IS ROCK CRITICISM DEAD?

that MINDSET grr

I'm getting my threads confused. Shouldn't Shakey be attacking Ferris Bueller again?

actually i didn't but one thing that i thought whiney was weird (a little off shakey's point here) but was the fact that while you sort of decried the camps of fans on the bonerro tweetfest (god what a term)...you yourself seemed to just write off all the "jam band crap" which, for me, if i went to bonerroo would be the most interesting thing to check out, just cuz it's sort of the roots of the fest and who the fuck knows, maybe like string cheese incident would rock my sox off in a live setting?

well Dan to sum up (pardon me for paraphrasing here Whiney) part of his point was that people's tastes are in general becoming very NARROW - listeners find a comfortable sub-section of music that they are into and they stick with it, they are oblivious to things going on outside it, and there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that.

x-post

if i went to bonerroo would be the most interesting thing to check out, just cuz it's sort of the roots of the fest and who the fuck knows, maybe like string cheese incident would rock my sox off in a live setting?

lolz M@tt I love you bro

" there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that."

somewhere sasha frere jones is raising his hand eagerly

btw String Cheese Incident likely WOULD rock yr sox off in a live setting, I ushered a show they did with Bela Fleck and MMW and they were great

"well Dan to sum up (pardon me for paraphrasing here Whiney) part of his point was that people's tastes are in general becoming very NARROW - listeners find a comfortable sub-section of music that they are into and they stick with it, they are oblivious to things going on outside it, and there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that."

Is Whiney not aware of the existence of specialty music mags prior to the www?

I see no one raised this complaint when Whiney "objectively" cited the compartmentalized listening tastes of Bonnarroo attendees

Never said their tastes were, I said their tweets were

xpost

yeah it's one of those things i'm like totally curious about but have no desire to actively make the effort to go to

like i wish a world famous hippie jam band would come play in my backyard for free

well Dan to sum up (pardon me for paraphrasing here Whiney) part of his point was that people's tastes are in general becoming very NARROW - listeners find a comfortable sub-section of music that they are into and they stick with it, they are oblivious to things going on outside it, and there's no critical mechanism readily available to break those listeners out of that.

call me crazypants but isn't this EXACTLY the thing croupier called him out about?

bonnaroo is fucking awesome btw

jesus god, someone take these prepositions away from me before I kill again

i think whiney's core point (lolz about fleet foxes and the like aside) that thoughtful criticism -- actual criticism -- is hard to find and probably going to get harder is well put and well taken.

who the fuck knows, maybe like string cheese incident would rock my sox off in a live setting?

one thing i liked about bonnaroo the 2 times i've gone is that i ended up going to see and sometimes enjoying bands i never would have. i let myself be dragged by my dancing-hippie-girl friend to both string cheese incident and widespread panic, and while it's hardly the kind of stuff i'm going to listen to in any other setting, in an open field with a big enthusiastic crowd it was pretty entertaining.

dan I'll let croupier speak for himself but no I don't think that was his original cricitism of Whiney

haha hard to believe but all I originally said was that whiney bitching about NPR playing fleet foxes because shitty critics like them was pretty off-key from an overall defense of music criticism. If you're actually trying to argue that critics are worth supporting, you can't complain when they succeed in getting an act attention just because you think your tastes are better.

best thread in... awhile! (guess i'm a little cranky today, IRL i just yelled at a guy in a wheelchair who ran into me on the sidewalk)

It is a good thread and I'd say more on here if I weren't fighting a frickin' cold/headache/earache combination.

is rock critic dead?

http://www.speakeasy.net/~mike1627/Linguo.jpg

yeah, good thread. i actually read everything you people had to say, and god knows i haven't done that in a long time. hahahahaha!

my whole point about the lifestyle accessory comment was related to croupier's point that most people don't listen to/experience/absorb music in terms m coleman was describing (ie " pop music as MUSIC at its core? why can't listeners -- or critics -- be responding to music when they like a pop song?") - its not just about appreciation of craft for most people, what the music signifies is often just as/if not MORE important. So identity politics is always a crucial component of criticism - it gets beyond the "wow the drum programming on this song is really well done" sorta analysis and into the music's subtext, its social role, its political signifiers, its relationship to musical history, its context, which is really (imho) what most people are engaging with when they listen to music. Not just the average listener, but music obsessives like us as well. That was what I meant by lifestyle accessory - that music is a part of a larger, deeper identity for most people - and not just a medium to be appreciated for its strictly technical merits (ie, "that guitar solo is really hard to play" or "this beat is fun to dance to", although that stuff all figures in as well on a surface level).

Whiney asks for more people to offer WHY they listen to the music they do - which more often than not is gonna come down to some level of lifestyle/identity politics kinda thing, and not so much appreciation of technical craft (although you will get weird exceptions to this like people who claim to listen to Dragonforce because all the musicians are SO AMAZING. But even guys who, say, privelege indie rock over rap because hip hop isn't made by "real musicians" are betraying their own identity politics more than their engaging with the actual craft of either genre)

That was what I meant by lifestyle accessory - that music is a part of a larger, deeper identity for most people

that makes sense, though "accessory" might be a little off. you're really talking about how people draw personal meaning from art and incorporate it into their lives and identities, etc. and i think the HOW and WHY that whiney's asking can take a lot of different forms. i'm sympathetic to the argument that more music critics should actually know more about music from a technical standpoint, because it really does make a difference in understanding something about how it works. otoh i'm sympathetic to the idea that most music fans don't really know much about music per se, and so a good populist critic doesn't have to understand the mechanics to talk insightfully about the way music functions socially or politically or whatever. probably the real thing is that you can do good, interesting critical work from either direction (even if a lot of the best of it is going to incorporate some elements of both) -- and that there isn't enough good, interesting critical work being done from any perspective. (and that some of the relatively few places that have provided forums for that kind of thing are either moving away from it or are just plain disappearing from the landscape.)

"What critic thinks the music they enjoy is common and conventional? That would be an impressively self-aware conservative critic."

I don't think many critics actively promote the music they listen to on these terms, but I think there are lots and lots of critics for whom the fact that a piece of music is generally indicative of a popular trend rather than somehow seemingly unique is not a barrier to it being great. Perhaps they would only explicitly promote its commonality/conventionality if it seemed to perfectly encapsulate the best qualities of the trend it typifies.

I know that for a long time I've been wary of music criticism that automatically looks for the innovative auteur in any given field of music on the basis that the "shining star against a sea of undifferentiated generic mulch" narrative makes for such an easy story to write. In the case of my favourite dance sub-genres I'm much more likely to be enthusiastic about something that portrays the "rules" of the genre in its best light (including by demonstrating their inherent flexibility), rather than something that seeks to "break the rules".

Re literature criticism versus music criticism, I wouldn't say there's a massive divide here with close reading on one side and identity politics on the other. Lots of people (critics and otherwise) love novels because they identify with the character. Most popular music sets up the performer as the "character" of the music, such that it's harder in every day terms to distinguish between the identity politics of the singer and the identity politics of the song than it is with an author and their book.

In terms of narrow/blinkered listening vs eclecticism, I would have thought that quite obviously the worst of all possible worlds is blinkered eclecticism: the thing about an "indie mindset" (which I'll use as my strawman example) is that it does allow for the enjoyment and even critical celebration of certain hip hop, certain dance music, certain metal, and so on. Insofar as its critical rules become detached from any particular sonic signifiers they are much harder to identify and so much harder to challenge.

I think generally a purist is preferable to that because their rigorous focus (or, to put it negatively, self-policing) mostly forces them to think harder about why they will like or not like something - even if you disagree with the choice they end up making at least you can see that it is a choice.

the thing about an "indie mindset" (which I'll use as my strawman example) is that it does allow for the enjoyment and even critical celebration of certain hip hop, certain dance music, certain metal, and so on. Insofar as its critical rules become detached from any particular sonic signifiers they are much harder to identify and so much harder to challenge.

lolz honestly this makes me think of those Christian music fans who will listen to any genre of music as long as its, y'know, about Jesus

Yeah, def. some interesting stuff here. A few things I don't get:

Like the connection between tweeting about 1,000 LPs in a year and the death of criticism. Is this just a Nero fiddles as Rome burns kind of situation? It seems like this kind of approach was presented as a solution, and if so, I don't follow.

Also, there are some interesting questions here about whether pointing people toward good stuff is what criticism should aspire to.

I think plenty of lit (and definitely film) critics are very invested in personal readings of works rather than technical/close readings (certainly seemed like a vast majority of the lit crit I read in college was of that type and not of the "let's look at what writer X is doing with similes here" in paragraph to.) It's not unique to music criticism at all.

music criticism should aspire to just be good writing because it'll never be music

the only reason to write about music is to use music as a crutch to get the pen to the paper

"whether pointing people toward good stuff is what criticism should aspire to"
I'm totally fine with critics doing this instead of apple 'music genius' or pandora doing this.

some dude killin it itt

btw i really dont see how thoughtful music crit is going to disappear any more than the written word as a medium for expression is going to disappear. can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the critics making a living off of music writing were embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs (ie tim's innovator against a sea of genericism) & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

im honestly not sure i ever liked music criticism as a 'job'. im doing it anyway because there are a few people i like who do it really really well & help me think about the music i listen to in different ways but thats such a small group, & always has been ... i cant say that since ive been reading rolling stone ive ever been particularly moved by a review (this is not a whiney diss ive never read his work in RS)

^^ I think golden age of music criticism arguments are basically like golden age of music arguments. Just as people mentally screen out the unfathomably popular, now forgotten stuff that haunted the charts in 1982 or whenever, people tend to focus on that one lifechanging article they read back in (insert year) and ignore that most critics have been autobots since day dot.

(on the golden age of music point, one of the finest Freaky Trigger articles ever was when Tom Ewing and Greg Scarth did a head-to-head on the top 20 UK records of 1982 versus the top 20 UK records of 2002, and 2002 won by some marginal amount)

can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the critics making a living off of music writing were embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs (ie tim's innovator against a sea of genericism) & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

^^^^please please let's

Basically, can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the people making a living off of anything are embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

Sure and all the people lamenting the death of the team sportswriter are basically full of shit too.

haha it's the same mixed feelings i have about all the "death of the newspaper" lamentations. on one hand, it's sad. on the other, most of them are pretty bad.

(but it's not like they're being replaced by anything better, i guess is the problem in these cases)

the thing vs. newspapers is that paying for actual reporting is different than 'music criticism'

"music criticism" is not journalism.

music journalism, im worried about

Sure and all the people lamenting the death of the team sportswriter are basically full of shit too.

― Alex in SF, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 11:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah columnists for the most part i'm not gonna mourn, at least my local clowns but yeah we are blessed with some great beat writers and i'll be sad to see them go.

Basically, can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the people making a living off of anything are embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

― Tim F, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:25 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

maybe. but some jobs dont require that kind of innovation

i mean the kind of innovation that would break from that received wisdom etc

xxxp Yeah I'm not saying ALL music critics are clowns mind you.

xpost - Absolutely, but nor does music criticism as a "job".

I'm constantly banging on about the need of music criticism not to be boring, but it's more in the sense that I'd not want to be friends with boring people rather than based on some notion of the music critic's obligation to society.

"music criticism" is not journalism.

i don't know, i think arts criticism in general is a form of journalism. and i think there's something lost with local papers all over the place ditching their local critics in favor of wire stuff, which a lot of them are doing -- even if a lot of the local critics aren't very good. (also, in a lot of places the local critics are also the local arts beatwriters. if you lose one, you lose both.)

i don't know, i think arts criticism in general is a form of journalism. and i think there's something lost with local papers all over the place ditching their local critics in favor of wire stuff, which a lot of them are doing -- even if a lot of the local critics aren't very good. (also, in a lot of places the local critics are also the local arts beatwriters. if you lose one, you lose both.)

― would you ask tom petty that? (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but see, i think that ideally what will happen is that (& yes im being optimistic here) good critics will still want to write about music & will do so on the internet, with more freedom than they are allowed in rolling stone or wherever, & will develop some kind of following that will of course require multiple sources of income & self-marketing, & the best ones will be popular&smart enough to sustain themselves

while the shitty ones will continue to write & have no following because no one understands where they are coming from (obv i mean "best" in terms of "ability to connect with an audience" here, speaking in pure capitalist terms not a subjective quality of writing debate) & will write on their little journals to their small audiences.

kind of feel like the internet has sorta leveled the kinds of wack writers who were being subsidized by the good writers to write about shit -- back when every newspaper could afford an arts critic no matter how bad, when every magazine employed an army of writers to say boring things that rehashed what smarter writers had already said, etc

i had a bunch of thoughts about this but i have been shocked into silence by HI DERE saying that MN is the Michael W. Smith capital of the world