IS ROCK CRITICISM DEAD?

most of this stuff you can pick up all over the place, in terms of influences.

if this is so, then where did all these people learn how to write about music? surely most of them didn't do it by reading the 'greats'.

No we don't. I am well aware that some critics are truely beautiful people, kind, sensitive and attentive lovers, morally upstanding and intellectually captivating too.

But nobody has ever written a single word on pop music that made any difference to either the listener or the musician.

There is no such thing as influence.

Including the sentence quoted above, presumably. So...why did you even bother typing it in, then?

Eh...given how many bands I first found out about because somebody wrote about them in such a way that I was intrigued, I'd have to disagree. But if you mean that if a listener who has already heard some music and then decided on its worth wouldn't be influenced by a critical opinion, that's something else.

Ahh...I see. But the sentence is still an example of music criticism, since you're saying something about an aspect of rock culture (music criticism isn't merely about records, y'know), and hence, still defeats itself.

Alexander: Dave Marsh's takes on "Surfin' USA", "I Second That Emotion" and "Don't Worry Baby" from "The Heart Of Rock & Soul"; Lester Bang's dissertation of "Astral Weeks"; Jon Savage, the review of "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" in "England's Dreaming"; Robert Lawsley's online essays about the work of Sly Stone; Billy Vera's liner notes on the Rhino 50's Rock box set; Patrick Humphries' track-by-track analysis of the Springsteen ouevre; the review of New Order's latest album in "Q" magazine....

And I'm only getting started here. All of these pieces have made me think in different ways about the music- sometimes opening whole new dimensions to it (Surf music as the will to power? Who woulda though!), sometimes just beautifully bringing something to the point (on "White Man In Hammersmith Palais", Joe Strummer is "the lonliest man in the world").

Much of this music I didn't like before reading other people's takes on it; some of it I just didn't understand. In every case, it enrichened the music for me. And I know I'm not alone here, others have reported similiar experiences.

It's not about being the taste police- it's about making people look at music in diferent ways or just alert them to details they may have missed the first time around.

Unfortunately, critics, and criticism, are becoming more and more irrelevant. Their authority has been undermined by chat rooms, bulletin boards and online reviews from your fellow Amazon.com customer.

...and I find myself hard-pressed to see why this is necessarily a BAD thing. Never mind that Bemis is using the big, bad Internet as the scapegoat for a "problem" that's been around a LOT longer (unless the Internet's been around for the 20 years between Meltzer's / Crawdaddy's reign in Camelot and today). And if the problem is the Internet (instead of the niche marketing genocide perpetrated by The Man), then PLEASE leave it broken.

It's a shame, though, because Alec Bemis is one of the better music writers I've encountered (up until this article), and it's a shame to see him fall back on the same crotchety stance that other "rock critics" strike when those pesky kids are playing on their lawn.

Anyone up for KlezmerCritics.com?

My own opinions are more valuable to me than other peoples, but I like to see how people recieve a certain song or album. I can't remember ever reading a review that MADE me want to go and get an album. I read reviews that make me want to hear a single but mainly because they say "Jon Carter/Erick Morillo have been playing this" and not because they say this is the sonic equivalent of a great date with Kirsten Dunst, or this sounds like a washing machine.

I read reviews that make me want to hear a single but mainly because they say "Jon Carter/Erick Morillo have been playing this"

Is there a contradiction here Ronan? Or does Jon Carter transcend the mere "people" category.

But you've made me see that dance music is an area where you don't bother so much with reviews except to try and find out what tune is what so you can buy it or download it. You'll already know it of course.

Well, I can't say that we weren't warned.

No one ever said the music business was a populist enterprise...

Why was I doing a websearch on my own name? Well, for one, like all writers, I'm somewhat of a narcissist (and a bad speller). And, secondly, I'm always curious to find out where my articles have been discussed on the net.

I figured I'd respond to some of the responses. My main qualm with what people seem to be saying about my article is that I'm somehow AGAINST the internet, or that I think it's a bad thing. That's the farthest thing from the truth. I LOVE the participatory nature of the internet. As I said above, I periodically google myself after I've published a big article in the LA Weekly. It helps me gauge how good a job I'm doing with my writing. When I see that an article has gotten a big response from those surfing the web -- and my Meltzer/Williams piece has probably gotten the best response yet -- I consider it a sign that I truly am doing something right. When people are discussing something on the web, blogging away, etc. it means they've been struck by something they've been reading or something they've heard or something they've seen. Hitting individual listeners is pretty much the goal of each and every creative person/writer person/musican person I've ever met, so I consider this a great thing indeed.

And to be honest, besides hearing about stuff from friends, I get most of my information on new music from a handful of....websites. Yes, websites. Admittedly most of 'em are not pure up-with-the-people sites -- I don't peruse too many webboards -- but they are very internet-like in character. My faves are:

- http://www.pitchforkmedia.com (for indie hipsterism from some extremely with it and gimlet eyed young observers -- not that I'm old...yet)

- http://www.allmusic.com (for the most comprhensive and handily available encyclopedia of reviews and information ANYWHERE)

- http://www.sxsw.com/music/daily_chord/ (for a fine, fine weblog of industry-ish information...though they also cite excellent reviewing and music writing when they see it)

As for what music criticism is good for? It's good for gauging what individual critics (who are really nothing but individual people) are excited about...basically music fans with a forum. What is the reason to write music criticism (I actually hate the term rock criticism)? Because you enjoy doing it...and you can find no better outlet for a certain kind of energy...and because it pays your rent. That's it.

I think that's that. BTW, the Melter article is available here: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/30/is-bemis2.php

And the Paul Wililams on here: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/30/is-bemis3.php

Better yet, pick up one of their books. Try Amazon.com. That's where I buy most of my books. Grrr....internet.

Why thank you. And yes, new answers to old threads are noted in the software, which is how I'm noticing this. More comprehensive thoughts later but I need to dash...

Well, that makes 'food critics' much more important than I'd realised....

I used to find some music critics (Jon Savage, John Gill) v. useful in the late 70's as an 'if you like that you might like this too' type of deal, but I can recall Jon Savage also opening up a totally different way of listening for me, and a way of embedding the listening into a wider conceptual setting (the paradigm shift).
But that's felt like a one-shot deal - and music since has become so multifaceted, so complex and so interwoven with other references that most writing about it is nearly incomprehensible to me now. I find David Toop, for example, almost literally (ahem) unreadable.
I also find this 'use other facts' approach (which I think you like mark s?) can generally be more like 'use irrelevancies dug up by the tenuous connections department'.

But then, I'm pretty fossilised by now - I gave up reading the music weeklies at the end of '81: can still remember ripping that year-end NME apart in a fit of absolute fucking rage, a final response to that year's shift towards both 'hedonism' and what were probably the early shoots of populist/ironic appreciation. (The endless stream of Me-Me-Me and Barthes/Heidegger/Cleverclogs guff produced by the Morley/Penman comedy duo were shite too.)

I've found reading this site (and dipping into the FreakyTrigger one) a lot more rewarding though because of the dialogue nature of it, and there seem to be a wide range of types and outlooks here. I'm hoping to use it soon to help me open up to other kinds of music, and find out about, er, stuff, by asking for guidance from contributors who I figure out I might initially have some common ground with......wait, where are you all going ?
*Sound of hooves stampeding away*

haha i like dylan but renaldo and clara is still NOT the greatest film ever filmed greatly on film by a great film-maker

Well I know they were not the same person...
I also don't think they addressed the same things, but I don't believe I'd implied that - or that the NME's Morecambe & Wise thought so either (actually, maybe it was actually Kierkegaard that one of them went through a phase of quoting).
Or did you mean (Barthes = !Heidegger)in some way?
Do you like both, or think one good and one guff?

You've made me wish I had kept some of the offending NME writings now, to see what it was about them that annoyed me so much...

whiney weighs in.

fuckin loved that, wtg dude

you go, whiney!

i have yet to tweet. maybe someday.

Nice speech. Crowd sourcing makes for lousy criticism because your average person cannot write worth crap, and they have crap tastes in music. I don't see the major music sites with in-depth reviews going away though. I do see Twitter fizzling out. I checked out his tweets, and they're even more truncated than Christgau's. Amusing but useless. Link 'em to a real review!

Great loss.

lolz @ introduction by Jonah Hill there

so much swearing!

I sympathize with a lot of what he says there and certainly the historical recap is accurate but .... its a weird defense of elitism, in a way (ie, the masses should be CHALLENGED by the likes of Lady Gaga/Linda Perry? And not by the likes of Fleet Foxes? What's being challenged exactly, and why...? I know those are just short, offhand remarks but whenever anyone goes into this sorta complaining about the indie rock audience not being into pop music or people being too satisfied with their pre-existing tastes my mind immediately leaps to these kinds of questions. Like, why is it taken as a given that its better to have eclectic tastes?)

or, to put it another way, why is one aesthetic value system priveleged over another, and what are the underlying assumptions of that value system... when it comes to indie rock dorks the standard criticism is that their listening habits are too narrow, too "nice", too comfortable, too white. Okay, but why are all those things de facto bad. The standard narrative of rock 'n' roll is that music that is inventive or challenges the status quo is good, music that breaks down social barriers is good, music that has some shock value is good, music that is energetic and brash is good, etc. But that aesthetic value system was developed 50 YEARS AGO, and constructed to challenge specific social conventions that largely no longer exist - why cling to these notions? Shouldn't they be challenged too? (isn't this where anti-rockist stuff comes into play?)

apologies if this all seems tangential

Great stuff, Whiney.

is it just that the accepted, underlying agenda of criticism is that they want everyone to be LIKE THEM - with eclectic, wide-ranging tastes? How narcissistic is that? Why should indie fans listen to Lady GaGa? Why should Merle Haggard fans listen to Snoop Dogg? (I like 3 out of those 4 fwiw) Is the underlying point that social divisions between listeners should be flattened out, creating a world where everybody likes everything, where everyone's a dilletante and nobody's an expert...?

x-post

thanks for the kind words guys!

tl; dRT oh wait.

I checked out his tweets, and they're even more truncated than Christgau's. Amusing but useless. Link 'em to a real review!

I try not to make them useless. I think you can be useful in 140 characters! Some of them are more useful than others, but I really am trying to be a conduit for people to do the moderate amount of legwork of visiting a myspace page and making their own decisions.

I sympathize with a lot of what he says there and certainly the historical recap is accurate but .... its a weird defense of elitism, in a way (ie, the masses should be CHALLENGED by the likes of Lady Gaga/Linda Perry? And not by the likes of Fleet Foxes? What's being challenged exactly, and why...?

I just think that everyone should at the very least HEAR Katy Perry and Fleet Foxes and make up their own minds. I think the fact that MTV plays Lady Gaga because they are in the major label's pockets is no stupider a reason to give an artist exposure than NPR playing Fleet Foxes because they're trying to keep up with the Pitchforks of the world. I would love a world where these places hired music dorks to comb through everything and make up their own minds and take chances instead of just following google trends.

is it just that the accepted, underlying agenda of criticism is that they want everyone to be LIKE THEM - with eclectic, wide-ranging tastes? How narcissistic is that? Why should indie fans listen to Lady GaGa? Why should Merle Haggard fans listen to Snoop Dogg? (I like 3 out of those 4 fwiw) Is the underlying point that social divisions between listeners should be flattened out, creating a world where everybody likes everything, where everyone's a dilletante and nobody's an expert...?

I don't think everyone should like everything, but I think that maybe people can be missing a particular pop artist or country artist or even a noise artist that they can connect with in their own way just because it's harder to simply stumble across that stuff now.

Is the underlying point that social divisions between listeners should be flattened out, creating a world where everybody likes everything, where everyone's a dilletante and nobody's an expert...?

I think Whiney's point is not that everybody should LIKE everything but that everybody should BE EXPOSED TO everything.

does the internet (lolz ILM) not count as a place to stumble...?

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I mean that's actually kinda what I like about this place - if I have a fleeting curiosity about the goings-on in the world of black metal, I just go over to the rolling metal thread and sure enough someone knowledgeable there will hip me to some shit (but then I am probably not the kinda listener you're talking about...)

I think Whiney's point is not that everybody should LIKE everything but that everybody should BE EXPOSED TO everything

but... this takes an insane amount of time and effort and most people don't care about music that much.

Yeah, part of me definitely agrees with the argument that the Internet has made it easier for people to find niches, and occasionally that's to the detriment of being exposed to the broader culture, but at the same time, the Internet has also expanded my music tastes by an incredible degree and made it a hell of a lot easier to be a dilettante. For instance, I can keep up with pop music now without even needing to turn on the radio.

I think the fact that MTV plays Lady Gaga because they are in the major label's pockets is no stupider a reason to give an artist exposure than NPR playing Fleet Foxes because they're trying to keep up with the Pitchforks of the world.

this is totally true - the interesting thing to me is that those two audiences (the pop/MTV audience and the NPR audience) seem to have a really deep mutual loathing/distrust of one another, and what are the roots of that and how do their opposing aesthetics play out

x-post

I liked the presentation. Started a little falteringly, but you got into a great swing, and made some excellent points. I want to believe that you can do what you say in 140 characters, but I'm not entirely convinced yet. 100 words, maybe...

Shakes

My speech basically says that the internet sucks as a place to stumble because every music site on it is so targeted to an audience. Being a target because thats easy clicks and manna for advertisers.

I'm NOT dogging the hard-working duders at Stereogum, but there's a reason they get more clicks/ad dollars than a superior (imo) site like Idolator: Sgum is targeted to a niche indie rock audience, and Idolator focuses on the general subject of "music."

Like, in some ways its really NOT okay to like both Fleet Foxes and Lady GaGa - and fans of one or the other will be suspicious/dismissive of you if you do. Similar to all those metal dudes complaining about Thurston Moore's Decibel interview ("FALSE METAL!" lolz)

x-post

I mean, as much as I don't like Fleet Foxes, I would love if MTV played them. And if NPR considered Katy like they would Bela Fleck.

The audiences USED to be opposed to each other for a reason, but now indie rock is just another industry. Like people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music. Indie rock is just selling the "I'M REBELLIOUS!" lifestyle back to adults the same way it sold it to kids in the height of Green Day/Offspring mania in the 90s.

I appreciated the sticking up for "because" and exposure to stuff outside your personal tastes, but the NPR-Fleet Foxes thing felt like a pithy tangent. Can't say everyone should pay attention to critics and then bitch that NPR pays attention to critics, who have always pushed middlebrow stuff like that. Still was a fun rant, but just sayin'.

DrownedInSound gets mega clicks because editorial policy re; coverage is (generally) pretty damn specific (I wrote about jazz there once, to be fair), and Sean seems to spend all his time gerrymandering clicks by linking to things on DiS that link to reviews, rather than linking straight to reviews themselves; plus the whole forum structure thing, enabling comments on the reviews-as-threads thing, means you get each person looking at a review 20 times to see what's been said, rather than 20x the amount of people reading. Is the writing good? Some of it. A lot is very average student paper stuff though, and that's the problem.

I wish, in the time I wrote for Stylus and anywhere else online, that I'd made more of an attempt at brevity, definitely.

The audiences USED to be opposed to each other for a reason, but now indie rock is just another industry. Like people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music. Indie rock is just selling the "I'M REBELLIOUS!" lifestyle back to adults the same way it sold it to kids in the height of Green Day/Offspring mania in the 90s.

well that is the fuckin truth, no argument there

people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music

It does actually boggle my mind that ppl think this, esp. since her whole album is a big sloppy love letter to 80s New Wave pop.

I can see indie rock selling a lifestyle thing, but is it really an "I'M REBELLIOUS!" lifestyle?

In a doofy way. (Thus Away We Go.)

yep. It's 30-year-old Starbucks/IKEA customers fighting against the business suits they have to wear now and thinking they are awesome for it.

its more of an "I AM UNIQUE AND UNCONVENTIONAL" lifestyle

people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music

people don't think this, they just like the music, but i understand you need a fucking thesis

oh like you don't shop at IKEA or drink Starbucks

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http://barsupplies.com/images/fat-straws.jpg

you really opened a can of straws with this speech

This is maybe swinging off to a whole other tangent, but my gripe with "things these days" is kind of the opposite of Whiney's -- that people (maybe not everyone but definitely a lot of people) think it's possible to hear everything, or a representative sample of everything, and figure out what the best of everything is in some objective way. I kinda feel like heavy duty music listeners (I just mean people who cop/download new shit on a regular basis, no value judgement here) should be MORE in tune witch exactly what they do or don't like and hone in on it, not go "OK i'm gonna get the BEST rap album and BEST indie album and BEST dance album etc. of the last few months," whether they're getting their idea of best from Pitchfork or word of mouth or whatever. I lke figuring out what's idioscyncratic about my tastes and catering to it by feeding that passion, not just constantly measuring it against hte concensus.

x-post bitching about the superficiality of people's "becauses" while wishing more people would give their "because" is kinda self-defeating. Identity politics being forced on to pop music is what made it popular. If it all really is just another industry then we don't need essays about why this toaster is the best.

waht

its more of an "I AM UNIQUE AND UNCONVENTIONAL" lifestyle

― Kitchen Paper Towel (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 3:33 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yah, this is what i meant.

I had starbucks today actually, lol

It just seems funny to complain about people buying into the "I'M UNIQUE AND UNCONVENTIONAL" products when rock criticism is basically about telling people what is unique and unconventional.

and I don't mean that as a direct knock against Mr. Listening To 1000 Albums This Year, to a certain point I think listening to a shit ton of stuff can be an enriching experience, but even the selection on Whiney's twitter clearly steers toward/away certain music based on his personal tastes.

xpost

identity politics being forced on to pop music is what made it popular.

specifically what do you mean by this

i should say "identity politics being forced on to pop music is basically the only reason rock criticism exists"

btw whiney i don't really have a lot to add here other than i will be bummed when criticism finally kicks it and that your speech was hella entertaining and you delivered it well.

You're reading me wrong, croup

I think "IUAU" is a fine reason to listen to something. The point is that people are sold "I'M UNIQUE AND UNCONVENTIONAL" as a lifestyle brand for music that isn't actually unique nor unconventional.

I mean, I stan for Ipecac and Hydra Head which are pretty much IUAU culture for ex-metalheads

Perhaps it's just me, but doesn't success turn most things that are unique and unconventional into the standard of conformity almost by definition?

I'm reading you right, Whiney. But to complain the sheep think "IUAU" because they bought "IUAU" in the middle of a defense of rock criticism is really self-defeating. Because that's what critics sell.

pepper keenan to thread

I bought an expensive Italian suit today, to try and get myself a better job, so I can earn more money and spend it on records and CD players and designer sofas. I've never even set foot in Starbucks. I think Ikea is some kind of utopian playground compared to most comparably-priced furniture stores. I like Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear and The Field and I think Fleet Foxes have about 4 decent tunes but are too winsome and too obvious. But I also like the "because". I don't give a fuck for IUAU. I give a fuck for quality experiences in my life. Whether that's an Italian suit or British speakers or a better pizza than Pizza Hut can make or drinking Kasteel Cru instead of Fosters or listening to Patrick Wolf instead of Jack Penate.

also whiney you kinda look like a dude i know and it's freaking me out!

Well, shitty critics sell Fleet Foxes as IUAU. I never said all critics are good and worthwhile.

oh ok well tell us who the good ones are and we'll financially support them

feel free to paypal me anytime

I think rock criticism needs to be more scientifically rigorous.

"people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music"

Wuh?

they should make CDS like a pregnancy test where good CDs have a blue plus that appears if you pee on them

I think rock criticism needs to be more scientifically rigorous.

yeah like being about MUSIC and close readings of what's actually on the records instead of oh, say, identity politics

it would be cool if rock criticism became more like the blurbs on old jazz records IMO

The problem, though, is that after the advent of Rolling Stone, it seems impossible to talk about music without resorting to identity politics.

rock criticism is basically about telling people what is unique and unconventional

Depends on the rock critic

should say "identity politics being forced on to pop music is basically the only reason rock criticism exists"

― da croupier, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:44 PM (

Huh? Still don't understand. This is why Creem and Crawdaddy started is what you're saying? And that pop music wouldn't have identity politics if there were not rock critics? Not sure I buy that

This is maybe swinging off to a whole other tangent, but my gripe with "things these days" is kind of the opposite of Whiney's -- that people (maybe not everyone but definitely a lot of people) think it's possible to hear everything, or a representative sample of everything, and figure out what the best of everything is in some objective way. I kinda feel like heavy duty music listeners (I just mean people who cop/download new shit on a regular basis, no value judgement here) should be MORE in tune witch exactly what they do or don't like and hone in on it, not go "OK i'm gonna get the BEST rap album and BEST indie album and BEST dance album etc. of the last few months," whether they're getting their idea of best from Pitchfork or word of mouth or whatever. I lke figuring out what's idioscyncratic about my tastes and catering to it by feeding that passion, not just constantly measuring it against the concensus.

― the cult of radio killa (some dude), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:38 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

^^ there's totally a whole OTHER clusterfuck thread in this

I think rock criticism needs to be more scientifically rigorous.

yeah like being about MUSIC and close readings of what's actually on the records instead of oh, say, identity politics

― m coleman, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 2:54 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I meant like not getting to make shit up and having to back assertions with verifiable data.

I think croupier's onto something tbh

Depends on the rock critic

What critic thinks the music they enjoy is common and conventional? That would be an impressively self-aware conservative critic.

This is why Creem and Crawdaddy started is what you're saying? And that pop music wouldn't have identity politics if there were not rock critics?

Music would have identity politics, but rock criticism basically started so people could say what they got out of pop music, which more often than not has to do with identity politics than a mere an appreciation of craft. There's a reason we care about one type and not the other.

one type of music and not another, I should clarify.

"people could say what they got out of pop music, which more often than not has to do with identity politics than a mere an appreciation of craft"

mmm yes/no

part of the problem with the whole 'music critics should use actual musical vocabulary' thing is that so much of the appeal of pop music even qua music is textural — there's not really a technical vocabulary to talk about how one THWOOMP noise is more interesting than another THWOOMP noise

"that people (maybe not everyone but definitely a lot of people) think it's possible to hear everything, or a representative sample of everything"

There've always been people like this. Folks who just buy the four star albums in record guides or whatever. I don't think it's any worse than it's ever been.

well, you know, "buy"

What critic thinks the music they enjoy is common and conventional? That would be an impressively self-aware conservative critic.

When I wanted to be a music writer, it was because I kept stumbling across stuff that wasn't that far removed from the mainstream but appeared to not have cracked it that I enjoyed a lot more than what was being played on the radio; my entire MO was "hey, you like A, why don't you like B and C as well?" and the not-at-all-subtle aim was to attempt to shift mainstream radio such that I could listen to it and be entertained. Shortly after this, modern rock stations started appearing that also had dance music and industrial blocks and I shut up.

part of the problem with the whole 'music critics should use actual musical vocabulary' thing is that so much of the appeal of pop music even qua music is textural — there's not really a technical vocabulary to talk about how one THWOOMP noise is more interesting than another THWOOMP noise

You can talk about reverb/distortion/filters, though, not necessarily in specific detail but at least in acknowledgment of the fact that a production choice resulted in manipulating a piece of technology to get that sound.

xp That seems like its a different complaint.

you really opened a can of straws with this speech

― Bitchtime Producto (M@tt He1ges0n), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 12:37 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark

lollllllllll

rock criticism basically started so people could say what they got out of pop music, which more often than not has to do with identity politics than a mere an appreciation of craft. There's a reason we care about one type and not the other.

imagine reviewing books where the critic didn't discuss the text and instead focused on how his/her impressions of the author squared with some politicized sense of identity. don't know about you but I wouldn't want to read that. isn't pop music MUSIC at its core? why can't listeners -- or critics -- be responding to music when they like a pop song?

x-post to Da Croupier-

I was reading your use of "unconventional" as asserting that all critics want to write about stuff that is avante-garde or atonal, and not stuff that sells to millions of people. But that's not what you meant I see.

"part of the problem with the whole 'music critics should use actual musical vocabulary' thing"

And the other part of the problem is that most readers of music criticism aren't terribly musically literate themselves. . .

Music would have identity politics, but rock criticism basically started so people could say what they got out of pop music, which more often than not has to do with identity politics than a mere an appreciation of craft. There's a reason we care about one type and not the other.

this is totally true but it kinda predates rock (cf black music being authentic/white music being fake)

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why can't listeners -- or critics -- be responding to music when they like a pop song?

lolz are you kidding - music is a lifestyle accessory for the vast VAST majority of listeners

this is why I quit writing about music kthxbye

imagine reviewing books where the critic didn't discuss the text and instead focused on how his/her impressions of the author squared with some politicized sense of identity. don't know about you but I wouldn't want to read that. isn't pop music MUSIC at its core? why can't listeners -- or critics -- be responding to music when they like a pop song?

you're really overstating the case here. I think like-minded people can agree on what's "good" or "bad" based on close readings and an understanding of craft, but when talk about what's "great" we usually bring personal values in. And an appreciation of craft alone isn't usually what drives people to be evangelical about art.

You can talk about reverb/distortion/filters, though, not necessarily in specific detail but at least in acknowledgment of the fact that a production choice resulted in manipulating a piece of technology to get that sound.

― HIS VAGINA IS MAKING HIM CRAVE SALAD. (HI DERE)

which, you know, people do. -- i mean, it's not like most people completely avoid that, although i do wish hand-wavey terms like 'psychedelic guitar tones' or whatever would go away. btw you are totally the poster that comes to mind when ppl on this board mention the idea that pop music critics ought to talk about how the technical factors of how music works and stuff

"imagine reviewing books where the critic didn't discuss the text and instead focused on how his/her impressions of the author squared with some politicized sense of identity"

what, like in . . . book reviews?

btw the issues of responding to (and writing about) music qua music and not as 'lifestyle accessory' or 'identity politics' (are these two on a sliding scale or what?) are totally valid ones, if wgw's speech were a week-long seminar, and not a ten minute speech attempting to limn some particular problems in fairly light-hearted fashion

oh also:

I give a fuck for quality experiences in my life. Whether that's an Italian suit or British speakers or a better pizza than Pizza Hut can make or drinking Kasteel Cru instead of Fosters or listening to Patrick Wolf instead of Jack Penate.

― Sickamous Mouthall (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:48 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

^^ someone copy-paste the phil collins / huey lewis bits from american psycho here plz

why can't listeners -- or critics -- be responding to music when they like a pop song?

lolz are you kidding - music is a lifestyle accessory for the vast VAST majority of listeners

― Kitchen Paper Towel (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 4:09 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

real talk you are a depressing motherfucker

I don't feel depressing

seriously dude that's like saying "most people don't actually have ears they just grab the CD with the same cover everyone else has"

Yeah I don't think it's true for even a vast majority of listeners let alone a vast VAST one.

It's a pretty condescending viewpoint IMO, both to the audience and the artists.

i liked your speech whiney! you're a good speaker. i kept hoping you'd throw us a bone and say something like "listeners today are drowning in a deluge of choices!"

yeah i mean for every like brad paisley or rhianna there's like a zillion country singers or R&B singers that are totally trying to do the same thing but totally fail, and are trying to be just as "commercial" or whatever, so it's not like ppl just fall for anything that's handed them

of course, we also don't have a technical vocabulary for aesthetic appreciation

Shakey's right though. Condescension isn't really very depressing.

i mean, rather than 'music is something most people who listen to music are only into as a lifestyle accessory' maybe read 'a lot of people are genuinely engaged with the music they like, but in a way that some other people might read as being naive and self-regarding'

maybe I'm just a jerk (entirely possible) but the average non-music-dorks in my life spend at most less than a few minutes a day thinking/talking/searching out music. Yes, they do mostly take what's handed to them - they find some outlet they like and they take whatever comes out of that outlet (ie, NPR or 106 and Park, same diff)

spare me the faux populist routine guys

I don't think that consuming music in a reactionary manner means you don't like music and that you don't have opinions about it.

wow if people are just buying everything they hear on NPR or 106 and Park it's amazing the music industry is doing poorly

most of the people I know who don't spend a lot of time thinking about or seeking out music still have some kind of visceral engagement with the music they do like -- think the chorus is catchy, find the lyrics deep, like dancing to the beat, love the singer's voice, etc. i guess you could say their enjoyment is less valid or 'earned' or something because they bought less than 12 CDs last year but saying their enthusiasm is less sincere or more tied to lifestyle or social status is mostly bullshit imo.

So you think people go around saying I've chosen an NPR lifestyle or a Hot 97 lifestyle and therefore I have to listen to such songs that have been "handed" to me? Where and how would you have people expose themselves to music and decide which songs they like or don't like, or are you not being critical of people's chosen outlets?

if they were listening critically on some level then there would be no big huge, zillion dollar marketed albums by big artists that ever flop, and that happens all the time

wow if people are just buying everything they hear on NPR or 106 and Park it's amazing the music industry is doing poorly

lolz note I didn't use the word "buy" anywhere

so if your tastes aren't eclectic enough to have you scouring the radio dial, music is just a "lifestyle accessory" to you

late to the game but wanted to say whiney u are a v. entertaining speaker and about 99% correct in yr assessment of things.

wow you guys are really misreading me ... I'm not saying the mass of music consumers out there don't enjoy or engage with the music they listen to. Obviously they do. But the music they listen to is closely tied to the kind of person they want to be, the kind of culture they want to be involved in, the kind of images they aspire to, the kind of aesthetic worldview that they are comfortable in. People like things that reinforce their established image of themselves (and none of us are any exceptions to this, btw) - this is what I meant by music being treated as a "lifestyle accessory". People develop a conception of themselves and the music they listen to is part of that. This is not really a unique or challenging or condescending concept, so you can all kindly fuck off with your stone-throwing.

I don't think you're totally wrong, but I don't think the mindset is nearly as aspirational or tied to self-image as you do. Basically, everyone picks and chooses what songs they like or dislike out of what's in front of them, whether it's 10 songs or 1000.

this is where the whole "identity politics" aspect of music ties in as well - ie, "I am this kind of person and I subscribe to these cultural tenets, ergo I enjoy Christian/country/R&B/indie music. This music comes to me through this outlet, which more often than not plays things I enjoy." rinse and repeat

x-post

But, Shakey, I don't know anyone who listens to music that way!

I am this kind of person and I subscribe to these cultural tenets, ergo I enjoy Christian/country/R&B/indie music. This music comes to me through this outlet, which more often than not plays things I enjoy.

This should be a Gang Of Four lyric

yeah i hafta say, people i know who have limited tastes or small cd collections, most of them still can be pretty passionate about the stuff they do like. i think the "lifestyle accessory" people exist, but they're a relative minority. i think most people have some music they really care about.

There's no causal relationship between voting for Bush and downloading a Swans song.

(xxxpost)

I don't see why you can't really care about a lifestyle accessory...?

I object to the idea that being satisfied by a mainstream music source somehow implies that you don't care about music and see it solely as a box to be ticked on a lifestyle checklist; it seems to be completely counter to why people gravitate towards lifestyles in the first place, namely because the trappings give them emotional satisfaction. You seem to be putting the cart before the horse here.

I mean lolz consumer capitalism, isn't that what its all about

x-post

somehow implies that you don't care about music and see it solely as a box to be ticked on a lifestyle checklist[

I see there is an issue here with the semantics of the term "lifestyle accessory"

the last time I heard the phrase lifestyle accessory was on some ad for a head shop

something about like "we have all your 420 lifestyle accessories here"

are lyfestile accessories dead?

to me "lifetime accessory" means "boyfriend".

and that was like 5 or 6 yrs ago

I mean, for every Christian out there who only listens to Christian rock, there are a bazillion others who listen to other things as well or who actively abhor Christian rock; it's not nearly as simple as "I am THIS so I only listen to THAT".

this is where the whole "identity politics" aspect of music ties in as well - ie, "I am this kind of person and I subscribe to these cultural tenets, ergo I enjoy Christian/country/R&B/indie music. This music comes to me through this outlet, which more often than not plays things I enjoy." rinse and repeat

x-post

― Kitchen Paper Towel (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 8:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i was sitting next to this dude on a plane a couple weeks ago and he was scrolling through all these bands on his itunes and i didn't know one of them so i was spying on him, them some michael w. smith popped up...so i finally was like "ah dude is a big xian born again" dude...but then all of a sudden "ill communication" by the beasties popped up and also "what's the story morning glory" so who knows?

Haha in fairness, I think that like 80% of MN listens to Michael W. Smith!

Chuck Eddy and I have a few Amy Grant albums that Mike Huckabee and his band might wanna cover on Sunday nights.

I mean, for every Christian out there who only listens to Christian rock, there are a bazillion others who listen to other things as well or who actively abhor Christian rock; it's not nearly as simple as "I am THIS so I only listen to THAT".

I see no one raised this complaint when Whiney "objectively" cited the compartmentalized listening tastes of Bonnarroo attendees

I, for one, didn't listen to the talk because I'm still at work; my reactions are to the discussion much more than they are to the source material. At any rate, I think croupier was reacting against that in his posts.

that MINDSET grr

I'm getting my threads confused. Shouldn't Shakey be attacking Ferris Bueller again?

actually i didn't but one thing that i thought whiney was weird (a little off shakey's point here) but was the fact that while you sort of decried the camps of fans on the bonerro tweetfest (god what a term)...you yourself seemed to just write off all the "jam band crap" which, for me, if i went to bonerroo would be the most interesting thing to check out, just cuz it's sort of the roots of the fest and who the fuck knows, maybe like string cheese incident would rock my sox off in a live setting?

well Dan to sum up (pardon me for paraphrasing here Whiney) part of his point was that people's tastes are in general becoming very NARROW - listeners find a comfortable sub-section of music that they are into and they stick with it, they are oblivious to things going on outside it, and there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that.

x-post

if i went to bonerroo would be the most interesting thing to check out, just cuz it's sort of the roots of the fest and who the fuck knows, maybe like string cheese incident would rock my sox off in a live setting?

lolz M@tt I love you bro

" there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that."

somewhere sasha frere jones is raising his hand eagerly

btw String Cheese Incident likely WOULD rock yr sox off in a live setting, I ushered a show they did with Bela Fleck and MMW and they were great

"well Dan to sum up (pardon me for paraphrasing here Whiney) part of his point was that people's tastes are in general becoming very NARROW - listeners find a comfortable sub-section of music that they are into and they stick with it, they are oblivious to things going on outside it, and there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that."

Is Whiney not aware of the existence of specialty music mags prior to the www?

I see no one raised this complaint when Whiney "objectively" cited the compartmentalized listening tastes of Bonnarroo attendees

Never said their tastes were, I said their tweets were

xpost

yeah it's one of those things i'm like totally curious about but have no desire to actively make the effort to go to

like i wish a world famous hippie jam band would come play in my backyard for free

well Dan to sum up (pardon me for paraphrasing here Whiney) part of his point was that people's tastes are in general becoming very NARROW - listeners find a comfortable sub-section of music that they are into and they stick with it, they are oblivious to things going on outside it, and there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that.

call me crazypants but isn't this EXACTLY the thing croupier called him out about?

bonnaroo is fucking awesome btw

jesus god, someone take these prepositions away from me before I kill again

i think whiney's core point (lolz about fleet foxes and the like aside) that thoughtful criticism -- actual criticism -- is hard to find and probably going to get harder is well put and well taken.

who the fuck knows, maybe like string cheese incident would rock my sox off in a live setting?

one thing i liked about bonnaroo the 2 times i've gone is that i ended up going to see and sometimes enjoying bands i never would have. i let myself be dragged by my dancing-hippie-girl friend to both string cheese incident and widespread panic, and while it's hardly the kind of stuff i'm going to listen to in any other setting, in an open field with a big enthusiastic crowd it was pretty entertaining.

dan I'll let croupier speak for himself but no I don't think that was his original cricitism of Whiney

haha hard to believe but all I originally said was that whiney bitching about NPR playing fleet foxes because shitty critics like them was pretty off-key from an overall defense of music criticism. If you're actually trying to argue that critics are worth supporting, you can't complain when they succeed in getting an act attention just because you think your tastes are better.

best thread in... awhile! (guess i'm a little cranky today, IRL i just yelled at a guy in a wheelchair who ran into me on the sidewalk)

It is a good thread and I'd say more on here if I weren't fighting a frickin' cold/headache/earache combination.

is rock critic dead?

http://www.speakeasy.net/~mike1627/Linguo.jpg

yeah, good thread. i actually read everything you people had to say, and god knows i haven't done that in a long time. hahahahaha!

my whole point about the lifestyle accessory comment was related to croupier's point that most people don't listen to/experience/absorb music in terms m coleman was describing (ie " pop music as MUSIC at its core? why can't listeners -- or critics -- be responding to music when they like a pop song?") - its not just about appreciation of craft for most people, what the music signifies is often just as/if not MORE important. So identity politics is always a crucial component of criticism - it gets beyond the "wow the drum programming on this song is really well done" sorta analysis and into the music's subtext, its social role, its political signifiers, its relationship to musical history, its context, which is really (imho) what most people are engaging with when they listen to music. Not just the average listener, but music obsessives like us as well. That was what I meant by lifestyle accessory - that music is a part of a larger, deeper identity for most people - and not just a medium to be appreciated for its strictly technical merits (ie, "that guitar solo is really hard to play" or "this beat is fun to dance to", although that stuff all figures in as well on a surface level).

Whiney asks for more people to offer WHY they listen to the music they do - which more often than not is gonna come down to some level of lifestyle/identity politics kinda thing, and not so much appreciation of technical craft (although you will get weird exceptions to this like people who claim to listen to Dragonforce because all the musicians are SO AMAZING. But even guys who, say, privelege indie rock over rap because hip hop isn't made by "real musicians" are betraying their own identity politics more than their engaging with the actual craft of either genre)

That was what I meant by lifestyle accessory - that music is a part of a larger, deeper identity for most people

that makes sense, though "accessory" might be a little off. you're really talking about how people draw personal meaning from art and incorporate it into their lives and identities, etc. and i think the HOW and WHY that whiney's asking can take a lot of different forms. i'm sympathetic to the argument that more music critics should actually know more about music from a technical standpoint, because it really does make a difference in understanding something about how it works. otoh i'm sympathetic to the idea that most music fans don't really know much about music per se, and so a good populist critic doesn't have to understand the mechanics to talk insightfully about the way music functions socially or politically or whatever. probably the real thing is that you can do good, interesting critical work from either direction (even if a lot of the best of it is going to incorporate some elements of both) -- and that there isn't enough good, interesting critical work being done from any perspective. (and that some of the relatively few places that have provided forums for that kind of thing are either moving away from it or are just plain disappearing from the landscape.)

"What critic thinks the music they enjoy is common and conventional? That would be an impressively self-aware conservative critic."

I don't think many critics actively promote the music they listen to on these terms, but I think there are lots and lots of critics for whom the fact that a piece of music is generally indicative of a popular trend rather than somehow seemingly unique is not a barrier to it being great. Perhaps they would only explicitly promote its commonality/conventionality if it seemed to perfectly encapsulate the best qualities of the trend it typifies.

I know that for a long time I've been wary of music criticism that automatically looks for the innovative auteur in any given field of music on the basis that the "shining star against a sea of undifferentiated generic mulch" narrative makes for such an easy story to write. In the case of my favourite dance sub-genres I'm much more likely to be enthusiastic about something that portrays the "rules" of the genre in its best light (including by demonstrating their inherent flexibility), rather than something that seeks to "break the rules".

Re literature criticism versus music criticism, I wouldn't say there's a massive divide here with close reading on one side and identity politics on the other. Lots of people (critics and otherwise) love novels because they identify with the character. Most popular music sets up the performer as the "character" of the music, such that it's harder in every day terms to distinguish between the identity politics of the singer and the identity politics of the song than it is with an author and their book.

In terms of narrow/blinkered listening vs eclecticism, I would have thought that quite obviously the worst of all possible worlds is blinkered eclecticism: the thing about an "indie mindset" (which I'll use as my strawman example) is that it does allow for the enjoyment and even critical celebration of certain hip hop, certain dance music, certain metal, and so on. Insofar as its critical rules become detached from any particular sonic signifiers they are much harder to identify and so much harder to challenge.

I think generally a purist is preferable to that because their rigorous focus (or, to put it negatively, self-policing) mostly forces them to think harder about why they will like or not like something - even if you disagree with the choice they end up making at least you can see that it is a choice.

the thing about an "indie mindset" (which I'll use as my strawman example) is that it does allow for the enjoyment and even critical celebration of certain hip hop, certain dance music, certain metal, and so on. Insofar as its critical rules become detached from any particular sonic signifiers they are much harder to identify and so much harder to challenge.

lolz honestly this makes me think of those Christian music fans who will listen to any genre of music as long as its, y'know, about Jesus

Yeah, def. some interesting stuff here. A few things I don't get:

Like the connection between tweeting about 1,000 LPs in a year and the death of criticism. Is this just a Nero fiddles as Rome burns kind of situation? It seems like this kind of approach was presented as a solution, and if so, I don't follow.

Also, there are some interesting questions here about whether pointing people toward good stuff is what criticism should aspire to.

I think plenty of lit (and definitely film) critics are very invested in personal readings of works rather than technical/close readings (certainly seemed like a vast majority of the lit crit I read in college was of that type and not of the "let's look at what writer X is doing with similes here" in paragraph to.) It's not unique to music criticism at all.

music criticism should aspire to just be good writing because it'll never be music

the only reason to write about music is to use music as a crutch to get the pen to the paper

"whether pointing people toward good stuff is what criticism should aspire to"
I'm totally fine with critics doing this instead of apple 'music genius' or pandora doing this.

some dude killin it itt

btw i really dont see how thoughtful music crit is going to disappear any more than the written word as a medium for expression is going to disappear. can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the critics making a living off of music writing were embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs (ie tim's innovator against a sea of genericism) & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

im honestly not sure i ever liked music criticism as a 'job'. im doing it anyway because there are a few people i like who do it really really well & help me think about the music i listen to in different ways but thats such a small group, & always has been ... i cant say that since ive been reading rolling stone ive ever been particularly moved by a review (this is not a whiney diss ive never read his work in RS)

^^ I think golden age of music criticism arguments are basically like golden age of music arguments. Just as people mentally screen out the unfathomably popular, now forgotten stuff that haunted the charts in 1982 or whenever, people tend to focus on that one lifechanging article they read back in (insert year) and ignore that most critics have been autobots since day dot.

(on the golden age of music point, one of the finest Freaky Trigger articles ever was when Tom Ewing and Greg Scarth did a head-to-head on the top 20 UK records of 1982 versus the top 20 UK records of 2002, and 2002 won by some marginal amount)

can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the critics making a living off of music writing were embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs (ie tim's innovator against a sea of genericism) & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

^^^^please please let's

Basically, can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the people making a living off of anything are embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

Sure and all the people lamenting the death of the team sportswriter are basically full of shit too.

haha it's the same mixed feelings i have about all the "death of the newspaper" lamentations. on one hand, it's sad. on the other, most of them are pretty bad.

(but it's not like they're being replaced by anything better, i guess is the problem in these cases)

the thing vs. newspapers is that paying for actual reporting is different than 'music criticism'

"music criticism" is not journalism.

music journalism, im worried about

Sure and all the people lamenting the death of the team sportswriter are basically full of shit too.

― Alex in SF, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 11:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah columnists for the most part i'm not gonna mourn, at least my local clowns but yeah we are blessed with some great beat writers and i'll be sad to see them go.

Basically, can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the people making a living off of anything are embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

― Tim F, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:25 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

maybe. but some jobs dont require that kind of innovation

i mean the kind of innovation that would break from that received wisdom etc

xxxp Yeah I'm not saying ALL music critics are clowns mind you.

xpost - Absolutely, but nor does music criticism as a "job".

I'm constantly banging on about the need of music criticism not to be boring, but it's more in the sense that I'd not want to be friends with boring people rather than based on some notion of the music critic's obligation to society.

"music criticism" is not journalism.

i don't know, i think arts criticism in general is a form of journalism. and i think there's something lost with local papers all over the place ditching their local critics in favor of wire stuff, which a lot of them are doing -- even if a lot of the local critics aren't very good. (also, in a lot of places the local critics are also the local arts beatwriters. if you lose one, you lose both.)

i don't know, i think arts criticism in general is a form of journalism. and i think there's something lost with local papers all over the place ditching their local critics in favor of wire stuff, which a lot of them are doing -- even if a lot of the local critics aren't very good. (also, in a lot of places the local critics are also the local arts beatwriters. if you lose one, you lose both.)

― would you ask tom petty that? (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but see, i think that ideally what will happen is that (& yes im being optimistic here) good critics will still want to write about music & will do so on the internet, with more freedom than they are allowed in rolling stone or wherever, & will develop some kind of following that will of course require multiple sources of income & self-marketing, & the best ones will be popular&smart enough to sustain themselves

while the shitty ones will continue to write & have no following because no one understands where they are coming from (obv i mean "best" in terms of "ability to connect with an audience" here, speaking in pure capitalist terms not a subjective quality of writing debate) & will write on their little journals to their small audiences.

kind of feel like the internet has sorta leveled the kinds of wack writers who were being subsidized by the good writers to write about shit -- back when every newspaper could afford an arts critic no matter how bad, when every magazine employed an army of writers to say boring things that rehashed what smarter writers had already said, etc

i had a bunch of thoughts about this but i have been shocked into silence by HI DERE saying that MN is the Michael W. Smith capital of the world

this is kind of idealized -- there are tons of shortcomings, i.e. writers writing to a small niche are often very valuable & good at what they do but have very small audiences & cant maintain ... but at some level i kind of feel like the drought of money in the industry is maybe not as much a bad thing as a different thing

do u get what im saying?

xp Alex: The lit crit that I read in college was a bit of both, some new criticism that focuses on the text as a thing in and of itself outside of historical context (which drove me crazy), a lot of criticism that also engaged technically with the writing and did close reading for things like assumptions/views on race, gender, sexuality, economic/class politics, etc. The personal response to the work - that I see in a lot of music reviews - wasn't something I saw as much in criticism of other media at the time (though that was approximately 15 years ago).

In some ways, I felt the personal response approach (outside of using that as a means to challenge conventional assumptions about how someone of one's race/gender/etc. would respond to the work) was somewhat lazy and didn't really tell me all that much.

But I think people respond to music differently than literature, with film being somewhere in between. I'd guess that most people listen to music while doing other things (even at a live show), as opposed to reading or watching a film, which generally require more active involvement, or at least more intellectual engagement in a "what's going on? what just happened? do you think they're gonna do (blank) next?" But that's the thing - it's generally the case - but not true for everyone. There's a wider range of levels of engagement with music than with literature and film.

I think that wider range makes music criticism more challenging - add to that a lower degree of music literacy of the audience (compared to literature) - and you have something that is difficult to do well.

yeah but see, i think that ideally what will happen is that (& yes im being optimistic here) good critics will still want to write about music & will do so on the internet, with more freedom than they are allowed in rolling stone or wherever, & will develop some kind of following that will of course require multiple sources of income & self-marketing, & the best ones will be popular&smart enough to sustain themselves

I would love nothing more than to shit-talk my way out of the industry by leaving a definitive list of worthless hacks who are doing better than myself tireless, excellent writers I love because they're either cloying or controversial in a way that gets hit-counts

*myself and/or tireless*

lots of people will generate hit counts. byron crawford is an awful music critic but hes often hilarious & more importantly highly readable

its not like its taking money out of your pocket when other people succeed

or maybe it is, but its certainly not helpful to think about it that way

i think i should brand myself as a motivational writer for rock critics concerned that rock criticism is dead.

http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~nhiggins/matt_foley.jpg

We've got ourselves a writer here! Hey, Dad, I can't see real good... is that Bob Christgau over there?

@sarahel, I'm reminded of this quote from Carl Wilson:

I was being interviewed for a teevee show about music writing and blogging today, and among my staircase moments afterwards, I thought that my answer to the question, "If writing about music is such a non-lucrative career, why do it?" should have been that precisely because music is so abstract and inimical to verbal capture, it opens up an infinite field to write across, an unending series of creative near-or far-misses - and because music is so insinuated in everyone's personal lives and consciousnesses, it burrows tunnels into every subject matter, making it a subject that potentially permits you to write about anything and everything in the world. But then again, I thought, that could be said of writing about food or clothing or a hundred other things. You could do it even if you were covering the scrap-metal industry, and it would be all the more dazzling because more unlikely. At least with scrap metal you probably couldn't fall back on writing a lot of articles using the words "angular" and "seminal."

Then it occurred to me that the real TV answer should have been, "Because it still pays better than writing poetry."

that carl, he's a hoot.

i think basically i just get really tired of hearing about the end of rock crit when 1) i dont write about rock but i write about music (sorry silly pedantic complaint) but more importantly 2) i basically started writing abt music since all this shit happened & while ive gotten a few freelance checks i dont think i ever expected to be able to make a living doing it nor did i want to particularly?? I just knew i wanted to write about it because i liked thinking about it & reading a few writers who made me think about it.

but theres no, like, before-internet crit for me really. i mean ive read old stuff & some of its obv really great (altho my fav Bangs piece is STILL his most 'journalistic' piece - innocents in babylon) but i dunno i never really thought of it as, like, a real career or something (sorry if this is getting too personal/judgmental) it just seemed like a way to look at the world & figure shit out about life & stuff while getting to listen to music at the same time. maybe i just missed out on the golden age of record labels offering blow & hookers for 'greatest thing since jesus' PR-rewrites i dunno

@sarahel, I'm reminded of this quote from Carl Wilson:

I was being interviewed for a teevee show about music writing and blogging today, and among my staircase moments afterwards, I thought that my answer to the question, "If writing about music is such a non-lucrative career, why do it?" should have been that precisely because music is so abstract and inimical to verbal capture, it opens up an infinite field to write across, an unending series of creative near-or far-misses - and because music is so insinuated in everyone's personal lives and consciousnesses, it burrows tunnels into every subject matter, making it a subject that potentially permits you to write about anything and everything in the world. But then again, I thought, that could be said of writing about food or clothing or a hundred other things. You could do it even if you were covering the scrap-metal industry, and it would be all the more dazzling because more unlikely. At least with scrap metal you probably couldn't fall back on writing a lot of articles using the words "angular" and "seminal."

Then it occurred to me that the real TV answer should have been, "Because it still pays better than writing poetry."

― Bianca Jagger (jaymc), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahaha this is great

wheres that from

i think basically i just get really tired of hearing about the end of rock crit when 1) i dont write about rock but i write about music (sorry silly pedantic complaint) but more importantly 2) i basically started writing abt music since all this shit happened & while ive gotten a few freelance checks i dont think i ever expected to be able to make a living doing it nor did i want to particularly?? I just knew i wanted to write about it because i liked thinking about it & reading a few writers who made me think about it.

but theres no, like, before-internet crit for me really. i mean ive read old stuff & some of its obv really great (altho my fav Bangs piece is STILL his most 'journalistic' piece - innocents in babylon) but i dunno i never really thought of it as, like, a real career or something (sorry if this is getting too personal/judgmental) it just seemed like a way to look at the world & figure shit out about life & stuff while getting to listen to music at the same time. maybe i just missed out on the golden age of record labels offering blow & hookers for 'greatest thing since jesus' PR-rewrites i dunno

― autogucci cru (deej), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:21 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

um i think the key i missed explaining here is that the internet is what ENABLED me to be able to write about music & think about it this way -- i grew up pretty poor (like for real poor) & i remember thru out jr. high being way 'behind' on whatever the latest shit was, i could only tape stuff off the radio & everyone else was walking around with discmans or whatever. not trying to suggest that the internet is 'better' for socializing music crit but its like ... i wouldnt really be here (here where i am in my life, obviously i wouldn't be on ilx) without it

haha socializing music LISTENING, & entirely destroying the career of 'music crit'

kind of feel like the internet has sorta leveled the kinds of wack writers who were being subsidized by the good writers to write about shit -- back when every newspaper could afford an arts critic no matter how bad, when every magazine employed an army of writers to say boring things that rehashed what smarter writers had already said, etc

i think this is true and it's in line with my ambivalence about the collapse of print media overall -- a lot of what's being lost isn't worth lamenting. otoh (and here's where i get to be creaky old-media man) i really like the idea, or the ideal, represented by the presence of arts criticism in accessible mainstream media -- whether it's the local paper or the new yorker or wherever, but in a place where sort of casual readers without necessarily a niche interest in arts writing might (out of boredom or at the airport or on the toilet) stumble across an interesting essay. i think the problem with even good writing on music websites is that it is by definition mostly going to be found by people looking at music websites. (unless of course it gets linked to by some general-interest blogger or something.)

i think basically i just get really tired of hearing about the end of rock crit when 1) i dont write about rock but i write about music (sorry silly pedantic complaint)

not that silly and i thought about it when i was looking for the appropriate thread to post whiney's link on. i sort of regretted that this one said ROCK in the title, but it was the best fit overall.

deej is POSTIN

Personal: I mean, I'm not gonna lie, deej. I'm passionate about it because I went to school for it for four years and have been living off it for eight more. It's nice that the internets helped a young'n like make some extra ends, but all my gigs are drying up because young'ns-making-papes do it for CHEAP if not FREE.

I'm going to be a 30-year-old grown-ass man in a few months. I can't just pick up and be a chemist or a neurosurgeon. I did the grunt-work and heavylifting and interning for free when I was in my early 20s and I'm going to have literally nothing to show for it in a few years, if not sooner.

yah & my mom is almost 60 & works in textbook publishing. life suxx

haha sorry that sounded dickish

i just mean like ... did you really major in 'music criticism' in college?? are your skills so limited that all u can do is offer opinions on records? youre a smart dude, theres got to be a way to make a lane for yourself & market yourself. i mean look @ how you showed up & charmed in that video (being mostly serious here!) cant you push yourself into being the next klosterman or something? i dunno

just trying not to be pessimistic. listening to a lot of writer-types get all depresso is bringing me down lately. feel like we need more positive energy to be successful

if journalists werent the ones losing their jobs, would journalists be covering the loss of their jobs so frequently?

Deej, the Carl Wilson excerpt was from a blog post.

sweet thnx

xposts, i'm gonna be a 40-yr-old man in a few months with almost 20 years of experience in newspapers and alt-weeklies, eesh. i'm hopin some of those kids with their twitterblogging really do figure out how to sustain profitable (or at least break-even) new media models, because the model that employs me is not lookin real steady.

i mean i think the main problem is AD BLOCKERS right. those things suck!!!

x-post to deej

I can also play the drums. That pays well LOL.

I def appreciate the push, deej. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but the problem i see is that "change with the times" usually means that out of 100 people that have an old job, it means 10 people get in with the new version.

Also, if being the next Klosterman was easy, I would have done it a long time ago. It's like telling a struggling, broke indie rock band "Why don't you just be the next Sonic Youth?"

i remember looking into ads for my site & trying to figure out why they wouldnt show up on the test page & realizing that my ad blocker was blocking the ad.

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/lynne-d-johnson/digital-media-diva/10-most-creative-people-music-biz

lmao @ #4 -- forget what i said, anything related to music is dead

as a "writer" (albeit not in the criticism or journalism game), i have a 10-6 gig and try to get into a nice groove writing on the side at night and on weekends, though sometimes it feels like a dead-end because i've only sold one piece in three years and writing isn't likely to support me in this economy as much as it could have 7-8 years ago.

shocked theres no market for Blossom fan fiction

sorry i was just on a role. think im gonna go for a run & think about how to create a sustainable model for personal success. will let u guys know what i figure out

*a roll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Nu51whDN8

whiney yoo will land on yer feet. think of the 50-something dude with bills up the butt laid off from his job at the local newspaper. where's HE gonna go. my dad is 74 and he works 4 days a week with the mentally ill to make extra bread. ya gotta do what ya gotta do. if yer smart and quick you come up with stuff. somehow. maybe. sorry, it's the beer. i don't know where i'm going.

what i liked about yer speech was that it was about - sorta - uncertainty. and we can all relate to that.

heck, i'm 40 and i've got two kids and i decided to leave my job with EXCELLENT benefits and move and open my own business during the worst recession in decades! those nike ads finally got to me.

meaning, ya gotta make your own fun sometimes. and make your fun work for you. somehow. maybe.

Thx scott :)

Good messages from Scott indeed!

I've muttered this story before but it seems appropriate here:

Back in 1993 or so, maybe early 1994, I noticed J. D. Considine posting on alt.music.alternative. I knew his name from his short takes column in Musician and enjoyed his work there, and having barely dipped a toe into 'music criticism' as such via the school newspaper at UCI, I figured I'd drop him a line just to introduce myself and network a bit (hey, why not?).

At some point in our brief e-mail exchange I mentioned how even though I was currently in a grad program in English lit I really had a notion that writing about music seemed to be more my speed in general. So I asked him what the life of a working writer was like. He was very thoughtful, even-handed but ultimately clear about how it was a job only for those who were constantly, eternally self-motivated, chasing down all opportunities, all possibilities for work -- that it was not a job for someone who needed, flat out required, a certain unchangeable stability.

I took that lesson to heart -- I knew already I needed that kind of relative stability, something which the years have already made clearer to me. For that reason I pursued writing as a side pursuit in terms of making one's basic way in the world, from then to now -- it's hardly a unique path, many other writers do similar and do it very well, and many more deftly and thoughtfully than myself, and I feel it.

But as time continues and as I see that path that J. D. talked about shrivel more and more as any kind of workable model for living, more than anything I'm grateful for his unintentional warning. Just now the UC employees at large got a formal note from the office of the campus president statewide discussing the pay-cut/furlough options we all must face, and as expected the numbers are jarring. It's still a stable anchor, though, and I'm glad of it -- the Wallace Stevens option, on a much reduced scale in my case.

Thirteen ways of looking at a blackboard.

What this always appears to go to is a discussion of a combination of developments which have ripped the bottom out of the US economy and the application of merciless 'social Darwinism' in which
being the fittest isn't the trait valuable in the Darwinian part, just individual circumstances
and blind luck.

Everyone I knew in newspaper work back in Pennsylvania (and in LA) has either been fired or compelled into early retirement in the last year or so. And this culling stopped being something which
improved performance and efficiency a good long time ago. Even a well-known on-line venue for which I wrote a twice a month column, not on music and not in the US, had its budget damaged by the US economic meltdown.

There are a combination of reasons for the severe contraction, and not all of them have to do with the facile explanation that the Internet is the great leveller, hastening the demise of writing professions which need being put down.

A lot of it has been the result of bad faith decision-making, incompetent and short-sighted
business management, and a ruthless and shriveled economic environment brought about by the US finance
industry, which has nothing to do with the talent and work ethic -- surplus or lack of it -- among those who work in journalism.

Generally speaking,
the bottle works sometime.

but at least youre not working for GM

dude that lives downstairs from me, his granddad/dad have a GM dealership in wisconsin that was closed after being in business since the 30s. his dad had thought about selling out a few years ago, when he might have gotten 5mil for the business. now he's 65, and he ~might~ get 250k for the lot

so long retirement

I really kinda do feel bad for j-school people. I started writing about music for money in 1996, and I got in because the NJ alt-paper the Aquarian Weekly (still publishing, having reverted to its original late '60s name after a long stretch as the East Coast Rocker) issued an open call for new writers which my wife spotted and cajoled me into responding to. From there I pestered Jason Pettigrew at Alternative Press until one day he called me and said, "Will you interview Godsmack so I don't have to?" and from there it was off to the races. I have never made my primary living from freelancing, though it's now my #2 source of income (my #1 source of income is unemployment checks, insert bitter laugh here, and thank fuckin zombie Jesus that NY State is passing out a total of 72 weeks' worth to the unlucky many - the usual 26 weeks, plus 33 weeks' "emergency unemployment" and a bonus 13 weeks' worth after that, and I haven't gotten to the end of the first 26 yet so I plan or at least expect to be suckin' that government teat until well into 2010). But the thing is, I never did a damn bit of studying to become what I am. I barely graduated high school and went to three semesters of community college; while there, I met my wife, and academics went right out the goddamn window. I've worked for auto parts stores, warehouses, trucking companies, and behind the food service counters at Newark Airport. I can drive a forklift; I can cut a brake rotor; I can spackle and paint and lay tile. I may call my uncle up and see if he needs help on one of his crews - he does home renovations in a part of NJ where the neighbors get antsy if too many Latinos show up at one time, so he likes to hire all-white crews when he can.

yah dude i work @ a ballpark

honestly dudes, if i'm gonna go back to having a real job and doing something as a hobby, I'm gonna bail on writing altogether and go back to playing drums.

i hate the idea of having a 'hobby'. theres my life, then my 'hobby' pays the rent

I sympathize with you, Chris, and with tipsy, deej, Scott, and the others who've done this professionally and otherwise for many years. As someone who's been freelancing intermittently for ten years (in July), I know the thrill of reading a review online or print AND receiving a check in the mail; I couldn't believe I was getting paid for doing something I loved -- something I considered a 'favorite waste of time' (to quote Howard Hawks).

At the same time, I never for one second thought this was a way of making a living. We all have different standards, and I just enjoyed too many other luxuries to become accustomed to living check to check. Now that I'm in my mid thirties and paying a mortgage, it's luxuries + safety cushion. I have neither a wife nor children, and I couldn't put them through the monthly anxiety of not knowing you can't, I don't know, put off paying for braces or not buying them ice cream or something.

I hope it's not presumptuous of me to suggest that if you love writing and thinking critically maybe you should return to school. At the very least, a college degree guarantees a certain level of income or gets your foot past interview gatekeepers. Times are too strange to walk around without some proof of undergraduate education.

Whatever else, we're here if you wanna bitch.

yeah i feel the same way, more or less, about music and movie writing. it's always been a sideline to more conventional journalistic endeavors. (sad thing of course is that those conventional endeavors are getting squeezed now by exactly the same forces as the music writing...)

i'm really disappointed that none of the autogoon cru noticed my ego trip shirt in the video

i can't tell if its hopeful or depressing, this attitude that the collapse of print journalism will somehow just kill off all the bad stuff. kinda bums me out tbh. would you really say that about any other industry? and i gotta say, even though there are mediocre writers in every local paper, i still think there is something valuable about their local-ness, about there being people still covering their little arts scene or police blotter or whatever, living where that stuff is actually going down. there's value to that even if the writing is not great.

the dumb thing about me is i kinda fell ass-backwards into writing/editing, which has been my main source of income for like 8 years now. since i was always doing other stuff at the time i somehow was doing it for... the money? or at least that's how it started out, like an oh they'll pay me for this kinda thing?

i mean it became something else and writing has always been pretty much my main thing but still.

i def noticed whiney's ego trip shirt

i can't tell if its hopeful or depressing, this attitude that the collapse of print journalism will somehow just kill off all the bad stuff. kinda bums me out tbh. would you really say that about any other industry? and i gotta say, even though there are mediocre writers in every local paper, i still think there is something valuable about their local-ness, about there being people still covering their little arts scene or police blotter or whatever, living where that stuff is actually going down. there's value to that even if the writing is not great.

― s1ocki, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 11:16 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well i def wouldnt extend it to reporting s1ocki! just pop music criticism

ya i know. i think there is some good to local scene writing type stuff, even if it is unbearably parochial.

As a guy who was laid off from what I thought was a steady job in February and has been doing contract work since the severance package disappeared, I want to give my sympathies to all you writers who have been or may soon be similarly affected. It sucks!

Whiney's speech touched on the phenomenon of people so wrapped up in their subcultures that they're oblivious to the broader culture. That's not new, but I think the internet encourages or at least enables and in many cases flatters this tendency. So does cable (as vs network 30 years ago), and so does satellite radio (as vs freeform or even regular old pre-market-segmented radio). There's always a tradeoff, and the resource explosion we've gained also gave us a million little foxholes in which to squirrel ourselves away. All this new media helps us compartmentalize ourselves out of even a pretense that we're all diving or even dipping into a shared pool, some sort of a commons. Where that matters most (to me) isn't aesthetics but politics - left and right wing bloggers each finding their own special echo chambers, cable news choices reduced to which flavor of loudmouth you prefer, etc. As though there's no longer a center/common ground. In general that seems like a bad thing for a democracy - I'd think you'd get better political results (or at least a better political process) when we all are responsive to each other.

But was there ever a center to begin with? To get back to music: Wasn't the Universal Music Critic and/or Magazine, covering everything & doing it well, largely a shared fiction? If I've seen any common ground among music fans, it's been the chip on the shoulder about those who don't quite get it when it comes to their particular favorites. Seems to me that annoyance at critics getting it wrong is the primary way they've been received, for generations. More to the point, common ground may be important for a democracy, but I'm not sure it matters for music. What's so bad about a million sub-communities all digging their own things?

honestly dudes, if i'm gonna go back to having a real job and doing something as a hobby, I'm gonna bail on writing altogether and go back to playing drums.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 10:38 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i will buy 2 copies of your next record, maybe 3 if it's as good as those P&L records

i'm really disappointed that none of the autogoon cru noticed my ego trip shirt in the video

I noticed and thought, is he making some silent comment that twittering or rockcrit-ing is just one big ego trip? Or is he just wearing a hip shirt?

i noticed!!

it's really sad though, that no one noticed

"and i gotta say, even though there are mediocre writers in every local paper, i still think there is something valuable about their local-ness, about there being people still covering their little arts scene or police blotter or whatever, living where that stuff is actually going down. there's value to that even if the writing is not great."

Unfortunately a lot of this "local writing in your local paper"-stuff got killed off by the massive media consolidation of the late 90s so a lot of what's being killed off right now is just a bunch of VV/NT junk on a weekly level and a steady diet of AP wire rehash on the daily. If the SF Bay Guardian dies though, I'll be really bummed though since it's a good weekly with a lot of solid local political reporting and good local events coverage.

ya i know, this stuff has been dying by a thousand little cuts for a whle now.

fwiw the only reason i'm still making any money at all writing about music is that i made local music my niche & my paper is cutting away space/budget for that slower than all other music coverage

but then it's not a VVM paper and is probably more an exception that proves the rule than not

"ya i know, this stuff has been dying by a thousand little cuts for a whle now."

To be fair though, this is the one thing that the web is really good at replacing. Semi-professional (or totally amateur) topical writing about local politics/scenes/happenings is something that very easily leaps from newsprint to blog. It's the more in-depth journalism that's really being hurt most and I'm not sure how that (or if it even does) gets replaced.

^^^^yeah i mean even if u want to talk about it w/r/t music, its not like bloggers are able to do things like getting the entire crew of ppl responsible for a classic album in a room together to talk about the making of an illmatic or whatever. there are certain real things that, at least when it comes to journalism, requires institutional $$$

i agree that the web is ideal for replacing this stuff, it just sucks that it's no longer a viable paying job - also i wonder if the people who are doing this stuff on the web will have the tenacity to keep going, consistently, week by week like a paying gig would

Probably not. Remember when every music writer was a dutiful blogger in like 2004?

exactly. who will be doing this stuff? and why?

another thing that i fret about is that most web writing (blogs of course) are unedited... i think editing is if anything more undervalued than writing. it is important, no matter how good a writer u are.

xpost It's gonna be either 19-year-old kids who think it's an opening for a job, or older dudes who do it as a hobby.

big name magazines regularly tell my copy-editor friends that they need to edit less and just look over things FASTER to get more content out, since quantity is slowly overtaking quality as the measure of financial success

godspeed, 25-year-olds. xp

Apologies to Whiney and everyone else cause I know this is real serious talk time but Chris, I really like that hat.

big name magazines regularly tell my copy-editor friends that they need to edit less and just look over things FASTER to get more content out, since quantity is slowly overtaking quality as the measure of financial success

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Thursday, June 18, 2009 5:16 AM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

urgh terrible. not just copy editing im talking here tho of course

Also, great speech Whiney

whiney i noticed your ego trip shirt too : )

also this whole thread is hella sobering...speaking as someone who has only been protected from this due to god's grace and larger data footprints.

Whiney's thesis, which I mostly agreed with, reminded me of this PBF comic

http://i40.tinypic.com/2mhea8o.gif

http://i40.tinypic.com/2mhea8o.gif

Oh, and the comic's name is "Grammar Wizard," which helps with the joke obv.

Oh, and after the wizard (more like rock critic!) is toppled the masses segregate and form new tribes Lord of the Flies-style, and start blaring Fleet Foxes and thinking they need no ruler. It's in the fifth panel which didn't fit.

i dont think this has been mentioned itt (kind of skimmed so forgtive me), but one the thing the internet is truly going to kill is name brand critics. xgau, sfj, carmancia, senneh etc - all those guys worked/work on the old system and still make waves on blogs, message boards because their opinions still matter more than, like, whiney's. i just don't see that being true in like... 10 years, at least not on the level that sfj has where he can write about m.i.a., no age, r, kelly and taylor swift and no one blinks an eye. noz, tom breihan, fennessey, perpetua, even our very own al shipley have kind of transcended as name brand guys but they are the go to guys in genre x or niche y (in shipley's case bmore shit) but now so much is "pitchfork said this" or "stereogum said this" or "the guy from gorilla vs bear linked this" and i def think the "era" (?) of big name, all genre critics is gonna die if it hasn't already

u really think that is happening more than ppl used to say "rolling stone said this"?

yeah, true

yeah i'm not sure how big any of those names are now. i guarantee you almost none of my coworkers -- including the new yorker subscribers -- could tell you who sfj is. or christgau. any kind of criticism is such a niche thing, really, that the small number of people who pay attention to it are always going to know some names, whether it's on blogs or elsewhere. and nobody else will much give a shit. what's at issue is whether and how that small niche world intersects with any kind of broader audience, in a way that might invigorate discourse etc. and that's not likely to happen on music blogs.

(much less on twitter feeds, where the likelihood of accidental intersection is reduced almost to nil)

well when i talk about name brand critics i mean in terms of people who care about reviews in the first place, not normal ppl

could any of your co-workers or otherwise random set of people EVER tell you who the name brand rock crit of the day was?

ha xp

Really loved your talk, Christopher, it was borderline standup, like Jonah Hill meets George Carlin--there's your "because." And I take your point about Twitterfication even if I don't think NPR critics bend their tastes for hit counts (but then I don't mind Fleet Foxes).

I just think you're mixing up symptoms and causes. Media corporatization, online advertising, and the Bush/Clinton/Wall Street-induced financial/economic collapse all loom larger than blogs as a reason why critics have less time, pay, and opportunity. And I don't think people being able to hear music immediately diminishes critics much--nobody has time to listen to it all, and that's not really why music heads read critics anyway.

Arguably these big music critic "generalists" are a hangover from when music crit was funnelled through music mags which couldn't afford to hire a heavyweight to write authorititatively and regularly about every niche.

In some ways specialisation has become more necessary as a result of the internet because a) there's more choice of writers; and b) everyone's an expert. Comments boxes on web-based articles and reviews are now filled with corrections (both fact-checking and "your opinion is wrong"), such that knowing your product becomes more immediately important than it might have been in the past.

And I don't think people being able to hear music immediately diminishes critics much--nobody has time to listen to it all, and that's not really why music heads read critics anyway.

― Pete Scholtes, Thursday, June 18, 2009 1:26 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i agree & disagree; i think the days of critics as consumer guides are really really ... different. ideally, it will make people much better writers cuz theyll be forced to become better writers -- u cant just treat music writing like a guide for whether or not ppl should spend their money -- shit is free. any critic who thought that way in the first place is stuck saying "download it and decide for yourself."

so hopefully it will drive ppl to actually write about the music in interesting ways w/ less of a focus on thumbs up/thumbs down type writing

i dunno, one thing MP3 blogs do I think is show how the taste-in-music of individual critics (or "critics") remains important. There's so many things that can be downloaded that as an mp3 blog if you've gotten someone to download off your page that's almost a minor victory in itself (unless you're posting no-brainer big album leaks or the number one single on the charts etc.)

There's lots of mp3 blogs that have convinced me to download stuff I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise, either because of the quality of the write-up or because the general taste of the writer seemed trustworthy.

could any of your co-workers or otherwise random set of people EVER tell you who the name brand rock crit of the day was?

well exactly. which is why i think that to the extent "name brand rock critics" exist or have ever, they'll continue to. they just might not be ... employed.

I think we're going to see a splintering in music criticism. On the one hand music criticism will become more abstruse and will be something enjoyed more and more by specialists who really are writing for each other (ILM writ large). In other words rock criticism will become more academic, or at least part of it will be. Who knows, maybe it will even be subsidized by our universities one day.

But the other half? As James Bowman recently pointed out, the only kind of traditional media that isn't being dwarfed right now (if it's really shrinking at all) is celebrity/tabloid media. He mentions that one of the reasons the media loves Obama, aside from ideology, is that, unlike Bush, Obama can be marketed to the public like a celebrity - and celebrity still sells like it did when the economy was healthy. The same strategy might be used for pushing music reviews (bear with me).

I think that music criticism will also go the way of next generation movie reviewing ('criticism' doesn't fit) and become something that is dominated by celebrity-worship, monomaniacal fanboys with no perspective, flamboyant personalities (doesn't Perez Hilton have a record label just because people liked his quasi-record reviews?). The fact that Ben Lyons replaced Robert Ebert might suggest where popular music criticism will go soon.

In other words I think that music criticism will simultaneously become too complicated for the average reader to appreciate on the one hand, but then so dumbed down that the other kind of critic will be like a Perez Hilton media whore who uses his name brand as an all around personality to sell or damn the music that he reviews. It won't so much be music reviewing as it will be "celebrity commentator talks about new album by celebrity band!" The person who gets pushed out will be the knowledgeable middle-brow critic who doesn't, or cannot, be an academic or Ben Lyons-type hack.

I hope that theory made sense. I should point out that I've personally never tried to publish a piece of music writing before, and I'm just writing as an outsider trying to analyze the climate and predict what will happen based on other trends I think I've observed. I'm not an expert on the field nor do I claim to be, so if I'm way off I wouldn't be too surprised.

"Who knows, maybe it will even be subsidized by our universities one day."

Already happened. But maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek here.

"I think that music criticism will also go the way of next generation movie reviewing ('criticism' doesn't fit) and become something that is dominated by celebrity-worship, monomaniacal fanboys with no perspective, flamboyant personalities (doesn't Perez Hilton have a record label just because people liked his quasi-record reviews?)."

I think this has already been around for quite a while to some extent as well, but in the past it's mainly been in the form of "music experts" annexed to lifestyle, variety and entertainment shows rather than via the internet (Perez being a quasi-exception). People in Australia will be familiar with Molly Meldrum and his "do yourself a favour" reviews. There was another relatively big broadsheet writer Nui Te Koha who was rather like this.

If anything there's almost been a slight move away from this model over the past ten years I'd say: as the cult of celebrity has grown more intense and invasive, the need to pretend that we are also talking about the music of Madonna or Lindsay Lohan or Courtney Love when discussing their latest love triangle, drug bust or plastic surgery gone wrong has really fallen away. Paris was obviously the tipping point here: as far as I know the first person whose first claim to fame was being a tabloid celeb, upon which her musical career was founded.

Perez I think is the point where celeb gossip columnist crosses over into celeb-in-himself. In this sense people being interested in what he is listening to is perhaps closer to people being interested in what Kanye is listening to than it is to people reading Rolling Stone or whatever.

But what if the future of mainstream "music reviewing" is just that: no more reading Rolling Stone, or what any faceless and celebrity-less voice has to say, but looking at what powerful celebrity is listening to? I've read that businessmen have tried to pay Kanye to put their products on his blog (and his blog isn't very wordy, if you've seen it - almost what you would call a "picture blog.")

Could we - nay, have we- reached the point where someone with fame like that just posting a picture with the caption "CHECK THIS OUT" is of infinitely more influence than entire mobs of journalists and critics? I suppose the question isn't whether they have a majority, but will that type of micro-reviewing have a monopoly?

Maybe I'm overstating the potential for disaster and fallout from this economy - and what may result from it. I got word today of an e-mail sent to my mother, from somebody who is a Wall Street day trader, and this is lifted from the e-mail:

"Things are not going to get better as we are told; they are only going to get less worse. Are you prepared for the coming meltdown of our society? It has already started. Be prepared. And let god protect you and your family."

normally I'd write it off but this guy was the like the mad prophet in the wilderness just months before the economy fainted - and I don't remember him believing religious either. So heavier-than-usual gloom, doom, and the further collapse of standards was on my mind (but also ILM's, coincidentally)

There were heaps of mad prophets in the wilderness just months before the economy fainted though. Even a stopped clock etc.

Anyone who uses the phrase "coming meltdown of our society" is clearly a few securities short of a majority shareholding in his own sanity.

Good music writing will survive wherever it pops up and regardless of who does or doesn't get paid for doing it as long as there are people who want to read it.

The genre division is meaningless since any music writer worth their salt should be able to persuade the reader that such and such is worth paying attention to, whatever their preferences or prejudices.

Max Harrison's writing persuaded me to buy a Paul Whiteman box set back in the day; I know nothing about birdwatching but Simon Barnes' writing makes me want to know something about it.

It's all to do with writerly skill and demonstrable knowledge which guides the reader rather than hits them over the head with it.

As Constant Lambert said, the enterprising music writer shouldn't be put off if they initially feel that they are only writing for themselves, since Cleopatra will inevitably tire of billiards.

hahaha

That is true that there were lots of mad prophets. He seemed so sane though leading up to it, but then months before - BAM!

Stockbroking is a good industry for sudden onset stress conditions. I'd rank the big ones:

1) Child Protection
2) Social security customer service (maybe doesn't exist to the same extent in the US)
3) nursing home staff
4) stockbroking
5) charity organisations
6) law
7) psychiatry

Perez I think is the point where celeb gossip columnist crosses over into celeb-in-himself. In this sense people being interested in what he is listening to is perhaps closer to people being interested in what Kanye is listening to than it is to people reading Rolling Stone or whatever.

― Tim F, Thursday, 18 June 2009 07:35 (2 hours ago) Permalink

But what if the future of mainstream "music reviewing" is just that: no more reading Rolling Stone, or what any faceless and celebrity-less voice has to say, but looking at what powerful celebrity is listening to? I've read that businessmen have tried to pay Kanye to put their products on his blog (and his blog isn't very wordy, if you've seen it - almost what you would call a "picture blog.")

Could we - nay, have we- reached the point where someone with fame like that just posting a picture with the caption "CHECK THIS OUT" is of infinitely more influence than entire mobs of journalists and critics? I suppose the question isn't whether they have a majority, but will that type of micro-reviewing have a monopoly?

― Cunga, Thursday, 18 June 2009 07:44 (2 hours ago)

wow i had a conversation this week w/an old friend who's been a rockcritic and worked in the biz doing a&r and producing and now he's involved in this^ type of thang

though my teenage son who's a big big music fan (mainstream pop/R&B) asked for a rolling stone subscription for his last birthday. i was really surprised that he didn't want US or some other celebrity thing. (and he's only vaguely aware that i wrote for the rag). don't think he reads the reviews, though.

I think we're going to see a splintering in music criticism. On the one hand music criticism will become more abstruse and will be something enjoyed more and more by specialists who really are writing for each other (ILM writ large). In other words rock criticism will become more academic, or at least part of it will be. Who knows, maybe it will even be subsidized by our universities one day.

the EMP conference

"I think that music criticism will also go the way of next generation movie reviewing ('criticism' doesn't fit) and become something that is dominated by celebrity-worship, monomaniacal fanboys with no perspective, flamboyant personalities

while they're far from perez hilton i can think of two very prominent american critics (not mentioned in this thread) who do what I consider a form of highbrow gushing. their work is well written on the prose level but pretty shallow in terms of content IMO. so yeah, music criticism may be just a couple steps away from this academic/fanboy split.

Anyone who uses the phrase "coming meltdown of our society" is clearly a few securities short of a majority shareholding in his own sanity.

digression, but what if the "meltdown of our society" is just that a lot of families will only be able to afford one car and a small yard? that would look calamitous from a certain perspective (from wall street, say) but there's a big difference between that and the road. not to minimize the hard times a comin', which obviously there are, but i think a lot of wall street types -- having spent years flying on their own gases -- are now getting off on being the "truth tellers" to a clueless populace that just doesn't get it. end of digression.

(and you know how everyone's like, "well, maybe all our smartest people won't go to wall street anymore, maybe they'll do something more useful"? maybe they'll become music critics!)

i was really surprised that he didn't want US or some other celebrity thing.

Teenage boys read Us Weekly?

I read it at the supermarket whenever Robert Pattinson's on the cover.

i read it once when someone left a copy in the bathroom, and i learned that Celebrities Are Just Like Us! (did u know uma thurman shops for groceries? true!)

Teenage boys read Us Weekly?

maybe not as much as girls, i just grabbed that title as an uber-example of our current pop culture. i think my kid idly flips thru celeb magazines to read the bits about pop-music stars. like me at that age he's not into sports. now his female cousin who's also an early-teenager is flat-out obsessed w/celebrity culture perez hilton she knows the "stars" of every third-string MTV reality show etc. if my kid was that into it I might take a less relaxed attitude about it.

i learned that Celebrities Are Just Like Us! (did u know uma thurman shops for groceries? true!)

megalolz

I just think the issues of criticism-generated income and music-criticism-reader behavior are more separate than people think. The most dramatic changes of the past five years are ad dollars going to new places where there's no need for content of any kind, and less ad dollars to go anywhere, neither of which says much about the demand for the service we provide.

^^ t-bomb

That depends whether you view music writers as "providing a service" as though they were call centre staff or garage mechanics.

Teenage boys read Us Weekly?

maybe not as much as girls, i just grabbed that title as an uber-example of our current pop culture. i think my kid idly flips thru celeb magazines to read the bits about pop-music stars. like me at that age he's not into sports. now his female cousin who's also an early-teenager is flat-out obsessed w/celebrity culture perez hilton she knows the "stars" of every third-string MTV reality show etc. if my kid was that into it I might take a less relaxed attitude about it.

― m coleman, Thursday, June 18, 2009 1:40 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

kids are always into stupid shit

That depends whether you view music writers as "providing a service" as though they were call centre staff or garage mechanics.

― Dingbod Kesterson, Thursday, June 18, 2009 3:47 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

so you can complain about the loss of writing jobs but god forbid someone considers writing on the same level as an unspeakable blue collar profession like that

I'm not complaining about the loss of writing jobs!

"just trying not to be pessimistic. listening to a lot of writer-types get all depresso is bringing me down lately. feel like we need more positive energy to be successful"

amen, man. i'm among the bitchers, and i need to quit bitchin'. personally, i HAVE started my slow, methodical creep away from crit as a side-career, but i still hope to be at this when i'm 50 (i'm 32, now).

great, great thread that, ironically, is distracting me from rock-crit shit i should be writing about yellow tears on my lunch break. ah well.

hey yall, 23-yr-old here, lyfe sucks, its hard to make a living, no worries tho, itll all turn out OK in the end

i find your youthful zest a comfort in my declining years max

"but then it's not a VVM paper and is probably more an exception that proves the rule than not"

VVM's on hard times, too, believe me.

i just graduated and am sort of dancing around the concept of writing-to-make-a-living since it seems so difficult & i dont want to end up writing myself into a corner. on the other hand--doing stuff that isnt writing kind of sucks, and i dont want to spend 40 hrs/wk doing stuff that sucks.

i am developing my personal brand tho

ray, my point was that our paper priveleges local music coverage more than VVM-owned papers, not that one's doing better or worse than the other

dude there's all kinds of writing jobs out there - i mean, i'm a technical writer right now, before that i was a proofreader, and before THAT i was a general assignment journo

music/books crit is something i've done on the side over that whole time (in college i did way, way more of it)

ah, ok - sorry i misread you, al.

fwiw max i spend 40 hrs/wk doing stuff that sucks, and the only way i've been keeping my head above water the last couple years was also freelancing a lot. now that's disappearing, and my wife is pregnant, and the "itll all turn out OK in the end" philosophy i used to share is a lot harder to come by now.

i guess what i'm saying is -- wear a rubber?

times change, don't they? i remember the days when people were constantly bombarding our paper with hate mail cuz it wasn't
"covering the scene" with enough zest or whatever - but that was when there was 2x or 3x more overall copy in there, when it would take a few hours to read everything

god, i need to stop with all the "back in MY day BS," i sound like an old man

al yr wife is pregannat/??????

congratulations man!!!!

oh and also freelancing a lot means you usually end up owing a TON in taxes that you wouldn't otherwise with a 9 to 5

haha yeah thanks

(congrats some dude!)

"i guess what i'm saying is -- wear a rubber?"

good advice universally!

and hell yeah on the tax thing, it gets brutal and wipes out the gains you would've made from your taxable day-job earnings

btw that was a horrible post for you guys to find out that news from -- i thought i had alluded to it enough that it was semi-common knowledge by now

I had heard it mentioned elsewhere but hey, congratulations again anyway!

Name of kid if a boy: "some little dude"

ya congratulations. talk about burying the lede!

Congratulations, Al.

some babby

"some dudeito"

i'd join in the congrats, but i already congratulated you on yr blog

as a guy who's made MAYBE four grand on music writing in the past decade, i've never really entertained the idea of being a full time critic/writer. as others have noted, it requires a certain amount of hustle that I've found I just don't have. i'd just say to anyone who really enjoys writing to try to enjoy writing about any topic, music or otherwise. I've gotten to the point where I like the activity of writing, regardless of whether it's about some psych folk dude or a business report on Denver. And this attitude is what makes me able to pay my bills without wanting to kill myself.

i should have been born rich

some dude can u change yr name to some dad

not yet!

(congrats)

― some dad (some dude), Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:15 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ i thought this qualified as an announcement guys

I thought it was self-deprecation.

gay dude is the drummer in some dad

hater dads having hater babies and shit

j/k congrats, al!

look at this thread, it was all depressing, and then al had a baby

in a lot of ways, music criticism, is the baby, of writers, making people happy

Let's all get shitty jobs so that Al can afford to take his kid to Starbucks in a couple of years.

"3,000 rock crits and a baby"

rock criticism is dead, and will be reincarnated as my scion

some scion

congratulations!!

"When rock crit is reincarnated as a Scion, can I borrow the keys?"

i am enjoying this good cheer because tbh the past 24 hours have been about the most pessimistic and hopeless i have felt about the whole situation since i found out

christgau is risen

lol was toying with christ/gau puns for the past 5 mins but yours was better than any i had

congrats!

which ringtone cru member are u gonna name it after? I propose HOOS

also: congrats!

some brood

true story: once a few years ago the mrs. looked over my shoulder at an AIM window as said "ethan...i like that name"

i don't think even luriqua is a big enough padgettstan to name his first born that, though

lol god help us if there's ever a luriqua jr.

talk about burying the lede!

great new euphemism!

congratulations, some dude sr.!

name the kid Vedder

i think after a family friend who's a huge NIN fan named his first son Trent we collectively put our foot down like NO ROCK STAR NAMES

i choose to believe your friend named his kid after Trent Tucker

some woman just came in and sold me a big stack of 70's rolling stones. so i'm gonna sit around and read name-brand critics all day.

Holy crap this thread exploded. Still not finished reading, but I'll just mention that the only critic I've been really following is John Mulvey. Ironically I never noticed him apart from others in the Uncut reviews, mainly because I don't buy it anymore, just skim at the bookstore. I subscribe to Uncut on Twitter, which is mostly incredibly annoying, because it updates what it's playing in the office almost hourly. The one thing that keeps me from canceling are the occasional reminders of Mulvey's posts in his Wild Mercury Sound blog. I like how he reviews promos pretty much when he hears them, long before the official release date when most reviews are coordinated to come out and duly collated at Metacritic, weeks after most of us have heard 'em.

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=6&p=1208&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Looking at his half-year list and recent posts, a lot of this stuff isn't even leaked yet, like Fiery Furnaces, Cornershop, Wild Beasts and White Denim (a Texas band that has no U.S. distribution?) His casual blog-style writing isn't as polished as the 100 word blurbs in the glossies, which is a good thing. It's been a while since a single writer got me excited about multiple releases in a given week. I'm currently listening to Arbouretum and Sleepy Sun, which I wasn't aware of until seeing them in his blog. David Fricke sort of plays this role at Rolling Stone, and would do well to follow the Wild Mercury Sound model and expand on his casual album reviews.

I presume with its overpriced cover price and high overhead, that Uncut's days are numbered. Hopefully Mulvey and some others like him will be able to maintain an audience, perhaps by banding together into their own site?

― some dad (some dude), Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:15 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ i thought this qualified as an announcement guys

― some dude, Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:42 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i knew u were reproducing but even i assumed this was abt your dad jokes

now 100% more authentic

I barely graduated high school and went to three semesters of community college; while there, I met my wife, and academics went right out the goddamn window.

― unperson, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:42 PM (20 hours ago)

This would be the Curvy Colombian Wife, right? Spina Biffita?

Bizarre that Mulvey lists Alela Diane at #9 in that list, and no Neko Case at all. (Speaking as someone who loves both albums, but really no comparison.) I wish I remember who I was reading/watching/listening to recently who said that the music critic is transforming/will transform into a curator-like position instead - probably lots of people have been saying that lately. It's something that confused me at Whiney's argument; yes, everyone can download the albums for themselves and render their own judgement, but who has time for that?

Looking for a good place to put this. Failing.

A pretty good conversation between Carl "Let's Talk About Love" Wilson and Jesse "Jian Gomeshi's a Raging Pervert" Brown, on Brown's podcast: http://canadalandshow.com/podcast/last-music-critic

Bit dull. Also, hyperbolic and meta. Would rather he was just talking about new music that he's into etc. That should be the job of a music critic. Next podcast: "what does it mean when the writer we're calling the last music critic goes on a show and never discusses any music."

"the writer we're calling the last music critic"--do people actually say that?

"The Last Music Critic" is the name of the podcast episode. Starts off with Brown saying stuff like "Carl Wilson changed the way we think about music. I don't know if that's hyperbole or not". I'm listening to this thinking "YES. IT'S HYPERBOLE!"

Thanks--why the royal "we" is a terrible idea. (Not really a knock on Wilson; definitely a knock on whoever would make such a statement.)

In the podcast Brown goes on about how he (I guess as a teenager) hated hip-hop but finally started to like it in the early 90s, realizing his own musical snobbery. In 2007 Wilson did his book about Celine Dion which somehow reminded Brown of his own experience (of shedding his rockism or whatever). In this way, Wilson "changed the way we think about music". It's all a bit silly. I'd rather have Wilson just do his job and talk about whatever music is on his radar right now.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying