Well, since it's my blog, I figure I don't need to only make comments in the "comments" section of my posts, but please see the last post for some more on that topic.
But here's more:
-- I think I can trace a genealogy of hipster lingo to jazz song titles (unlike pop song titles, don't need to "mean" anything or say anything about the song---mostly arbitrary) and dadaism. This is to draw a line between dadaism and surrealism. Magritte (a surrealist for our purposes), writes "This is not a pipe" (in french of course) underneath a picture of a pipe. Famously, this is true and false at the same time, because literally, it is not a pipe. It is only a PICTURE of a pipe. Duchamp putting a urinal in an art gallery, however, requires no caption. ("Fountain" is metonymic, it's the same thing once removed. It's not necessary.) The reference is to the viewer's expectations- it is a provocation. Magritte is not provoking you: he is telling you the TRUTH. It *is not* a pipe.
-- In a comment in the last post, I discuss the circular defense this lingo puts around itself. To quote TS Eliot, these are "fragments shored against the ruins" of an identity. It is not new; I am not impressed. I am replying to a poster who writes that to reference something outside of oneself is to admit that the self is absent, that saying "Misfits Fan" is substituting for something absent. I dunno. Surely that line has to be drawn somewhere. I would argue, with a certain amount of eye-rolling, that maybe my interests (Proust + the Misfits, to be reductive) DOES add up to something new. But it seems to me that the comment overstates identification. You don't need Freud to tell you that a lot of "becoming" takes place by processes of "identification" and "recognition." And that what is different (in the other) exists only in relation to a difference in you. So, the space between the self and what it identifies with is clearly important. That is why I wonder what has happened in hipsterism, where identitification is either missing or ironized, as if there were a fear that the space left between identification and identity wouldn't be enough.
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2 comments:
I don't understand where the irony lies in hipster band names. names like awesome color, japanther and aids wolf aren't ironic. ironic would be a band called awesome different strokes episode, when no member of the band found any episodes of different strokes to be awesome.
I also don't understand the statement about jazz titles. it seems the titles of jazz tunes are most usually the title of the standard the song is based on (which would stand in relation to the song very much the way a pop song's title does) or is something very evocative of the mood of the song and usually say more about the song than a pop song's title would. how many jazz records from your collection did you check that against before typing it?
please please please do not reply if your comment only has this kind of snarky, uninformed tone.
1) you need to check your definition of irony, which strikes me as facile.
Irony is a notoriously hard-to-define word. You have taken it to mean "a knowing self-contradiction." That is one part of it, I guess.
Irony is DISTANCE. It is also PROXIMITY. If you get too close to something, you cannot ironize it properly, as you identify with it. If you get too far away from something, you cannot ironize it, as it is irrelevant/oppositional.
So, actually, that's a pretty good definition, I think. "Aids Wolf" is ironic because it puts one in a different relation (closer) to AIDS as a frivolous topic than one would normally be. The other names work on the absurdity (which brings us closer in or further from) of combination. I just don't think you have a good working definition of the word.
2) no less a person than Martin Williams, editor of THE JAZZ REVIEW, who wrote the notes to Ornette Coleman's "Shape of Jazz to Come," says "most jazz song titles are usually ironies or throw-aways".
Since you are posting anonymously, I cannot say "I will not respond to any more of these comments," but please please please leave this quibbling, sniping attitude at home.
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