Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah: What's the issue, really.

In the 80s we called it "Apartheid Oriented Radio." Billy Squier over here, Prince over there, but they hung out together with MTV and Kasey Casem. And that was it.

That's institutional bias, though. Calling out individuals, even when like Merritt they serve as de facto representatives for movements and tendencies, that's of-our-times tricky, and I understand Cook's impulse in wanting to bat at SFJ/JH, even if I suspect this is a grudge Cook's been carrying for two years [he says not]. Very of-our-times also to identify with the artists we admire, and to take critique of those artists as slights on our own persons.

If you really want to look at the rockism debate (and yes I'm having a good chuckle thinking of S. Merritt as an exemplar of rockism), seems to me what's at stake is the critical playing field -- is the conversation going to be about recycling one narrow set of tropes (e.g. indie), is the conversation going to be about a wider reclamation of references (e.g. pop), or is the conversation going to be about the goddam experience of listening to whatever moves you right then (e.g. John Darnielle's love of pop, folk, gangsta, death metal, wtf-ever).

What I want from criticism is to be pointed to potentially great uses of my time. I've done my time with the Magnetic Fields (disc one of 69 love songs is about a third good). I hate it when critics rule out entire zones of production in their given fields -- it just about always disqualifies their opinions, sorry. Merritt's much less a critic than an art-producer, though, and there are perfectly good reasons to let artists have their weird narrow fields of vision, number one of which is the absolute freedom any artist needs. (Number two is trauma, but I'm no diagnostician so I'll let that one just float there.)

Not that anybody asked.

(UPDATE: Joshua as ever to the heart of it.)