IS ROCK CRITICISM DEAD?

ya i know. i think there is some good to local scene writing type stuff, even if it is unbearably parochial.

As a guy who was laid off from what I thought was a steady job in February and has been doing contract work since the severance package disappeared, I want to give my sympathies to all you writers who have been or may soon be similarly affected. It sucks!

Whiney's speech touched on the phenomenon of people so wrapped up in their subcultures that they're oblivious to the broader culture. That's not new, but I think the internet encourages or at least enables and in many cases flatters this tendency. So does cable (as vs network 30 years ago), and so does satellite radio (as vs freeform or even regular old pre-market-segmented radio). There's always a tradeoff, and the resource explosion we've gained also gave us a million little foxholes in which to squirrel ourselves away. All this new media helps us compartmentalize ourselves out of even a pretense that we're all diving or even dipping into a shared pool, some sort of a commons. Where that matters most (to me) isn't aesthetics but politics - left and right wing bloggers each finding their own special echo chambers, cable news choices reduced to which flavor of loudmouth you prefer, etc. As though there's no longer a center/common ground. In general that seems like a bad thing for a democracy - I'd think you'd get better political results (or at least a better political process) when we all are responsive to each other.

But was there ever a center to begin with? To get back to music: Wasn't the Universal Music Critic and/or Magazine, covering everything & doing it well, largely a shared fiction? If I've seen any common ground among music fans, it's been the chip on the shoulder about those who don't quite get it when it comes to their particular favorites. Seems to me that annoyance at critics getting it wrong is the primary way they've been received, for generations. More to the point, common ground may be important for a democracy, but I'm not sure it matters for music. What's so bad about a million sub-communities all digging their own things?

honestly dudes, if i'm gonna go back to having a real job and doing something as a hobby, I'm gonna bail on writing altogether and go back to playing drums.

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 10:38 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i will buy 2 copies of your next record, maybe 3 if it's as good as those P&L records

i'm really disappointed that none of the autogoon cru noticed my ego trip shirt in the video

I noticed and thought, is he making some silent comment that twittering or rockcrit-ing is just one big ego trip? Or is he just wearing a hip shirt?

i noticed!!

it's really sad though, that no one noticed

"and i gotta say, even though there are mediocre writers in every local paper, i still think there is something valuable about their local-ness, about there being people still covering their little arts scene or police blotter or whatever, living where that stuff is actually going down. there's value to that even if the writing is not great."

Unfortunately a lot of this "local writing in your local paper"-stuff got killed off by the massive media consolidation of the late 90s so a lot of what's being killed off right now is just a bunch of VV/NT junk on a weekly level and a steady diet of AP wire rehash on the daily. If the SF Bay Guardian dies though, I'll be really bummed though since it's a good weekly with a lot of solid local political reporting and good local events coverage.

ya i know, this stuff has been dying by a thousand little cuts for a whle now.

fwiw the only reason i'm still making any money at all writing about music is that i made local music my niche & my paper is cutting away space/budget for that slower than all other music coverage

but then it's not a VVM paper and is probably more an exception that proves the rule than not

"ya i know, this stuff has been dying by a thousand little cuts for a whle now."

To be fair though, this is the one thing that the web is really good at replacing. Semi-professional (or totally amateur) topical writing about local politics/scenes/happenings is something that very easily leaps from newsprint to blog. It's the more in-depth journalism that's really being hurt most and I'm not sure how that (or if it even does) gets replaced.

^^^^yeah i mean even if u want to talk about it w/r/t music, its not like bloggers are able to do things like getting the entire crew of ppl responsible for a classic album in a room together to talk about the making of an illmatic or whatever. there are certain real things that, at least when it comes to journalism, requires institutional $$$

i agree that the web is ideal for replacing this stuff, it just sucks that it's no longer a viable paying job - also i wonder if the people who are doing this stuff on the web will have the tenacity to keep going, consistently, week by week like a paying gig would

Probably not. Remember when every music writer was a dutiful blogger in like 2004?

exactly. who will be doing this stuff? and why?

another thing that i fret about is that most web writing (blogs of course) are unedited... i think editing is if anything more undervalued than writing. it is important, no matter how good a writer u are.

xpost It's gonna be either 19-year-old kids who think it's an opening for a job, or older dudes who do it as a hobby.

big name magazines regularly tell my copy-editor friends that they need to edit less and just look over things FASTER to get more content out, since quantity is slowly overtaking quality as the measure of financial success

godspeed, 25-year-olds. xp

Apologies to Whiney and everyone else cause I know this is real serious talk time but Chris, I really like that hat.

big name magazines regularly tell my copy-editor friends that they need to edit less and just look over things FASTER to get more content out, since quantity is slowly overtaking quality as the measure of financial success

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Thursday, June 18, 2009 5:16 AM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

urgh terrible. not just copy editing im talking here tho of course

Also, great speech Whiney

whiney i noticed your ego trip shirt too : )

also this whole thread is hella sobering...speaking as someone who has only been protected from this due to god's grace and larger data footprints.

Whiney's thesis, which I mostly agreed with, reminded me of this PBF comic

http://i40.tinypic.com/2mhea8o.gif

http://i40.tinypic.com/2mhea8o.gif

Oh, and the comic's name is "Grammar Wizard," which helps with the joke obv.

Oh, and after the wizard (more like rock critic!) is toppled the masses segregate and form new tribes Lord of the Flies-style, and start blaring Fleet Foxes and thinking they need no ruler. It's in the fifth panel which didn't fit.

i dont think this has been mentioned itt (kind of skimmed so forgtive me), but one the thing the internet is truly going to kill is name brand critics. xgau, sfj, carmancia, senneh etc - all those guys worked/work on the old system and still make waves on blogs, message boards because their opinions still matter more than, like, whiney's. i just don't see that being true in like... 10 years, at least not on the level that sfj has where he can write about m.i.a., no age, r, kelly and taylor swift and no one blinks an eye. noz, tom breihan, fennessey, perpetua, even our very own al shipley have kind of transcended as name brand guys but they are the go to guys in genre x or niche y (in shipley's case bmore shit) but now so much is "pitchfork said this" or "stereogum said this" or "the guy from gorilla vs bear linked this" and i def think the "era" (?) of big name, all genre critics is gonna die if it hasn't already

u really think that is happening more than ppl used to say "rolling stone said this"?

yeah, true

yeah i'm not sure how big any of those names are now. i guarantee you almost none of my coworkers -- including the new yorker subscribers -- could tell you who sfj is. or christgau. any kind of criticism is such a niche thing, really, that the small number of people who pay attention to it are always going to know some names, whether it's on blogs or elsewhere. and nobody else will much give a shit. what's at issue is whether and how that small niche world intersects with any kind of broader audience, in a way that might invigorate discourse etc. and that's not likely to happen on music blogs.

(much less on twitter feeds, where the likelihood of accidental intersection is reduced almost to nil)

well when i talk about name brand critics i mean in terms of people who care about reviews in the first place, not normal ppl

could any of your co-workers or otherwise random set of people EVER tell you who the name brand rock crit of the day was?

ha xp

Really loved your talk, Christopher, it was borderline standup, like Jonah Hill meets George Carlin--there's your "because." And I take your point about Twitterfication even if I don't think NPR critics bend their tastes for hit counts (but then I don't mind Fleet Foxes).

I just think you're mixing up symptoms and causes. Media corporatization, online advertising, and the Bush/Clinton/Wall Street-induced financial/economic collapse all loom larger than blogs as a reason why critics have less time, pay, and opportunity. And I don't think people being able to hear music immediately diminishes critics much--nobody has time to listen to it all, and that's not really why music heads read critics anyway.

Arguably these big music critic "generalists" are a hangover from when music crit was funnelled through music mags which couldn't afford to hire a heavyweight to write authorititatively and regularly about every niche.

In some ways specialisation has become more necessary as a result of the internet because a) there's more choice of writers; and b) everyone's an expert. Comments boxes on web-based articles and reviews are now filled with corrections (both fact-checking and "your opinion is wrong"), such that knowing your product becomes more immediately important than it might have been in the past.

And I don't think people being able to hear music immediately diminishes critics much--nobody has time to listen to it all, and that's not really why music heads read critics anyway.

― Pete Scholtes, Thursday, June 18, 2009 1:26 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i agree & disagree; i think the days of critics as consumer guides are really really ... different. ideally, it will make people much better writers cuz theyll be forced to become better writers -- u cant just treat music writing like a guide for whether or not ppl should spend their money -- shit is free. any critic who thought that way in the first place is stuck saying "download it and decide for yourself."

so hopefully it will drive ppl to actually write about the music in interesting ways w/ less of a focus on thumbs up/thumbs down type writing

i dunno, one thing MP3 blogs do I think is show how the taste-in-music of individual critics (or "critics") remains important. There's so many things that can be downloaded that as an mp3 blog if you've gotten someone to download off your page that's almost a minor victory in itself (unless you're posting no-brainer big album leaks or the number one single on the charts etc.)

There's lots of mp3 blogs that have convinced me to download stuff I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise, either because of the quality of the write-up or because the general taste of the writer seemed trustworthy.

could any of your co-workers or otherwise random set of people EVER tell you who the name brand rock crit of the day was?

well exactly. which is why i think that to the extent "name brand rock critics" exist or have ever, they'll continue to. they just might not be ... employed.

I think we're going to see a splintering in music criticism. On the one hand music criticism will become more abstruse and will be something enjoyed more and more by specialists who really are writing for each other (ILM writ large). In other words rock criticism will become more academic, or at least part of it will be. Who knows, maybe it will even be subsidized by our universities one day.

But the other half? As James Bowman recently pointed out, the only kind of traditional media that isn't being dwarfed right now (if it's really shrinking at all) is celebrity/tabloid media. He mentions that one of the reasons the media loves Obama, aside from ideology, is that, unlike Bush, Obama can be marketed to the public like a celebrity - and celebrity still sells like it did when the economy was healthy. The same strategy might be used for pushing music reviews (bear with me).

I think that music criticism will also go the way of next generation movie reviewing ('criticism' doesn't fit) and become something that is dominated by celebrity-worship, monomaniacal fanboys with no perspective, flamboyant personalities (doesn't Perez Hilton have a record label just because people liked his quasi-record reviews?). The fact that Ben Lyons replaced Robert Ebert might suggest where popular music criticism will go soon.

In other words I think that music criticism will simultaneously become too complicated for the average reader to appreciate on the one hand, but then so dumbed down that the other kind of critic will be like a Perez Hilton media whore who uses his name brand as an all around personality to sell or damn the music that he reviews. It won't so much be music reviewing as it will be "celebrity commentator talks about new album by celebrity band!" The person who gets pushed out will be the knowledgeable middle-brow critic who doesn't, or cannot, be an academic or Ben Lyons-type hack.

I hope that theory made sense. I should point out that I've personally never tried to publish a piece of music writing before, and I'm just writing as an outsider trying to analyze the climate and predict what will happen based on other trends I think I've observed. I'm not an expert on the field nor do I claim to be, so if I'm way off I wouldn't be too surprised.

"Who knows, maybe it will even be subsidized by our universities one day."

Already happened. But maybe you were being tongue-in-cheek here.

"I think that music criticism will also go the way of next generation movie reviewing ('criticism' doesn't fit) and become something that is dominated by celebrity-worship, monomaniacal fanboys with no perspective, flamboyant personalities (doesn't Perez Hilton have a record label just because people liked his quasi-record reviews?)."

I think this has already been around for quite a while to some extent as well, but in the past it's mainly been in the form of "music experts" annexed to lifestyle, variety and entertainment shows rather than via the internet (Perez being a quasi-exception). People in Australia will be familiar with Molly Meldrum and his "do yourself a favour" reviews. There was another relatively big broadsheet writer Nui Te Koha who was rather like this.

If anything there's almost been a slight move away from this model over the past ten years I'd say: as the cult of celebrity has grown more intense and invasive, the need to pretend that we are also talking about the music of Madonna or Lindsay Lohan or Courtney Love when discussing their latest love triangle, drug bust or plastic surgery gone wrong has really fallen away. Paris was obviously the tipping point here: as far as I know the first person whose first claim to fame was being a tabloid celeb, upon which her musical career was founded.

Perez I think is the point where celeb gossip columnist crosses over into celeb-in-himself. In this sense people being interested in what he is listening to is perhaps closer to people being interested in what Kanye is listening to than it is to people reading Rolling Stone or whatever.

But what if the future of mainstream "music reviewing" is just that: no more reading Rolling Stone, or what any faceless and celebrity-less voice has to say, but looking at what powerful celebrity is listening to? I've read that businessmen have tried to pay Kanye to put their products on his blog (and his blog isn't very wordy, if you've seen it - almost what you would call a "picture blog.")

Could we - nay, have we- reached the point where someone with fame like that just posting a picture with the caption "CHECK THIS OUT" is of infinitely more influence than entire mobs of journalists and critics? I suppose the question isn't whether they have a majority, but will that type of micro-reviewing have a monopoly?

Maybe I'm overstating the potential for disaster and fallout from this economy - and what may result from it. I got word today of an e-mail sent to my mother, from somebody who is a Wall Street day trader, and this is lifted from the e-mail:

"Things are not going to get better as we are told; they are only going to get less worse. Are you prepared for the coming meltdown of our society? It has already started. Be prepared. And let god protect you and your family."

normally I'd write it off but this guy was the like the mad prophet in the wilderness just months before the economy fainted - and I don't remember him believing religious either. So heavier-than-usual gloom, doom, and the further collapse of standards was on my mind (but also ILM's, coincidentally)

There were heaps of mad prophets in the wilderness just months before the economy fainted though. Even a stopped clock etc.

Anyone who uses the phrase "coming meltdown of our society" is clearly a few securities short of a majority shareholding in his own sanity.

Good music writing will survive wherever it pops up and regardless of who does or doesn't get paid for doing it as long as there are people who want to read it.

The genre division is meaningless since any music writer worth their salt should be able to persuade the reader that such and such is worth paying attention to, whatever their preferences or prejudices.

Max Harrison's writing persuaded me to buy a Paul Whiteman box set back in the day; I know nothing about birdwatching but Simon Barnes' writing makes me want to know something about it.

It's all to do with writerly skill and demonstrable knowledge which guides the reader rather than hits them over the head with it.

As Constant Lambert said, the enterprising music writer shouldn't be put off if they initially feel that they are only writing for themselves, since Cleopatra will inevitably tire of billiards.

hahaha

That is true that there were lots of mad prophets. He seemed so sane though leading up to it, but then months before - BAM!

Stockbroking is a good industry for sudden onset stress conditions. I'd rank the big ones:

1) Child Protection
2) Social security customer service (maybe doesn't exist to the same extent in the US)
3) nursing home staff
4) stockbroking
5) charity organisations
6) law
7) psychiatry

Perez I think is the point where celeb gossip columnist crosses over into celeb-in-himself. In this sense people being interested in what he is listening to is perhaps closer to people being interested in what Kanye is listening to than it is to people reading Rolling Stone or whatever.

― Tim F, Thursday, 18 June 2009 07:35 (2 hours ago) Permalink

But what if the future of mainstream "music reviewing" is just that: no more reading Rolling Stone, or what any faceless and celebrity-less voice has to say, but looking at what powerful celebrity is listening to? I've read that businessmen have tried to pay Kanye to put their products on his blog (and his blog isn't very wordy, if you've seen it - almost what you would call a "picture blog.")

Could we - nay, have we- reached the point where someone with fame like that just posting a picture with the caption "CHECK THIS OUT" is of infinitely more influence than entire mobs of journalists and critics? I suppose the question isn't whether they have a majority, but will that type of micro-reviewing have a monopoly?

― Cunga, Thursday, 18 June 2009 07:44 (2 hours ago)

wow i had a conversation this week w/an old friend who's been a rockcritic and worked in the biz doing a&r and producing and now he's involved in this^ type of thang

though my teenage son who's a big big music fan (mainstream pop/R&B) asked for a rolling stone subscription for his last birthday. i was really surprised that he didn't want US or some other celebrity thing. (and he's only vaguely aware that i wrote for the rag). don't think he reads the reviews, though.