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poptimistsChuck Eddy fired from Village Voice music section.
No Eddy, no NYLPM. (about half our links used to be to Voice features. The other half were slagging off the Guardian)
No Eddy on the Voice, no ILXers in the Voice (and fewer Voicers in ILX)
No Eddy, no ILX come to think of it. (thf. no Poptimists)
ect ect
Best of luck Chuck in whatever you do next.
The future of print music writing has looked murky for a long time: I worry somewhat for the good writers and people I know who are involved in it.
(time for DJ Martian's new darkwave zine then!)
No Eddy, no NYLPM. (about half our links used to be to Voice features. The other half were slagging off the Guardian)
No Eddy on the Voice, no ILXers in the Voice (and fewer Voicers in ILX)
No Eddy, no ILX come to think of it. (thf. no Poptimists)
ect ect
Best of luck Chuck in whatever you do next.
The future of print music writing has looked murky for a long time: I worry somewhat for the good writers and people I know who are involved in it.
(time for DJ Martian's new darkwave zine then!)
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 11:07 am (UTC)This is bad news indeed.
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Date: 2006-04-19 11:21 am (UTC)On the other hand it kind of seems inevitable given the way the mass media is developing, and we don't know the full story at all. Catherine picked up the Voice when we were in New York and HATED the reviews (mainly the film ones, but music too) because they were impossible to read and didn't tell her the information she wanted to know (plot, genre, rating, I guess) in advance. (Someone who LIKES short and summary reviews! GO figure.). (And yes, the incredibly stylised writing that had evolved to make short pieces into think pieces was equal parts beautiful and tiresome.) Is there a place for rock-crit by geeks for geeks in the mainstream? Probably not, ultimately -- however sad I am about it, how do we move on? Well, by looking at it as opportunity. There's so little criticism of the level that Chuck, Frank etc. aspire to in the mass press, so why compete there -- I can imagine something more like a literary journal where more interesting work could be done, freed from the need to be continually relevant / short etc. Of course this would mean no-one makes their living writing well (as it were) BUT isn't there something odd about the people-who-obsess-about-music communicating to a majority of people who pretty much by definition DON'T (i.e. don't obsess). So a medium which circulated amongst people who DO would avoid the conflict.
On the OTHER (third) hand, the stuff about being 'local' does sound like grade A bullshit. If there's anywhere where local means universal, isn't it somewhere like New York? I don't get it, but the *local* politics of all this is obviously a mystery to me.
I don't want to sound like an arsehole but as someone who is not trying to make their living writing about music this just doesn't seem like the end of the world.
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Date: 2006-04-19 11:31 am (UTC)The history of rockwrite is full of strange local 'bubbles' of goodness where it all comes together for a few years and then vanishes, and the Eddy VV was one of those I think, but I do think the mass media trends make it less likely those bubbles will occur.
(I particularly agree that the supercompressed post-Xgau style is trying, as well as being (like you say) often beautiful once you 'crack the code', and I'm guessing this is where the "serious"/"academic" stuff comes from. The compression makes the rhythm of the prose so hectic and unnatural - it's like reading a Melt-Banana record! But I'd still prefer 100 words of that than 100 words of a Dave Simpson Guardian capsule.)
no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 11:31 am (UTC)Voice compression
Date: 2006-04-22 03:28 am (UTC)Re: Voice compression
Date: 2006-04-22 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 11:29 am (UTC)(no chuck in the voice in the 80s, no "my" wire)
(wire after me is a lesson in the possibilities and problems of a medium circulated among obsessives only: i think this "oddness" is the heart of said project actually -- an interface between two worlds that want to seperate and mustn't be allowed to
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Date: 2006-04-19 11:34 am (UTC)This is why people should never use the word 'demographic' to me in public and mean it, that word makes me livid.
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Date: 2006-04-19 11:43 am (UTC)- how well the decision-makers understand the supply and the demand
- how much attention they're paying to minor bits of their papers/vast neevil capitalist empires (I think a lot of the problems w/the 'decline of the music press' is that it's just EASIER now for businesses to analyse the performance of niche concerns)
- whether it's fashionable in the sector to tolerate eccentricity or act tough for the markets (this fluctuates WILDLY from business to business and moment to moment)
blah blah.
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Date: 2006-04-19 11:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 12:01 pm (UTC)- magazine's music section low on ad revenue
- THEREFORE they lose the editor and put someone new in
- magazine loses even more ad revenue
- the reasoning then becomes not "We made a mistake changing it" but "This is a general downward trend and there was nothing we could have done." Music section is axed entirely.
The self-image of business is strongly weighted to protect any executive decisions (see also: blaming bad performance on people's reluctance to 'embrace change'). It's only when the failure is public and huge - eg New Coke - that reversal is accepted.
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Date: 2006-04-19 01:32 pm (UTC)As an aside from this, does the NME sell more now than it did in the early-mid 90s, after embarking upon this massive programme of brand-building and ever more tightly-defining its demographic (so it now reads 'fans of a maximum of 12 bands)?
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Date: 2006-04-19 01:36 pm (UTC)The NME brand building has been about delivering a tight and highly desirable demographic to advertisers rather than increasing circulation, though.
I don't know what it did in the mid-90s. When I started reading in the Madchester era it was on about 120k, which then was (I think) seen as fairly healthy but not impressive.
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Date: 2006-04-19 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 11:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 12:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 02:58 pm (UTC)There's no NYLPM now anyway. :(
This is very sad news, I love Eddy's writing and he's done a lot to nurture young writers.
the judge said...
Date: 2006-04-19 03:07 pm (UTC)This seems to me very acute -- and the reason I can't articulate about why this definitely feels like a bad thing.
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Date: 2006-04-19 03:21 pm (UTC)OTM.
It isn't certain that no ILXers would be in the new New Times Voice; but if Westword (the Denver NT affiliate) is any model, reviews will be fewer and even shorter and most of the section will be one-source artist profiles of bands performing in the upcoming week. That's what most "local coverage" actually is in Westword. New music ed. Rob Harvilla didn't seem like a jerk the several times he'd posted on ILX, and Chris O'Connor, canned editor of the Phoenix NT mag, so not an NT fan, nonetheless speaks well of Rob's writing.
Also, I too saw no source for the phrase "too academic"; I'd heard that the complaint was "too pedantic." And my gut feeling is also that management didn't want to pay Chuck's salary, though that's 100 percent my speculation and, even if it's true, I doubt that we'll ever know.
As for the business reasons for the change in emphasis, I doubt that there are any. I think this is all about Michael Lacey's self-image, his compensating for his intellectual insecurity by imposing a big blustery capital J "We go out and get the stories" journalism bullshit on everything. That's based on how he comes across in the few interviews I've seen. I could be wrong. But if Westword is any indication, the man actually has no interest in getting the poop on how "the deal went down," despite what he says. Westword's office is six blocks from both the Colorado state capitol and the Denver city hall and has rarely covered either (I was going to say "never," but I really don't read the thing enough anymore to say this for sure). So there's been little attempt to probe into how power and authority actually work anywhere, though Michael Roberts has reported on Clear Channel's attempts to bully their way into dominance of the local concert scene. Basically, Westword is lifestyle, consumer guides, and human-interest stories, none of which I have any objection to in principle and none of which preclude actual ideas, if only the writers had any; the artist profiles end up as puff pieces, mostly.
When people here say "Westword," the usually add the suffix "is boring."
Send Me Money I Will Need It Spice
P.S. Alex, I've been long meaning to write you just to assure you that I'm not obsessed with tracking you down and trying harass you intellectually; that I really would like to learn from you. Anyway, I had what turned out to be an obsolete e-address for you, but I think I've located a current one, so maybe someday you'll get a not-too-taxing message from me.
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Date: 2006-04-19 03:30 pm (UTC)Lovelorn Spice
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Date: 2006-04-19 03:35 pm (UTC)and I meant to emphasize that most artist profiles in Westword are of national acts (Dinosaur Jr., for instance) that are coming through. So "local" means local venue, not local act.
Rephrasing Spice
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Date: 2006-04-19 09:06 pm (UTC)most of the section will be one-source artist profiles of bands performing in the upcoming week
I have written one of these for the Voice, at Chuck's urging, and indeed a few profiles not written by me have already run if anyone wants to check 'em and out and see the brave new world to come. I felt uncomfortable posting this in the ILX thread for some reason (I="Eppy"="Mike Barthel"), but everyone I've told that the Voice is looking to do more local band profiles has thought it was a really good thing, although admittedly I guess most of those people are in local bands. And I think if they're "puff pieces" that has more to do with local writers writing about local bands than any institutional bias. I'd probably prefer not to write profiles of bands I loathed if for no other reason than I might end up on the same bill as them at some point (and indeed this has already happened a few times!), but I also wouldn't necessarily shy away from it, and given the Voice's rep, I'm sure they could get lots of fearless, critically astute writers to write interesting profiles. Whether they will or not is another matter, of course, as is whether or not Harvilla will kill my piece, too!
no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 09:08 pm (UTC)post marxist
Date: 2006-04-20 03:20 am (UTC)Re: post marxist
Date: 2006-04-20 09:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-20 09:41 am (UTC)and for the larger picture, how do we spend cultural capital--does cultural capital mean capital capital any more?
what happened to that 60s/70s ramparts/evergreen/east village other/la free press/oz/etc energy...
is it even possible to do that anymore, with donations and subscriptions and friends, is the internet the 1000 flowers that are blooming, none of them giving any fruit
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Date: 2006-04-20 03:09 pm (UTC)These already exist. They're called "ILX" and "Poptimists" and "Dissensus." The questions are: (1) How can we come up with equivalents that pay (don't assume that this can't be done; ad revenue is a possibility)? (2) How can we come up with versions that speak to and include more of the pop audience (incl. rock and pop and hip-hop and dance and indie) and more people from the academy (anthropologists and sociologists and historians, for instance); can we get more of the fans and more of the academics without dumbing ourselves down? (3) Can we stop dumbing ourselves down by pretending that the real conversation is happening elsewhere and that we therefore have no need to follow through our ideas (the warning in your title about too much "Other Place" content is telling, is it not)? (4) Can we avoid the insularity and low ambition that hamstrings indie-alternative music? 'Cause face it, we are in an indie role, even if we try to look out to a broad world.
Indira Insalata Spice
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Date: 2006-04-20 03:11 pm (UTC)I quit Red Dark Sweet because they weren't going to try to be famous. Then I quit the Pillowmakers because we didn't deserve to be famous, because our music had too narrow a range (...because we weren't Red Dark Sweet). Now there's Your Mom Too, which does deserve to be famous - but we've already decided not to try. I'll quit my next band too, undoubtedly, because it's not Your Mom Too. I still think Red Dark Sweet should try to be famous. "Famous" perhaps is the wrong word. Red Dark Sweet should go out and meet the unknown audience... For all the bands and incipient bands in the Readers' Poll readership, the task is to create a new audience. Ben Edmonds, writing in 1973, about the New York Dolls: "Perhaps the reason the Dolls have been so misunderstood is that they don't play to an existing audience; it's an audience that has yet to reveal itself. More than simply latching onto an audience, the next phenomenon will be that which creates its audience. The Dolls have very little choice: they either create that audience or they have none at all. They don't really belong to anything else." ("The New York Dolls Greatest Hits Volume 1," Creem, October 1973.) The Dolls, with the mighty help of the rock press, did create that audience, though it was the Sex Pistols who reaped the harvest. I don't think Red Dark Sweet or any other band can create that audience using a Dolls' or Stooges' or Sex Pistols' type of Grand Gesture (The Grand Gesture is now a PBS subsidiary). Nor would they want to. But the openness of Red Dark Sweet - open to all influences and defying classification, including the classification "eclectic" - is a way of reaching out to many different potential audience members. (Though the reaction of many people to Red Dark Sweet is often bafflement or hostility.) The new audience must somehow be outside of the existing postpunk categories - it must somehow not be punk or postpunk or avant garde or jazz or alternative or electronic or art. The new audience need not be new people - it may be us, if we can teach ourselves to behave differently as an audience, transform ourselves into the carney sideshow audience. (We must refuse to shunt ourselves off into a "little magazine" attitude.) It certainly need not be a mass audience; but it should be a nonexclusionary audience (Lionel Richie fans welcome). It would be nice to get kids in the audience, because for kids music is life and death. This always adds something. Maybe some older people, too. And refugees from discos and lounges who discover that they like puzzling music.
Maybe Red Dark Sweet and the Scene Is Now could start acting like pop bands - e.g., start fan clubs, bite off chickens' heads onstage, have scantily clad dancers in cages suspended from the ceiling, drive cars into swimming pools, hire people to scream.
Ashbot Spice
no subject
Date: 2006-04-20 03:36 pm (UTC)As many of you have probably heard through the grapevine, I am leaving the Village Voice tomorrow, after seven often wonderful years here as the music editor. To make it brief, I have been "terminated for reasons of taste"; if you're wondering what that cryptic phrase means, my advice would be to look at just about any random music section in one of the many other New Times alternative weekly papers around the country, compare it to any random music section I've put together here at the Voice, subtract the difference, and draw your own conclusions. To also be brief, I need a new job now, so if you have any leads, don't hesitate to say so.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-20 03:39 pm (UTC)Next Month's Rent Spice