Oh, boy ....... Pareles is at it again

Like a cheesy self-help guru, Coldplay inflates listeners' vague fears and insecurities, then offers itself as a panacea: "I will fix you," Chris Martin vowed.

Animal Collective will save your life.

In attacking the public's taste he never really touches on the role of Clear Channel and MTV in getting music out to the non-music fanatic public...

His tedious praise of U2's last effort also annoyed me.

Voting with its dollars, the public ignored the esoteric favorites championed by critics and went for music that offered a little comfort and dance beats.

then later he says:

Independent companies, small and large, are claiming an ever larger part of the music market,

Is this last statement factually accurate? Just asking. Are those two statements consistent?

He never explains really on page 2 why Kanye is the uh, token exception, pop star with grand ambitions...

This sentence just cracks me up. Oh no, public ignores esoteric favorites! And here I was thinking that "esoteric" and "popular" were contradictory terms.

i.e. he's probably not a fan of the streets

xpost

If Pareles likes AC, Bright Eyes, and Sufjan, why not just write about them, instead of a questionable piece like this?

Exactly. If this were so, Big Country would be discussed in the same breath as Gang of Four.

the world has learned nothig from bob dylan (despite the recap with no direction home).

i'll only accept this sort of thing if i can believe that pareles isn't actually making a value judgement, that despite all this he can actually believe that the more "escapist" records he lists above this are potentially (or conceivably) *better* than um, green day. because i suppose green day did make a more "politically ambitious" record than mariah carey but green day happen to be thoroughly mediocre.

this seems sort of out of character for him, more jim derogatis than anything else.

in fact it seems *very* jim derogatis.

i'm tired of this canard. i'm not convinced that (a) one can really assert that "their products" (i.e. all 103,450,321 albums and singles released in a given there) are universally or near-universally "uninspiring"; (b) people really would stop downloading and head into stores if they were only more "inspired" by the music. it's a useful canard in that it tosses blame back to the labels *and* allows critics to feel like they are one-with-the-people sort of folks. but i'm not sure it holds much water. and i've heard this canard dozens of times in this moment of year's-end round ups.

whoops someone got there first.

Is this last statement factually accurate?

rock critics aren't held to a very high factual standard when it comes to grandiose pronouncements about the state of "the industry." i actually think this is a significant problem. since facts can sometimes be surprising.

btw we had a discussion about his coldplay article...somewhere. i thought it was pretty bad. i sort of like coldplay, but not so much that i'm not interested in criticism of them (i too think their lyrics are impossibly awful), and i think pareles criticism was really lazy and unenlightening.

god this sucks. i thought he was a decent critic.

You did? On what basis? He's a really nice guy (I've met him at a half dozen or so shows) but as a thinker he's pretty second-tier.

Low literacy levels seem to be a long-running ILM challenge. Be brave in the attempt, lad!

but yeah you're not missing much. jaymc OTM.

I doubt it.

>(or were you just saying that on another thread because someone was playing reggaeton too loud for 6 hours straight in your building)?

It was partly just an anti-neighbor gripe, but I do think reggaeton and dancehall are pretty generic. There are a couple of genuinely captivating performers (Daddy Yankee, Bounty Killer), but when I watch Mun2 (the Latin video channel on my cable) the vast majority of the reggaeton songs are boring and indistinguishable from one another.

Somehow I missed all the Mariah and 50 Cent songs about their publicists this year.

And all the U2 and Green Day and Bright Eyes and Animal Collective ones that were not marketed or publicized.

This is really odd, too. Has there ever been a year when several of the biggest sellers didn't come from the previous year? (And is that why Rascal Flatts, which also came out in '04, also continued to sell through 2005? Because there was little to supplant it? Or because most people happen to not buy albums right when they hit the stores?)

my point re: learning frm dylan is that some artists speak very clearly about just making music because its what they choose to do. they hope to not have to keep another job in order to do it. they of course want people to hear it. but they don't talk much about anthing else. in talking about them the press group them in with other artists and try to define what they do and why.

dylan fought back famously.

im working on a piece which talks more expansively about this so i'm hesitant to say much more right now..

what if u2 and green day have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY about their chosen "themes"?? as i think is the case...

as to the marketing point, well i don't know enough to say. surely mariah is more marketed, by persons other than Mariah than animal collective? (i know this sounds like your standard anti-Max Martin rockist bullshit and i don't care, because i really think i'm saying something different.) is she focus-grouped? are AC? i dunno. i won't deny that they each, at least subconsciously, direct themselves at particular audiences, and that they have business strategies to aid in that direction, but isn't the degree pretty strikingly different? [another caveat - i'm fairly certain that I'd like Mariah better than any of the indie acts mentioned] moreover (and I think this is Pareles' actual point), isn't the difference found in what the relative audiences demand? I mean, I don't think he's isolating the most vapid pop acts and most penetrating indie acts, he's isolating the most popular pop acts and the most popular indie acts and asking what their subject matter had to do with their popularity this year. i think he way overestimates his answer to the latter question, but i don't think his point is invalid.

And yes, more money and person-hours are put into Mariah's marketing than Animal Collective's (though maybe not more than into Green Day's or U2's). But it's only a difference of degree, as far as I can see; what exactly is it that AC's audience demands that Mariah's doesn't?

Singing about the happy things. (When they sing about the sad things, they apparently become deep.)

what exactly is it that AC's audience demands that Mariah's doesn't?

i doubt this is pareles' point, and it involves huge stereotyping, but isn't it possible that a fan who listens to 100 albums a year might have bigger demands than a fan who listens to 5 albums a year?

i think that's sort of the reason there's even an audience for my bullshit critwank reviews. peeps be different

Current U.S. population: 295,734,134

Wait, shouldn't this properly read "Ms. Carey or Mr. Cent"?

Really?! Amazing!

Current U.S. population: 295,734,134

More than 1 in 30 people in America bought either Massacre or Mimi and that strikes you as a negligible number?

(jk)