How would you make rockcritics.com a better website?

(I'm new to I Love Music)

Good point about the old people.

That's mostly my fault, not Scott Woods. I'm the guy behind the interviews with DeCurtis and a bunch of other dinosaur rock crits.

And forget about interviews. What other kinds of features and pieces would you like to see at the site?

make those Q&A from the readers respondants (coughcoughXGAUcoughcough) actually answer the questions that rub them the wrong way instead of evading them.

Scott Woods did a great interview with Metal Mike that's at the site.

And please, no requests for Chuck Eddy. I like Chuck and his stuff, but the site is chock full of Chuck already.

(put another way: I only go to the site looking for ideas about criticism from a small handful of interviews with some of the most interesting and or frustrating critics, like kogan, marcus, eddy. so maybe writing about ideas that doesn't come from the critics' own mouths would be more helpful.)

Something that I'd be interesting in reading is a group interview with all of the SPIN/Vibe/Rolling Stone etc music critics who are always appearing on VH1 shows praising people. I'd like to get an understanding of what their experience on those shows is like, if they hate doing it but need the cash, and if they ever coached on what to say when the cameras are rolling.

That's a great point. Unfortunely, there is a lot of self flattery in those interviews. But it is interesting to me (and other fans of the site) about how these writers got their starts in the biz.

Still, those ideas *about* criticism are gems that do poke out of the interviews sometimes.

I'm not here to defend what was printed before. I just want to improve the site and I'm looking for ideas.

You think we need to ask better or the right questions, right?

i just pictured don and frank and chuck riding around in old jalopy dressed as greasers for some reason.( throwing beer cans at little old ladies )

if you have to do interviews, make them look more like exams than VH1 bopic specials.

Why does your name so sound familiar to me? Did you write for Radio On or Why Music Sucks? Or did you write for the glossies?

For some reason I associate your name with the Chuck Eddy crew.

Maybe I'm wrong.

The people I consider part of his crew -- Allred, Scott Woods, Kogan, Arsenio Orteza, Rob Sheffield -- were people who wrote for Why Music Sucks and Radio On. Fanzines Chuck wrote for and LOVED.

steven:    What's your opinion of the current state of rock criticism?

glenn:    Beats me, I hate most rock criticism too violently to have a very good perspective on the field. It feels to me, from my own limited and subjective experience, like the bulk of mainstream writing about music is just journalism, at this point, and most of the rest of it amounts to a contest to see who can piss on things with the most elegant arc. It seems like everything polarizes into sycophancy or superciliousness. I think it's incredibly important that there be a intellectual and aesthetic dialog about popular music, but I rarely read anything that seems to be trying to be a part of it. Fortunately, popular music carries on its own conversation about itself, so virtually any insight a critic might have stated, some other record will come along and demonstrate.

I was moved by his writing and take on music criticism.

That was a very good interview. I'm proud of it.

make contact with more academics and then hassle them about the lameness of academic work on pop music

Lightbulb!

That's a great idea. I'm going to talk with Scott Woods about that.

they even mythologize the pitiful sides like the awful pay, whoring, hackwork, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of people interested in criticism can't get anywhere in the 'biz' anyway! there's some kind of nietzschean slave ropeadope going on there.

steven ward otm

(Kenny actually writes about film today at Premiere but he got his start at Musician and the Village Voice in the 80s.)

Exactly

Sorry, the domain name MUSICCRITICS.COM has been taken. Consider one of the below alternatives.

Name Alternatives

1. music-critics
2. musiccritic
3. music-critic
4. music-review
5. music-industry
6. musicjournalist
7. musicjournalists
8. music-journalist
9. music-journalists
10.
printmedia

Seriously, how are you going to attract people who are into music but not per se in rock? Unless, you believe for example, like allmusic.com, that disco, soul, speed garage, Detroit Techno and hip hop are a subgenre of rock? I wonder why you chose the name.

FYI, the other main genres in allmusic are roots, jazz, blues, holiday and country.

Jan

On a serious note, if the word ROCK can be excised from that URL & the site in general (just the word, of course), that'd be a most excellent step in the "right" direction.

Another thought that crossed my mind was to make the site more webziney, but in the way that Sinka's run as Wire EIC worked (or, at least, how I imagined Mark's run worked from what I read in that anniversary issue of The Wire from a while back), or the way that Why Music Sucks worked, or (duh, Dave) the way most 'zines work - offer a theme of some sort, & solicit folks to babble about that theme in whatever manner they feel best suits the theme.

Also - no swimwear.

(Aside the cost of buying a new URL, of course...)

I would think that less Amy Phillips content may make your website better.

Also, has there been an interview with Rob Sh3ffield yet? He seems to be a big one that's missing. I could do it. I'll get him drunk on absinthe.

All of you have provided me with a bunch of laughter and some really great ideas.

I think it may be appropriate to do a piece (maybe an interview, maybe NOT) on Mr. Matos about his new job (And his IDEAS about music criticism). He IS going to be editing Mr. Seltzer, I assume. (Or does NO ONE edit Mr. Seltzer?)

Byron Coley, Ed Ward, Robert Wilonsky, Chuck Klosterman, and Margret Moser

1.How about some interviews/features on specialty music magazines like California based The Beat that covers world music(meaning mostly Jamaican, Caribbean, African, and Latino) or the British Folk Roots(fRoots as it appears often on the cover now); or the Wire or Urb or any of the various electronica/dance publications or the indie-rock ones or metal ones or other genres....

Ask them how many subscribers they have? Where do they get their contributors from? Do they feel a need to stretch the bounds of what music they will cover? Ask about touchy issues of race and class--do they feel they should be trying harder to have more diverse(race and gender) coverage in the artists they write about and/or should they be seeking more diversity in their staff, or does this not matter because of the genres they cover or do they think its phony political correctness to try? How are they affected by coverage of music on websites and blogs and radio and tv video channels and daily newspapers?

2. Use google, Lexis/nexis and other sources to see how many music reviewers for major newspapers are able to or choose to write about independent label or non-popular music? Interview/do features on some of these reviewers.

seconded!

i also liked what yancey (i think) said way up there, get some older articles on there a la Rock's backpages. Things that ppl would be interested in reading still/would not have come across. If mark s hadn't put Kogan's "Disco Tex" essay up on his site, I and many others would not have had a chance to read it and that sparked quite a bit of interesting discussion here. If you can somehow get stuff like that up there that would be great.

This is silly. Lots of daily newspapers with arts sections are
mad for local angles to their music coverage which makes it a
snap to drag in loads of writing on independent music.

Ten and some years ago I wrote most of the pop music features
for a daily city newspaper and once established was never
seriously opposed on any choices I made on what to cover.
One of the paper's assistant managing editors was peeved at
the music writing, in general, but this was because every Monday
he would have to field telephone calls from the irate who
felt their treatment to have been insufficiently slobbering.

Of course, one can find many, many hagiographers and lickpittles
slumming as music journalists at city dailies, too. Often
much of the coverage is furnished by free-lancers willing
to work for miserly newspaper rates -- like 15 or twenty
bucks for a review or feature.

Get rid of the multi-colored randomly generated page backgrounds. They're infuriating. I should never have to refresh a page five times just to be able to read it.

Just because you *can* do it with HTML doesn't mean you *should*.

Yeah, good point, and ditto Carey up above too. I didn't set this function up myself, and what I'd prefer to do would be to reduce the colour spectrum, so you still get the contrast though never a set of light colours (which tend to be the most difficult to read)...but alas, I am an html dummy. I don't know that I'll bother going back in and changing all the interviews that are up there, but I'll cut it out from here on in. Promise.

Steven and Scott, please interview George Smith. And Metal Mike Saunders too.

You must mean Metal Mike Saunders II... : }

I still like the title. I understand (sort of) why it turns people off so much, but the only thing I'd probably consider as an alternative would be either musiccritics.com or maybe popmusiccritics.com. I don't think it takes that big a leap of imagination, though, to connect "rockcritics" to people who also write about house, jazz, hip-hop, and classical. I think it describes a mindset as much as anything (and yeah, you could argue, as I think some have, that the "mindset" is the problem! which I'll be the last person to disagree with, hence my own conflicted feelings about the site). Anyway, I'm generally happy with the namebrand, and I figuired (hoped) it would make a lot of people gag.

One last point: More interviews with ILXors would of course be terrific, but a) who's gonna conduct all these interviews? (hint, hint); b) the problem I can forsee is how to do anything different or valuable with, say Dave Q or whoever that isn't already covered on ILX (though the value would be in introducing the likes of Dave Q to a different audience, I guess); and c) I'm still waiting on a certain Mr. E (questionnaire sent, like, 10 months ago).....tick-tock tick-tock, etc.

Mr. C's underappreciated replacement in the Shamen?