhaps a combination of formalism and romanticism. The socio-political context needn’t be banished, since music is not created in a vacuum and political content is one of many possible angles of critical interest. But if that same socio-politicization took a backseat to artistry and craft, creativity and invention, I don’t think Music would protest.

Filed under music criticism pop