art-school kid pull quotes, pt. II plus pop poseurs EMP prop

Casey Spooner:

It’s very upsetting when you go into an interview and you have expectations and you expect the truth to be told as an interviewee and then you read the interview and it misinterpretation your intention or who you think you are or what you’re trying to say. So it’s so much more fun when you go into an interview and you don’t expect anything truthful at all. All you expect to be is entertained.
Before [on the first album] it was about making an image, good pull-quotes and as crass as you could be. Engineering it consciously and encouraging interviewers to write whatever they wanted. The NME piece – Gavin McInness --100 percent fabricated. It was more a portrait of him. That’s the thing I enjoyed – when journalists took liberties, it was a more honest portrait of the journalist. Which is really what journalism is – even though they say it’s objective, it’s not. That’s cool. I liked it when people lie because it was more about the journalist.

My 11th hour EMP popcon proposal (look, it's like i'm writing for cosmo):

Poo pooing pop’s poseurs:
An analysis of anxiety around liking art-school trained musicians and their work

Admit it, you too have sneered at art school kids. It’s hard not to, with all their hip hair, funny antics and wild clothes. Who do they think they are, rock stars? Turns out, art school has been a fertile breeding ground for pop musicianship since the Rolling Stones. Because of this, the inclusion of “art-school” in pop biography, scholarship and criticism has taken on a strong set of connotations and is, by this time, a well worn but under analyzed cliché.
With an emphasis on conceptualism over skill, process over result, and creative amateurism over technical virtuosity, art school-trained musicians have become icons of a certain type of pop performance often negatively connotated as ‘dilettante’ by rock(ist) audiences. When adding to their pedagogically-instilled predisposition towards appropriation and their often savvy eyes to the visual aspects of pop performance, these musicians often incur the ultimate insult in the rock fan lexicon: poseurs.
In my paper I will examine the prose record of words connotating art-school trained musicians as “dilettantes” or “poseurs” to show how hierarchies of value and the unspoken rules of rock tradition are challenged when art-theory and practice jump into pop sound and performance. What threat do amateurism, conceptualism, appropriation and the willful embrace of artifice pose to traditional concepts of popular music and musicianship, performance presence, gender and persona construction? And, when writers bite the artsy conceptualism/hype, does it lend them avant garde status or make them big dupes? Only Fischerspooner knows for sure, and that’s where my examination begins.