Monday, October 22, 2007
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
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
I just read the two-chapter exerpt of Carl Wilson's
Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, about the Celine Dion album, and one part kinda jumped out at me:
"[I]t’s curious how often critics’ “own enjoyment” still takes us all down similar paths at once."
This reminded me of an article I was reading last week trying to figure out why thousand of different news journalists all seem to come up with the same stories on a daily basis, and why the nightly newscasts on the different networks all lead with the same stories despite not discussing it with each other. The answer was that there are certain news rules, which can be divided up into "regulative" and "constituative" rules, the former of which decides how news is to be gathered and the letter decides what is news. So, for instance, ideas about balance and objectivity would be regulative rules, but the thousand of little signposts journalists have in their head about what exactly is a story in the first place are constituative rules. So for music critics, there are clear rules about how a review is to be set up and what processes you should go through before writing a review (even when these rules are violated, they are consciously violated, as when Meltzer writes a review without listening to the album or Pitchfork posts a YouTube video of a monkey drinking his own pee as a Vines review), but there are also a shared, constantly shifting set of guidelines about what's an important album and what's not. The records that get lots of critical notice aren't necessarily the albums individual critics love the most; they're just the albums most critics will pay attention to and write about, no matter how strong their feelings. The fact that something obscure lands near the top of a year-end list doesn't necessarily mean everyone agrees it's the best, it's just that lots of people think other people should be listening to it. The precise things that make an album attract lots of critical attention are hard to nail down and can't usually be consciously included, but once an album lands in that category, it's easy to see the signs.
The article also talked about, though, the fact that these rules aren't naturally occurring; they come from the audience that the journalists are serving. So ideas about how a review should be written come from what an audience needs from a review, and rules about what constitutes a meaningful, important album come from critics' perception of the public's need-to-know. This was, after all, why critics ultimately felt secure ignoring pop music: the public was taking care of that on their own. But just as some stories are news because the public is perceived to need the information, critics think the public needs to be informed about difficult musics. Wilson says it himself: "my usual critical leanings [are] toward knotty music like art rock, psych-folk, post-punk, free jazz or the more abstract ends of electronics and hip-hop. I write about such sounds in the belief that 'difficult' music can help shake up perceptions, push us past habitual limits." Music critics elucidate the public by picking these albums, they don't express their own tastes.
We all like to think we're unique snowflakes, of course, but music critics--and, to a certain degree, serious music fans--are also professionals. There are rules. And we do fight about them, but these fights always seem to have as one view the idea that the rules don't exist. But they do, and they come from a very particular place: the public. The article also talks about how the public's needs for news journalism are now changing, so news rules may change too. The music industry is changing, and music critics tried to change what the public wants from music criticism. It seems like they failed, though, and the old patterns are still in place, strong as ever.
(crossposted from poptimists)
Labels: carl wilson, critics, pop, theory
Thursday, March 1, 2007
- TV reminds me of probably the best argument for
House's continued excellence: next week's episode features Dave Matthews playing a guy with brain damage. Allow me to repeat that. Next week, we will be able to turn on our television sets and see Dave Matthews, South African-born songwriter of such tunes as "Ants Marching," playing--and one can only assume he does so convincingly--a man with brain damage.
Mmm.
- This bolsters another thing TV told me tonight, or more specifically
Walter Mossberg, personal technology reporter for the
Wall Street Journal, told me. Walter
Mossberg says that TV critics say that we are currently in a golden age for television. I don't know who he's talking about, and I am suspicious given his claim to only watch things broadcast in high-definition, but I suspect those apocryphal TV critics are right. As far as I can tell, it's the only golden age we're living through right now, so enjoy it!
Labels: critics, dave matthews, House, notes, TV
Thursday, February 22, 2007
- Due to some, ah, internal problems at the clapclap household, the above has not been edited as well as it should, so if you're one of the early birds, you're likely to see a different version later tomorrow. I'm sure there are any number of errors both factual and grammatical in there right now, but they'll be gone soon enough. If this bothers you, click your heels together three times and say, "It's only a blog..."
- Today's post was partially a reaction to a review of
The Sarah Silverman Program by Tad Friend, in
The New Yorker. You can
read it here. As a whole, it's good, but some of the the things he says along the way are absolutely baffling. For instance, he writes:
Sarah’s crowd punishes sexual indeterminacy: when she suddenly decides that she’s a lesbian, everyone scoffs. 'As a lesbian, I resent your laughter,' Sarah says. 'And all laughter.' Is the joke about identity politics? Lesbians? Or is it on us: So you think lesbians are humorless? At times, you wonder whether you’re laughing with Silverman or at her, and then you realize that she’s laughing at you.
The last point is good, but as for what comes before: dude,
it's a joke about lesbians. Trust me on this, I went to Oberlin. I've heard that joke before.
- I have
two reviews in Flagpole this week, of local Athens bands King of Prussia and The 63 Crayons. The latter will hopefully be interesting even if you haven't heard the band, but the former is actually about music, and it's very positive. I reference the New Pornographers, and that's quite intentional; it's baffling to me why bands are imitating other indie bands but not that one. Well, King of Prussia, intentionally or not, sound like the New Pornographers, and I couldn't be happier about it. Their CD, only seven songs ong, is absolutely wonderful, and I really hope they get some wider attention.
Here is their Myspace page, where you can hear two of their best songs: "Terrarium" and "Misadventures of the Campaign Kids." If you like the New Pornographers, or good guitar-pop in general, you should really check them out. (Ha, and I see they have now changed their motto. Thanks guys!)
Labels: critics, flagpole, king of prussia, notes, reviews, The New Yorker
