Is SPIN really circling the drain?

yeah, the people i've written about are in the noise/weird/whatever camp, and most of them are happy to get a mention anywhere. and are genuinely appreciative of kind words. i just don't want to ever censor myself anywhere cuz so and so is friends with this label or that guy...that kind of thing. i've never had to worry about that at all, cuz i never go anywhere and don't know anybody. but now my, uh, circle has expanded.

http://twitter.com/#!/1000TimesYes/status/157527382905978881

the ivory tower quip obv stupid, but dude makes some salient points imho best of which is that music criticism as consumer guide has been a bankrupt idea for a long time.

xpost loooool

yeah it'd be hard to imagine, say, a publication branding their favorite records as the "best new music" and consumers rushing en masse to check out those records (xpost)

i don't think it's necessarily fiscally bankrupt. i think it's intellectually bankrupt. has criticism ever been quite as explicitly linked to purchasing product as music crit?

I was gonna say, I've heard from more than one record store owner about how they immediately double their stock whenever a Pfork drops a BnM.

::shrugs:: a big part of music writing will ALWAYS be "here is something new that you may not have heard yet, and here is why it is or isn't worth hearing." for better or worse i don't know if there's any getting away from that.

xpost

that's the dominant paradigm of music writing in 2012 but it's not the only kind of music criticism that is done and it's far from the only kind of criticism that is done. like he mentions in his post - you don't read art criticism to decide what art to buy. sometimes you read book reviews to decide what books to buy but often you read the review bc you want to get a survey of the field, or a discussion of the book's themes and you never even intend to buy the book. not to mention all the critical writing about books that you can only really read after you've read the book. film criticism often takes popular form as consumer guide, but that's dying off too and tons of film crit still survives. etc

so it's the dominant paradigm AND a bankrupt idea. got it.

r u just snarking now? i don't see the contradiction. lots of intellectually bankrupt shit is dominant paradigm.

i can't even tell if you disagree with me or what your argument is.

we're in the same boat, then!

"has criticism ever been quite as explicitly linked to purchasing product as music crit?"

uh, film crit? book crit? theatre crit? food crit?

except not is my point

i dunno i guess i thought by "bankrupt idea" you meant that it isn't still being practiced by many many people or is trending downward at the moment.

I was gonna say, I've heard from more than one record store owner about how they immediately double their stock whenever a Pfork drops a BnM.

― jon /via/ chi 2.0,

but not metal albums, eh? ;)

that's the dominant paradigm of music writing in 2012 but it's not the only kind of music criticism that is done and it's far from the only kind of criticism that is done.

It is the only music criticism worth reading

i disagree. i wish there was more music crit like this:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/15/030915fa_fact_baum

so you would never read something about an older record you are already familiar with that is unconcerned with good/bad verdicts? (xpost)

Well, criticism about old stuff I haven't yet heard is also worth reading; generally speaking, if I have heard something and made up my mind on what I think of it, a critic's opinion is not going to change my mind.

lol xposts

Criticism, by its very nature, is about good/bad verdicts btw

A music critic could easily change my opinion of something I've heard if she points out something I didn't notice about it.

u say btw so matter-of-factly but i think most critics would contest that description of what they do xp

That's why there are so many terrible critics out there!

i'm thinking primarily literary critics here

there's actually a whole interesting history of the words "critique/criticize" and how they've apparently over time developed a connotation of qualitative good/bad (especially negative) judgments, whereas before it meant more neutrally analysis or commentary than evaluation

http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/030403/critical-inquiry1.jpg

Criticism, by its very nature, is about good/bad verdicts btw

couldn't disagree more - criticism is about ways of thinking about art/literature/music - sorting through one's responses - the "verdict" is always the least interesting part afaic

Critique of Pure Reason
by Immanuel Kant

Pure Reason is pretty good, a distinct improvement on last year's Impure Reason. Reliability is obviously much higher and the usage value is off the charts. I expect to be using Pure Reason for many years to come. 9.2

lol

Criticism, by its very nature, is about good/bad verdicts btw

is this for real

hahaha aerosmith plz start that twitter

The verdict is always there, though. Something has to drive the analysis otherwise you are looking at aimless, directionless meandering with no thesis.

I dunno; I read the NY Review of Books & I'm not looking for a "good/bad verdict", I'm looking to learn what the book's like; what're its topics, its way of doing what it does (I'm thinking most of nonfiction but the same's mostly true for fiction too). I'll decide "good/bad" on my own.

hahaha aerosmith plz start that twitter

v. tempted

or not, actually; I rarely read the full books being reviewed there; I just like reading the crit tbh

xp

btw Bandwagonesque 4eva (to keep w/ the thread's topic)

it's possible to have a thesis besides "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" iirc

post one and I will show you how it can be reduced to "thumbs up"/"thumbs down"

Something has to drive the analysis otherwise you are looking at aimless, directionless meandering with no thesis.

lol I am saying this in a friendly way so don't take it wrong but a critical theory class would drive you completely bonkers. the whole point of critical theory is to table verdicts in favor of competing truth-claims & seeing how they work together, what the assumptions that go into them are, etc. what drives the analysis is sort of quasi-scientific: an interest in the workings of things, which are assumed/shown to be very complicated and capable of sustaining multiple readings. However, it is also the case that reading this stuff one picks & prods to figure out whether the author (sorry, "author") is harboring some verdict to which he/she doesn't cop

I had more to say here but I could actually hear the sound of you scratching at your eyeballs to make it stop + it made me feel bad

lol

Agreed re Twitter request.

Aerosmith OTM here. I was going to say, DJP, nobody is saying that criticism doesn't often reduce to a good/bad verdict, what they (and I) say is that it doesn't have to be that way, and there are numerous field where in fact the good/bad duality is almost non-existent.

*fields

whenever someone claims a "reduction" or that X "reduces" to Y, I'm suspicious & recommend the same.

I can attest that writing reviews is more fun than student discussions in lit theory courses.

setting the bar high there

whenever someone claims a "reduction" or that X "reduces" to Y, I'm suspicious & recommend the same.

I feel it's fair to remind the thread here that Euler "does" philosophy and is required by the terms of his contract to suspect all claims of reduction

I studied computer science; reduction is the foundation of everything.

that seems a rather reductive claim to me - Euler, back me up here