[Dixielandjazz] What is Rockism?

[Steve barbone]

"The fundamental tenet of rockism is that some forms of popular music, and
some musical artists, are more authentic than others.

This was snipped for brevity but the article is very interesting if you have
an inquiring mind. Not about OKOM, but about music, and music critics.

Note the second paragraph reference to Dixieland purists. Perhaps there
should be a term called Dixieism? :-) VBG.

Full Article at: http://www.slate.com/id/2141418/

Cheers,
Steve 

The Perils of Poptimism - Does hating rock make you a music critic?
By Jody Rosen - May 9, 2006, at 7:18 PM ET


By far the most-discussed piece of popular music criticism of the past
several years‹at least among pop music critics‹was Kelefa Sanneh's October
2004 New York Times article, "The Rap Against Rockism," which took a
long-running conversation in music-wonk circles to the pages of the Gray
Lady. For those who haven't caught up with the debate, rockism is Š well, no
one quite knows what it is. On the Web site rockcritics.com, a "Gallery of
Rockism" highlights the lexical confusion, excerpting "Erroneous, Bizarre,
and Occasionally Illuminating Usages of Today's Number-One-With-a-Bullet
Buzzword." As far as I know, the Oxford English Dictionary hasn't bothered
to define rockism (despite the term's apparent U.K. origins), but a
Wikipedia entry, somewhat awkwardly, tries: "The fundamental tenet of
rockism is that some forms of popular music, and some musical artists, are
more authentic than others Š [that] authentic popular music fits the rock
and roll paradigm." Sanneh himself chose to define by example: "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." Perhaps the most cogent gloss came from
frequent Slate contributor Douglas Wolk, who wrote last year in Seattle
Weekly that the rockists regard rock as "normative Š the standard state of
popular music Š to which everything else is compared, explicitly or
implicitly."

The term may be slippery, but it's a useful framework for considering how
ideas about taste and authenticity have infected writing and thinking about
music over the years. And not just in the rock era: All who have sought to
separate high from low, art from trash, the folk-authentic from the
synthetic-mass-marketed, the bad new from the good old‹the folk revivalists
in the 1950s, the Dixieland jazz purists in 1940s, the Victorian parlor-song
champions who blasted Tin Pan Alley ragtime in the 1910s‹were, in their way,
arch-rockists. Undoubtedly there were plainchant rockists back in
13th-century France, thumbing their noses at that god-awful polyphony.

One thing's for sure: Most pop critics today would just as soon be accused
of pedophilia as rockism. REMAINDER SNIPPED.