IS ROCK CRITICISM DEAD?

My own opinions are more valuable to me than other peoples, but I like to see how people recieve a certain song or album. I can't remember ever reading a review that MADE me want to go and get an album. I read reviews that make me want to hear a single but mainly because they say "Jon Carter/Erick Morillo have been playing this" and not because they say this is the sonic equivalent of a great date with Kirsten Dunst, or this sounds like a washing machine.

I read reviews that make me want to hear a single but mainly because they say "Jon Carter/Erick Morillo have been playing this"

Is there a contradiction here Ronan? Or does Jon Carter transcend the mere "people" category.

But you've made me see that dance music is an area where you don't bother so much with reviews except to try and find out what tune is what so you can buy it or download it. You'll already know it of course.

Well, I can't say that we weren't warned.

No one ever said the music business was a populist enterprise...

Why was I doing a websearch on my own name? Well, for one, like all writers, I'm somewhat of a narcissist (and a bad speller). And, secondly, I'm always curious to find out where my articles have been discussed on the net.

I figured I'd respond to some of the responses. My main qualm with what people seem to be saying about my article is that I'm somehow AGAINST the internet, or that I think it's a bad thing. That's the farthest thing from the truth. I LOVE the participatory nature of the internet. As I said above, I periodically google myself after I've published a big article in the LA Weekly. It helps me gauge how good a job I'm doing with my writing. When I see that an article has gotten a big response from those surfing the web -- and my Meltzer/Williams piece has probably gotten the best response yet -- I consider it a sign that I truly am doing something right. When people are discussing something on the web, blogging away, etc. it means they've been struck by something they've been reading or something they've heard or something they've seen. Hitting individual listeners is pretty much the goal of each and every creative person/writer person/musican person I've ever met, so I consider this a great thing indeed.

And to be honest, besides hearing about stuff from friends, I get most of my information on new music from a handful of....websites. Yes, websites. Admittedly most of 'em are not pure up-with-the-people sites -- I don't peruse too many webboards -- but they are very internet-like in character. My faves are:

- http://www.pitchforkmedia.com (for indie hipsterism from some extremely with it and gimlet eyed young observers -- not that I'm old...yet)

- http://www.allmusic.com (for the most comprhensive and handily available encyclopedia of reviews and information ANYWHERE)

- http://www.sxsw.com/music/daily_chord/ (for a fine, fine weblog of industry-ish information...though they also cite excellent reviewing and music writing when they see it)

As for what music criticism is good for? It's good for gauging what individual critics (who are really nothing but individual people) are excited about...basically music fans with a forum. What is the reason to write music criticism (I actually hate the term rock criticism)? Because you enjoy doing it...and you can find no better outlet for a certain kind of energy...and because it pays your rent. That's it.

I think that's that. BTW, the Melter article is available here: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/30/is-bemis2.php

And the Paul Wililams on here: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/30/is-bemis3.php

Better yet, pick up one of their books. Try Amazon.com. That's where I buy most of my books. Grrr....internet.

Why thank you. And yes, new answers to old threads are noted in the software, which is how I'm noticing this. More comprehensive thoughts later but I need to dash...

Well, that makes 'food critics' much more important than I'd realised....

I used to find some music critics (Jon Savage, John Gill) v. useful in the late 70's as an 'if you like that you might like this too' type of deal, but I can recall Jon Savage also opening up a totally different way of listening for me, and a way of embedding the listening into a wider conceptual setting (the paradigm shift).
But that's felt like a one-shot deal - and music since has become so multifaceted, so complex and so interwoven with other references that most writing about it is nearly incomprehensible to me now. I find David Toop, for example, almost literally (ahem) unreadable.
I also find this 'use other facts' approach (which I think you like mark s?) can generally be more like 'use irrelevancies dug up by the tenuous connections department'.

But then, I'm pretty fossilised by now - I gave up reading the music weeklies at the end of '81: can still remember ripping that year-end NME apart in a fit of absolute fucking rage, a final response to that year's shift towards both 'hedonism' and what were probably the early shoots of populist/ironic appreciation. (The endless stream of Me-Me-Me and Barthes/Heidegger/Cleverclogs guff produced by the Morley/Penman comedy duo were shite too.)

I've found reading this site (and dipping into the FreakyTrigger one) a lot more rewarding though because of the dialogue nature of it, and there seem to be a wide range of types and outlooks here. I'm hoping to use it soon to help me open up to other kinds of music, and find out about, er, stuff, by asking for guidance from contributors who I figure out I might initially have some common ground with......wait, where are you all going ?
*Sound of hooves stampeding away*

haha i like dylan but renaldo and clara is still NOT the greatest film ever filmed greatly on film by a great film-maker

Well I know they were not the same person...
I also don't think they addressed the same things, but I don't believe I'd implied that - or that the NME's Morecambe & Wise thought so either (actually, maybe it was actually Kierkegaard that one of them went through a phase of quoting).
Or did you mean (Barthes = !Heidegger)in some way?
Do you like both, or think one good and one guff?

You've made me wish I had kept some of the offending NME writings now, to see what it was about them that annoyed me so much...

whiney weighs in.

fuckin loved that, wtg dude

you go, whiney!

i have yet to tweet. maybe someday.

Nice speech. Crowd sourcing makes for lousy criticism because your average person cannot write worth crap, and they have crap tastes in music. I don't see the major music sites with in-depth reviews going away though. I do see Twitter fizzling out. I checked out his tweets, and they're even more truncated than Christgau's. Amusing but useless. Link 'em to a real review!

Great loss.

lolz @ introduction by Jonah Hill there

so much swearing!

I sympathize with a lot of what he says there and certainly the historical recap is accurate but .... its a weird defense of elitism, in a way (ie, the masses should be CHALLENGED by the likes of Lady Gaga/Linda Perry? And not by the likes of Fleet Foxes? What's being challenged exactly, and why...? I know those are just short, offhand remarks but whenever anyone goes into this sorta complaining about the indie rock audience not being into pop music or people being too satisfied with their pre-existing tastes my mind immediately leaps to these kinds of questions. Like, why is it taken as a given that its better to have eclectic tastes?)

or, to put it another way, why is one aesthetic value system priveleged over another, and what are the underlying assumptions of that value system... when it comes to indie rock dorks the standard criticism is that their listening habits are too narrow, too "nice", too comfortable, too white. Okay, but why are all those things de facto bad. The standard narrative of rock 'n' roll is that music that is inventive or challenges the status quo is good, music that breaks down social barriers is good, music that has some shock value is good, music that is energetic and brash is good, etc. But that aesthetic value system was developed 50 YEARS AGO, and constructed to challenge specific social conventions that largely no longer exist - why cling to these notions? Shouldn't they be challenged too? (isn't this where anti-rockist stuff comes into play?)

apologies if this all seems tangential

Great stuff, Whiney.

is it just that the accepted, underlying agenda of criticism is that they want everyone to be LIKE THEM - with eclectic, wide-ranging tastes? How narcissistic is that? Why should indie fans listen to Lady GaGa? Why should Merle Haggard fans listen to Snoop Dogg? (I like 3 out of those 4 fwiw) Is the underlying point that social divisions between listeners should be flattened out, creating a world where everybody likes everything, where everyone's a dilletante and nobody's an expert...?

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thanks for the kind words guys!

tl; dRT oh wait.

I checked out his tweets, and they're even more truncated than Christgau's. Amusing but useless. Link 'em to a real review!

I try not to make them useless. I think you can be useful in 140 characters! Some of them are more useful than others, but I really am trying to be a conduit for people to do the moderate amount of legwork of visiting a myspace page and making their own decisions.

I sympathize with a lot of what he says there and certainly the historical recap is accurate but .... its a weird defense of elitism, in a way (ie, the masses should be CHALLENGED by the likes of Lady Gaga/Linda Perry? And not by the likes of Fleet Foxes? What's being challenged exactly, and why...?

I just think that everyone should at the very least HEAR Katy Perry and Fleet Foxes and make up their own minds. I think the fact that MTV plays Lady Gaga because they are in the major label's pockets is no stupider a reason to give an artist exposure than NPR playing Fleet Foxes because they're trying to keep up with the Pitchforks of the world. I would love a world where these places hired music dorks to comb through everything and make up their own minds and take chances instead of just following google trends.

is it just that the accepted, underlying agenda of criticism is that they want everyone to be LIKE THEM - with eclectic, wide-ranging tastes? How narcissistic is that? Why should indie fans listen to Lady GaGa? Why should Merle Haggard fans listen to Snoop Dogg? (I like 3 out of those 4 fwiw) Is the underlying point that social divisions between listeners should be flattened out, creating a world where everybody likes everything, where everyone's a dilletante and nobody's an expert...?

I don't think everyone should like everything, but I think that maybe people can be missing a particular pop artist or country artist or even a noise artist that they can connect with in their own way just because it's harder to simply stumble across that stuff now.

Is the underlying point that social divisions between listeners should be flattened out, creating a world where everybody likes everything, where everyone's a dilletante and nobody's an expert...?

I think Whiney's point is not that everybody should LIKE everything but that everybody should BE EXPOSED TO everything.

does the internet (lolz ILM) not count as a place to stumble...?

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I mean that's actually kinda what I like about this place - if I have a fleeting curiosity about the goings-on in the world of black metal, I just go over to the rolling metal thread and sure enough someone knowledgeable there will hip me to some shit (but then I am probably not the kinda listener you're talking about...)

I think Whiney's point is not that everybody should LIKE everything but that everybody should BE EXPOSED TO everything

but... this takes an insane amount of time and effort and most people don't care about music that much.

Yeah, part of me definitely agrees with the argument that the Internet has made it easier for people to find niches, and occasionally that's to the detriment of being exposed to the broader culture, but at the same time, the Internet has also expanded my music tastes by an incredible degree and made it a hell of a lot easier to be a dilettante. For instance, I can keep up with pop music now without even needing to turn on the radio.

I think the fact that MTV plays Lady Gaga because they are in the major label's pockets is no stupider a reason to give an artist exposure than NPR playing Fleet Foxes because they're trying to keep up with the Pitchforks of the world.

this is totally true - the interesting thing to me is that those two audiences (the pop/MTV audience and the NPR audience) seem to have a really deep mutual loathing/distrust of one another, and what are the roots of that and how do their opposing aesthetics play out

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I liked the presentation. Started a little falteringly, but you got into a great swing, and made some excellent points. I want to believe that you can do what you say in 140 characters, but I'm not entirely convinced yet. 100 words, maybe...

Shakes

My speech basically says that the internet sucks as a place to stumble because every music site on it is so targeted to an audience. Being a target because thats easy clicks and manna for advertisers.

I'm NOT dogging the hard-working duders at Stereogum, but there's a reason they get more clicks/ad dollars than a superior (imo) site like Idolator: Sgum is targeted to a niche indie rock audience, and Idolator focuses on the general subject of "music."

Like, in some ways its really NOT okay to like both Fleet Foxes and Lady GaGa - and fans of one or the other will be suspicious/dismissive of you if you do. Similar to all those metal dudes complaining about Thurston Moore's Decibel interview ("FALSE METAL!" lolz)

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I mean, as much as I don't like Fleet Foxes, I would love if MTV played them. And if NPR considered Katy like they would Bela Fleck.

The audiences USED to be opposed to each other for a reason, but now indie rock is just another industry. Like people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music. Indie rock is just selling the "I'M REBELLIOUS!" lifestyle back to adults the same way it sold it to kids in the height of Green Day/Offspring mania in the 90s.

I appreciated the sticking up for "because" and exposure to stuff outside your personal tastes, but the NPR-Fleet Foxes thing felt like a pithy tangent. Can't say everyone should pay attention to critics and then bitch that NPR pays attention to critics, who have always pushed middlebrow stuff like that. Still was a fun rant, but just sayin'.

DrownedInSound gets mega clicks because editorial policy re; coverage is (generally) pretty damn specific (I wrote about jazz there once, to be fair), and Sean seems to spend all his time gerrymandering clicks by linking to things on DiS that link to reviews, rather than linking straight to reviews themselves; plus the whole forum structure thing, enabling comments on the reviews-as-threads thing, means you get each person looking at a review 20 times to see what's been said, rather than 20x the amount of people reading. Is the writing good? Some of it. A lot is very average student paper stuff though, and that's the problem.

I wish, in the time I wrote for Stylus and anywhere else online, that I'd made more of an attempt at brevity, definitely.

The audiences USED to be opposed to each other for a reason, but now indie rock is just another industry. Like people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music. Indie rock is just selling the "I'M REBELLIOUS!" lifestyle back to adults the same way it sold it to kids in the height of Green Day/Offspring mania in the 90s.

well that is the fuckin truth, no argument there

people actually buying into the idea that major-label creation Santigold is some bold swing against pop music

It does actually boggle my mind that ppl think this, esp. since her whole album is a big sloppy love letter to 80s New Wave pop.

I can see indie rock selling a lifestyle thing, but is it really an "I'M REBELLIOUS!" lifestyle?

In a doofy way. (Thus Away We Go.)

yep. It's 30-year-old Starbucks/IKEA customers fighting against the business suits they have to wear now and thinking they are awesome for it.

lol god help us if there's ever a luriqua jr.

talk about burying the lede!

great new euphemism!

congratulations, some dude sr.!

name the kid Vedder

i think after a family friend who's a huge NIN fan named his first son Trent we collectively put our foot down like NO ROCK STAR NAMES

i choose to believe your friend named his kid after Trent Tucker

some woman just came in and sold me a big stack of 70's rolling stones. so i'm gonna sit around and read name-brand critics all day.

Holy crap this thread exploded. Still not finished reading, but I'll just mention that the only critic I've been really following is John Mulvey. Ironically I never noticed him apart from others in the Uncut reviews, mainly because I don't buy it anymore, just skim at the bookstore. I subscribe to Uncut on Twitter, which is mostly incredibly annoying, because it updates what it's playing in the office almost hourly. The one thing that keeps me from canceling are the occasional reminders of Mulvey's posts in his Wild Mercury Sound blog. I like how he reviews promos pretty much when he hears them, long before the official release date when most reviews are coordinated to come out and duly collated at Metacritic, weeks after most of us have heard 'em.

http://www.uncut.co.uk/blog/index.php?blog=6&p=1208&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Looking at his half-year list and recent posts, a lot of this stuff isn't even leaked yet, like Fiery Furnaces, Cornershop, Wild Beasts and White Denim (a Texas band that has no U.S. distribution?) His casual blog-style writing isn't as polished as the 100 word blurbs in the glossies, which is a good thing. It's been a while since a single writer got me excited about multiple releases in a given week. I'm currently listening to Arbouretum and Sleepy Sun, which I wasn't aware of until seeing them in his blog. David Fricke sort of plays this role at Rolling Stone, and would do well to follow the Wild Mercury Sound model and expand on his casual album reviews.

I presume with its overpriced cover price and high overhead, that Uncut's days are numbered. Hopefully Mulvey and some others like him will be able to maintain an audience, perhaps by banding together into their own site?

― some dad (some dude), Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:15 AM (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^ i thought this qualified as an announcement guys

― some dude, Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:42 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i knew u were reproducing but even i assumed this was abt your dad jokes

now 100% more authentic

I barely graduated high school and went to three semesters of community college; while there, I met my wife, and academics went right out the goddamn window.

― unperson, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:42 PM (20 hours ago)

This would be the Curvy Colombian Wife, right? Spina Biffita?

Bizarre that Mulvey lists Alela Diane at #9 in that list, and no Neko Case at all. (Speaking as someone who loves both albums, but really no comparison.) I wish I remember who I was reading/watching/listening to recently who said that the music critic is transforming/will transform into a curator-like position instead - probably lots of people have been saying that lately. It's something that confused me at Whiney's argument; yes, everyone can download the albums for themselves and render their own judgement, but who has time for that?

Looking for a good place to put this. Failing.

A pretty good conversation between Carl "Let's Talk About Love" Wilson and Jesse "Jian Gomeshi's a Raging Pervert" Brown, on Brown's podcast: http://canadalandshow.com/podcast/last-music-critic

Bit dull. Also, hyperbolic and meta. Would rather he was just talking about new music that he's into etc. That should be the job of a music critic. Next podcast: "what does it mean when the writer we're calling the last music critic goes on a show and never discusses any music."

"the writer we're calling the last music critic"--do people actually say that?

"The Last Music Critic" is the name of the podcast episode. Starts off with Brown saying stuff like "Carl Wilson changed the way we think about music. I don't know if that's hyperbole or not". I'm listening to this thinking "YES. IT'S HYPERBOLE!"

Thanks--why the royal "we" is a terrible idea. (Not really a knock on Wilson; definitely a knock on whoever would make such a statement.)

In the podcast Brown goes on about how he (I guess as a teenager) hated hip-hop but finally started to like it in the early 90s, realizing his own musical snobbery. In 2007 Wilson did his book about Celine Dion which somehow reminded Brown of his own experience (of shedding his rockism or whatever). In this way, Wilson "changed the way we think about music". It's all a bit silly. I'd rather have Wilson just do his job and talk about whatever music is on his radar right now.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying