Celine Dion has got to go - - I've got to Go Celine Dion

So, given the (perhaps) less than critical/scholarly tone of Wilson's book i would like to pose a series of (again perhaps) slightly less-than-purely-scholarly questions to this work (please note that while reading Wilson's book has somehow actually made me pause to consider the fact that i might actually like Celine Dion {and/or her music} my questions run on the assumption that we all start from the point of view of hating her music):

.08 . In chapter 6 Wilson introduces the concepts of the 'genuine fake' and 'authentic inauthenticity', which (to me at least) bring to mind these ideas we've mentioned of indie culture searching for its "authenticity" in older medium (vinyl, black & white film, lo-fi). Is it a fair assumption to accept these terms, but not consider the 'fake genuine' or 'inauthentic authenticity' as equally valid 'positions'?

1. On p. 67 Wilson ventures into questions about finding 'the self' & the "self-assemblage" that makes up modern identity. I wonder if the complex "bricolage" of self-identity isn't simplified in every kind of fandom (mainstream or indie), so that rather than having to create a version of 'the self' for every given situation, a fandom (and maybe especially an indie fandom) fashions a specific posture (say an ironic posture) to cover all sorts of social situations. Can we consider conformity (rather than the 'bad' mainstream sort or the unacknowledged indie sort) to taste cultures simply a way of managing the complex nature of modern social interaction?

2. At the very end of chapter 5, Wilson gives us a version of why Dion will never enjoy an ironic indie revival: "schmalz...is never purely escapist: it is not just cathartic but socially reinforcing" and so it "rots faster than other ingredients in the musical pantry" (61). First of all, this assumes that schmalz (and perhaps any unseemly outpouring of emotion) is trying to be escapist, ignoring possibilities for it to be, say, subversive, but the conclusion also ignores a 'schmalzy' artist who did enjoy a revival like, say, William Shatner whose acting could quite easily be characterized as 'schmalzy' and whose first "musical" foray was what i might categorize as experimental schmalz. In 2004, though, Shatner (and Ben Folds) released Has Been, an album that (at least somewhat) revives Shatner's career & 'indie cred'. Who gets to decide what can be retrospectively appreciated (albeit ironically) & what gets re-invented (read co-opted)?

2.5 . In the late '90s when i was living in Germany, a cultural/television phenomenon had developed known as "Deutsche Schalger" (German Hits). The phenomenon amounted to old German crooners (and some unknown younger artists) singing classic German 'schmalz'. These shows were popular with young and old audiences alike, but the sense i got was that the youth audiences watched/enjoyed these shows 'ironically' while older audiences saw them nostalgically. This seems to me to parallel our earlier 'Monster Truck' conversation where indie culture can consume 'mainstream' (or trashy) culture 'ironically' and remain indie, but i'm curious where this line breaks down, or how/why we draw it (i thought of this around p. 43-44)

2.73 . on page 42, when a 2003 Chicago Tribune article that Wilson is citing makes such a big fuss about the use of the word titanic in Afghanistan... isn't "titanic" just a word that means big?

3. Wilson posits the idea of 'difficult listening' vs. 'easier [not easy] listening' as a possible explanation to why we hate Celine Dion (p. 20). This is an idea we've come to previously in this class, particularly when talking about indie rock & early REM, but i wonder if we haven't overlooked the promise of 'complicating' simpler texts. Why do we (or why does indie culture) preference the 'deep text', the text you have to work at in order to understand over the simple text that you have to work at to 'complicate'? I'm thinking here of the the distinction between avant-garde art that (at least at some point in its history) valued texts that were at least on the surface level utterly simple (such as Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" or Michael Snow's Wavelength), that were, essentially works of art without content. Their complexity comes, then, from how they are read by the viewer.