<< Longer Than I Don't Remember: Idiosyncratic Periodization for Fun and Profit | Front Page | Vestnik Ameriky: I'm on the road again! >>
Friday, December 08, 2006
Is it because I is American?
James Ellroy evidently does not lack self-belief. In a New York Times Magazine interview, on the 5th of November, he voiced the following self assessment:
I am a master of fiction. I am also the greatest crime novelist who ever lived. I am to the crime novel in specific what Tolstoy is to the Russian novel and what Beethoven is to music. [Quoted not from NYTM, but the latest Ansible]
To my English ears this is quite ex-tra-or-din-airee. Where’s the man’s proper diffidence and modesty? All writers feel that way about their own art, of course, but – you know—privately. In the secrecy of one’s own study. But to come right out with it like this? It violates the writers’ omertà. Or is it because he is American? Is this kind of thing permissible over the pond? Can anybody think of any similarly vainglorious public self-assessments by writers? Because, apart from Bernard Shaw’s published opinion that he was a much better playwright than Shakespeare to which John H. made reference a few weeks ago (and that was at least wittily done) I can’t.
Below the fold is a photo of the Tolstoy-Beethoven of modern crime fiction.
It disappoints me. He looks like Eichmann when he should look like Mussolini. Or, to be a little less offensive, he looks like a clerk when he should look like a Circus Ringmaster. Still, there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the etc etc.
Note: when I say “Can anybody think of any similarly vainglorious public self-assessments?” I, of course, exclude Rap. This sort of thing is naturally de rigueur in Rap and gives that mode of art its distinctive charm. But a novelist?
Comments
Is this kind of thing permissible over the pond?
Well, there’s that scene in Limbo with Dante and all the antique poets. And various people getting themselves crowned with Laurel, whether Petrarch, or, lest you should think this a Mediterranean affectation, Leigh Hunt, Keats, or, earlier, maybe, Robert Henryson.
And, more recently, there’s Jeanette Winterson, who proclaimed herself the heir to Virginia Woolf. She’s since backed off, but there’s that.
My favorite ever hip-hop boast was the one by MC Hawking (the guy who pretends to sing as Stephen Hawking): “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds, G / The Hawkman cometh, and I’m bringing Hell with me”. It’s the continuity from the Bhagavad-Gita through Robert Oppenheimer that makes it. Of course, MC Hawking is trying to be funny; maybe it has to be inadvertently funny in order to qualify.
But every American life is enlivened by hip-hop. I don’t see why novelists shouldn’t join in. Put it down to late capitalism, as with everything else: the less power, the more boasting about power; the more fragmentation, the more boasting about being the master of space and time. James Ellroy has reached the top of his marketing category, and he’s looking around, thinking “Don’t I get to be Tolstoy?”
Adam, I don’t think this sort of thing flies over here anymore than over there.
But now I’m gonna try to start a big fight:
Claiming to be the Beethoven of crime fiction isn’t really saying much. It’s like being the Shakespeare of Muzak. I know I’m inviting the ire of genre fiction fans, but the very fact that Ellroy is sort of right that his novels are totally amazing for crime fiction is some proof that my claim isn’t too off the wall. Ellroy is to crime fiction as Radiohead is to pop music. Neither is doing anything terribly original; the originality is that they are doing what they are doing within an otherwise fairly limited genre. Compare Ellroy’s recent historical fiction to, say, Pynchon or DeLillo’s *Libra* and it tanks. Compare Radiohead to Can or Matmos and they are quite tame. But compare Radiohead to Coldplay and the *Kid A* is genius.
(Elloy’s recent fiction compares well to Neal Stephenson’s big project. At least Ellroy has a style. Stephenson, like so many “great” genre writers, from Octavia Butler to Ursula Le Guin to William Gibson, has great ideas with no formal skills. Elloy, in other words, has at least an ear for sentences. )
Hey, is Elvis Costello not a Brit? As I understand, he called himself the greatest pop singer EVAH, and that wasn’t even the most obnoxious thing he said that day.
Not sure which is more impressive--the unabashed egoism of Ellroy, or your attempt to transform it into a generalization about an entire nation. Alas, it appears that World Stereotype Day has come ‘round again, and I’ve once more forgotten to send out the appropriate greeting cards.
If it is any consolation, as an evolutionary biologist I can tell you that were you to put together a short list of the monumentally inflated egos in my field, Great Britian is more than adequately represented--I suppose making it a proud thing that you is British.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kJqihcDdD8
“I’m James Ellroy, the death dog with the hog log, the fowl owl with the death growl, the slick trick with the donkey dick.”
With Ellroy it is a desire to have a persona as cinematic as his fiction combined with a total lack of shame.
I don’t have a link to the original interview, but I will say in Ellroy’s defense that the quote came in a session with Deborah Solomon, who has a long and solidly-grounded history of asking the most neddlesome and worthless questions of anybody with a regular gig in Q&A (I wrote a short post about her interview of CC Golwater here, back in August).
Ellroy’s blather about his own perfection, if I recall, seemed an attempt to frustrate Solomon’s irksome interview style, and not particularly generalizeable, though of course it might be useful to act as if it were indeed an instance of some pathological me-usa-first.
And John, by way of contrast, is much too modest to note that he’s the easily best blog commenter in the genre’s history.
Two words: Ecce Homo. Oh wait, you said no rap ["Why I am a Destiny, yo!"].
Hey, Stephenson does so have a style. It happens to be Pynchon’s, but it still exists.
LB: “Stephenson, like so many “great” genre writers, from Octavia Butler to Ursula Le Guin to William Gibson, has great ideas with no formal skills. Elloy, in other words, has at least an ear for sentences.”
Not good enough to start a big fight, sorry. But I do think that the idea of “formal skills” is odd in this context. I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean other than that you think that some of these writers are better than others. Presumably it’s not a synonym for “has a distinctive style”?
“An ear for sentences” is also somewhat suspect; if you like the genre that Pynchon and DeLillo write in, then of course you’ll have an ear for certain kinds of sentences. This sounds like Delany on PKD yet again, complaining about PKD’s horrible sentences; the reply is to read Stanislaw Lem on PKD, and to say that the problem is in how you’re reading. William Gibson, also, seems to have sentences whose flattened affect suits his subject quite well. (I’m not going to defend Le Guin or Stephanson or, sadly, Butler on style, though).
What is wrong with him, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and gogol can all kick Tolstoy’s ass.
Oh my God, did I enjoy reading that. I find Ellroy’s self-estimation refreshing and liberating. Good for him.
I blogged too hastily. Chris H.’s link (very interesting, too) makes it plain that this is an example of Ellroy’s shall-we-say idiosyncratic sense of humour. And quite funny too, when delivered deadpannedly enough. Actually the fact that he calls himself the Tolstoy of crime fiction and not the Dostoevsky of crime fiction probably should have given it away. My tin ear, clearly.
The other examples of boastful Europeans are all good, save only Karl’s Keats (Keats? Hardly the epitome of vainglory in his personal stylee) and Elvis Costello, who, yes, is sometimes immodest but who gets excepted in my book because I have one of his lyrics tattooed on my arm. Those of you who lack a similar tattoo are free to slag him off, naturally.
Raymond Roussel? Grant Morrison?
Both of them were\are kind of right, though.
Ellroy’s “My Dark Places” is a brutally frank memoir
that certainly isn’t devoted to vainglory. I think his swagger is deployed mostly for humor, but there is a half serious side to it. My favorite quote was his gloss on the biblical injunction “judge not, lest ye be judged.” Ellroy’s rendered it as “if you’re truly prepared to be judged yourself, then judge away motherfucker.”
I didn’t actually say Costello was wrong, just obnoxious.
Bobcat Goldthwaite claimed to have produced the “Citizen Kane” of alcoholic-clown movies (SHakes the Clown). Who is to say he’s wrong?
Ellroy wrote one book, gave it multiple titles, changed the characters’ names and simply republished it over and over. (The plot of almost every one of his books is the same). And that one book isn’t that good!
While I admit the general standard of crime fiction is roughly hovering around zero, leaving aside Jim Thompson (without whom Ellroy is simply inconcievable)and such old masters, what about:
Leonardo Sciascia
Carlo Emilio Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana
Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square
Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us
Massimo Carlotto’s Death’s Dark Abyss
Jason Starr’s Cold Caller
any of these are far more interesting than Ellroy’s tome with many different titles.
LB, as Rich pointed out, I think you’re a little confused. First, the form/content distinction needs a wee bit more elaboration here, no? Neuromancer‘s highly stylized—its foundational status isn’t predicated on ideas alone. (If anything, the whole “he predicted the internet/virtual reality” line obscures his stylistic achievement.) Even before The Baroque Cycle, you could see his indebtedness to an overstuffed Victorian aesthetic—as in The Diamond Age—so to claim that he is without style, or that his ideas overshadow it, says as much about a Dickensian aesthetic as Stephenson’s. It takes a flair for the formal to make such a novel work, so unless you’re limiting “style” to sentence-level phenomena, I don’t think you’ve made the distinction you think you have.
Neither is doing anything terribly original; the originality is that they are doing what they are doing within an otherwise fairly limited genre.
Like all those pathetic sonneteers—that Shakespeare twit springs to mind—who couldn’t invent their way out of a sonnet. A sonnet! With all those formal constrictions, it took absolutely no originality to enliven those formal prisons—like country songs, sonnets practically write themselves. It’s much more creative to just cut loose and write Howl ...
... spoiling, you said? Seriously though, I think we’re talking about two forms of originality here: the first, more traditional form includes your Shakespeares and Radioheads, i.e. they enliven established traditions; and the second, modern, Romantic form of self-expression, i.e. beyond established forms, very Blakean. Personally, I prefer those who enliven the familiar—whose understanding of it informs every word they write, which is why Pynchon fits here, not with the Romantics. (Not that Romantics don’t know their own indebtedness, only that they don’t play with it as someone like Pynchon or Radiohead does. In other words, I prefer Radiohead’s interpretation of four-minutes of “rock” better for what it refuses to relinquish instead of what openly embraces—I find the resulting tension more satisfying both musically and intellectually.)
Scott—I think LB was kind of using “limited” in the sense of “not very good”, not “rigid”. As in “X is a very limited thinker” and such.
I’m not sure he was. He seemed to be talking about the inherent limitations of certain genres—say, the difference between Radiohead and Matmos, both bands I like, but Radiohead will never be as experimental as Matmos, bound as they are to the genre whose limits they push: the four-minute rock song. But I could be wrong.
(For the record, my hyperbole here is feigned. Just wanted to make that clear. Doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s wrong, only that when you say you’re spoiling for a fight, well...)
Burritoboy, Ellroy’s written at least two novels: the “my mom was killed and all women deserve it” novel and the “JFK/MLK/RFK was killed and they sort of deserved it too” novel. Both are basically about how the virgin/whore deserves it, whether it’s real women or the nation as woman ("The End of the Innocence” bologna).
Scott’s right that I’m playing fast and loose with the form/content distinction. I mostly mean “style,” but most of style is form: tone, sentence, typical plot structures, character types, thematic concerns, etc. Basically, I mean this: Butler, Le Guin, Stephenson, Gaiman, Gibson write prose that feels to me strictly functional. Its main purpose is to convey the plot with minimal intrusion—“readerly” versus “writerly,” to bring back that golden oldie. And the plots themselves—especially with Gibson’s later work, but also with Butler and Stephenson—often have “TURN ME INTO A MOVIE, PLEASE” written all over them. Neil Gaiman suffers from this is his novels as well (*American Gods* was not only disturbing in its attitude toward religion but comically badly written).
I don’t buy the Stephenson as Dickens comparison. Dickens’ prose is one of the most tonally complex around; in many ways, Dickens’ prose reminds me of Beethoven in the way emotion twists and turns. Stephenson is basically flat—to use a music comparison, he’s like that decent but forgettable singer/songwriter you hear on the internet radio.
I agree, though, that Stephenson at least handles plot gracefully, which is more than I can say for Gibson.
And Rich, I don’t ask all writers to sound like Pynchon and DeLillo (who are themselves stylistically and formally very very different).
(I am mostly talking out my ass here, but I am so bitter at the time I wasted on the first book of the *Baroque Cycle* and on all those damned Gibson novels that I’m taking it out here.)
LB- Snow Crash, though, is pretty charmingly goofy. I’m not sure what this list means for the genre as a whole, though, since I think you’re (fantastically) right on the money with each of these items, but still think highly of SF in general.
Not in terms of “style” or “form” or what have you per se, but as far as a linguistic craft that (when properly understood against the contextual backdrop of genre conventions and a particular writer’s overall poetics) does not compromise the aesthetic ambition of the whole, sure: How about Bester, Lem, Dick, Ellison?
Beyond that, I take issue with the line of thinking that ends with medium-specific virtues being the ultimate measure of a work, which I think is implicit in your judgments (though maybe you’re just sharing you preferences towards the linguistically intense). It follows exactly the flawed reasoning of Aristotle’s original argument to the contrary: Searching for the defining property of the category an artifact belongs too and proclaiming it to be the primary source of merit—problem is, any artifact belongs to several different categories with differing defining properties.
LB, I wrote that Pynchon and DeLillo write in the same genre (i.e. American postmodern literary fiction), not that they are indistinguishable. Your dislike of what you see as strictly functional prose, and of conveying the plot with minimal intrusion, is a classic complaint from readers of that subgenre, no different in kind from the stereotypical SF fan’s dislike of novels without “ideas”.
I know that you’re just sounding off, but this conflict is a classic one within the non-literary genres that have internal elements that want them to go literary. Within SF, as I write above, Delany’s comments on PKD provide a good example (the Valve thread here might be interesting). All those horrible sentences! Or, in the case of Gibson, all those horribly functional sentences. There’s something reductionistic about it.
All right, now I smell what yer cooking, Rich. I guess that’s what I was thinking when I first commented on Ellroy: in the land of the tone-deaf sentence, the one-eared man is king. Ellroy can be the Tolstoy of crime fiction if only because he does at least try to attend to how his novels’ forms do what his ideas say.
As I tried to explain with my Radiohead comparison, a novel like *A Cold Six Thousand* is not original at all, but it’s original within crime fiction. (But at what point does an experiment *within* a genre-fiction category simply remove it from that category? *Kid A* is not an experimental pop album; it’s a passable electronic album. If Sufjan Stevens starts rapping, that won’t make him a folk experimentalist; it will make him a rapper. Suddenly, I feel like the Walter Benn Michaels of genre: the identity of a work of art is what it does, not what its author identifies with in general or in the past.)
Neil Gaiman suffers from this is his novels as well.
I’ve always thought it odd how terrible Gaiman’s novels are—obviously, the man can handle material, has a knack for plot and ear for dialogue, but he struggles with exposition, as is evidenced by his novels. His talents are perfectly suited for collaborative mediums, though—a fact which our lionization of the individual artist blinds us to. (At least in fiction and film, where the author and/or director receives the lion’s share of the credit. In music, obviously, it’s still appreciated—but on vis-a- performance, usually. Composers, not virtuoso players, and all.)
Its main purpose is to convey the plot with minimal intrusion—“readerly” versus “writerly,” to bring back that golden oldie.
As long as we’re bringing things back, I’ll talk a little about Jack London, whose stilted prose was admired by his peers for its un-Jamesian directness. It was short, clipped and muscular—and was written to be made into a movie, at least the latter material. At the time, it was considered stylized in the same way Hemingway or Carver currently is—would you call such deliberate attempts to strip language of (perceived) niceties and detritus necessarily unliterary? Or would context matter? Because I see something similar happening with someone like Butler, whose career begins in the shadow of Tolkien and Morrison—and who tried to write speculative fiction which kowtowed to neither while trespassing their respective domains. Comparing the prose in Kindred to that of, say, the Patternist series, reveals an ability to shift between the former’s frantic tone and the careful, deliberate prose of the latter. (Also, if plot factors into style in any way, shape or form, you can’t dismiss the elegance of her plots, the way she interleaves so many issues without frustrating.)
Dickens’ prose is one of the most tonally complex around; in many ways, Dickens’ prose reminds me of Beethoven in the way emotion twists and turns.
Odd comparison, given the accusations (often justified) of rank sentimentalism (What will become of Little Nell!) But yes, he do do the policemen in different voices, whereas the protagonist in a Stephenson novel almost always sounds like the protagonist in a Stephenson novel irrespective of era. I spoke more there of his felicity with plot, the ability to keep so many different ones moving forward simultaneously, which seems to me a Dickensian—or, more generally, Victorian—talent.
*Kid A* is not an experimental pop album; it’s a passable electronic album. If Sufjan Stevens starts rapping, that won’t make him a folk experimentalist; it will make him a rapper.
So the answer to the question of at what point an experiment in one kind of thing makes it another kind of thing is … the incorporation of recognizable elements of the second kind of thing? If Stevens retained the woodwinds and banjo, and just started rapping, sure, insofar as he was rapping, he’d be a rapper, but insofar as he was rapping over 9/8 oboe melodies, he would be a pop experimentalist—the coincidence is the experiment. (What if a rapper started using Stevens-like musical accompaniment? Would he necessarily remain a rapper because rapping has a higher priority, or something?) Surely *Kid A* is an experimental pop album in virtue of being a pop album that is also an electronic album, even if only a mediocre electronic album.
I think Radiohead and Kid A serve to obscure the question. Unlike the other genres being discussed above (crime fiction, fantasy, &c.), Pop has a unique trait that makes this kind of question that much harder to answer.
Namely, that Pop is defined as what is very mainstream at the moment. Pop could be defined as the center of the road when the road is a Venetian canal.
So while crime fiction tends to be very strongly demarcated in a way that really doesn’t change much with time (it’s kind of useless to talk about early twentieth century crime fiction as typistically different than contemporary work in the genre, except as a means to distinguish individual authors), Pop does change. At the time that Kid A was released, electronica was rising in profile, and was bound to find its way into somebody’s Pop music. That’s what Pop music does (see Beatles, The).
Now, to stay within music, the question of “when does it stop being. . .” can be asked of just about any other genre, but not so much of Pop, whose limits are drawn by audience taste in a way unique to the requirement of popularity.
Scott, I’m not sure I could pin it down, but I do see a difference between a stripped-down style and a purely functional one. Hemingway and Carver are pretty easy to pin down, actually: it’s not just the simplicity of the syntax and diction, but the giant paratactical gaps between sentences. I was just teaching the first paragraph of “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” which is a perfect example of how much Hemingway can accomplish with so little. And it’s that tradition that Ellroy himself tries to write himself into, with his short, muscular telegraph-like bursts of sentences in books like *A Cold Six Thousand*. At the same time, Ellroy gets it all wrong: he gets the Hemingway clipped syntax, but he leaves nothing out, instead over-explaining and generally describing everything in pure “readerly” fashion.
I agree with you about Gaiman, ‘tho I’m not as familiar with his comix work. *American Gods* had a great concept and some interesting aspects (the creepy human sacrifice plot angle, for instance), but the execution was bumbling. It would have made a great graphic novel—and I don’t mean that in a condescending way. I love *The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen*, for example, but it would make a stupid novel. (’Tho the new Thomas Pynchon novel begins with a style that could perhaps do it—that late Victorian boys fiction thing: Pynchon nails it. Pynchon, 1; Kakutani: 0)
Ben: rap units like Cannibal Ox and Anti-Pop Consortium *do* include things like oboe and banjo samples, but it doesn’t make them not a rap act. (Can-Ox even have a hard-hitting apocalyptic flow over a Philip Glass sample.) The rapping makes them a rap act. If Sufjan raps, he becomes a rapper and needs to be evaluated against other rappers (same goes for Nellie McKay, who is called a brilliant experimental pop singer for rapping, when what she really is in those songs is a bad rapper).
For me *Kid A* was no different from a lot of electronic work that was going on at the time, such as Styrofoam or The Books. Electronic acts were incorporating more “live” instruments and some vocals, while Radiohead was incorporating more electronics. I’m not saying that a new “third wave” genre wasn’t forming, but that this genre needed to be compared to the best of electronic music as well as the best of pop music (and *Kid A* doesn’t compare well, as much as I love Radiohead and it hurts me to say it). I just think that too many pop acts get credit for “experimenting” when “experimenting” just means “bringing in new genres.” The moment 60s British pop went Edwardian song-hall (Beatles, Zombies, Small Faces, etc.) or raga, critics should have started comparing them not to other pop acts (Beatles trump Herman’s Hermits) but to the genres they borrowed from (Ravi Shankar trumps the Beatles and The Byrds). That was the moment—or perhaps even earlier, when The Beatles and The Stones did half-rate r’n’b and got credit for first-rate “rock and roll” or “pop”—that this trend started. And it continues today.
"Burritoboy, Ellroy’s written at least two novels: the “my mom was killed and all women deserve it” novel and the “JFK/MLK/RFK was killed and they sort of deserved it too” novel. Both are basically about how the virgin/whore deserves it, whether it’s real women or the nation as woman ("The End of the Innocence” bologna).”
Pretty much my interpretation - variations on a single main plot, with the variations seeming substantial upon first read, and gradually becoming comparatively trivial as you read more Ellroy and find all of his books running the same way.
Of course, Jim Thompson isn’t that different ("man undergoes violent pyschological crack-up and dies” describes almost all of his work) or David Goodis ("alcoholic depressive gets involved in underworld” describes almost all of his work). But Thompson and Goodis didn’t claim to be the Tolstoys of crime fiction, either.
[I]“It’s main purpose is to convey the plot with minimal intrusion—“readerly” versus “writerly,” to bring back that golden oldie.”
SK: As long as we’re bringing things back, I’ll talk a little about Jack London, whose stilted prose was admired by his peers for its un-Jamesian directness. It was short, clipped and muscular—and was written to be made into a movie, at least the latter material.[/I]
--Perhaps a better comparison as far as ‘un-Jamesian directness’ would be HG Wells, and invoking a so-called ‘writerly’ writer like Wells serves a point here for me. I’m always suspicious of this kind of distinction. Because at the risk of sounding like an undergraduate who has just discovered Derrida, what’s being done here is that ‘readerly’ writing is being given a surreptitious kick in the nuts while ‘writerly’ writing gets its elegant fist raised in the air by the referee, fight over: thank-you very much.
Let’s put aside Sartre’s excellent point that a writer always writes for some imaginary audience, and that writing for writing’s sake is itself a nifty fiction.
In his early fiction-- that is, in his greatest fiction-- Wells was (and I watch this tautology getting stretchmarks as I try to work with it) both readerly and writerly. One thing I’ve always said about Harrison Ford’s latter acting career: all this man wants is NOT to be a carpenter. With this one fact, we can explain every rotten film he has made since ‘Indiana Jones’. But that kind of ambition worked well for Wells. Above all, HG Wells at 29 wants NOT to be a draper. Getting an audience, a popular audience, was central to that ambition. Of course, he succeeded quite spectacularly, and produced literary fiction the equal of anything the ponderous Mr James wrote.
The fact is that it was when Wells started ignoring his audience, forgot *minor* details like having a plot for his readers to engage with, that he went straight down the pan. His crafted, elegant, spare style, his metaphorical astuteness, got all clogged up when he pursued his ‘writerly’ ambitions.
I was told by someone recently that James was like a great classical musician, and Wells a great pop artist. That argument is wrong in so many ways, but it’s there, underlying all this ‘readerly’-’writerly’ stuff in literary criticism.
And just as surely the Radiohead / Beethoven thing is straw man stuff, surely. Try Public Enemy sampledelia circa ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions’ versus, say, Steve Reich’s ‘City Life’: if you ask me, neither suffers by the comparison.
Ben: rap units like Cannibal Ox and Anti-Pop Consortium *do* include things like oboe and banjo samples, but it doesn’t make them not a rap act. (Can-Ox even have a hard-hitting apocalyptic flow over a Philip Glass sample.)
I didn’t say samples.
If Dälek (the guy, not the group) started rapping over a string quartet he had composed himself and had performed live by a quartet of string players, would you say that it was only to be judged against other rap? Or would you compare the quartet to other string quartets? You never did say why rapping gets to win out over elements of other genres, but apparently it does—perhaps the only way to experiment with multiple genres is be a rapper, because then no matter what else you do, it’s ineluctably grounded in rap first and foremost.
You never did say why rapping gets to win out over elements of other genres, but apparently it does—perhaps the only way to experiment with multiple genres is be a rapper
Ben, I think Luther was clear about it when he said,
I just think that too many pop acts get credit for “experimenting” when “experimenting” just means “bringing in new genres.” The moment 60s British pop went Edwardian song-hall (Beatles, Zombies, Small Faces, etc.) or raga, critics should have started comparing them not to other pop acts (Beatles trump Herman’s Hermits) but to the genres they borrowed from (Ravi Shankar trumps the Beatles and The Byrds). That was the moment—or perhaps even earlier, when The Beatles and The Stones did half-rate r’n’b and got credit for first-rate “rock and roll” or “pop”—that this trend started. And it continues today.
As I mentioned in my earlier comment, the edge-blurring of Pop might not be the best answer to this thread’s question of what attributes delineate genre: Pop is not majorly defined by its attributes specifically, but instead by the currency those attributes have with audiences.
So, in short, it is not rap that is somehow special, but instead Pop.
LB - You seem to ignore the fact that genre is a set of reading practices as much as it is a set of writing practices. When a certain form or gesture or what have you is used in a different genre, even if that change is purely contextual, its function (not just cultural function, but every aspect of the way the textual material works) changes, and so do the very criterions for evaluation— not just the ranking chart.
[repost]
Somehow, a so-called interview with Thomas Bernhard seems apposite (via Lit Saloon).