Flagplanters v Cogitants

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I pulled this out of the ILX EMP thread. It's by Scott P, who is a senior editor at Pitchfork (he edits my column, conflict of interest fans). He's summarising a current hot topic.

"...To an emerging generation of kids, music criticism is 24-hour news and leaks and mp3s and ratings and getting to things first. It's not about digesting music and it's not having meaningful conversations about it or reading someone else's ideas about it. Indeed, it's barely having conversations about it all. The democratization of music crit-- on mssg boards, mp3 blogs, etc.-- seems to not be resulting in ppl sharing more ideas with one another, but falling over another just to plant flags. And now many (specifically indie) fans seem actively suspicious of anyone who talks at length about music.

P4k's very act of printing longform reviews** and attempting to share ideas about music is, quite oddly, resented and seen to many as us cramming our opinions down someone's throat or inherently self-indulgent because ppl don't look to music writers for ideas, merely for suggestions on what to download. It's resented and kicked against because music crit is, to many of them, seemingly merely used as a tipsheet and now they can just 'listen to an mp3 and make up their own mind.'

And I fear that with mp3s giving people v. little tangible to grasp onto (no album art, liner notes, photos-- no product), the internet eliminating the need to hunt for info or sounds about/from an artist (let alone make choices about who to literally invest in), the rise of DVDs and video games as products that kids cherish, collect, and participate in w/o other distractions, and music almost exclusively something you do while you're doing something else (a background/lifestyle item) that there is little myth-making or magic in pop music these days, and as a result fewer ideas and conversations and arguments. In short, the future of writing about music, or whatever Amy's panel was called, is pretty grim because the future of getting people to invest their thoughts in music seems grim, too.

** Put it another way: P4k and its peers and contemporaries could be the first and last eZines. If the future of music crit is online, then the old print mag format-- followed by P4k, Stylus, Dusted, Drowned in Sound, CMG, etc.-- is almost N/A. Maybe I'm off but I can't recall a new eZine starting in the past few years. It's all blogs, and lately all that means is posting music or videos. The energy and ideas that departed the Voice, for example, seem to primarily have gone to writing for retail (eMusic), MTV Urge, or writing about single tracks (the very good PTW). I don't blame anyone-- you'd be foolish to start an eZine now-- but what does that say about sustaining lengthy word counts, which was the very thing the internet and the first wave of blogs got right, let alone expressing and communicating ideas?"

Thoughts? Comments? This is a huge topic, obviously.

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Curse of the short attention span. I blame turkey twizzlers.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

In fact, I'm already more interested in Scooch flying the Eurovision flag the wrong way up in their video (see Popjustice for further details). It's a bad omen!

Srsly though: might it be true that most of the interesting things to say about pop music have already been said by various music writers over the last 30 years, and ver kids are intimidated by their legacy? I'm sure Frank would disagree with me here! But the only thing I feel I could write about at any length is my own personal experience, and that's boring for everyone else to read :-)

[koganbot]

I definitely disagree as to your personal experience being boring for people to read. And I think we old critics have left our ideas unfinished and that the territory is wide open for smart young critics (and smart old critics) to say new things and to finish up what Meltzer and Xgua and Marcus and Frith et al. fumbled away.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I suppose the talent lies in transforming the mundane into something worth reading! Like rhodri posting about e.g. ringing up Wandsworth Council to complain about noisy teenagers...

I know *I* am intimidated by all the vast library of music criticism that I haven't read a page of. I get all my music knollidge from Great Pop Things, innit.

[koganbot]

Maybe if you read classic rock criticism you would be inspired by how half-assed and vague and preposterous it is, as you will see that you could easily do better.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I think ILX simultaneously made me a better and worse writer - obv it opened me up to a shedload of ideas and music and ways of thinking that I'd never even been aware of, but at the same time it's made me so concerned with covering my arse re angles I haven't thought through in excruciating detail, or expressing opinion on areas I am not completely immersed in, that my natural writing style has been cramped and crucially that I've grown to love writing itself a lot less, and any desire I might have had to do this professionally has completely died.

[koganbot]

No, you must be a writer. I was always battling an internal tendency to shut down when I wrote for the Voice, the fear of being taken to task by the readers if I said something "wrong"; and ILX has been getting more and more toxic, so I can see how it also can inspire a shutdown, but on the threads that were working well, it was a place where I didn't have to cover my ass, where I could start with a half-baked idea and take it somewhere. Problem with music criticism hasn't been that music critics have half-baked ideas - any good idea is half-baked at its conception - but that the genre of music criticism (which is basically a part of journalism) doesn't allow follow-through.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It's not the only reason I don't want to be a professional writer, there's also the fact that I really do love money, or at least comfortable financial security, which is kind of incompatible with writing, at least the kind of writing I want to do...and I'm lazy, and to be a full-time music writer demands work and networking. But in terms of amateur writing, the kind I do now, in these internet spaces and in the pages of the publications who approach me, I don't see myself stopping that ever. And maybe in 20 years time I will have financial security and still care enough about music writing to be able to do something about it. But prioritising that and deliberately aiming for it would be v bad for me.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. One of the things I did when I started my new site was resolve not to read ILM anymore. I found that my ideas were getting strangled in the crib so to speak; I wanted to be able to get past the wrong things far enough to let them develop into something that's useful or productive, and hearing the ILM pundits in the back of my head (everything anyone says there is refuted somehow by someone, and in this zinger-centric way that tends to destroy your ego, and writers need their egos!) really made that impossible. Maybe try a break, I dunno, but you should really keep at it, you're a hell of a writer man.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I keep trying a break! And I've cut down loads recently. But despite the toxicity it is STILL useful for discovering/being made aware of new stuff, and even occasionally discussing it. But even the good things about it are strangulating, eg when I write about minimal house, as immersed as I am in it, I'm always aware that someone like Ronan is a million times more knowledgeable about it than me, and let's not get started on my utter panic when my first Guardian commission was a dubstep compilation.

Rationally I do know that most of the snipers are jealous inadequates who'd snipe at anything, and who snipe at lots of people I consider v good writers (inc my mentor who has said various things along the lines of "fuck the internet people they are just weird internet people and the more attention the better"), and I did really really love the way my Klaxons review exploded ILM (50/50 positive/negative).

Thanks for the compliment btw!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Hehe! Possibly. I got tired of reviewing rubbish music some years ago and nothing has really inspired me recently to scribble anything down (my rant on female guitarists 2 years ago was the last substantial article I wrote). However I worry that it's like making music: if you've only heard two bands in your life and they are Nirvana and the Pixies, then what sort of music are you going to end up making yourself? How can you avoid making the mistakes of your precedants if you don't even know what those mistakes are? Or worse, aspiring to emulate those mistakes?

[koganbot]

Yeah, but you haven't only read two writers in your life. You shouldn't assume that only music critics can inspire music criticism. What about sociologists, novelists, philosophers, film critics?

And what I've been saying is that the "great" rock critics had good ideas that they left woefully incomplete, so if you read a few of them you might be inspired to do what they couldn't. Or inspired because you find their blindness irritating.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

What would happen if an idea was completed? What is an example of a completed idea (not necc. in the rock critic field!)

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Special Relativity.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

As for the why: it's simple, its consequences have been worked out as far as they can go, it's universally accepted amongst people who care about the problems it deals with. No one's actually doing any research on it, or even any thinking about it. Whenever it is used as a tool, it is taken as a given.

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

How about artistic ideas?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Isn't this the stage at which it becomes imperative that it's rethought, or thought about in a different way, which most ideas are due to passage of time? I think the validity of thought is in its state of...permanent restlessness.

There are scientifically proven facts of course, though those aren't "ideas" in the same way.

I am too tired to approach the question of moral ideas which should probably not be rethought.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

No, not necessarily; only if the idea or the use of it prove unsatisfactory in some way (cf GR and the standard model of particle physics, both of which are being continually rethought precisely because they are unsatisfactory).

No such thing as 'scientifically proven', dude! And SR absolutely was an idea in the same way. That it isn't now is because it has been completed.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

the only ones that springs to mind are scientific ones that were subsequently found to be not correct, eg clockwork universe

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

What Frank said--I'm not intimidated by Xgau because I can't understand what the hell he's saying half the time.