EVERYTHING'S COMING UP PIZNARSKI

Famous-sounding words make your head feel light.
Pixies: Gigantic (live, 1988)

Clicks are currency here in the ad-sponsored online media Interzone, and that simple fact changes not just how we interact with content, but also what content we see in the first place. In 2007, is the concept of a Googleable name so newsworthy it belongs on the front page of The Wall Street Journal? Just a couple of years ago, was the notion of college kids eating cereal really so novel it merited an entire trend story in The New York Times? Magazines like Time have pandered hard with sex and religion covers for decades, but the online medium has only intensified the media's emphasis on easy sells over timely news pegs. The difference: It doesn't even matter anymore if people actually read the story, let alone find it worth money. The click is all that counts.

News websites have a few different ways to generate clicks. The most valuable to readers is breaking a fresh story, but while this may be the best strategy for maintaining long-term credibility, it requires resources (talented reporters with time to develop sources) and flexibility (you can't schedule scoops). Another way to generate clicks is to write a story with broad inherent appeal: No matter what you write about universal topics like sex, religion, or health, if you write an intriguing headline, people are going to click. Keep your common denominator low enough, and AOL or MSN might even throw links your way (= more advertising revenue). Finally, sites can run cultish stories targeting readers who make up in passion what they lack in numbers. Not everybody cares about Sirius stock (ticker: SIRI), but everybody who does seems to click on every Sirius-related news story.

From a news perspective, the effect of the latter two options is to trivialize and segment the dialogue even further than cable TV shoutfests have already done. Websites run stories that are the journalistic equivalent of Cosmopolitan coverlines: A Slate article on "Hillary's red-state accent" probably doesn't have any policy relevance, but that headline is like American Apparel near-nudity for grabbing clicks-- whether or not anybody actually finishes reading the durn thing. Further, Sirius might not be particularly important, but click-conscious editors will probably assign additional resources to them to keep up their numbers, and end up missing out on smarter, tougher, more important stories. At some point, forget investigative reporting.


Not only is a man in the cabinet, but the man is a midget.
Los Campesinos!: We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives (cross-posted from Pitchfork)

I'm beginning to believe that Web music discussion is affected by these same trends, though probably not as consciously (none of my editors have ever, ever broached the topic). Here, too, news portals and click-conscious bloggers must know they can get the most bang from their buck writing about topics with extremely broad appeal. Or topics with tiny but devout (often aka bored) followings. And this is where I get back to one of the things that's bold and awesome about Matt LeMay's band, Get Him Eat Him (although in response to Nick's post, I like the album but have no idea how I'd go about rating it-- knowing somebody involved with a band tends to make me worry both about being unfairly positive and about overcompensating for perhaps being unfairly positive): This is an environment where the Top 40, MTV, and American Idol acts still have cross-niche appeal to writers and readers; everybody likes and writes about the tiny amount of stuff that gets a national push from non-Internet media. It's also an environment where we, overloaded with information, devote an inordinate amount of time to albums nobody seems willing to admit they don't get (in fairness sometimes I probably just don't get 'em). The faltering mass culture and the above-reproach avant garde. [though: Why accept Clive Davis's story as credible? Doesn't it enhance a pop star's image to portray her as a rebel rather than a product?]

"ANYWAY" (hyuck hyuck) what Get Him Eat Him do is put together influences from unjustly undermentioned '90s indie-rock heroes like Chavez and Shudder to Think and write catchy songs and actually sing well. This is neither low-brow nor incomprehensibly outre. In fact it's so barely a few years ago ("Oh, I'm listening to an indie-rock band") it seems like the type of thing that could get overlooked in the New Promotional Order. A one-line post about a buzzed-about record you've never listened to in its entirety (but OMG it just hit oink) would be an easier, flashier lure for buzzers/ees. WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET PEOPLE TO LISTEN TO STUFF NOWADAYS??? Are we making music "work" or did the technology just get that way.


My Crystal Gayle shirt is ruined.
Jonathan Richman: Springtime in New York

Elsewhere:

Here's more on what I was getting at in the non-musical portion of the post that prompted this discussion with Dave Moore. If no journalism at least strives for objectivity (while inevitably failing), then we're further from a well-informed democracy:

"You can always dismiss a blogger, or a partisan paper like the New York Post, as biased. But The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal have long batted down this complaint. That's because it rings so empty. The MSM makes an earnest (albeit occasionally flawed) effort to achieve a neutral understanding of events, and that's the source of an authority and prestige that even its harshest critics in the political and corporate elite still must respect."

If you haven't gotten to Tom Ewing's latest Poptimist column yet, you should. Key point:

"[C]riticism isn't at the brass-rubbing stage quite yet. To fully avoid it, it seems to me as a reader that music critics will have to stop relying on their superior taste and expertise, and start trading on their ideas and the conversations they help spark."

One crazy addition: I read some of my favorite music writers also for the pleasure of their prose, savoring the vitality of their language as much as what the words convey (the way people can listen to an album that sounds good whether or not the lyrics match up) (cf. especially Meltzer, Bangs, and Xgau, yes he of the "Consumer Guide"). Good writing can function without necessarily being only overtly functional, right? (Not saying I can even achieve this, but ideally it's one more way we could make ourselves useful.)


Look at that, a bear mining for coal.
Yoko Ono and Cat Power: Revelations