Poptimist #4

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

NOW 100% MORE META: my column for Pitchfork this month, spinning out of a Poptimists post last week.

Comments

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

It's the simple fact that the immediate availability of music cuts off criticism from gatekeeping. Why read a long review when you can make up your own mind quickly?

I think it's more important than ever that a critic knows who their audience is: something we've touched on before, the sheer volume of everything which is readily available, means that to a dilettante audience for whom music is important but not a priority, critics are still as necessary as they were - not to gatekeep but to sift, to reduce the volume to a manageable level for non-music geeks. Of course all your points still apply!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Good stuff! It's quite satisfying having already read the bits of interweb you're referring to :-)

the meme that never dies

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

POINT OF ORDER: i DIDN'T put michael jackson on the cover of the wire! that was pioneer avant-poptimist richard cook, my predecessor and mentor!! (who should get more recognition)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i shall lend you it if i remember (erm it's NOT THAT GOOD sadly -- the idea was better than the execution, bcz rdc was massively over-extending himself then, to keep the mag alive at all, and was too tired and pressured to write the best piece he could... ) (on his game he is easily one of my favourite writers)

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

it rly p!sses me off that p4k doesn't have comments or at least a "linking to this post" thing. obv WE know all this stuff, but i'm fascinated by what Others will make of it...

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Good post - you (and lex above) touched on both the points I'd scribbled down in the margins. Why anyone would not like writing about music that suggests something new that you [i]can[/i] hear is beyond me. (This is sometimes why I read reviews of new product from the Stones or Dylan, just to see what meaning, if any, can be teased from tired old acts.

A few cents' worth (the remix)

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

A few rhetorical questions I don't have the luxury of thinking all the way through:

Can good pop criticism also prevent certain kinds of conversations? Shouldn't it? Aren't there generally awful, pointless, useful-to-no-one conversations that we (or "we") agree should be avoided?

Can music criticism that tries to shut down conversation actually be better at starting conversations than music criticism that tries to engage the reader on its own polite terms? (I'm thinking specifically of Tom Frank's shitty, opaque, wrong-headed Yum-Yum article in Harper's) Is there never any virtue in sneering at a reader?

[koganbot]

Btw, thanks Tom.

[koganbot]

Actually, in the U.S. the main gatekeeper has been radio, not criticism. It's still radio that more-or-less tells you (or is told) what genre something is in, for instance. And of course, radio is facing competition from the Internet too.

Simon Frith once told me that in Britain, magazines play a greater role in determining genre.

[nicolars.livejournal.com]

I finally got around to reading this and I liked it a lot.