Where you used to have quotes from the NME in adverts, now you can have actual people’s opinion of a product!
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| — | digital rep from Warner Music at the 140 Characters conference in London. |
Or: "Get off my lawn, I'm trying to have a Multi-Family Garage Sale."
Maybe this is another thing about the appeal of this particular music to people who write online — it’s in some ways a reflection? People on all sides are trying to muddle through their creative impulses with tools that allow for instant publishing/dissemination, and by extension the impulse to get something out overtakes the impulse to make something “right” in whatever abstract sense.
I think that’s very likely it. (talking about “chillwave”). “Perfect is the enemy of done” and all that - a big current in internet thought.
The little inconsistencies in musicians’ performances aren’t just glitches, though: They’re exactly what we respond to as listeners — the part that feels like “style,” or even like “rock.” The exciting part of guitar-bass-drum-voice music is the alchemy of specific musicians playing with each other, and the way those musicians’ idiosyncratic senses of timing and articulation and emphasis relate to each other.
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The Death Of Mistakes Means The Death Of Rock - Monitor Mix Blog : NPR (via desnoise) This is the same argument Joe Carducci used to use about why dance music sucked - I am actually pretty sympathetic to it (in Wolk’s articulation, not Carducci’s), more than you might expect given my tastes. But I wonder if it explains my tastes to some extent: I suspect it’s part of why I like a lot of old rock and not a lot of new rock (though the stuff I DO enjoy, like Fall Out Boy, is doubtless guilty of TONS of this kind of sin - but I don’t relate to it as “a band making music together” at all). Luckily, there’s a lot more out there than rock for me to enjoy so I don’t feel the loss as keenly. |
Carrie Brownstein leads a discussion with label heads from Matador, Merge, Sub Pop, Kill Rock Stars, Jagaguwar, and Saddle Creek. There’s a lot of interesting stuff mixed in with stuff you’ve heard a dozen times before, but the thing that interested me most — almost certainly because I have some involvement in it — is the discussion of how much power Pitchfork has in driving the success of some records. It’s a complicated thing. While Best New Music can really get people going, it only seems to work when the audience is already going to be interested. There are plenty of highly rated records on Pfork that the audience just seems to shrug off entirely. Also, as a person who puts a great deal of effort into writing for the site, it’s disheartening whenever people talk about how grades below a mid-7 are ignored entirely, in part because I know that’s true of so many readers. Internally, however, grades in the 6 and 7 range are considered to be positive scores!
5-7 pointers are also a lot harder to write. You’re either dealing with a strong but flawed record, which means you need to be convincing about its strengths and its flaws, or you’re dealing with a mediocre or generic record, in which case it’s just a pestilence to write about interestingly.
And yes, people don’t read them, but I don’t really care about that. The structure of web audiences mean that 90% of the audience of ANYTHING aren’t reading it, or they’re skimming it, or they stop a quarter of the way through, or whatever. That’s the devil’s bargain that comes with such a huge potential readership.
What I do is try to put something in every review I write that I think is actually an interesting point or idea whether or not you care about the band or are ever going to hear the record. I don’t always manage it but that’s the idea. Probably it says something awful about the times in which we live that I have to think of ideas as ‘easter eggs’ like this, but oh well!
Nixonland Notes
Finished Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland yesterday - a romp of a book, 700 pages of politics and swearing in which, to be honest, very little of “the 60s” comes out well. I don’t really know if Perlstein’s central “Nixonland” metaphor stands up - in fact I don’t really even think I can summarise it that well: that Nixon’s populist politics of flattering people’s resentment created a new kind of division in America, maybe? It works as a way to frame a very entertaining book but as analysis - not so sure. I wasn’t convinced that this was something Nixon created rather than just something he was particularly good at.
But the book isn’t just about Nixon - it’s also a second story, about Nixon’s enemies - first the Democrat political machines, and then the New Left that looked to supplant them. Perlstein is a rare kind of historian in that he’s fiercely opinionated without actually coming across as partisan - if he’s on anyone’s side in this electoral narrative, it’s the much-abused voter’s. The political figures in Nixonland he treats with contempt, but it’s a shaded contempt: disgust (giving way to horrified laughter) at Nixon’s chicanery, boiling frustration at the nihilism and naivety of his opponents.
Two relevant lessons stand out. The first is that early adopters are cultural catnip but political poison. If you’re on one side of a big social change it can be incredibly difficult to empathise with people who are on the other side of it, and incredibly easy to underestimate their numbers or clout. So you downplay those numbers, and dismiss people as “not getting it”, because the change is inevitable, right? And this leads to the second lesson, which is that a strong narrative is the most powerful force in politics (or business or anything) but only as long as you don’t take it for granted. A strong narrative is like a winning novel proposal: a terrific first chapter and a powerful concept, but the risk is that the concept is so good you think the book will write itself, and surprise surprise it doesn’t, and the detail kills you.
We’re looking for people to play in the 2010 Pop World Cup. Competitive new music discovery! What could be finer? Sign up on Freaky Trigger at the link above.
Everyone’s missed the clever part of Rupert Murdoch’s broadside against Google last week. Murdoch said he’d block Google from spidering his websites’ content, and may use litigation against public broadcasters such as the BBC, who use material spawned in his papers. The conventional wisdom from web gurus was that he was off his rocker, and his comments were the last gasp of a Luddite. And that shows you what the conventional wisdom of web pundits is worth.
What Murdoch has done is say the unspeakable. He’s offered a roadmap for taming Google - and a re-ordering of everything we take for granted about the web today. He can’t do so alone, which is why his real audience included media and entertainment executives who lack the courage to think such heresies. But he invited the prospect that without its expensively-produced material, Google stops being the omnivorous destroyer of their livelihoods they suppose it is today. And this, in turn, means Google’s own investment decisions today may be horribly misplaced.
Good - or at the very least interesting - analysis of Murdoch’s paywall strategy from The Register.
At the same time, especially with regard to Stylus and Plan B and now Idolator, one finds a slow limiting of a burst of spirit that had had a good decade-long run, of balancing out the passion of writing and thoughtful debate via the vehicle of music — and quite often the subjects under discussion reached far beyond the notes heard and the lyrics comprehended — with an appreciation for the here and now, that engaged with music that was six seconds old as much as it was six decades, and sought to do so beyond the realm of simple yeas or nays or presumptions of one particular style of music ruling over all else.
Ned waxes elegiac over the passing of a critical era. It’s a gloomy way of framing it: I think there’s something in it, though. What I think happened is that a bunch of people who were fans of, or had been inspired by, print music writing in the 90s decided to have a pop at seeing how the stuff they’d been inspired by might work on the web. The source materials were stuff like (variously) Melody Maker, Sassy, The Wire, Village Voice, Smash Hits…
…and the answer, ultimately, was no, it mostly didn’t work, or at least not commercially. The “burst of spirit” you’re talking about was a transitional thing, I think. Stylus, I would say, is WAY more fondly remembered now than it was admired when it was going. Plan B is the same. Freaky Trigger’s relevance rested on NYLPM and was pretty much wiped out when MP3 blogs came along. ILX is splendid and wide-ranging and way better than it was a few years ago, but the barriers to entry are pretty daunting.
Idolator was good because it was being done by somebody who loved music, and who believed in music writing as something inclusive and intelligent and questioning, but who was also commercially aware and web-experienced enough to know that just ‘writing well about music’ wouldn’t necessarily mean much on its own. If Maura couldn’t make that site’s numbers work - and I do mean “if”: I have no idea if that was or wasn’t why they parted ways - I don’t know who could.
The two “transitional phase” sites that really have succeeded on their own terms are Pitchfork in the US (always a weird exception to anything, and I’m not even sure Ryan WAS inspired by any particular publication or type of writing) and Popjustice in the UK, which has managed to actually be a Smash Hits for its era. Of course, neither are as generalist as Idolator or Stylus. That particular dream is pretty much gone. But not, I’d guess, for individual listeners, who’ll pick their critical sources from a huge range of partisan voices which they can blend as their feed-reading leisure.
Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.
As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”
There is some controversy over this on Twitter, where a lot of people feel it should be “defriend” or “de-friend”.
Which is it - UNfriend or DEfriend?
