Article - Music Criticism has turned into lifestyle reporting
 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...reporting.html

Interesting read.

I love music, and talking about music, and thinking about music. I hate reading music reviews that basically describe the way a band/musician looks and acts and never really goes into the music other than saying "It's like a cross between Early-Genesis and the Meat Puppets".


What you guys think?

its a pretense to say there's anything that can be SAID about sounds anyway.

i dont like it when people pretend that all this superficial artificiality has gotten in the way of the "real authentic" music. fuck all entertainment that imagines it can recover some authentic vitalist energy or spirit. that's a substitute for religion.

actually now that ive read the article im more sympathetic to it.

the problem is that the only place you could go to make music writing culturally valid would be to analyse and talk about the psychologies and lyrics and aesthetics in a way that related it to the wider cultural context.

and when you even HINT at doing that you get fucking slaughtered by the chorus of "its just fun man dont spoil it with your pretentiousness!". this is the dominant response and its incredibly loud and aggressive and anyone who dissents from that is going to get screamed at and ridiculed.

the fact is the majority AGGRESSIVELY DEMAND that instead of culture they have a kind of context free sludge of entertainment that they imagine exists in this space of pure enjoyment and has absolutely no "depth" or "meaning", things which terrify them. in fact, what they want from the entertainment junk they consume is a kind of ritual that absolves them from thought and delivers them to a space where their frivolous personalized affects are elevated into this kind of transcendental experience. at the most, they'll say things like "to me, this means..." and what it always means is something that can be interpreted in ANYWAY whatsoever and ultimately has the point that you should feelgood about yourself.

our times would rank perhaps the most conservative and stupid cultural climate that humans have ever known, and that is funny considering we have the technical means to produce culture that would have been unimaginable throughout most of history.

now, instead of politely applauding or reflecting on someones work, your audience is at best gonna cheer you on and link or like you, but more likely viciously tear into your work on boards or comment sections. what is being demanded is the impossible - that banal junk be produced that has ZERO meaning, has ZERO awareness or understanding of itself in a social or political context, but that also manages to act as a kind of soothing breastmilk for atomized and isolated individuals who want to just float around as infantilized consumers being distracted by noise and shiny stuff and the narcissism by proxy of identitarianism.

i mean, i've been RAGING about all this for years, on this board and on other places, and a few other people have, but really i'm talking like one or two at the most.

you could see this start during the early 00's when indie became hyper twee/kitsch and the most excruciatingly positive, happy, upbeat crap you could ever imagine. this was the music of TOTAL DENIAL. it was happening at a time when mass slaughter and destruction was occurring due to the collision of advanced US military technology and primitive islamic fundamentalism. the response of the culture doing the murdering was to dress up as a bunny rabbit and finger paint with florescent colours and write songs that sounded like self help affirmations.

so now look where we are - turn on your fucking tv and find me an add that doesnt start with banjo or ukelele music and a cooing voice talking to you as if you were an infant.

why? because this is what we want from culture now:

“Imaginary plenitude,” the desire to return to this (never actually existing) state in which we had a direct, unconstructed, pure and “full” perception of the world, as well as the instant and effortless gratification of every wish through thought alone.

we can't face nihilism, and so we've regressed to fantasies of omnipotence. but really, the history of 20th century culture is basically about one thing - the decline of religion and various ultimately failed strategies to ward off the threat of disenchantment through science and endow the individual or the collective human subject with some form of omnipotence, or some replacement for its loss of value and meaning to itself.

and since we're also only allowed to criticize individuals, and to knock down the individual who thinks critically at all like you've done in response to this post, then how the fuck can we expect to have a culture less vapid than we have now? since ALL THE MAJORITY OF YOU IDIOTS WILL EVER DO IS ATTACK THE INDIVIDUAL TO PROVE HE'S NOT PERFECT BECAUSE YOU'RE REALLY IMPRESSED BY THAT KIND OF RETARD CYNICISM. playing this game of implicitly demanding perfection. anything you can do i can do meta. tl:dr its cos the majority are idiots and they can now loudly air their stupidity whereas in the past it was more difficult for audiences to interact and thus quality stuff could happen due to the performer not being intimidated into silence. so send me money on paypal u fuckups

You didn't read it

The article is not about the quality of music or what is real or not real.

It is about the analysis of musical output.

anything can be said about anything, if you choose to limit yourself that is fine, but it does not apply to anyone but yourself.

yeah i didnt read it until the 3rd post

I stopped talking about music (seriously) on the interwebs about 10 years.

As I see it, it's only good for one thing, and that's stepping on nutsacks.

I mean, have any of you read Loudr's Hip HAP Cafeteria? Total fucking garbage, that is.

I only like cds, lps and cassettes because they pile up in a mess against my walls and make my dates say that I like something when they step into my bedroom. I never listen to any of them. For real.

some of my favorite quotes from the article:

Some smart criticism flourishes in the blogosphere but, with all the background noise, you would have a better chance of finding a Victrola needle in a Radio Shack.

please take me to your victrola needles.

When Harry Connick, Jr. recently used the word “pentatonic” on American Idol, his fellow judge Jennifer Lopez turned it into a joke.

i never thought i'd find myself siding with harry connick jr. in any kind of musical dispute, or with his person over j-lo's magnificent ass, but that's why i judge her by her ass which is her only contribution to world culture.

During the entire year 1967, The Chicago Tribune only employed the word “lifestyle” seven times, but five years later the term showed up in the same newspaper more than 3,000 times.

on the other hand, in 1967 the only acceptable "lifestyle" was to be a white man with a corporate job, a house in the suburbs, a wife, 2+ children, attending a protestant church, etc.

this is just to say (skipping some steps) that the social revolution of the 60s now merely amounts to customized consumerism of the most vapid kind, or as db would rightly call it, american banality. this is of course a universal phenomenon. "what brand represents you"? lemme see….

these can’t serve as the foundation for a healthy musical culture


tacitus was right. history is a permanent downward slope. get used to it somehow or kill yourself. there are only dystopias.

---

anyway this reminds me that i rarely go "upstairs" in this forum because i don't have the language to discuss music and i wouldn't pretend otherwise, even though i think i have a pretty good musical ear. still, my ear is an aphasic fuck who can't explain himself. but i'm also wondering if i'm not as aphasic because i never got to read the people that the guy mentions.

anyway-- whoever has them-- please show me your selection of victrola needles.

Hand on my heart, the only people I've ever come across on this forum who can write about music in an interesting and stimulating way are Savage Clone and Jenn. You haven't missed much.

jenn is our lester bangs, per that article.

The internet is for posting images, not writing long posts. Nobody follows your good advice on life etc and when they do it's maybe only via private message. Besides, if you ranted the way Jonathan does all the time in a pub the chances are that Clare would throw a glass at you.

I stop reading any post after three lines.

that said, I still listen to a mix Gabbers made years ago.

actions speak louder than turds.

actually. i was all excited about the future and that all things would be consider one. past tense/the now, kinda like Beck in a Beck non-post modern way turdism way by the way of interconnection collective way without the lameness.

turn outs.....the internet in 2014 is more SHALLOW and fickle than we realized. like the 90's but, a more sophisticated white trashiness. they'll always win. for now!

sugar boo boo. honey boo boo. it's fucked and im happy for it. AY PAPI suck it.

i've felt for awhile that music criticism is essentially an "intellectual" breaking down why they're totally smarter than the performer and reader, who are all vulgar salt of the earth types who don't understand music as a result of their utter lack of postgraduate liberal arts education. more reviews contain the line "nietzsche once said..." than contain a reference to concepts such as tempo or harmony, because the writers don't know what that is


"fuck a critic, they talk about it but i live it" - meth man

while i agree with the article i don't think it's right to view this as being unique to contemporary music journalism. the brouhaha about that elvis presley character certainly centred around fancy 'lifestyle' things like pink cadillacs, gold lame suits and mansions more than fancy "vocalstyle" things like trilladeedoodoos and boobeepbadaps.

took me a while to read this, but it was worth the wait.

no, i'm not shitting you.

speaking of neil young (elsewhere) do a search here and see what people wrote about him when he made an antiwar song that wasn't like a classic but it was antiwar.

o wait this board is from 2006.

"artists should stick to…" bla bla bla etc. people were ENRAGED. how dare he! etc.

anyway it's late i gotta go but okay.

ps

the narcissism by proxy of identitarianism.

this is great. gotta go but talk tomorrow maybe. i'll think about something that you said but can't reply now.

he brouhaha around elvis was not music criticism. it was social commentary. Music criticism of rock n roll did not begin until later on after elvis had already come and gone. rock n roll was seen as such shit unworthy of true criticism.

cheers man!

Tell me if I'm a dick or just wrong.

I read "good" music criticism from someone clearly talented and bright (Greil Marcus comes to mind), I sort of think it's kinda sad they choose to use their talents to write about rock music, for fucks's sake. Feels like a waste.



I'm not sure what this means. Stimulate to what? Putting on the record itself? What's the point?


I like Chuck Klosterman because he's very perceptive and usually focuses on the characters behind the music. Same for Nick Kent's immortal "The Dark Stuff."

As for writings about the music itself, it's useful when it's about jazz or classical or some other genre where I could use some technical help. But rock?

Again, even when people do it well, it seems like a waste of talent.



(Oh, wait. I'm just a snob. Never mind.)

greg saunier is a conservatory-trained percussionist. is it a waste for him to play rock? (okay, latter-day deerhoof has been poppy and unlistenable, but still).

what about rock covers of traditional folk/country music? even stuff like the white stripes jolene deserves an explanation. apparently the celtic roots of american country music are what makes it popular in some parts of the british isles.

then the other day i heard some kiddie band that was replicating echo and the bunnymen to the point of carbon copy. someone should be able to explain to the audience what is it that they are ripping off and what are those things called (rhythms, vocal inflections, instrumentation, melodic lines--what?).

or tell me for example what parts of the rolling stones liars channelled and what varied from them.

or why pelican never plays on classic rock radio when it clearly totally could.

Hm. I guess I'm filing "rock history" over here, and "rock criticism/theory/essay" over there.

Yeah, I love me some good rock history, for sure (although usually in the form of a documentary or a good insert booklet).

I am a dick the more I think of it.

A point with deep sociological or philosophical force in a rock essay feels like a waste. The same point made in a literary essay is fine with me, and part of a long, rich, honorable tradition.

even rock history will be about musical personalities not about the perpetuation, dissemination and evolution of musical strains. "this guy fucked someone else's girlfriend. they did drugs together." but what did keith moon bring to drumming?

or tell me how galaxy 500 mutated into contemporary techno.

or how the roots of ambient music go all the way back to satie.

wait, there was this cool pbs documentary "latino usa" (i think) that got into that-- how salsa is the nuyorican melding of cuban rhythms for example. it's made up of a few good episodes. but that shit is rare. you don't read this stuff often.

or right now on the spotify was playing rh+ which is an ongoing italian outfit but i could hear a lot of 80s new wave over a bed of slowed-down flock of seagulls.

or what are the elements that make wye oak so pleasant to my ears? i know they aren't revolutionizing my world or anything i just like them a lot but i can't understand why. and what's the name of the pedals they use?

hey, what pedals does agata use in his monster pedal board? how do they alter each other? this is not conservatory shit-- it's electric guitar geekery.

explain to me why rika was doing with the bass when she was on melt banana (i think she's gone--is she gone?). explain to me the musical reason why tzadik had to include afri-rampo in their releases. explain the fucking music. i am fucking starved for good explanations of what the music is doing, where it comes from, where is it going.

Totally fair. I'll give you your curiosity.

For the most part, I like mystery in my music, so I guess that's where I'm coming from.

(Although, again, I really appreciate a good piece on whatever Schoenberg's doing tonally in a certain string quartet or whatever.)


I'd want to know what Keith brought to drumming via a doc, then listen to a few tracks while reading about the drugs and fucking.

Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!

THAT IS MAKING HISTORY AND NOT BEING USED BY IT!

This article is right on and parallels some things I've been thinking about - basically corporate culture = no culture. And thats what we have here, a forced corporate culture which has efficiencized anything interesting or human right out of the equation.

conan the fluoridian

you can't give me what's already mine, but i suppose that's an american idiom that eludes me


that would be like saying "i like mystery in my novels, so i guess i don't want to know grammar"


and yet, "noise rock" is doing more tonally than schoenberg ever did, thanks to chaos, but nobody can tell me what structures are these



sure, i can also tell you that beethoven hand-picked 60 grains of coffee to brew and drink before writing, or that bach was as genitally fecund as he was musically prolific, but we have better writing about what they contributed to the history of music, don't we?


and yet, rock was the soundtrack of the social revolution of the 60s, but an essay about that somehow would be a waste.

as for rich and honorable traditions, i don't know what's in this piece but it's one of the best things i've ever read about rock (and yes it helped to be familiar with said scene back in those days)

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/a...on-the-killjoy

enjoy it, sucka.

(and of course i dare you to generationally place that writer without looking him up. it's an easy job, really)

It is an American idiom. Hence it's rudeness and arrogance.



Not really. Without basic grammar knowledge, lit is incoherent. Without basic music knowledge, rock, even experimental rock, still makes sense.




Why choose? That bio stuff is fun, sometimes enlightening, and again, when it comes to classical music, someone needs to explain to me how, for example, Beethoven's counter-point works in the late string quartets.

By the way. last night I watched the very good 20 Feet From Stardom. I enjoyed the personal stories, I enjoyed learning how the craft of background singing has developed. But I'm not sure I'd read a 400 page book on the subject.



Sorry. I read the first three paragraphs, then skimmed. That's a long article. Fugazi's sincerity ruined the DC scene? Is that what's going on? And I have no idea how old the writer could be. I sort of don't get what I was supposed to take from that vis a vis this thread.

ha ha ha


sorry, no. you "hear" musical structure even if you don't understand it. you "make sense" of grammar even if you don't understand what the fuck a dependent clause is. you can see the beauty of a building even if you don't know anything about construction. but you can get another level of enjoyment if you know the nuts and bolts. just like everyone can eat a delicious meal but the initiated can get the nuances of seasoning and technique on top of "yum yum!". what i'm trying to say is that this love of "mistery" is just antiintelectualism on your part. which i think you justify by saying "i'm not the antiintellectual, this music is supposed to be dumb". which is why i linked you the article, in part-- he agrees with you-- rock is here to appeal to our baser instincts (and he quotes ronan's father on it).


Why choose indeed? But it applies both ways and that's what the author of that piece complains about.


and because you wouldn't, nobody else would? how about just 2 pages?


not sincerity per se, rather their earnest puritanism-- the sincerity gets mocked only secondarily. i guess you had to be there. but i linked it cuz it's a bit of social commentary on both rock and dc, and the social role of music, and if you look at the dispute it points out at the larger role of a certain kind of music in the culture, and how generational attitudes have changed.

the author is of course a sex-drugs-rocknroll baby boomer (because after the boomers came AIDS-- people always forget the boomer legacy of AIDS).

but in a different level it's kind of the same disputation you're making-- rock is dumb, doesn't need or deserve analysis or understanding, you just need to feel like the dinosaurs are back on earth. which is at some level true (which is why i liked the article, people at dc shows used to behave like monks), but at some other level it is not true, in the sense that a) there is now a long tradition of complex, difficult, "intellectual" rock, and b) musicians and lovers of music will want a little more information than "wow, that shreds, maaaan" or whatever is it that people say when talking about "dumb" music.

and with this i'm not even saying that i am capable of understanding what people like tears o'rourke or john mcEntyre brough to dumb-as-rocks rock and roll, i am simply complaining because i'm missing out on the understanding (not the feeling, i get the feeling) of it. and i like to rant on the internets.

also, i think the high-brow/low-brow art distinction you're making has been abandoned for over half a century now. it's all culture.

Not dumb, exactly, and of course I get your point about intellectually stimulating music, but when someone really smart and skilled devotes their talents and their entire life to writing about rock, just feels like a waste to me, personally.

Because:




I sort of still make the distinction. And there are still museums and literary journals with discriminating taste, and they still give out Nobels.

Actually, I think now we have a choice about whether or not to accept any sort of cannon, which is even more liberating.

So from my antiquated perspective, I find it hard to take Camille Paglia's academic take on the Rolling Stones all that seriously. (Also, I'm sort of dumb, and I have to be selective about firing my brain cells.)

Or it may be I'm feeling my mortality, and with only so much time left, the number of things I take seriously has dwindled.

But I use to care a lot about rock theory, and this book used to get me hard. I think many will enjoy it:

http://www.amazon.com/Rhythm-Noise-A...ythm+and+noise

right, but i am not concerned with people's wasted talent, i want to read good writing about music i enjoy. thing is though, "rock" (whatever that may be) is a dead form and at this point sort of irrelevant to the culture-- a lesser genre, soon to be confined to museums and preservation halls and academic departments just like jazz or the study of "the classics". i was reading some garbage article in gawker which is always garbage but the writer made one good point (almost makes me want to believe in miracles to find something worthy there) that the last time there was some kind of mass "youth" thing centered around rock was in the early 90s… that's 20 fucking years ago! (oh yes, the article was about the dead nirbano and what he meant to people etc.)

back in the 90s though there was also this utopianist writing about raves and electronic/sampled music and the poor suckas in mondo 2000 claimed that with the death of the rockstar and its supplanting by electronic music without "stars" performing onstage but instead drugged out people immersed in some communal experience, some sort of great anarchist era was about to happen. haa haaa haaa haaa.

poor people.


well sure there is good and there is bad. on that note, the boomer idol bob dylan has been nominated for the nobel literature prize before.


unless you're in ukraine and the cannon is shooting at you and you have no choice! (sorry, terrible joke on many levels). but yes. we can read/ listen to/ watch whatever the fuck we want. which is why i want writing about the irrelevant thing i listen to!-- just like that whiny article that inspired this thread. he whines for me (but not for thee, in this case).


but paglia was not talking about music! she was talking about archetypes in popular culture-- she was talking about the popular imagination. she was not doing any kind of musical analysis. warhol is the one who put tin cans in his high-concept paintings, and everyone has followed since. also, frank herbert's "dune"--pulp or masterpiece?


that, for sure. same goes for drinking budweiser. my problem now is to find books i want to read. i found some chekhov translations online and i'm happy to say i've finished a short story. a sort of miracle. i used to devour books until i went to grad school. the force-feeding gave me a delicate stomach and i haven't recovered since.


that i had never seen. i might check it out. thanks for the link. though these days i read mostly how-to books on farming and making bricks out of mud and that sort of shit.

No. Unless you mean something specific. Noise rock tends towards being tonally limited; serial music (let's assume that's the side of Schoenberg you mean) is quite deliberately, self-consciously and pathologically not tonally limited.

Of course, it's possible you mean something do with accidentals and 'noise' (in the sense of 'impure' tones) being of greater import; I tend to see the outside of the tonal centre as critical but not imperative. MBV (because we all know them, not because they're exemplars of noise-rock or even part of that) have a shitload of not-tonal stuff - 'deliberate accidentals', perhaps - but in my view they're perenially sticking to staid formal arrangements, straight-up intervals and rigorous arrangements. (Which in my view is common and analogous to whatever noise rock means)

Anyway, I only came here to post this: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/c...ic_theory.html

Which does a couple of things, for me - it explains that there's a high degree of thought and care goes into what may appear to be an asinine song (and it can still be asinine after that's agreed upon) - the mainstream industry, being an industry, tends to pay a lot of attention to these details. I tend not to see that elsewhere in popular music (meaning a lot of rock music, in the broadest sense) but I realise that's both contentious and prejudicious of me. It also explains why people really don't want music theory - while this might be an exciting article insofar as it's relatively unusual, the novelty would quickly wear off as every song has its variations on standard tropes and journalism would end up being flat descriptions.

Generally speaking, I tend towards the idea that music theory is a specific, unrelated subset of music appreciation - by which I mean, while the process of appreciation might tacitly include it, it doesn't rely upon it. Certainly, that'd explain why most of you have such appalling taste in music.

To be honest, sweetheart, it's more likely that all the people with bad taste in music find the way it's written about it
tedious and listen to Taylor Swift instead.

I love good music writing. Rare, but excellent. Although I think more journalists should actually delve into the music itself. What is it precisely about the music that moves them? Is it a synth sound? How do they present their overall sound? Talk about that instead of tying to label as transgressive-IDM-noisecore or comparing every punk band to Wire or Minor Threat.

If fucking only.

bullshit. you've got great metaphor & bravado in spades. to wit:

"The Blackest Crow"--As far as "Cali-metal-band-tries-Southern-balladry" goes, which thankfully isn't far, "Blackest Crow" is better than Metallica's "Ronnie." But so is being catapulted headfirst into a tree.

[…]

With the release of this laborious shitcicle, Megadeth are officially the most ignominious major band in thrash metal history. Their decline has been more painful to witness than Sir Laurence Oliver in The Jazz Singer. Mustaine's the guy who writes an album about anamnesis. Mustaine's the guy who knows what anamnesis is to begin with. And that album would be top-to-bottom wretched. Maybe 63 seconds of salvageable material, and not consecutive seconds either.

i rest my case.