i demand higher-quality crap
You probably won't be surprised to hear me say that the internet has made music better. Admittedly, I sort of think the internet has made everything better. But I think it's particularly true for music.
Filesharing has vastly expanded listeners' ability to sample music, allowing consumption decisions to be based more upon listening and less upon marketing than they were in the past. Major labels have been forced to adapt and produce a superior product — I like to use the example of Fallout Boy versus Good Charlotte. Same gimmick, vastly different levels of quality in terms of songwriting and musicianship (identical overproduction, sadly). I suspect that there's been a Long Tail effect, too, with top earners' share of revenue declining and more acts finding that they can make a living with regional touring and a decent website. And digital technology has made recording and marketing cheaper, letting us shift wealth away from the useless record company middlemen and into some combination of concert tickets, cheaper iTunes downloads, and/or our own pockets (thanks, filesharing).
I still think all of the above is true. But I let my optimism get away from me: I had also sort of started to believe that the recent increase in pop music's quality had led to a reduction in people being colossal dicks about it. Maybe it was just me and my friends getting older, but it seemed like I no longer had to hear as many complaints about bands selling out. When the Flaming Lips or Modest Mouse sold a song to sell a minivan, the reaction seemed to be "good for them!" rather than "Judas!"
It no longer takes as much effort to find and enjoy great music, so everyone was able to. Sure, tastes differed, but the lines between the mainstream "artists" and actual artists began to break down, and with it a lot of the antagonistic elitism surrounding the latter began to wane. I thought everyone was starting to get along.
Needless to say, I was wrong. Just check out the DCist thread on Georgie James. Their album isn't even out yet and people are already sick of 'em. The backlash cycle has condensed in this intimidating newfangled digital age! In order to retain a proper level of detached ahead-of-the-curviness, one has to join the backlash as soon as there's the merest hint of there eventually being something to lash back against.
Of course, by writing this I'm casting my lot with the inevitable anti-backlash movement, hoping to skip a step and get back ahead of the cycle. But that won't hold. The backlash to the anti-backlash will inevitably emerge, and then where will I be? It's all kind of exhausting. To the extent that my subconscious vanity makes me actually care about this stuff for non-blogfodder purposes, anyway.
All of which brings me to my central point. Music writers are by necessity more sensitive to this quickening cycle than anyone else. And I think they've decided that there's only one way to survive as the waves of hype collapse into a bitter, Velvet Underground-worshipping singularity: position one's self at the edge of its tidal forces, where relativistic effects mean that the author's 15 minutes of cultural relevance will appear, from earth, to last as infinite amount of time.
The problem is that maintaining this delicate position requires the endorsement of recursively ironic, post-musical media events like the new Paris Hilton song (see here and here). I can understand the need for this kind of gambit — if the staffs of Pitchfork and TNR got together, this is the kind of counterintuitive musical recommendation they'd produce in order to shock and amaze us with their daring iconoclasm. It's kind of a hack move, but it grabs your attention.
But it's no good! If this Paris track was the next Since U Been Gone, it'd be one thing. But it's not. It's just boring, shitty reggae pop. I'll happily submit to these kinds of songs-as-press-release — I can see that fickle internet users like myself have backed music journalists into a corner. Besides, Autotune's made actual singing ability irrelevant anyway — dancing skill, sex appeal and personality are now the only criteria by which pop stars can compete with one another for corporate patronage. Since it doesn't matter who's singing, I suppose we might as well get some grist for US Weekly out of the song-delivery mechanism that brings us the producer and songwriter's finely-tuned creation.
But I'm only okay with surrendering in this way if the songs remain of the same insidiously addictive quality that I've recently come to expect from pop trash. The song matters, and this isn't a good one. Do what you've gotta do, music journos of the world, but don't let them cheap out on us with this weak, Ace of Bass-style bullshit. If you're going to prostrate yourself before a false god, at least let it be the The Matrix, Neptunes and/or Timbaland.
Otherwise we're going to inevitably end up with a slew of internet poseurs pretending that the new Kevin Federline "isn't that bad". And that's going to lead to an ugly place.
Comments
I think you meant Ace of Base.
Oh man, you're totally right. To my credit, though, the actual spelling makes considerably less sense.
the Quickening!
Well-written! It's a huge relief for me to not have to worry about this problem now that I've turned 30. With a new zero comes the "pass" to like or dislike whatever kind of musical crap I want to without worrying about sellouts and backlashes. Hell, I even put an old Counting Crows CD in the car the other day. Sweet! As for people who write about music much more than I do and for money, it'd be much less tiring and more informative to explore the actual music without mentioning buzz. That said, I do love how the internets have let us find so much more great stuff. Go internets.
Your faith in technology is your weakness, Tommy—not a billion terabytes of RSS feeds will bring an end to hipster oneupsmanship. But really, I don't think that's really what's going on in the DCist threads. IMHO, commenters in that thread responded to the tone of the piece. It read like advocacy, not a review. I was puzzled by the note, "Camera Obscura refused to be upstaged"—well, of course not, they have something like 10 recordings and have been touring internationally for years now. Headliners may be outstaged by openers, but the writer puts it as a fait accompli that Georgie James was better—it was, in fact, a counterintuitive take.
(And I don't mean to submit to traditional opener/closer paradigms; the music stuff I write for CP is almost always about the openers. Hooray openers!)
So, DCist's enthusiasm is good but it ought to be metered—then, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't get such hostile reactions. This conclusion, for example, threw me: "In Boston and New York, not a stray ticket [for CO and GJ] could be found. And with good reason. Georgie James' live shows have been getting better and better." Well, no, the shows sell because hundreds of thousands—maybe meeeellions!—of kids listen to Camera Obscura. If the writer meant that GJ brought the sell-out crowd specifically to the Black Cat show, that's not clear in the post, and anyway it's still myopic and probably wrong. It's engrams like that in the post that inhibit the full clarity of our awareness of Georgie James.
You've got an excellent point, Kriston. I've got to admit, I basically just skimmed the article to get to the comments after hearing that controversy was emerging. I'm sure that the shortchanging of CO had a lot to do with how things went.
I think there were probably other factors, too. A lot of folks on that thread sounded like musicians who were frustrated by the ease with which GJ has been getting coverage and selling out shows. They're the closest thing to a supergroup that DC has seen in a little while, and they're taking things in a poppy direction. So it's pretty easy to dismiss them as being more superficial than your own band, which has been thanklessly studying lo these many years at the feet of MacKaye. John is the rogue ninja who has betrayed his own master! He must be stopped!
But really, more than the specific backlash, antilash, or lash-lash that GJ receives, my point is just that this inevitable cycle is driving music journalists to start pumping out really stupid, lazy shit in order to stand out from their peers. Kind of like what real journalists have been doing the last few years.
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