OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

Also, they may be a pop band, but they're a pop band whose tone is primarily serious. Like them or not, I don't think their music is particularly light or sunny.

Various other-projects does not make their music any more-or-less "pop". Do you hear any contemporary classical influence in the music of The National? I don't.

They're definitely a pop band; I wasn't denying that. And there's definitely Steve Reich in their music, say, in Fake Empire

For the record, here's the man himself, from the NYT a few years ago:

One early admirer of “Sorrow” is Steve Reich. (Bryce sometimes sends him songs.) Reich says the National combines “a classic rock ’n’ roll sound using repeated bass lines and pulses that have cropped up more recently. They’re the latest incarnation of a classic rock ’n’ roll band.” Speaking of “Sorrow” and “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” another cut Reich likes on the new album, he said: “A major is their gold key. The melody note will be repeated but the bass and harmony will change. You’ll find it all over my music, a lot in the ‘Mother Goose’ of Ravel, and as far back as Bach. It works very well.”

You can totally take that with a grain of salt, or as a cheap appeal to authority. It kind of is! But I do think you can hear this stuff in their music, and that they can still be a pop band.

a pop band with an overwhelming tone of "seriousness," I might add.

I've been thinking about the Austerlitz essay for the last two days.

An uninformed reader would not be blamed for interpreting Austerlitz's points as these:

1) Music critics these days prefer pop to other genres.
2) Such "poptimist" critics are not discerning about the pop they like, as long as it's popular.
3) This is truer now than it used to be.

However, none of these really hold up.

Since Austerlitz himself uses Pazz & Jop as symbolic of the state of music criticism, let's take a look at last year's albums list. Four albums in the top 20 (Kanye West, Daft Punk, Beyonce, Drake) have generated hits that have landed in the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. That's the exact same number that did so in 2003 (OutKast, Fountains of Wayne, Jay-Z, 50 Cent). While other albums high on the 2013 P&J list have had modest commercial success and have received airplay on commercial radio (Vampire Weekend, Kacey Musgraves), others are decidedly outside the mainstream (Savages, Deafheaven). What's more, there are plenty of 2013 albums that went platinum and generated chart hits that Pazz and Jop voters barely acknowledged (One Direction, Imagine Dragons, Luke Bryan).

I definitely think that there's been a shift in critics' outlooks within the past decade that's a direct result of the rockism/poptimism debates of the early '00s, but Austerlitz dumbly simplifies that to "everyone now prefers anything popular to anything else."

Actually, that in itself is a dumb simplification of his argument. But in places, that's how it reads.

Yeah, hurting 2 is otm about the article being about unhappiness with general direction more than individual acts.

My feeling is that, previously, the most coverage and actual critical passion in the music press was devoted to "serious" rock, with "the best" of other genres cherry-picked for coverage. That's definitely the way it felt when I was a teenager 20 years ago reading Rolling Stone and the like.

Agree with jaymc about the shift. Now instead of occasional articles about "pop" focused purely on the consensus "best," there's a lot more coverage of a wide variety of artists. That's what bothers Austerlitz.

Of course "the best" of other genres was often based on a particular rock dude viewpoint, which is how you get Arrested Development winning Pazz n Jop

Obviously a major problem with his piece is choice of barometer of "music criticism" -- lots of people ITT have already pointed out "hello, pitchfork?"

Wait; Interpol are a pop band? Does that make it OK for me to like them, then?

My problem is thinking of pop as a "genre."

More of an "intent"?

"Pop" is in 3 different senses, a genre, and a methodology/intent and a space to be occupied.

Discussions of "Pop" should clarify which sense(s) are meant!

He doesn't seem to consider the methodology aspect. You can have a rockist reading of Beyonce or a poptimist reading of the Strokes. To SA, poptimism = liking mainstream pop.

Wrote this on fb earlier today; goes along w/ what jaymc says above:

Calling "poptimism" the "reigning style of music criticism today” would be deluded -- if not a blatant lie -- even if poptimism actually existed. That NYT writer's favorite album last year, by the National, placed #20 in Pazz & Jop; Queens Of The Stone Age, who he pretends he's so out of fashion for liking, finished #21. (He had the 68th most typical ballot in the poll, out of 453 voters, according to Glenn Mcdonald's math -- not exactly out in left field somewhere!) Some artists who finished even higher: Deafheaven, Jason Isbell, David Bowie, Arcade Fire, Disclosure, Savages, Neko Case, Kurt Vile, My Bloody Valentine, Chance The Rapper -- one of a few hip-hop artists up there -- and, at #2, Vampire Weekend. In the top 20 the year before: Japandroids, Tame Impala, Swans, Grimes, Beach House, Dirty Projectors, Jack White, Cloud Nothings, Father John Misty, Bruce Springsteen, Alabama Shakes, Sharon Von Etten, for starters. Whose definition of "reigning" "poptimism" do those artists fit, exactly? How exactly are Taylor Swift and Ke$ha dominating over them, critic-appraisal-wise, any more than, say, Madonna dominated over the Mekons or Husker Du or whoever back in the day? The argument here seems to be that critics shouldn’t write about a certain kind of hitmaker *at all*. Which, sorry, is ridiculous.

listening to "sorrow" now on headphones. it's pretty!

the lyrics are terrible though

Danny Bowes OTM

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/criticwire-survey-groupthink

i keep forgetting to ask if the nyt guy has ever actually written about music before. all i hear about is the sitcom book.

i've never really witnessed the sort of pile-ons those film critics talk about in music criticism. it's actually sort of odd that so few music crit beefs are actually about specific opinions about specific releases, there's very much a chacun à son gout mentality.

which isn't to say some forms of groupthink don't exist but it's less to do with critical assessment and more to do with "neutral" attention (sites reporting news about certain artists but not others), and it's nothing to do with poptimism or pop-leaning critics. (i assume this has been said, but just because megastars like beyoncé and t-swift get critical attention - though by no means consensus critical love! - this doesn't mean that pop as a genre is respected, let alone celebrated! pop artists beneath a certain level of success and/or without certain "credibility" dog whistle signifiers get absolutely no respect, and all the old rockist arguments get trotted out. for example, like taylor swift among uk critics prior to her latest album.)

Lindsay Zolandz's recent Tumblr post about critics and audiences made me realise that I'm glad that music critics engage in less navel-gazing than film critics and UK ones less than US ones. As a critic I love reading this stuff but it's irrelevant to all but a handful of readers.

I think the narrative voice in, say, The Wire's interviews is about as navel-gazing as anything, although with a bit of a stuffy academic air

I don't know, I don't think the film critic world is that much more "navel-gazing" than the music critic world at all. I think they both have certain insularities that will always look like "navel-gazing" to people outside that realm..

I mean, for example, in my experience, you're definitely more likely to find a pointless personal story in a music review than in a film review. Or a really moving personal story! But still.

how are we defining "navel gazing" -- staring at lint until you glean insights?

yeah, it's maybe not really worth me starting an argument about. But having read a lot of music and film criticism, neither really seems "more 'navel-gazing'" to me, and I couldn't quite understand the blanket statement that music-critics engage in less navel-gazing.

By navel-gazing I mean interactions between critics and talk of a critical community, as in Lindsay's piece, not the tone of reviews. There's no way that music critics, at least British ones, would be asked to offer their insights into the response to a review like the EW Under the Skin one which sparked the Indiewire post. We'd just bitch about it on Facebook.

I definitely think that there's been a shift in critics' outlooks within the past decade that's a direct result of the rockism/poptimism debates of the early '00s, but Austerlitz dumbly simplifies that to "everyone now prefers anything popular to anything else."

― jaymc, Monday, April 7, 2014 8:13 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think what has had a bigger impact than those debates is social media (and more broadly internet publishing), which has increased critics' exposure to one another's work/tastes in a manner that has made it a lot harder for critics to doggedly plough their furrow and assume everyone else is wrong. In general, there's a lot more tolerance for the idea that, even if you don't like X, someone else doing so is just fine (I can think of notable exceptions to this rule, but that's what they are - exceptions). I don't think this was predominantly caused by the rise of "poptimism" but the more pragmatic matter of being connected to, and friends (or "friends") with, other writers who are talking about X. At a more basic level, everyone using social media is faced with these tastes divergences regularly - after you've realised that X friend is actually ideologically totally opposite to you, liking slightly different music seems like a minor point.

This is in contrast to when both critics and readers could more effectively self-select the kinds (and topics) of music criticism they would be regularly exposed to. And the less you actually read a type of criticism, the easier it is to assume the worst of it.

(kinda ironic given that in other ways the internet has facilitated so much self-selection - political news being an obvious case in point)

There's a reason this has been written by a relative "outsider" (a tv/film critic) - as much as we might say "hello, pitchfork", no pitchfork writer today would express the opinions contained in this piece.

I think there was a similar dynamic with the jazz guy's article - only someone who was in fact totally oblivious of popular music coverage 90% of the time could then airily put it all in the same box.

xp I don't really know how one Indiewire piece, one that was really more about the idea of "groupthink" or "pile-on" reactions to critical writings in the internet age, is somehow evidence of the vast scope of film critic navel-gazing. It's not like there aren't plenty of reaction pieces, blogposts, or forum posts about controversial or misguided pieces of music criticism.

Honestly that's not really even unique to arts criticism at all, people are always talking about the way the internet changes the way people interact and react to written content (see Tim F's good point above). Don't know if that's really navel gazing.

good *points*, I mean

hi i wrote a piece about all this
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/the-new-york-times-sucks-poptimism

lol that url!

Can't (and don't want to try to) speak for the state of music criticism, but I will say that as a reader, I often get the impression that writers are approaching from the point of view of "what will be most likely read" or "what will be understood by the most people". My sense is that most criticism is presented as a survey of something that has already been discussed a lot beforehand, and the review itself is recap, presented in general terms. I can see how this can seem hiveminded, and though I do also notice that, I don't think they are necessarily one and the same phenomena.

Furthermore, I don't think that strategy is inherently bad. Criticism *should* be written so that people can understand it, arguably especially to people who aren't terribly familiar with what's being discussed. One reason I can't stand a lot of art criticism is because I feel like it's written to only be understood by people in the art world, or other critics.

However, I also think it is much easier to write something that will be grasped by the most people...when you're writing about music or art that in and of itself has already demonstrated to appeal to the most people. There's an understanding that gets grandfathered in, so you don't have to write an intro paragrpah explaining where the music came from, or why it's being discussed. I also think that when writers approach things in this way, they forgoe (imo unfortunately) the personal perspective, and don't let me as a reader know why they in particular are writing about this music. In that way, user reviews at Amazon or messageboards are actually more valuable, even though you have to sift through a lot of them to get a broader sense of the music/album. /2cents

xpost love the picture

this popular "critic" gives silly answer to silly question in this trolling video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be_HVMwiBAM

"Poptimism" is not about blindly accepting every piece of radio-ready music that comes down the pike and hailing it as the next important thing. Instead, it's about throwing out the artificial distinctions that elevate Serious Mass-Appeal Music (usually made by men, and with guitars) over Frothy Bubbly Stuff (which often appeals to women as much as, if not more than, it does men).

All that needs to be said really.

When I saw that the link was a video I knew it'd be that guy! xpost

Has Anthony Fantano been discussed on ILM? Am I wrong in thinking he's one of the most popular critics in the game right now? Dude is regularly clocking over 100,000 views of his videos on YouTube.

how many of those are accidental clicks though

I always thought it'd be funny if someone cut his hands off so that when he gesticulated it would just be these bloody stumps splattering blood on his walls.

lol someone sent me a really angry message after i deleted a sentence about tim hecker's virgins being anthony fantano's favorite album of 2013 from that album's wiki page

A lot of gimmicky earnest bands come from his area of Connecticut.

dude is terrible, would be nice w/ the bloody stumps for hands... also n1 @ dyl for deleting lame wiki-reference.

seems like the guy just repeats consensus opinions, but he comes off as the worst, maybe because he makes it seem as if all his opinions are "special" or "important" or "very clever" or just cool when obv they're not lol...

keeps showing up in my related videos on youtube, accidentally saw a few of his "reviews".

on a positive note his name reminds me of brian fantana :)

http://www.quotesworthrepeating.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Brian-Fantana-195x271.jpg

Anyone complaining about Fantano needs to do a YT search for coverkillernation. Holy fucking shit is that guy awful - the ultimate IMN (= Internet Metal Nerd). I think the worst thing about these guys is they're so stilted in their word choice and delivery, like they wrote up everything they're going to say without any thought for how those words would sound leaving someone's mouth as speech.

Animal Collective’s music didn’t just accompany my life, it embodied and sometimes even validated it. Here was a band that not only seemed to think that the bare fact of existence was as fucked-up and confusing as I did, but also managed to replicate that confusion in sound. Biking across campus, I listened to Sung Tongs' alternate-reality smashes at pitiless volumes, staring at my peers, thinking, "Damn, it’s weird to have eyeballs—could I love an insect if insects had eyeballs too?" Naturally, my academic advisors thought I was on the right track.

oh god