Controv!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Here are some links that may entertain or aggravate ya!

(If you read my tumblr or Lex's LJ you'll have seen them)

What hath Popism wrought?: critics being nice to albums - WHEN WILL THE MADNESS STOP.

Right Music Wrongs: popism means that the righteous anger of the people against bad music must now be outsourced to corporations like Virgin Mobile Australia.

Simon Reynolds on 'wonky': a losing move in the game of genre jenga, sez Lex (and many others)

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I'm perplexed at the Hitsville pt. 2 response to Mike's post about writing a fair Arcade Fire review. Actually, I'm just perplexed generally. I don't think this guy has any idea what he's actually so angry (or sounding so angry) about. I think the three most important pieces of information to consider when thinking about Metacritic are:

(1) METACRITIC decides whether or not many of their reviews are positive, not the majority of the sources they are choosing from, so to try to gauge positive/negative split among these reviews is ridiculous -- you'd have to go to the PRIMARY source and do a qualitative, not quantitative, analysis. (This may be true of films, too, but that means that THOSE are suspect too -- are the people who decide the "score" of an unscored movie review the same people who decide the "score" of an unscored music review?)

(2) Metacritic makes their ratings on a more specific scale than most sites actually have. We can say of a 4-star system that has no half-stars that, very rougly, 1 = very bad, 2 = bad, 3 = good, 4 = very good. And this depends on the critic -- the understanding of the "4-star review" might mean "masterpiece" or "probably one of the 20 best films of the year," two very different criteria.

(3) As many people have said, there is no cogent PR industry for music as a whole. The only comparable (and even then it's not that comparable) analogy in films would be like trying to include all art-house releases, major film festivals, and maybe major experimental and museum screenings in this kind of system. I bet you would see the exact same thing happen as happens in music. The critics who go to see these works will likely be very critical, but won't write reviews that easily translate to "thumbs down" (or, also important, "thumbs up").

But of course (4) we don't know this, because the movie industry and the music industry are completely different entities that, at very institutional levels, have exactly ZERO to do with one another. (For one thing, the resources that go into film and television are utterly staggering, even in comparison to major label music expenditures including production AND marketing. Music is a niche entertainment field from an industrial standpoint. Really you'd be better off comparing film reviews to videogame reviews, and you'd be better off comparing Metacritic music review scores to, e.g., compiled review scores for something like comic books.

One thing that "something we call popism" should do if it wants to argue against the "Down with the System & The Man" mode of critical engagement with music is to UNDERSTAND the system and the Man and begin to better figure out that, in the scheme of things, the allocation of resources between music releases, even including things like advertising/marketing budgets, just don't hold a candle to other media in the entertainment industry (even the concept of "industry" of music is more fractured in music than it is in film, in which the coordination of huge sums of money is an absolute requirement for basic production let alone mass distribution). If anything, there should be a reactionary anti-system faction of film reviewing that refuses to engage with much of it because of its demonstrable labor injustices, etc. The music industry just doesn't participate in [insert problematic mode of production and state of the world etc.] the way that other media do.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Forgot to hat tip chuckeddy's point in that old Idolator piece in (1), and uh I guess there were 4 points, though the final one is more of a bigger picture thing.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I see that I have now called down the Popist Comments Crew Massive on Hitsville's blog! Destroyer-in-paddling-pool scenario!

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Well, I still can't figure out if I'm more irritated or amused by the Virgin Mobile thing (and I refuse to re-type any of it from it's Flash format) and I'm not planning on reading the Reynolds piece. So Hitsville is the only fish in the barrel!