Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

i would probably check out Dananananaykroyd based on jaymc's description if i wasn't scared of indie bands with stupid names that riff on the names of celebrities

I'm being facetious, Que. Some aggressive rock music is a little too much for me, though.

I felt that way sometimes in the mid-90s as I first navigated the waters of indie rock. I was a big fan of Pavement and Sonic Youth, but I didn't really feel at home in the world of indie until I got into stuff like Stereolab and Tortoise.

weirdly enough i saw doug mcoombs from tortoise playing bass for red eyed legends, which is the new band of chris thompson from skull kontrol/monorchid so the opposing forces are actually bros IRL

Yeah, he's in Eleventh Dream Day, too.

And v. much a bro in his own right. I see him at random shows all the time, or at least I did when I used to go to shows.

I wouldn't equate being slightly dangerous and disreputable with being loud and aggressive. There are lots of ways to challenge conventional mores.

When I was at school some of my friends and i used to talk in very music crit terms about, like, the new kylie single or the new janet jackson album or whatev, though I wasn't in some kind of non-indie bubble, i was also consuming a lot of that stuff (admittedly more the 80s UK variant). We weren't reading any music press at that stage (those same friends still don't really, and still talk about kylie etc. in pretty much the same terms), I think we were just picking up on modes of thinking about music that was like a middle ground between generalist pop culture consumption and the kind of "close reading" we were told to undertake in literature classes.

I sort of think that the opposition between "people interested in music crit" and "drooling masses" ignores the fact that a lot of people are like my high school friends. They never really got into capital letter music crit because they do the same thing on an ad hoc, casual basis amongst themselves - analysing a new pop album to death while being indifferent to published reviews of that album.

I don't think there's an organic connection between indie and the form of what we consider to be capital letter Music Crit, but more to the point I don't think that this form of thinking about music is a total construction either, a straightforward consequence of being immersed in (usually indie friendly) rock crit which has set up its own standards for how one approaches music. Certainly to an extent it is, but a lot of people who don't read music crit at all will talk in very similar terms about music they like if you start a discussion with them. The distinction my anecdote above points to (and it's not the only possible distinction, but maybe it's a relatively important one) is that indie and music crit are so mutually dependent that the one almost necessitates the other, it would be highly unusual to find someone who owned all the GAPDY albums but wasn't a big consumer of music crit; whereas fans of other genres might be just as critical in their thoughts and discussions about music while being disinterested in the music crit industry per se - they can like Kylie and become "critical" in their assessment of her music without the necessary intervention or assistance of consuming published music criticism.

i mean also:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-12-22/music/the-decade-in-music-genre-hype/

maybe you could just file "indie nerdball interest in pop music" under 2001-2008

yeah tim's post is important, i think it needs to be said that R&B definitely has its own discourse going on, and living in a city like chicago its actually a pretty vibrant & in-depth one -- its just that it definitely tends to center more around record store employees & DJs & radio than written crit -- & presumably music message boards, etc. lots of people are having these conversations, "oh that track is a classic" "i always thought that song was overrated" "remember when DJ xyz used to play it at venue zyx" -- really the level of discourse is pretty much the same. Im not really convinced that a website that focuses on criticism couldnt surround other genres. it might not be as big as pfork, where you have this kind of unified alternative flag.

didn't you sort of answer your own ? though there deej? Chuck (via Frank), nabisco, and others have also pointed out elements of what you're saying here: Indie was historically less real-world social, with a lot of people gathering around the music or broadcasting their opinions about it via alternative forms of communication-- college radio/zines/blogs/etc-- because they had to both construct an alternate system for communicating about the music and, often, had to look outside of their communities in order to find ppl to talk to. Something like R&B, which is more social in the first place, seems like it would function the way you and Tim describe it, and as a result there isn't a historical relationship between (self-)published conversation and the music.

would be interesting to see if more R&B/pop crit can develop now that a lot of the better artists there are as niche as anything else. It's almost like there is more need for it now than ever

one of the tensions that has always existed in rap writing (& for me an important one) is that a lot of the ppl who would write about rap were not always intersecting w/ the social/communal critical communities in rap, and a lot of the conflicts w/r/t the genre on the internet are related to these conflicting discourses -- especially now that there is a strong (if niche) critical community around hip hop that is entirely divorced from for example my high school experiences

hahah matt Chavez is basically my favorite band ever

drive like jehu rules too

oh god yes

Yeah, I think what I was trying to say is similar, in some ways, to what Tim's saying. The distinction's not between "people who read/write criticism" and "unwashed masses of fans." It's between people who are accustomed to engaging with music via reviews and analytical essays, and people who are accustomed to dealing with music via conversations, DJs, radio chatter, conversations in stores, tabloid magazines, different kinds of blogs and comment boxes and message boards, TV coverage, etc. All those conversations can take place at different levels of thoughtfulness, using different types of language, with different assumptions. And different types of music will be over- or under-represented in any one of those spheres.

So when someone tells me that Criticism should encompass more different kinds of music, I think "yes, totally," and then I think, "well, it already would, if what we thought of as Criticism wasn't just middlebrow analytical writing, and included all those other things from the get-go."

(Obviously it'd be difficult for P&J to rope in voters from among, like, "this guy who has great conversations about music with his friends," but just as an example: what might it look like if you asked a bunch of radio DJs?)

Drive Like Jehu dudes were in the band Pitchfork, so it all comes full circle.

haha

Matos: Here, for some consolation, is my 2006 collation of the two polls, and the even more detailed 2007 version. I have all the album votes from 2007, at least, and I think I actually have all the whole ballots from 2006...

one of the tensions that has always existed in rap writing (& for me an important one) is that a lot of the ppl who would write about rap were not always intersecting w/ the social/communal critical communities in rap, and a lot of the conflicts w/r/t the genre on the internet are related to these conflicting discourses -- especially now that there is a strong (if niche) critical community around hip hop that is entirely divorced from for example my high school experiences

This something that seems so blindingly obvious to me (in a good way, deej), and is a big part of why I'm so hesitant to get involved in rap crit compared to say, R&B crit (apart from the more prosaic issue being that i'm great at remembering song lyrics and bad at remembering rap lyrics, and this means I find it hard to say anything interesting or original about the latter). Do you think that it is or should be a similar issue-for-consideration for R&B? i.e. are their social/critical communities in R&B that are being ignored when people like say me write about it, and is this a problem?

I know that in the case of dance music I'd say that there are certain life-factors that I would point to when judging someone's capacity to engage with the music. But it's complicated. I feel I'm in a position to talk about UK Funky, say, despite obviously never having physically engaged with the community, but only because of the presence of a whole host of vitiating factors.

I think most R&B, even at its most modern and hip hop-influenced, generally follows such a long and universal tradition of popular songwriting that there's probably not nearly as many possible blind spots for people who don't have a foothold in its typical social environment. feels kinda like you can get all the context you need to know from the songs and videos etc., which definitely isn't the case with rap.

Yeah that's been my general assumption - but this is the kind of thing where people make assumptions that are convenient to them so I'm interested as to whether anyone thinks differently.

This recent discussion gets at one thing that's always been a little weird for me about being on ILM: I've tended to be more in the: "people who are accustomed to dealing with music via conversations, DJs, radio chatter, conversations in stores, tabloid magazines [well, not tabloid magazines], different kinds of blogs and comment boxes and message boards, TV coverage, etc." category. I can't say I've never read any magazines or books related to music, but it's been minimal compared to most of you (I think--most of you most active on this thread anyway), and it's never been a really primary source. I did consciously start buying music magazines (generally Option or the Wire, or things along those lines) more when the college radio station I had relied on the most for exposure to unfamiliar music drastically switched its format. It wasn't an adequate substitute though, and it's kind of interesting that after that point, involvement with dancing (+ conversation, I suppose) become a more crucial source for listening leads than radio.

isn't it a little limiting to talk about a "typical social environment" for hip-hop, or anything? people listen to it in lots of different environments, and it can be potentially interesting to consider it critically from any of those vantage points. i mean, american film critics write about asian films all the time, and in reading them you just implicitly take into account that it's an outsider's perspective. i have a lot of southern friends who hate modern commercial country music and wouldn't feel all that kindly to a bunch of yankee intellectuals telling them how great brad paisley is, but that doesn't mean christgau or whoever shouldn't write about it.

yeah i mean one of the funny things about hip hop is that an 'authentic position' on it is whatever position happens to be honest & true to your experience of it. So the problem becomes less about expressing your own enjoyment & more one of awareness & self-consciousness about imposing your own narratives as superior ones. which is what the 'pressing arguments of the day' on rap blogs have been about lately, i.e. noz's reaction to passion of the weiss' freddie gibbs piece. & certainly the 'backlash' to stuff that was written about gucci was a strong example of ppl taking the same position im arguing here, but in a way that i believe misidentifies the 'problem' or does so in a way that is problematic in other ways

i think the question of ownership is an interesting one and yeah can definitely be written about intelligently from opposing perspectives. as a sort of perennial outsider to any and all scenes, i'm sympathetic to the "this belongs to me because it means something to me" view, but i'm also respectful of the "this belongs to me because it came from where i'm from" view. (tho of course even claiming it on those grounds gets complicated once you get very far outside particular geographic or cultural boundaries.) and with hip-hop especially, the music itself has always been such a voracious consumer of any sounds that stray across its borders from anywhere, there's a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in any claims on propriety. live by the sample, die by the sample. (not that hip-hop is historically unique in that kind of rapid assimilation and regurgitation of influences, it's just always been more explicit about it.)

and maybe, spinning back toward indie, part of the problem (if it is a problem) with indie is the sort of lack of engagement outside its own boundaries, or at least perceived lack of engagement. i think the discomfort a lot of people feel looking at the p/j list is a sense of insularity both within the music and the fanbase. who exactly is animal collective reaching out to or interacting with? i have no idea. to me listening to them feels a little like looking into a hermetically sealed goldfish bowl. which probably isn't fair because there must be animal collective fans out there for whom that music feels like some kind of lifeline from a distant place, the way college radio felt to me in my 1980s suburbs. i can believe that anco or dirty projectors or whoever mean something, signify something, i just have a hard time getting a handle on it. and very little of the appreciation i've read of that music gives me any sense of that either. i really don't like vampire weekend, but if they have a #1 album it must be engaging and interacting at a level that goes beyond the cognoscent-consensus, just like hip-hop and country and susan boyle do, and getting any kind of real feel for that would tell me a lot more about the music.

I think Animal Collective are reaching out to some extent - all of the people I know IRL who love the most recent album are more dance music (particularly dubstep/post-dubstep! Which I always enjoy telling lex) plus the occasional indie record types rather than dyed in the wool indie types, and the terms in which they talk about the music are roughly comparable to the terms that equivalents would have used to talk about, say, Spiritualized in the late 90s.

(none of my friends who I would call lifelong indie types (about 5 or so) like it - they've all become too invested in "organic" sounding music I suspect, and would much rather listen to Bon Iver or something. At least one of them likes Grizzly Bear though, I suspect the others do or would too)

I mean you can hate the record and say it fails on every conceivable level and even decry its intentions, but I think it's pretty clearly not proferring a hermetically sealed notion of indie.

If anything this becomes the root cause of the problem you're referring to: the more promiscuous and obviously polysemous indie becomes stylistically (and I think AnCo/Dirty Projectors/Vampire Weekend are all part of this trend), the less people are likely to feel self-conscious about indie dominating their listening habits to the exclusion of other genres (this is the secret implication of Reynolds' recent defence of modern indie I think: "now that indie is firing again it's okay to ignore other music once more").

roughly comparable to the terms that equivalents would have used to talk about, say, Spiritualized in the late 90s

Hmm, this brings up a memory that around the time that Spz (and Verve) were all the popular rage in 1997, some writer -- ha, maybe even Simon R. -- offered up the idea that based on his experience the biggest fans were dance freaks who were needing something to 'chill' to after spending most of the decade in techno.

Yeah, that certainly seems to be the impulse going on when Dirty Projectors do a vaguely R&B-ish song that critics feel comfortable calling the best R&B song of the year instead of trying to figure out what song might fit that definition a little better. (xpost)

Hmm, this brings up a memory that around the time that Spz (and Verve) were all the popular rage in 1997, some writer -- ha, maybe even Simon R. -- offered up the idea that based on his experience the biggest fans were dance freaks who were needing something to 'chill' to after spending most of the decade in techno.

Exactly!

And to turn the screw further, I think the other thing going on here is that - classifications and particular sonic differences aside - these indie artists "feel" close to current dance music as much because the current dance music they feel close to also feels very indie (in the same way that Spiritualized and The Verve didn't need a guest spot or remix to seem close to The Chemical Bros, who were pushing a comparable vibe only as "dance music").

Deej spot on when he says on his tumblr:

For example, the widely-praised FACT magazine list was seen as a fresh aesthetic look because it seemed to hold a different canon than Pitchfork’s. When I look at that list though, it really seems to celebrate a lot of the same critical values of ‘worthiness’ that Pitchfork does, just shifts a bit away from indie based around a certain aesthetic & moves it into a post-rave/IDM nerd version — but with extremely similar value judgments about ‘worthiness’ & a lot of the same gender & cultural biases around that.

Despite the seeming disparity between "Pitchfork Indie" and what is celebrated in dance music at the moment, the overall vibe of these musics, and the tone of the writing about them, is almost indistinguishable.

If anything this becomes the root cause of the problem you're referring to: the more promiscuous and obviously polysemous indie becomes stylistically (and I think AnCo/Dirty Projectors/Vampire Weekend are all part of this trend), the less people are likely to feel self-conscious about indie dominating their listening habits to the exclusion of other genres

but then how is that not hermetically sealed? or at least constricted? what i mean about reaching out and engaging is, is animal collective unexpectedly intersecting with people's lives in the way that what we (or i) think of as "pop music" does? in a way that could justify anyone calling "my girls" a single-of-the-year? maybe they are, i don't know. but if they are, i certainly don't know it from anything i've read about them, critically speaking. which is the thing, the criticism tends to be sealed off too. it engages with the music, but not with how or whether the music engages with anything outside of its own hipster-runoff universe. if there are 20-something paralegals in omaha getting turned onto mpp at some 4th-of-july cookout, i'd like to know about it, but there's no sense of that at all in how the music is presented or considered, as far as i can tell.

Perhaps what we're seeing the real "triumph of..." over time is not some specific notion of indie but just indie values across the board, only now so finely and carefully massaged into every crevice and wrinkle that it's not even obvious any more. "The indie version of dance" is no longer just IDM and its equivalents but an entire mode of approaching dance music that seeks, like indie perspectives, to celebrate a certain model of educated aesthetic individualism*, such that, near paradoxically, even music designed specifically for the dancefloor gets framed in these terms.

* Of course these are also techno values - but, if you'll allow me to be glib for a moment, techno was always already the first indie manifestation in dance music. Which is why this "takeover" has been so subtle and so successful.

but then how is that not hermetically sealed? or at least constricted? what i mean about reaching out and engaging is, is animal collective unexpectedly intersecting with people's lives in the way that what we (or i) think of as "pop music" does? in a way that could justify anyone calling "my girls" a single-of-the-year? maybe they are, i don't know. but if they are, i certainly don't know it from anything i've read about them, critically speaking. which is the thing, the criticism tends to be sealed off too. it engages with the music, but not with how or whether the music engages with anything outside of its own hipster-runoff universe. if there are 20-something paralegals in omaha getting turned onto mpp at some 4th-of-july cookout, i'd like to know about it, but there's no sense of that at all in how the music is presented or considered, as far as i can tell.

Tipsy, what music crit are you comparing this to??? What music crit about which music would make me think "gee, 20-something paralegals in omaha are getting into this and this makes me feel like I click with them and understand what they feel" - or even some non-joking version of same...

If all you mean to say is: "nothing I've read about Animal Collective suggest that they're being enjoyed by people not predisposed to like indie music". If so, well, duh. For the most part music that "unexpectedly" intersects with people's lives tends to do so in a way that reinforces their prejudices rather than breaks them down - see "Hey Ya".

Also I and I suspect most AnCo fans probably have never read HipsterRunoff. I have a vague notion of what it is but I think you really mean "anything outside of its own mainstream music press universe."

I was a 20 something paralegal in Australia in 2006 when I started getting into this band, if that helps you to feel more in touch with the wider world at all. I believe it was watching Shortbus that won me over!

Ha, I was a 30-something paralegal in Richmond, Virginia, when I started listening to Animal Collective.

It's funny watching AC haters frothing at the mouth isn't it? They can't help it, their loathing is so visceral, such an uncontrollable gut aversion to the sound: its maculate, confusional qualities seem to be intolerable, a real affront to sensibility--the way the music mixes levels, categories, registers like so much spin art (or more apposite in this case, like tie-dye). Yet there also seems to be a principled aspect to the revulsion, a real concordance of aesthetics and ideology, taste and social allegiance. It reminds me a bit of those people in the UK who hate hate HATE crusties, on principle, which really means squeamishness sublimated, elevated with a gloss of quasi-pro-workerist indignation ("bloody trustifarians", "soap-dodging layabouts" etc). In the UK that often seems based in the mod thing of "clean living in difficult circumstances" and the accompanying sharp, clear sound-aesthetic; the ressentiment the lower middle class are structurally led to feel towards that fraction of the upper middle class who aspire downwards, who step off the career track. See also attitudes to psy-trance and (most relevant to AC-disgust) jam bands. It's not quite the same in America, where there isn't really an equivalent to the mod stratum in society. But something similar is going on. You just think "why not funnel your hate towards something actually... hate-worthy?". Of course anybody's entitled to simply not like the records, but there does seem to be something more going on a lot of the time, like it's one of those instances where aesthetics and ideology, sonics and the social, conjoin very tightly. Judging by the intensity, the virulence, of the anti-reactions...

The chuck eddy essay is the most annoying thing I've ever read. So if Brad Paisley, kid sister and Lady Gaga were in the final top 10 you'd feel better about the state of music?!?! For a change it's nice to see artists that DON'T sell millions of records top the poll, if you want to see rich people who sell millions of records and put out mediorcre albums, watch the grammy's. You'll be surely happy there....

ok, kid sister doesn't sell millions, but she sucks nevertheless

Speaking of the Grammys, was a DMB album really nominated for Best Album of the Year? What's up with that?

It's funny watching AC haters frothing at the mouth isn't it?

I don't ever really feel hatred of music any more, if I ever did (and always it's been more a dislike of certain types of fandom/criticism - e.g. I was very annoyed back in 2000 when all my friends loved Travis but I was indifferent to Travis mostly and even rather liked a song or two), so I simply don't understand that kind of froth reaction and, for that reason, vaguely respect it (what annoys me rather is when I see people let their hatred of stuff cloud their vision and their logic, leading them to say stuff the obvious wrongness of which they would jump all over otherwise).

re: singles - i like that these polls are open to "tracks", just because a track can so often function as a single without ever getting an official release as one. voting for deep album cuts if they don't make sense in isolation is missing the point though, yeah. contra jaymc i don't trust artists or record labels to pick the right singles in the slightest - though i think indie acts are actually way better at this than r&b or pop acts these days, weirdly.

I think a bit part of it is also cultural perception. Indie has becomed perceived to be "educated" music

think this is otm, sadly.

good thread to catch up on!

For a change it's nice to see artists that DON'T sell millions of records top the poll, if you want to see rich people who sell millions of records and put out mediorcre albums, watch the grammy's. You'll be surely happy there....

ah youth

What music crit about which music would make me think "gee, 20-something paralegals in omaha are getting into this and this makes me feel like I click with them and understand what they feel" - or even some non-joking version of same...

what i mean -- and this is a phenomenon of the internet, which i think is what "pitchfork" is really being used as a stand-in for here -- is that a lot of this music seems exist almost in some virtual realm. the indieverse. it moves from myspace pages to small music blogs to big music blogs to pitchfork or whatever (passing through ILM and such places on the way), achieving a sense of ubiquity and significance within a densely connected but actually relatively limited sphere, and an awful lot of the writing about it doesn't manage to look very far outside that sphere. (neither does a lot of the music, for that matter.) you could argue that this is all just a digital version of the college radio-zines-clubs world of our band could be your life, and obviously it serves a lot of the same purposes (including helping bands find living-room floors to crash on), but there's a step of removal from the "real" world that i think has a real and insulating (and in a lot of ways deadening) effect on how the music is received and talked about.

and btw i like a good handful of animal collective albums, just not the awful cluttered overstuffed recent ones. which is neither here nor there, i don't care that i don't like mpp, i'd just like to read more considerations of it that give some sense of its cultural location outside of six blogs.

animal collective is that band i saw twiddling dials at south street seaport with people standing around distractedly, yapping into their phones? That's the animal collective that's causing all this commotion? OK, there were a dozen people up front feigning enthusiasm. Maybe they write all the reviews.

Ha, I was a 30-something paralegal in Richmond, Virginia, when I started listening to Animal Collective.

to complete the loop, our publisher was a 20something from Omaha when he started listening to AnCo. chris k + mark r = that comment.

there's a step of removal from the "real" world that i think has a real and insulating (and in a lot of ways deadening) effect on how the music is received and talked about.

I ask again, to anyone: What don't we cover that is so great in the real world? Is it John Mayer? Is it BEP? What are we missing that is so good that appeals to "the real world"?

One thing your comment does highlight however Tipsy is how hermetically sealed off part of the real world are. Williamsburg/Greenpoint is like a freakin' snowglobe, and here in North Chicago-- and in college towns, hoods in large U.S. cities-- the stuff in bars, cafes, shops, boutiques, restaurants that is played is "stuff Pitchfork covers" whether it's Spoon or AnCo or Kanye or Lily Allen or Grizzly Bear. Or classic rock. One of the two, and that's it. This IS our real world.

look at it another way:

There are a few big, decent superstars around-- beyonce, rihanna, jay-z, kanye, gaga-- i.e. they are also the superstars we cover, i.e. the ones that make our year-end lists, i.e. the ones everyone likes.

Then subtract the obvious dreck from the charts, the real crap.

The next biggest-selling pocket of music left would be cult or established hip-hop/R&B acts - rae, cudi, mos def, maxwell, which we cover. And make our year-end lists.

And next, I would guess is...top-tier indie-- Neko, Phoenix, VW, Spoon, AnCo, A Bird, Grizzly Bear, which is selling between 150-500k basically, a pretty solid 'real world' return these days

What else is there in the real world? What is selling more than 200K that Pitchfork a) doesn't cover and put into year-end lists, and b) is good?

As I've said before I don't think we're an indie mag, we're an independently run general music mag. And rock is as large a part of our pie chart as it was for other general music mags. The difference is that rock-as-marketing-term is indie these days, if only by default. In another day a lot of these bands would be on Sire or Columbia and just be called rock bands.

"I don't ever really feel hatred of music any more… so I simply don't understand that kind of froth reaction and, for that reason, vaguely respect it."

So true. I've used up all my hatred on more deserving targets. Whereas a film, like Taken, can still enrage me for reasons which click with things that enrage me in the real world, the most I can muster with records now is "I don't get it."

I, for one, would laugh my ass off at a Ke$hastravaganza in Pitchfork.

well that's an interesting way of putting it, and i think it reflects some of what i'm talking about: that it is possible at least some places to consume and consider all of this stuff in a limited virtual realm, and then to go "out" mostly to bars/clubs/thrift stores/etc that serve as basically an extension of the same realm. and yes of course there's always an insularity to any scene or genre or whatever, but i think the internet (and in the case of "indie" in particular) has given that a new dimension.

What don't we cover that is so great in the real world? Is it John Mayer? Is it BEP?

sure, why not? i think there's plenty of interesting things that could be said about either of them. ("covering" =/= "liking" or "approving of.") but even just within the parameters of GAPDY, i think there's a lot of other ways to write about it than the ways it tends to get written about (anywhere, this isn't by any means a pitchfork-specific issue). like i said, i have very little sense of what it means that mpp is the "best album of the year." the voice essay goes a little way there by hooking it up to spike jonze, but settles for a sort of vague psychological gloss -- "coming to terms with being an adult" -- that doesn't say anything very specific about the culture and sensibility that produced both works. why does mpp sound like it does? what does that sound mean? what does the indie arrested-development sensibility of the past 15 years or so signify about the economic situation of the american middle class? i think there's a connection between animal collective, a flat wage curve and 10 percent unemployment, but the music rarely seems to be talked about in any terms outside its own aesthetic. and i think it's hard to consider that aesthetic in any really insightful way from the inside.

(oops, that needs an xpost -- the first part of that post was coming off of "This IS our real world.")

That's an interesting thought. Some albums are so much easier to hang sociopolitical significance on, hence endless essays on how MIA reflects The Way We Live Now, or what [fill in major 00s indie album here] tells us about 9/11. But MPP comes from the same cloistered psychedelic universe as, say, The Soft Bulletin and that's harder to analyse outside of its own terms. I don't know enough about the US middle class to know if your hypothesis is right but it sounds worth exploring.