To build a new sanctuary the old sanctuary must first be destroyed.
Lil Wayne: Gossip (xpost, but Ryan Dombal had it first over at Blender)
EVERYONE, PAT YOURSELVES ON THE BACK!!!
The New York Times frequently publishes articles and opinion pieces offering boilerplate solutions to the problems of low-income schools. For example, Bob Herbert recently wrote a column under the headline "Our Schools Must Do Better." In it, he says, "Let's identify the good teachers and find out what works." If this argument doesn't seem painfully, meaninglessly obvious to you, you're reading the wrong blog.
Sadly, such work is typical of the Times' and other major newspapers' superficial coverage of schools in low-income neighborhoods. All we need is higher standards, better teachers, and tougher coursework... right? When our schools don't do better, the Times' education reporters and editorial pages can come back with the same bromides the next year. And the next. And the next. (Rarely, however, do they recall a troubling figure that Herbert himself used in 2005: "By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind non-poor students.")
To state the obvious, simply stating the obvious about inner-city education doesn't help kids keep from falling behind. And if low-income fourth graders already read three grade levels behind non-poor students, the problem might be something that can't be fixed by simply raising standards, hiring more experienced teachers, or passing out books the kids can't read. Who, then, does this stuff serve? What is the point?
Well, I'd speculate that it makes the writer feel good. It makes the editor feel good. And it makes the readers feel good. Hooray for everyone for caring so much about black kids. Won't someone please think of the black kids?
The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones will. SF-J is one of my favorite music critics, which is to say he seems crazy to me slightly less often than most of the other music critics I like. Lots of people have posted about his recent article in favor of indie-rock "miscegenation." Friend of offnotes Tom Breihan blames the Velvet Underground. Lots of other people said lots of other stuff. I was kinda bogged down with CMJ and a cold and work and other work I should be doing even RIGHT NOW but here we are. In lieu of an opinion (not worth it, because what is "blackness" in 21st-century pop music, is it inherently better than "whiteness" because if not why does this matter, should white guys proud of their racial consciousness keep using the word "miscegenation," etc.), please enjoy the following abbreviated (unexpurgated!) list, which, because this entire conversation is meaningless and self-aggrandizing, lists whatever anyone wants it to list:
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM !!! SPOON VAMPIRE WEEKEND MOUNTAIN GOATS DEVENDRA BANHART THE TOUGH ALLIANCE M.I.A. DIPLO GIRL TALK JENS LEKMAN SHOCKING PINKS KING KHAN CHROMEO WHITE STRIPES STUDIO AIR FRANCE SPANK ROCK CLIPSE LIL WAYNE
A legacy so far removed.
Billie Holiday: What a Little Moonlight Can Do
There's also been a lot of debate recently over who's to blame for blog-era insta-backlash. Is it the guy who thinks a new band has four great songs, and says so? Or the guy who backlashes against that band for not having a dozen great songs, plus a laser-light show? Or is it the the guy who doesn't particularly care for that band, but instead of backlashing against them directly, backlashes against the very idea of saying a band has four great songs? This guy thinks the backlash is the first guy's fault, though of course he doesn't name names.
When Belle & Sebastian released If You're Feeling Sinister, their live show was terrible, and there was no guarantee Murdoch could continue to write songs as good as the ones he'd composed in his years of chronic fatigue-imposed solitude. (Basically, he couldn't.) Many of the bands championed by the late, legendary John Peel must've recorded one or two great singles, tops-- should Peel not have proclaimed his love for those singles? What of the Desperate Bicycles? The Subway Sect? The Undertones? What of-- as an Idolator commenter noted-- the scores of bands who released much-hyped EPs and actually went on to live up to the hype? (Buzzcocks, REM, Pavement, arguably Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, etc.) Is the measure of four songs' excellence really contingent on whether the artist writes an album's worth of equally excellent songs down the road-- on whether their career is "built to last" (thanks, Tracks!)??? Is rockcrit just A&R now? O.A.R. now? "Oh, are they?" OH SHIT SCOOPED!!!
The rapidly accelerating hype cycle is something that has annoyed people since the moment the major labels' grunge-era signing spree started catapulting bands to fame on the basis of a couple of good live shows in Seattle. A more serious discussion ought to center around the music-- why it works, or why it doesn't-- and not the process, which we professional fogeys have been lamenting since the dawn of fogeydom, without ever finding a way to freeze time just yet.
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,250,000 for "is no exception". (0.23 seconds)
Sambassadeur: Between the Lines
It's not the band I hate, it's their fans.
UPDATE: I really should've linked to Matthew Perpetua's excellent post on related topic. And I should clarify that my complaint isn't talking about process vs. music-- context matters, and sometimes describing how art reaches us can be more interesting than describing the art itself. What I'm sick of is hearing arguments about process that are as banal and self-evident as "Our Schools Must Do Better" was for the issue of education. BLOGGERS, RAISE YR STANDARDS!
8 comments:
Finally listened to Black Kids via your Pfork song review from September...they're pretty good! Unfortunately wrong-place-wrong-time style pawns in communal excuse for venting toward no discernible goal.
I'm all for venting, but we need to take it for what it's worth, and it's usually not worth very much unless someone does something with it (preferably the venter). It is itself an uncritical approach, because it lets the outrage overwhelm the ideas, so you're not totally sure where the outrage is coming from in the first place.
What good conversation could come of this kind of speculation anyway? It wouldn't affect the "hype machine" (hype machines aren't particularly good or bad, they're just how word gets 'round -- usually a good thing; yes, they're FAST these days gawsh, but I don't see this as being categorically different from them being SLIGHTLY LESS FAST) nor would it change the make-up of indie's audience, nor would it change how people make the music they make.
We can change how we talk about music in a more general sense, though, by investigating all the stuff that is being hyped better than the people doing no investigation (which is where discussion of what Black Kids actually sound like comes in) or by ignoring them (this is where avoiding discussion of Black Kids altogether comes in and it is still an option).
I think the real problem here, though, a sort of perverse problem, is that no one is willing to stake the quality of the music they're complaining about on the process they want to wring their hands at. That's weird. It makes these all fairly difficult "problems" to discuss as problems; it's exclusively about the people who make it and listen to it, who they are and how they make and/or listen. So you get pretty broad and usually unfair or (or at least only half-formed) social judgments that only work in an extremely vague and generalized way (and therefore make for pretty useless social analysis). But I think I'm just repeating myself.
Dave: I agree with your agreement! And I find particularly interesting your final point, the one you say is repetitive. I don't think it is.
In olden times (the '90s?), it seems like many people really did stake the quality of the music on the mode of its distribution. Indie, for many, equaled good. Then came the ILX eye-opener, and the great pop round the turn of the millennium, and suddenly this punk-derived stance was no longer viable, because too many people found their tastes contradicting it.
For Black Kids, one could argue that their circumstances-- the fact they're homemade, unpolished, doing it for themselves in a place where the prospect of fame is distant enough that it doesn't seem like vapid fame-seeking (i.e., Jacksonville vs. NYC)-- make them good. DIY A-OK etc. I don't argue that, although I can't deny that it makes them more likable on a fannish level.
On the other hand, one could argue that because they were hyped by NME, or blogs, or (YE GAWDS) p4k, they are therefore inherently bad, because all music hyped by those sources is bad. I don't think anyone has argued that, either. The reason, perhaps, is that each of those sources has maintained enough (shudder) credibility that to argue thusly would lead to twisting oneself into a pretzel amid accusations of hypocrisy.
Culture Bully: Have I not added you to ye ol blog roll yet? Fixed. As always, Mr. Harvey is fantastically on point so far, though I haven't finished reading yet. I'm halfway through microwaving some leftover stir-fry. We used fake chicken ("Chick'n"). The microwave is beeping at me every 30 seconds. Um, where was I?
Good point about the adventure! The constant pursuit of the new-- a business imperative for music journalists and record labels alike, and something Tom Ewing ably explores in today's Poptimist column on Pitchfork-- is perhaps the great danger here, one that is exacerbated by the hypemachine age but also existed before it. We need to be sure that we're not liking something just because it's the new whatever-- that way Jet lies. Unfortunately, it's hard to be self-aware enough to recognize this; repeated listening is the best method I know of for this. On the plus side, though, it really does seem like people are consuming, and will continue to consume (OINK's demise notwithstanding, because Napster got shut down, too) greater and greater quantities of music in the future... meaning that we'll likely never return to such a limited canon as the Rolling Stone-approved acts on which I grew up, and therefore there will be room for more and more new acts.
The great fear is, how much will any of them mean to anyone? To us? To the people we love? To "the kids"?
Oh, and thank you so much for the fresh Lil Wayne link. Fucking YouTube, man.
ugh, i need to use the preview option. apologies for any clunky syntax.
Eric Harvey's piece should be required reading. I'm still developing my thoughts... for about an hour last night it made me think I shouldn't bother blogging if I can't give it the proper time, but then it made me wonder if we're treating blogs as "criticism" (which they can be) when the average blog might better looked as just "discourse" or, more casually, "conversation". This is how people interact with music nowadays -- we didn't used to overhear every stupid conversation, or see it held up as exemplary on a site like hypemachine, so we didn't need to heap scorn on them. Yes, blogging and music as social-networking are changing how we find out about music, and it's worth examining how (which Eric does), but I don't think it's worthwhile for us to sit around and complain about the medium anymore (and Eric doesn't do this, either), just the mediocre music it is used to promote.
Will keep thinking about this for a long time, I'm sure.
Sorry about the lateness here, but I was AFMIC (Away From My Internet Connection) for a few days while it happened.
Anyway, it seems to me that issue I had with Black Kids is that I had heard of them before the p4k review (I live not-too-far from Jacksonville, in Orlando) when I saw them on the lineup for the Athens Pop fest and thought it cool that a Florida band was attending--and I also thought they had a "provocative name." Though I still didn't attend the pop fest, I will retell what I did prior to the buzz:
I thought "These guys have a great band name..." then I found their myspace, saw some videos and streamed some music, and thought, "Hey, they're alright. They sound a lot like they want to sound like the Cure, though." And then I forgot about them until the buzz came back around.
Maybe I'm not a careful listener, but it seemed like their music was only pretty good. Pretty good for a little Florida band. And pretty good considering they had no buzz. But I will say, that while I agree with Marc's initiation of Jens Lekman into the 9.0+ club with his Kortedala review, I thought Black Kids' music was a little undercooked for initiation into the p4k 8.0+ club. And maybe, this premature hyping may affect the potential they might've had before.
If anything, this has taught us the value of a good band name to the NME/p4k/blog "hype machine." (Though maybe we should call the way hype seems to be working these days thing something less loaded with negative connotations than a "machine")
Omar, thanks for the thoughts. That's a totally fair assessment, though you won't sway me on those four songs.
I was reading Charles Aaron's punk history The Spirit of 77 over at SPIN the other day (disclosure: he's my editor there) and I had a few more thoughts about this Black Kids fracas.
It really seems to me like many critics, bloggers and fans have internalized the music industry's expectations of what a band should be: a proven commodity, constantly touring, likely to release a steady stream of interchangeable material that fans can buy year after year along with T-shirts and concert tickets.
Personally, I don't happen to believe that what makes a band most profitable should have any bearing on whether a particular track, even a one-off or "novelty" song, brings me pleasure.
After listing a multitude of regional first-wave punk bands, Charles writes, "Punk, by nature, is a volatile, sometimes self-destructive, work in progress that you make up as you go along, with no expectation that your band or scene will even exist in a year."
The potential for longevity-- whether a band was "undercooked" vs. ready to sell itself to the mainstream-- didn't matter then. Why is it such a hot topic for people now? (As an aside, I think Black Kids will do just fine, but I don't think such fantasy-baseball prognostication is valid as criticism, and it's especially puzzling to me from fans.)
To me, a great record is a great record even if it's the only great record a band ever makes. It's OK if you don't think the four songs Black Kids put on the Internet for free are "great." But it seems like most people are taking issue with the fact that that's ALL they've done, or that the tracks sound amateurish and homemade rather than honed by years of touring and building a lucrative, grassroots fan base (hey, punk and lo-fi and indie-rock before it was a bankable commodity sounded this way, too).
Me, I could give a fuck about all that business-oriented stuff. Just give me some songs I can sing along with, some songs I can dance to, some songs that make me look at the world a tiny bit differently, some songs I will find myself playing again and again long after my assignment to review them is over.
Um, speaking of hype, I've listened to this a dozen times already today:
Kate Nash covers Black Kids
I have only listened to Jens Lekman praising TTA on NPR once:
Lekman on All Songs Considered
Marc: That "fantasy-baseball prognostication" is a great analogy for this type of criticism. Well put. However, though, I don't want to come off as an advocate of that style I am just one of those fantasy-baseball prognosticators, an arm chair critic really, (un)trained in that style. I'm just a popular music consumer with a Blogger.com account.
Anyway, I basically agree that, "many critics, bloggers and fans have internalized the music industry's expectations of what a band should be" but it think that what they internalized is that "Spirit of '77" model as the expectation, not the "proven commodity, constantly touring, likely to release a steady stream of interchangeable material that fans can buy year after year along with T-shirts and concert tickets" model.
The role of criticism itself has changed from what it was in 77, seeing as how today, arm chair critics like this one flood the internet with their opinions and create the buzz that actually markets the bands and turns them into ("indie") superstars.
Anyway, I don't know if I even know the argument behind this comment anymore, but I just think that the role of the critic today has changed. To grossly oversimplify my point a bit and avoid getting into essay-lengths here:
Yesterday (1977 maybe): "Critical acclaim" = obscurity (i.e. Lester Bangs, a critic, loved Richard Hell and the Voidoids, but they weren't so famous)
Today: "Critical acclaim" = popularity (i.e. Black Kids get nods from Village Voice, Pitchfork, NME, and they get to play bigger venues and consumers take interest in their music)
Basically, Black Kids' getting music critic praise today is the equivalent of a band appearing on MTV in the early 80s because the business of music has so changed.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with anything, but if you are into obscure regional bands that are really great without touring or releasing albums and only have their myspaces to offer to the world, then check out this one called For Ex Lovers Only. I have no idea if they'll stay exist in a year, but their self-desctructively produced, works in progress are pretty awesome.
(Although I don't really want to start new thread/point here, I also want to say, in regards to the business of music not mattering, it does matter. While I also cherish the great, one-shot novelty song by the band that broke-up immediately after making, from an aesthetic perspective, the context that produced that song matters as much as the objective qualities of the work itself, if only to try and fully explain how such works get made. To me, knowing how those great songs tick is as much a part of loving them as just loving them.)
Not a response to you, Omar, so much as a general thought about the original cause of the discussion:
When you get right down to it, saying a band is over-hyped is saying, "People have heard of this band. I don't think this many people should have heard of this band. They should have heard of the bands I like instead."
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