Professsionalization
There's been some talk about "professionalization" lately, and at the risk of being overly "me-too," allow me to point you to a couple of antecedents: the Pazz & Jop '06 comments (near the bottom, Barthel to Weingarten), and an article I wrote for Flagpole about the professionalization of indie. I point this out not just because of narcisscism, but because the Flagpole article puts a decent amount of blame on the bands themselves, which the current discussion seems reluctant to do. It's something I harp on, and maybe I'm coming from the wrong perspective, but the state of criticism has an effect on the choices bands make, especially in a genre driven by criticism like indie. Bands aren't affected by blog-hype only after they become the subject of it. They're aware of it when they're forming, when they're starting to play, when they send out their demos. The presence of a brass ring makes everyone lean out farther, you know? It's too easy to paint this as victimization.Here's a selection:
What this means is that "indie musician" is now a viable temporary career
choice. If you're willing to play it safe and hew to a certain sound, you can
tour nationally, put out a record or two, and have a not entirely uncomfortable
life. Being in a band seems to have become the modern equivalent of the Grand
Tour: something superficially cultured and bohemian that represents a deliberate
step on the path to moving to the suburbs, raising a family, and having a steady
job. It fills up one's 20s....
Indie is derided as a middle-class pursuit. (But that was what made it so
great in the first place! In finding a middle path, indie-rock combined things
in new ways.) Now, though, it's become thoroughly professionalized. "Musician
wanted" ads might as well include a list of the position's duties, opportunities
for advancement and preferred resumé formats.
Interestingly, this shift has also produced a corresponding
professionalization in the apparatus surrounding indie music, which is even more
surprising: indie's whole ethos was Do It Yourself. But now, you can hire
publicity companies (staffed by cool people who graduated from a liberal arts
college, so you don't feel weird about it) to promote your music, graphic
designers to make your album packaging (so when people get your album it doesn't
look unprofessional), and get your picture in magazines catering to the hipster
demographic because you got style. Whereas indie outfits used to be staffed by
weirdoes and misfits with the time to devote to boosting the music they were
passionate about, now your parents will fund your internship with Nasty Little
Man so you can get +1s at the best shows, find yourself chumming it up at South
By Southwest and go on to make $30k a year doing marketing at Matador Records,
even though your degree was in Environmental Studies.
The weirdest thing, of course, has undoubtedly been the blogs. Arguing
about bands and making mixtapes used to be something you did with your friends,
or maybe on online message boards. But now advertisers will pay you to do this,
and bands and labels will send you free CDs, and this professionalization of
argumentation has produced a certain amplification...
The result, as with the mainstream incursions, has been a distortion in the
discourse surrounding indie. When bands are careers rather than artistic
pursuits, they're dumpable as soon as they become unproductive and unprofitable,
and the same thing goes for writing. Professionalization necessarily entails a
loss of community - you are competing against these other bands and publicists
and bloggers for the small share of money available to you, after all - and so
where there was once an awareness of the sound left unexplored, the band left
undiscovered, and an effort to fill that slot, now there's either grasping for
the last piece of cake by going with the tried and true or total disengagement
by retreating into distancing abstractions that no one can really call good or
bad.
Indie has been entrepreneurial in the past, but now it's codified so much
that it's become a profession; even experimental music on the national stage now
feels like a series of rote gestures you can see coming a mile away. No longer
are we contributing to the whole by contributing something new. We're merely
claiming our share, our reward for a short, short lifetime of loyal fandom.
Labels: blogtalk, critics, indie rock, professionalization
posted by Mike B. @ 8:13 PM
14 Comments:
Man, I forgot about that comment I wrote for the Voice. I'm pretty proud of it, that came out very well, better than I remember.
It's a good one.
You could probably tell that I was referencing that very article/discussion on porpoise. (But I already linked to ya elsewhere anywayz.)
And as I said over at Fluxblog today (well, I tried to say something coherent), I don't really care about the vicious hype circle, or whatever, because my interest in music as far as the internet goes is shooting the shit with people, sharing ideas, creating knowledge or whatever. A band can sell itself to whatever blog it wants and do something interesting on accident, but to be honest I'll listen to (if not like) whatever the people I want to associate with are listening to! And no one I particularly care to talk to has much interesting to say about plenty of these bands. So (1) why listen to them, and (2) why listen to them and force myself to say something about them? Doesn't make for very good criticism, or very good chat. This new Britney alb, on the other hand, I will talking about for a while. (It's awesome.)
Don't want to be totally disingenuous/ a jerk here, I do end up listening to plenty of these bands. Some of them I like and some of them I don't, but I don't care about most of them -- who's big now, Beirut? He ruined a darts game once with his awfulness (who puts on the Brooklyn Vegan podcast at a bar, anyway??) and I've never forgiven him. But I dunno, I should probably write something about Marnie Stern sometime because she needs more hype. (And I bought her album because of a rec from Fluxblog, I think!)
Oh yeah, no worries, it's just interesting to see how it metastasized...
Arguably this whole bruhaha right now is the "people who talk about music" coming to terms with the fact that they're not the only game on the block anymore. I think the expansion of the music blogosphere into hypeblogs was dismaying at the time and made talky-type people feel old and irrelevent and marginalized, but maybe this'll make everyone realize that we're all still here and still talking, and now we can move on to talk about other stuff.
What's funny is that in the mainstream pop world, this argument is not only totally irrelevant; it's actually pretty much the only way I listen to music! (Google blogsearch is my friend.) I don't have any problem whatsoever with content-less/hype hype music blogs, in fact depend on them for new music most of the time. One thing I was getting at at Fluxblog -- let's say these uncritical MP3 dumpsiters all of a sudden "got critical" and wrote about this stuff. Would we pay attention to them anyway? If not, why are we (the talky-talk types) irrelevant (there seems to be a feeling that we are), and how do we make ourselves relevant again? (This seems to be a rallying issue in Tom Ewing's new Pitchfork column.) Do we need to be relevant and popular (not-marginalized), or just feel that way? When my comments get up to 30-50 or so, I stop feeling marginalized, even if there are only a half dozen regular contributors...
And hell, let's talk about the continuing LACK of professionalization of nerdy music people critspeak! How do we get our shit together, people?? I JUST LOST MY 401K!
Well like I say, I think it produces a certain distortion in the discourse. The hypeblogs are ostensibly colleagues, and when they're all talking about the same few bands, it seems like "why aren't you guys talking about these bands too?" And so then people do feel a need to comment on bands that we have basically nothing to say about except "they're not very good." I mean, look, we're all talking about the Black Kids now, right? And it's not like anything interesting has been said about the band itself.
One of the great benefits of the early years (har har har) was that certain bands did seem to get latched onto as things to talk about, but not because they were new, because they were producive sources of inquiry. People bitched about blogbands or complained like "oh you guys didn't know about them already?" but some interesting shit came out of discussions of MIA, R. Kelly, etc. Hypeblogs shift the common subjects of discussion to bands there's essentially nothing to say about, because they only have 4 songs out.
The hypeblogs are ostensibly colleagues
(Werner Herzog voice:) This is where we disagree.
The disconnect in this argument seems to me to be: if we're calling "the people who we could conceivably talk to/interact with in a critical sorta way" our colleagues, then aren't uncritical blogs, by definition, not our colleagues?
I would hardly call my one-stop-pop-shop blogs "colleagues," but I also wouldn't want them to go away. I'm comfortable having it both ways -- they're in a different department entirely, and I just don't look to them for criticism. I'm usually way more concerned with the pseudo-critical things said even in the relatively small critical circle that I actually pay attention to.
I think we basically agree--I almost said something to this effect in a previous comment--but when I say "ostensibly" I mean "everyone's acting as if we are," which I think is true, evidenced, as I say, by the fact that there's all this chatter about Black Kids et al right now. I wouldn't mind seeing this division made, but it's something we're all going to have to come to on our own. Maybe this discussion, as I say, is the start of that. I was joking with Scott from PGWP that the critbloggers should pass around our own Dogme 07 manifesto in which we all agreed to cross-link extensively, etc.
That said, the fact is that what we talk about is almost as important as what is said in our line of criticism. The perception that there's a wide interest in a particular band can lead you to engage with something you might otherwise ignore, and wide interest in a band you're indifferent about can turn it to hate, and hate is a more productive critical position than indifference, after all.
Blogme. Ha!
This old guy recalls that around 1981 writer/promoter/sometime activist Jim Fouratt and Rockpool dj record Pool president Mark Josephson put together the New Music Seminar in NYC, which like the CMJ conventions (and CMJ magazine that existed at that time) sought to professionalize an indie label world. There were folks then trying to hire themselves as publicists, etc. so this 'professionalism' you speak of now may be more high-tech and more prevalent but it is certainly not new.
I think what I'm getting at (and this is only tangentially related to what Mike was talking about originally, I think) is a kind of "pseudo-professionalization" effective mostly in tone that favors fast blow-by-blow updates (ticker action) over analysis.
I said this development was "disheartening," but honestly it's also pretty easy to ignore, unless it's where you live. I think this is what Jess is getting at, though I think Idolator could just as easily not live there/not acknowledge Black Kids if they don't find them to be of any worth -- N.B. I still have no idea what Black Kids even sound like, despite allegedly talking about them for two days. Also N.B., for a while there in the Maura-only phase I was reading Idolator as my #1 teenpop site, but they seem to have backed away from it. No word on the Britney leak yet?! (It's great!)
Not so easy to ignore (for me) are people whom I do consider colleagues who want to blame "the culture" for their own refusal to try harder (I do this sometimes, too, but encourage just about anyone to call bullshit when I do). Standing in (what you believe to be) a cess pool and complaining that it smells like shit doesn't make for a very good conversation.
(Well it could spark a decent conversation, but it would depend on everyone finding something else to talk about -- which is starting to happen with these little conversational flare-ups.)
Anyway, if people don't want to talk about ____, they should guide the conversation themselves, since that's exactly what it is they (the critics) think they're in a position to do! (The truly uncritical bloggers and their minions will never follow along -- this is why they do what they do in the first place.)
What riles me up most (not that it's very hard to rile me up) is actively looking for criticism and finding writers spraying their audience with vague contempt with no engaging ideas in it whatsoever. Every "piece" implicitly begins "hey, you people," and we're either supposed to be in on the joke already or the butt of it.
I think that cess pool comment's going to look even worse in the morning. Oh well.
You can always cry cess pool if it's actually an issue, but I don't believe that it's the issue here: what I find interesting is that, across the board, there's little to no value judgment being placed on the music -- Black Kids don't SUCK or RULE (though having just listened to them I can safely call them ridiculously pleasant); they're just stand-in players in this big audience-problem. So vague, if not necessarily invalid (though probably clumsy and unworkable) social problems are being hinted at without any real follow-through on the social analysis. Not sure which of these I actually believe: (1) Because it implicates just about everyone who even remotely cares about this stuff, (2) because (related) most of the people discussing it fit their own profiles (be they white or middle class or part of the quasi- to uncritical innernet hype machine) and hold an uncomfortable position in suggesting alternatives (and don't really suggest any) (3) because no particularly interesting questions are being asked, so no interesting answers are being discussed. Such as: is indie rock actually listened to primarily by people in an upper middle class bracket? Most of my friends come from a middle-class background, but are for all intents and purposes are currently lower-middle-class going on poor according to their tax forms. I mean, we're talking about an audience with like a mean age of 25 or so here, right? So the normal class stuff is transformed somewhat by current (transitional) reality versus background -- I could call myself "middle class," but it's missing major shades of how my social life actually works, not that I fit typical indie demographic info these days (but at least I don't have to select "16+" to listen to RD anymore -- I just can't listen to it at all since their redesign, oh well).
Frank Kogan suggested over at poptimists: "this split isn't necessarily upper-middle vs. others, but rather upper-middle-niche-bohos-who-are-rapidly-being-accepted vs. mainstream, and the mainstream itself has its divisions between preps [who I'm guessing - emphasize the word "guess" - are veering emo and indie these days] and skaters etc. [who I'm guessing are going pretty emo these days][hmmm]."
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