Pretentiousness: Exemplar or Valueless?

I agree with that quote. There seems to be no way around it. Trying to manipulate reality into hard-hitting words is pretentious. I like it when bands throw in silliness to avoid sounding pretentious, but there are bands that do this pretentiously just because it's a trend. I'm really liking Butthole Surfers "Dracula From Houston" offa Weird Revolution. It makes me smile uncontrollably when I hear it, but the fact that it's nonsense is kinda pretentious, no? I know they've never made sense, but I guess it's always been pretentious."got no future and a great big past, little bitty guy on the rim of the glass, gotta meet my plane so I can get my monkey, teach him to be cool but a little bit funky, got no credit and I got no fear and I got about a buck so I can buy a beer, gotta see a doctor about the word's I've said and I gotta get a bike and I gotta paint it red. CHORUS: oh no we gotta go we're not gonna live forever why why we gotta die you know that we'll be together, hey hey we gotta stay, i could never be a savior, and you don't have to be there cuz i'm never, never, never comin' home." Song makes no fuckin' sense. Pretentious but amusing.

I'm usually all in favour of pretension, because it means someone is aspiring to some better image of themselves or the world. Pretentious in an interesting way: Bowie, Eno ('we started a whole new school of pretension'), 80s Prince. Pretentious in a bad way: DJ Spooky with his rambling theories.

I think you can turn the sense of the word around and say that there's nothing more pretentious than, say, Julie Burchill telling young people not to go to university, or Bruce Springsteen saying he knows something about blue collar life.

That is SO true and quite a thought, I might add. Now, if we could only get people to agree on which side is the "interesting" side and which side is the "dull" side. For example, I know what kids think is interesting is exactly what those old "boring" adults find rather "dull" and predictable because they've lived through something similar or had those similar feelings and attitudes and came to the conclusion these things aren't very interesting after all.

And by definition, it's bad.

This isn't to say (a) that all pretending-to-be-something-else is bad (that's nonsense, and a total red herring -- it's sophistry to conflate pretentiousness with, say, the fictive), or (b) that someone ignorant can't mistake a work that's difficult, but full of meaningful content, for one that's just crap. Like any other word, "pretentious" can be misapplied. But it has a very specific and thoroughly relevant meaning.

Pretentious usually just means trying too hard

I beg to differ. It very often means not trying hard enough, or at least not being good enough at whatever you do. Bad Lieutenant, for instance, is a pretentious movie not because they tried too hard, but because it's garbage, and adopts the vernacular of the art-house in order to hide the fact that it's got nothing to say. Ferrara thought he could throw together a bunch of crap (a cameo by Jesus, nun rape, Harvey Keitel's penis...), that no one would know the difference, and that people would imagine meaningful content to his work that wasn't there. (He was, sadly, largely correct.)

And, for that matter, when I was in poetry workshop and got rightfully skewered for writing a poem that was "pretentious", it was indeed because I was tossing out high-sounding phrases and the like without having any meaningful content to back them up. I literally didn't try hard enough to make a good poem, and the criticism was completely on the money.

things [insert favoured halfwit here] dismiss as pretentious = by defn GRATE

(Is this what Momus means by formalism? I never quite understood that.)

Mark S: Cute. But, of course, many halfwits dismiss things that are, in fact, bad -- they just do it for the wrong reasons.

Graham: So, you're saying that poetry, and for that matter music, is meaningless? That it's just a bunch of sounds, without any actual content or meaning behind them? I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by "meaningful content" -- I'm not referring to mawkish sociopolitical statements, I'm talking about what Charles Gayle (for instance) would call "saying something" -- as in, if you're not saying anything, put your instrument (laptop/turntable/whatever) down.

Alternatively, if you haven't misunderstood me, and were you to propose to most worthwhile poets past or present that their poems are, or ought to be, devoid of content and meaning, and are just a bunch of "high-sounding phrases" and nothing else, I fear you'd likely get the equivalent of a raised middle finger from them.

Anyway, Momus's formalism is closer to what you're talking about than what I'm talking about, inasmuch as formalism privileges form over content. But in any event, dwelling on the whole "formalist/kitsch" false dichotomy is soon tiresome, and has very little to do with making good art of any sort.

Hence eg queer = now good, frexample, tho formerly bad. There is possibly an aesthetic antagonism which yr refusal of the possibility of all shall-we-say sarcastic usage rules out of the discussion?

All language is socially constructed, of course -- but so what? Concepts do not solely exist in linguistic form, and a word like "pretentious" is used to describe a phenomenon which, within the context of our lives as socialized human beings, is seen to exist and be real. The phenomenon will still exist, and will still be real, even if the word is taken away -- so why take the word away? Why deprive ourselves of the ability to describe some part of reality?

As for "an aesthetic antagonism which yr refusal of the possibility of all shall-we-say sarcastic usage rules out of the discussion", I can't say I follow. Of course the word can be used sarcastically -- so what? That doesn't mean it doesn't have a clear and precise meaning -- one which, again, describes something that exists.

(BTW that "nothing personal" in my last post was left over from a previous sentence version)

(It's PHIL, by the way)

I think where you're misunderstanding me is the issue of what I mean by "content". You mentioned not knowing what 90% of your favorite records are "about", which leads me to believe that by "content" you think I mean a message, or a written text, or something of the sort -- in any event, something that can be described in words with a reasonable degree of completeness.

But when I say content, I'm referring to something far broader -- something that instrumental music, for one, can certainly have. Though you can't use the English language to describe it fully, the abstract musical relationships in a sonata by Beethoven or a Charlie Parker tune are certainly content, and without needing to refer to anything extramusical. And pretentiousness can certainly exist in "absolute" music (i.e. music without a text and without an explicit program), though it's much easier to peg when there's a text around; plenty of bad free jazz suffers from it, for one.

So when I'm talking about "saying something", I mean a purely musical idea as much, if not more so, than I mean any kind of textual/political/programmatic content. And what differentiates a work that's "difficult but rewarding" from one that's merely pretentious is the intelligibility of that idea, and the skill with which its implications are developed and explored.

(And a work can obviously have multiple forms of content -- one obvious dichotomy being music and lyrics/text, or in the case of opera, the music, the text and the drama. So one might appreciate a work for one form of content -- "the music is great", i.e. the musical ideas are appealing and developed in an attractive and engaging manner -- but disdain another part of its content -- "but the lyrics are terrible and pretentious", i.e. the text uses high-falutin' and self-consciously poetic language but ends up coming off as meaningless and self-indulgent, rather than nuanced and rich.)

I guess I tend to see pretentiousness as, in part, the triumph of the narcissistic drive for ego-gratification over one's taste and desire to make good music. Much as Bowie cultivated layer after layer of artifice, to me it always seems more like self-aware posturing than true pretentiousness. But then again, Bowie had something to say.

But I do think that reclamation is legitimate when the culture has no adequate words of approbation for newly-visible or newly-created social forms.

Societies tend to forge language in the dark ages of tolerance, during times when homosexuality, pretentiousness, affectedness etc are put, figuratively speaking, in the stocks and spattered with eggs. So to reclaim 'queer' is important.

In English, there is no positively-charged word for 'pretension'. There is no positively-charged word for 'kitsch'. And there are only positively-charged words for homosexuality because of decades of struggle on the part of activists.

My position is that I use a word like 'pretentious' both negatively and positively, according to context. And I try, as much as possible, to introduce new words from other cultures (where they think about things differently) into English.

For instance, on my website I introduce the word 'hikki', which means someone who chooses to stay at home with their parents well into adulthood. This would normally be seen in the English language as an inadequate person who should 'get a life'. But I try and show it as a form of cunning, a way of avoiding the meaningless drudgery needed to pay rent.

In this way, you see, we approach what Nietzsche called 'the transvaluation of all values' (he said, pretentiously)!

Is there a fear that if all our terms become neutralized, we will become blind, er, emotionally-impaired, to all true suffering? I would think that by eliminating the rhetorical extremes of language (is she dirt poor? is she the backbone of the American economy? is she lower middle class? Who gives a fock - she ain't got enough money to pay her rent and utility bills) we would become better able to see the real material conditions of suffering.

The generally accepted english term for someone who lives with their parents well into adulthood is, I think, slacker. It seems more interesting to work out the contradictions of this word (like in that movie called Slacker) than to replace it with some other word with which we have no history. Maybe I agree with you for the most part Momus but also maybe Nietzsche would rather have his values imploded.

And when I speak of "good art" I just mean "books/films/pieces of music that are good"! Surely you can't disagree that some works are crap, and some are brilliant, and most are somewhere in between? Of course the question of which is which will largely be a matter of opinion, but the alternative is the sort of "everything is the same as everything else" business which I find thoroughly distasteful.

All this stuff is a total red herring. A "meaning" is not a message! It's not a moral, it's not a tidy little point, it's not One to Grow On. (For that matter, having a point of view is not synonymous with being a propagandist, but that's another thing entirely.)

I was rightly skewered because what I wrote was crap! The purpose of art is not, and never has been, to express yourself -- that's total Romantic nonsense, the fetishization of the sensitive artist and the ego at the expense of things like craft and skill. It can be a useful byproduct of the process of creation, but it's not the point: the point is to make a good work.

And I didn't -- I just threw a bunch of phrases together and had no real thought behind them. (I certainly wasn't expressing some sort of deeply-held emotional truth.) On occasion, sure, that'll work, but in general, what comes out of a process like that is utter crap. And so it was!

And dave q is quite right, the maker doesn't always know what's being made or why, or how to justify it, or why it works or how to make it better. How does "pretentious" work in that situation? "They ought to know"? Why? Maybe the work is better when they don't.

Course I'm not interested in "good work" esp. anyway: I'm interested in having something meaty to talk about. "All important work is partly a failure": I think the entire conceptual history behind the word "pretentious" shuts THAT idea down.

Because pretentious is a word to describe a specific kind of bad art, and it was completely appropriate in that particular case. It was both "no good" and "pretentious"!

Pretentious seems more a judgment about what was going in in your head (or not going on)!

Naah. It's a judgment about the success of the work in communicating something of aesthetic interest. It's the act of a qualified reader in saying, "This person isn't really articulating anything worthwhile, and nothing I see here gives the feeling that there's anything I'm missing, either. They're using complex and esoteric devices of style and language in order to make the work seem deeper than it really is."

when you say Bad Lieut = pretentious, I don't really know WHAT you're saying abt the movie itself: "I don't get it hence there's nothing to get"?

I'm saying that I believe myself to be a qualified critic and intelligent person whose opinions are informed enough to be able to evaluate this movie, and that after having seen said movie, I believe that it is a poor one, whose use of nonstraightforward techniques (for instance) is merely a device to obscure its lack of merit. A movie like Persona needs to be made the way it's made -- if it were filmed in Hollywood style, the entire effect of the movie would be lost. This is not true of Bad Lieutenant, in which the effect of said techniques is to make the whole thing seem laughable and incoherent. And that's the heart of pretentiousness, in one sense: it lays claim to a style that's not justified by the movie's content, and does it in order to seem smarter/deeper than it really is, not because it's an inevitable decision predicated by what it had to say, as is the case with Persona.

Seems like the word can only be used from a position of artistic- creativity superiority.

Only if you call all criticism that isn't completely value-neutral "a position of artistic-creativity superiority". And a mode of criticism that never speaks of good nor bad is very limited, to say the least.

how do I know that Ferrara's "just using high- sounding stuff for effect"; what if he tried something really interesting and difficult and it didn't work out for reasons beyond his control – is that pretentious too, or just bad luck?

If it didn't work out, it's a pretentious movie. Whatever he may have had in mind doesn't much matter -- if it's not there for the finding in the movie, it's not there. He may very well have been ambitious, and trying to make something really interesting and difficult, but failed ambitions are the bread and butter of pretension! He may have tried, but he wasn't good enough.

To me the word feels very often like a shortcut to shut up the interesting part of the dicussion: why does this part work, that not? Who SAYS this works, that doesn't?

Who says? Each of us does, or can, inasmuch as each of us who don't accept everything we receive uncritically evaluate what we see and hear and read, whether we've articulated that process to ourselves or not. And unless we're complete solipsists, we believe that there are reasons that these things we see are successful or unsuccessful in their aims, and that those reasons aren't solely in our own heads. You seem to be afraid that "pretentious" will be used by doctrinaire critics, but in that case your problem really isn't with the word, it's with the notion of doctrinaire criticism, isn't it?

the maker doesn't always know what's being made or why, or how to justify it, or why it works or how to make it better. How does "pretentious" work in that situation?

Again, it's in the work -- whatever process may have created it, its failure to communicate its aesthetic vision successfully, intelligibly, and convincingly to an informed audience means that it's a failed work. If it's pretentious, it means that it's furthermore guilty of what we described above -- using obscurantist methods where straightforward ones would do, (in literature) making obscure allusions that aren't justified by the context, and so forth.

Course I'm not interested in "good work" esp. anyway: I'm interested in having something meaty to talk about.

Ah. Well, that says it all, doesn't it? If you're more interested in the chat than in the art -- and, by extension, being moved by it, or having your world turned upside-down by it, or finding that your way of looking at the universe has completely changed by it -- then that's fine, certainly. But as a musician and a (bad) writer, I can't say I share your point of view. I see a difference between pieces of music that are stupid, banal, and insultingly obvious, and pieces of music that have the power to move me and to conjure up aesthetic visions I'd never have dreamed of otherwise. I think my life would be wasted were I to spend it fawning over the former.

The arts are deadly serious to me, and I don't think it's possible to really love them without that being the case on some level -- not being deadly serious about talking-about-the-arts, but about the arts themselves. I tend to think you feel the same way, but are just railing against the notion of doctrinaire pronouncements of what Good Art is -- perhaps because you believe that certain works are unfairly overlooked and dismissed thereby. If so, then why not proselytize on their behalf, rather than go after the notion of good and bad?

"All important work is partly a failure"

Bullshit. It sounds clever, as many aphorisms do, but I don't buy it.

"whose use of nonstraightforward techniques (for instance) is merely a device to obscure its lack of merit."

Perhaps my POV would be clearly if I said is in effect merely a device etc. It doesn't matter what Ferrara meant -- it's not in the movie, so it's essentially irrelevant.

"Bother," said Pooh.

Everything must always be able to move, change, shapeshift ,be its opposite within the hour.

(taking sides: horace vs ovid)

"Ambition," perhaps - a near relation to "pretension." Not always positive, but sometimes. Pretension (and the word "pretentious") can be part of this: I pretend to knowledge I don't have, someone calls me on it, calls me "pretentious," I'm spurred to go out and get the knowledge and do the thinking. Without the original pretension I might not have gotten there.

I'd forgotten, but reading back it seems I got a bit more heated than I meant to vs. Mark S above: sorry 'bout that, Mark.

(1) Couldn't have if I didn't know how ignorant I was being. I mean, I'm not that self-aware.

(2) Chuck complains that I include too many apologies for myself as it is, and that my ideas risk getting buried under all my hemmings and hawings. The idea needs to face the crowd unprotected, as it were, even if it's a bad one.

(3) And I'm in over my head a lot when I write about music but I simply must put forward ideas, provocative ones, unfinished ones, cockeyed ones because practically no one else in the commercial rockcrit press is doing it, and maybe maybe maybe I'll scare someone up who knows better than I and will actually say something interesting in response.

I think I'm speaking to both your and Mark's concerns. He's against "pretentious" as a blanket putdown word that shuts down all novelty and risk, you're worried that he's throwing the baby out with the bathwater and eliminating a perfectly useful word, and I think you're both right.

frank i realised afterwards (while watching a sad tv prog abt richard pryor) that i shd have said "mis-rereading" not "re-misreading"