Can a music matter if its fans don't especially want to read about it?

(sidenote: i have been wrestling a similar question as i near the end of a long awful year's worth of recording and rerecording viz "can a music matter if no one especially wants to write about it?" - i am having my doubts boo hiss)

(I'm actually half serious about asking that.)

is there a word missing here?

Matters to me: gives me pleasure, has an emotional impact (however brief). Not necessarily changes my life in any noticeable way.

'matter'= i think i would still need to hear music even if i stopped reading abt it?

another distinction needs to be made here too: not reading about music doesn't equal not WANTING to. i wasn't aware until very recently that so much writing existed about music i used to scaffold with my own (largely invented/ill-considered) mythologies, for lack of exposure to, say, much rock-crit. even now, i'm not reading about Elvis's MGM years or mark's once-mentioned "real story of commodification" or a non-muso take on Gould's JS Bach work, but it's not for lack of wanting to.

Not everybody is an obsessive music freak. Personally, when I hear something I like, I like to find out everything I can about it, and find as much like it as I can. Some people just like catchy songs, and that's fine.

A) Who cares?

if these people can't be asked to engage with the secondary texts surrounding their primary thrill how could these thrills possibly become circulated meaningfully in a wider culture of readers and writers?

Everything counts in large amounts?

(um i'm still trying to work out whether this affects the second half of the question or not. i should have an answer to this and kim's question upthread sometime before the next ice-age)

mark - you used a CAPITAL - you growing up?

i don't think rock's unprecedentedly close relationship with writing-about-rock is accidental, in terms of history and value (and you could certainly elaborate a Why-Rock-is-Grebt and a Why-Rock-is-Rub out of this non-accidentality)

The success of that music is for history to decide.

Academics aside, the ear not the eye, is the primiry conduit.
¥

How is rock's relationship to writing essentially different from that of jazz (is it just sheer quantity?)

I think we can at least agree that a music doesn't matter if fans don't especially want to hear it.

I mean, Creed matters. They're clearing giving a lot of people what they want (or at least they have been, I think their peak has passed), and if you want to understand people, you should look at what they enjoy. Much more press has gone to The Strokes, but they certainly don't matter as much...yet.

Also, the question is whether or not people want to read about it, not whether people want to write about it. How do we gauge that? Magazine covers that sell? Cuz then women artists matter a hell of a lot more than guys. Except for Eminem.

(radio programming in the uk is today disproportionately in the shadow of rock-paper ideals, so the ear is being led by the eye there at least)

(how do things enter history? = they are written about)

Classical Music: Why Bother?

Doesn't something precede this? - and is writing the only way to preserve history? I wonder if the fact that a lot more people can read now (and have access to free writing) than, say, the non-aristocratic public of Mozart's time, impacts rock's (and everything else's) relationship with writing.

Compare: the number of words written about Mozart written during his life vs the number for the Thompson Twins during the 80s. (Not that I know the answer, mind you!)

The article "Classical Music: Why Bother" Yanc3y links to, on the other hand, really is a disgraceful piece of writing/(not)thinking that Salon should be ashamed to publish.

I'd have been pretty interested in hearing the case for elitism in music/the arts generally if it was properly argued. Instead it's a lazy, complacent, question-begging listing of unproven assertions, arts establishment prejudices presented as fact, and circular argument.

If this is the best rationale a Harvard professor of music can give for listening to modern classical music the answer to his question seems to be "no reason whatever".

No, it comes from the word FANcier. (Cat fancier, boxing fancier, etc.)

I know a lot of you folks write professionally about music; do you do so expecting that your readership consists of fans? (I mean as opposed to an audience who might potentially be exposed to the music through your writing; or an audience happy to engage in intellectual reflection/discussion of the subject, without being committed fans.)

revive!

so the last decade implies an answer: "yes! as long as music critics wanna WRITE about it!"

"poptimism"=writing about kinds of music whose fans don't care for reading about music.

(and, often, writing from the standpoint of "giving a voice" to those fans and their values, which are implicitly or explicitly evoked as a rebuke to the evils of rockism)

Moratorium on anyone who started posting on ILM after 2004 using the word "poptimism". Ever.

hey, I used quotation marks! would you prefer "anti-rockism"?

Dancing about music is a bit like sitting down about architecture, singing for people that can't dance.

what about people who just like pop music without making a big movement out of it

if the audience for writing about music was the same size as the audience for music, there'd be many more music publications and jobs for writers. QED

q: can a music matter

Anybody who doesn't read about the music that matters to them is a poseur

Music only matters if it's worth reading about, screw listening, let alone thinking for yourself.

What if everyone that chips in their twopenneth on the music you like depresses the fuck out of you, so you choose to avoid their discussions?

#ILX

i keep thinking about this question on and off

has the decline of reading in general meant the decline of music that matters? i think maybe it has?

anyway, ports weirdly one of the few areas of life where writing still matters and influences people cause sports fans are such maniacs they’ll consume anything even the written word, and when it’s good it’s good and everybody from analysts to fans has ALL read it

Do critics matter now? Among your average popular
music buyer and gig-goer couldn't have
care less about critics and bought what they knew from radio/mtv.

Do critics matter now?
Among your average popular music buyer and gig-goer couldn't have cared less about critics and bought what they knew from radio/mtv.

Nowadays critics seem to matter even less (except to writers and music nerds)

It’s one of my greatest disappointments about modern fandom is that almost no one from the younger generations seems to enjoy talking about (reading, writing, critiquing in any way) music. And in the place of talking about music and how it works and what it does, there seems to have formed this endless moralistic sub-Tumblr ✨discourse✨ about whether the creators, the fans, etc. are problematic or pure

I know this is my most boomer old man shouts at clouds complaint which I will probably regret as soon as hit post. But it’s Friday night so what the hell

What do they see in Fantano?

they care about pitchfork and fantano because they like to argue about who has a higher number

People are disappointingly hostile to negative opinions but music critics were always pretty useless.

I think critics were once better able to shape a sense that certain artists "mattered" while others clearly didn't. That's been destabilized both by the diminished importance of criticism to music fans and by trends within criticism itself toward more positive reviews and more omnivorous tastes. Critics still engage in tastemaking and canon-building to some extent, but it feels more arbitrary and less meaningful.

One phenomenon: labels and critics team up to expose some regional style (in the past this would be "world music", from the 00's on more likely some electronic genre), which previously had an established audience but not much writing about it to a new audience that very much does want to read about it as getting a window into its cultural context is a huge part of the appeal.

Of course there are things that complicate this: how do we actually know it hasn't been written about when we're not part of the culture? And even if it hasn't, is it because the audience doesn't want to read about it or because the structures for writing about it aren't there?

this was a a good question! i still don't know what my answer is (that's why it was a good question)

it's natural to assume i was just talking abt critics -- since i have been one now and then -- but i wasnt necessarily, unless critics includes everyone posting to ilx and in youtube comments and etc, as responders immediately clocked 20+ yrs ago, the word "matter" in the phrase "does it matter" means a whole bunch of very different possibly contradictory things

(like if i rephrased it "can a music enter history if its beloved but no one talks about it?")

(but that's not the only way to rephrases it!)

*i have never engaged in taste-maming and canon-buulding tho, i was useful not useless like milo says

Is there such a thing as music that fans don't want to write youtube comments about? If it's known at all and comments are disabled someone's gonna get in there.

aren't disabled

research needed which musics dont really feature on youtube

If it exists I am pessimistic about our chances to find it.

Purely in terms of what's available - as opposed to sound quality, curatorship and whatnot - I think youtube beats any other online space and certainly all the streaming services.

And in the place of talking about music and how it works and what it does, there seems to have formed this endless moralistic sub-Tumblr ✨discourse✨ about whether the creators, the fans, etc. are problematic or pure

I know this is my most boomer old man shouts at clouds complaint which I will probably regret as soon as hit post. But it’s Friday night so what the hell

― Etherwave, Friday, 20 June 2025 bookmarkflaglink

Lol please sober up and come back to this one.

https://www.tumblr.com/yourfaveisproblematic