Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

Those who like to think & read about their music by and large listen to indie

Wow. Uh...I have no words. (Though it's nice to know where all the great "thinkers" have been hiding lately, I suppose.)

I've always kinda felt that the more common ground you have with somebody, the better and more interesting your arguments will be about what little you don't see eye to eye on. I mean, The Lex is my #1 most similar voter on glenn's site!

I was just as much of an artist completist and producer credit scavenger when I was 12 and listening exclusively to Twin Cities Top 40 radio as I was when I discovered college rock after being thoroughly repulsed by hair metal's ascendancy shortly thereafter. I strongly suspect most of the other people here were the same way and I also believe we aren't measurably different from most other voracious music heads.

wow I can't believe I got all the way through that without typing "STFU"
oh, damn

Two more Alexa rankings:

Metalsucks.net 48,828
Blabbermouth.net 67,208

for the love of god everyone ignore that o nate post

hahahaha uh oh

I was just as much of an artist completist and producer credit scavenger when I was 12 and listening exclusively to Twin Cities Top 40 radio as I was when I discovered college rock after being thoroughly repulsed by hair metal's ascendancy shortly thereafter. I strongly suspect most of the other people here were the same way and I also believe we aren't measurably different from most other voracious music heads.

wow I can't believe I got all the way through that without typing "STFU"
oh, damn

― Vajazzle My Nazzle (HI DERE), Thursday, January 21, 2010 2:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, this is a good point -- i was definitely a big overthinking nerd about music even when i listened exclusively to grunge and pop rap and classic rock.

although tbh my tastes haven't advanced very far since then

Sorry, guys, please ignore my post. Scottpl said it better , "Where are the non-indie readers?" - and not the ones who read JazzTimes or Gramophone.

But I'd guess that music crit is being kept alive by (and therefore populated by), as one of my colleagues said, the exact same people keeping record stores alive. Those are the diehards and the specialists and the people who care enough to buy product.

This kind of says it all for me, really. The "diehards" we're talking about here aren't buying indie singles or metal albums, or used vinyl, but. . . "product."

are you offended that that word makes the transaction sound all dirty and capitalist or something?

i'm worried that it's reducing an argument to an incomprehensible abstraction

anyway i disagree w/ that premise -- i'm betting the majority of the people sitting in front of their computers reading and writing about music all the time are the same ones constantly downloading leaks and never going to record stores. (xpost)

ppl weren't clear on what "product" covers?

ha, that's probably true xpost

another but important point to keep in mind is that there are only so many hours in the day, and if you work full time, esp. if you work somewhere where you can't really surf the internet, you have a really limited amount of absolutely "free" time to do whatever you want when you come home. so, out of the people who are music fans, most of them are going to want to spend that time downloading and listening to records rather than reading someone's analysis of those records, which seems healthy and sane. the people who are interested in criticism, esp. as anything beyond a buyer's guide, is always going to be a really small portion of even the hardcore music fan demographic, and most of those people are going to be other critics.

*another obvious but

Further to something o.nate (and sorta Scott) is saying: I think one reason a lot of written criticism is about "indie" or "underground" music is that for a long time writing was one of the main ways anyone could hear about that stuff, and that got wound into its whole culture. (E.g., zines -- because the music wasn't on the TV, the radio, etc.) When the internet came along, fans of niches had a lot more motivation to leap out and talk to one another than did people whose enthusiasms were already more in the common sphere. In the case of indie fans, they also had a history and vocabulary and toolkit for doing this through analytical writing like criticism, and on some level I think we're still very much seeing the effects of that. That REALLY doesn't mean they're more thoughtful about music than anyone else, just that writing/reading "thoughtful" stuff is maybe a bigger part of how they relate to music.

Of course, the same thing is sorta true of people who are really into, say, non-charting rap, which leads to the next thing: the way lots of indie fans learned to talk about music fits with our general idea of what constitutes informed, analytical, "proper" criticism. I worry less that the "critic" way of talking about music tends to correlate with liking particular music (people who all talk the same way are bound to have values in common), and worry more about making myself experience totally different ways of talking about music. This can be hard, because I'll freely admit that written, middlebrow criticism is the manner of talking about music that's the most fun and comfortable for me. But as a way of engaging with music, there's obviously nothing about it that's any more important than the chatter on the Hot 97 morning radio shows or among teenagers in comments boxes -- they're all just different spheres where people talk about music in different ways.

anyway i disagree w/ that premise -- i'm betting the majority of the people sitting in front of their computers reading and writing about music all the time are the same ones constantly downloading leaks and never going to record stores. (xpost)

― some dude, Thursday, January 21, 2010 3:06 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

uh leak dudes have been statistically proven to buy the most records at record stores

i think those studies are kinda flawed tbh.

(are leak dudes super into susan boyle and taylor swift?)

was going to make a snarky post but realized it led to the idea that leak dudes are totes into the idea of boning Susan Boyle

that's quite the dream you are dreaming there, dan

Isn't it possible that, like I said before, a lot of people used to get paid a lot of money to write a lot of words about things that in actual fact nobody wanted to read?

to nitpick, i don't think "a lot" of people ever made "a lot" of money. a handful made a living, maybe a bigger handful than do now, but even in the golden age (whenever it was) it was always, like you say, a niche pursuit for a small number of people. but all this roundabout of credit and influence and whatever still leaves me with a more fundamental question about why this sensibiilty, this consensus, now? i'm more curious about what it means that animal collective is "the best album of 2009" than who said it first. i think the vv essay is right in connecting it to wild things, just as whoever it was who said it was right to connect vampire weekend to wes anderson, but those are surface affiliations that still i think need some elucidation about what's going on there. at least, if you're the sort of niche weirdo who's interested in such things.

I think a bit part of it is also cultural perception. Indie has becomed perceived to be "educated" music - like classical and jazz (which was once a populist form, but I digress). NPR is probably as big a part of this as P4k. It's music that makes you look smart if you like it. You won't be embarrassed if your coworkers or friends see "Stillness is the Move" on your Ipod, in fact you'd probably feel self-congratulatory, but you might be worried if they catch you singing along to "Whomp that Ass" or whatever.

why the fuck would i ever care what my co-workers thought of my music, is the larger question i have for you

I will admit to caring a tiny bit about what my coworkers thought of my music after sharing my iTunes library when I realized that I had a copy of Mocky's "Fuck All Night" in there. Basically I like avoiding HR.

that's kind of a different situation though--i mean, who really cares what is on your ipod? shouldn't we just like stuff and not worry about what other people think?

This is what you should do, yes, but when you start tying self-esteem to things you end up in very odd places.

Like, for example, Animal Collective shows

Just to bring up a point I made earlier, I've been looking at the percentage of voters who voted for the #1 and #2 albums since 1990 -- there's a clear trend downwards in the 00's, most notably since 2005. That's also when Xgau mentioned the close finish between Kanye and MIA in his essay -- this was the first time in 20 years that the % of voters voting for the #1 album was less than 30% (possible exception was 1999 but I don't have a reliable number for how many voters participated that year).

Anyway, I think my theory that what's happening to P&J is not dissimilar to what's happening to the pop charts may be somewhat to blame for some of the conversation here -- the fact is that fewer people agreed on the top albums in the past five years than at any time in the past 20 years (I haven't gone further back than that). On average, nearly 39% of voters voted for the #1 album in the 90's, compared to 24% in the past 5 years. Likewise, the difference in percentage points between people who voted for the #1 and #2 album was 11 in the 90's and about 3 in the past five years. This means that the trend is away from consensus albums and a move toward the kind of mad rush that better characterized the remainder of the Top Ten than the top two (sometimes three) slots through the 90's.

It suggests to me (as do the charts) that putting a #1 in front of something doesn't really mean what it used to. Not a direct swipe at Vampire Weekend, mind.

does anyone have any sort of general idea how many people actually consume music criticism regularly? like, how many people actually click through and read the P&J essays or Stylus Decade essays or anything any of us here would consider well-written, generally high-quality music criticism? i have a distorted perception of the whole thing since the only people i regularly discuss music with on any sort of a serious level post here.

And I mean, it's not like there aren't drooling, barely literate indie rock fans either -- ever take a look at Stereogum?

Fixed.

haha

massive lols

consensus is definitely weaker than it used to be, but I don't think that in itself is necessarily a bad (or good) thing -- there's way more records now, so it's probably healthy that there's a longer tail in these polls now, and a more even slope when you break down the statistics

The "drooling, barely literate indie-rock fan" is totally a 00s discovery for me. Not like indie types in my formative years weren't sometimes elitist, chauvinistic, or reactionary, but usually they were congratulating themselves for being geeks or liking something obscure or weird. It's still new and fascinating to me to see people who just want stuff to sound like Band of Horses and find other music to be weird, pretentious, trying-too-hard, or whatever. (I guess maybe if I were slightly older I'd have met more 80s/90s rock traditionalists who were like that?)

To be fair, there were probably some indie dudes you/me/any of us knew in high school or whenever that were sensitive geeky souls in person, but if you put them in front of a computer and gave them a comments box to go nuts in, they'd say some pretty dumb shit.

Btw, I don't think this perception of indie as "educated" music is a healthy thing. It may be too late for indie to shake off the "educated" music pigeonhole, but probably the best thing for the continued vitality of the genre would be for it to go back to being slightly dangerous and disreputable again.

ha nabisco, as someone who was an ardent industrial/EBM fan in high school, I absolutely encountered indie guys who found some music too weird to listen to

Yeah, the more I think about it, my view's totally skewed: I'm sure there were plenty of trad-rock reactionaries in the 80s praising the Replacements or something in exactly the way we're talking about. I'm probably biased by growing up in small-ass places where anyone who liked anything remotely irregular was really conscious of it as a weird choice.

there have always been people who wanted a more modern version of classic rock to embrace. u2/rem/replacements/etc. something a little different, but not too different.

xposts, yeah I'm not really making much of a judgment one way or another. In fact, if it takes a smaller percentage of the voters to put something to the top, then simply finding more critics in a particular taste cluster [there should be a candy bar called "taste clusters"] will increase the chances of raising a given genre or non-indie fave up the charts more so than in the 90's/early 00's -- this might be what's happening with metal on the charts, maybe the only other clear "cluster" slightly out of sync with the P4K overlap.

One thing I can't seem to find are the stats on how many albums total have been mentioned in this time period. I'd bet that this number increases at about the same time that # of voters voting for a given #1 album decreases but I can't find the numbers beyond the past few years.

well, Indie is, to be reductive, socially less about being an individual and more about fitting in than it was when we were young nabisco. I don't know that there is anything more sinister to it than "the internet exists" and all the attendant effects that had, but as we've said before I find a lot of truth your original thought. (at the same time, things that are weird and leftfield can gain a larger audience and don't seem as weird as they once would have)

xpot: Seward is right. A lot of the popular indie stuff is, like I said earlier, just a 2009 version of what used to be mainstream rock. The idea that critics like straightforward guitar rock with roots in classic rock or new wave is the norm; it's not new. That stuff just exists now outside of radio/tv-- there are few markets in old-school media circles for guitar music made by and for 20 and 30somethings-- so it's all lumnped under the meaningless big tent of "indie."

Hasn't "indie" just be defined by what it's not for the last five years? By audience rather than by genre, distribution, or label.

this is why i support genuinely misanthropic bands like Clockcleaner because we need bands to break up this cuddle party

remember when underground bands had unrepentant assholes in them?

YES

I think an interesting thing about "indie" now vs. in the '90s or esp. '80s is how well-behaved it is. I mean look at the indie champions of '09 - they tend to be carefully constructed, technically accomplished, pretty melodic, and eager to please. This is a far cry from the former dominant forms of indie such as lo-fi, grunge, post-hardcore, noise, etc. This is not ironic, angry, shock-the-squares indie. This is indie your parents could appreciate (at least the effort, skill and sincerity that went into it, even if they still might think it sounds weird). Is this the death of irony, a generational sea change? It may help to explain its ability to crossover.

i have to say, if i had to choose between old pazz & jop's john hiatt or steve earle love and new pitchfork/blog/whatever pazz & jop's vampire love, i'll take the vampires. (i probably have the same problems with the new fogeys that i did with the old ones. but its more probable that the new ones would turn me on to something i might enjoy. maybe.)

remember when underground bands had unrepentant assholes in them?

yeah, I still miss the original lineup of Parts & Labor too ;)