Music criticism in the here & now

[Andrew_TSKS]

I've been really grumpy on the boards today. That sucks.

Pagebreak context removal GO!

[Ignatius]

We’re so hard-wired as humans to define ourselves through the shit we buy (or own)—Boeckner’s “100,000 sad inventions”—that we produce alternative consumer cultures where the objects we own mean what we want ourselves to mean and then we turn around and say we live a different way than our parents. It’s true and it’s not true, and I think Wolf Parade’s politics and aesthetic are, consciously or unconsciously, mitigated by that fact.

This is the kind of stuff that bothers me in particular about music reviewing...  I sometimes appreciate state-of-the-art type essays on indie rock or what-have-you.  And of course there's a place in reviews of particular albums or artists where it's totally reasonable and helpful to correlate their style or appeal to bigger trends.  But I often feel that reviews like this use the work they're reviewing as a soapbox...  This doesn't help me decide whether I want to listen to Wolf Parade or not, y'know? 

I see what you're saying, Antero, and I appreciate that sort of writing too...  But I get a little put off when an album review gets to this point...  I think it's a personal thing where you have to decide to what extent a review should serve a functional purpose, and to what extent a reviewer ought to take on bigger themes, or whatever.  I suppose I'd rather have someone tell me whether they like something, what it might sound like, and whether they think I might like it.  For this reason, I've tended to retreat more and more from internet music criticism to this place here, friends' recommendations, and newspaper reviews.  Oldening bitter guy?  My take, anyhow.  In the meantime, I also tend to lean on AMG.  If you're crotchety like me, you might like it too.  I'll also admit that I'm still pretty bitter about the time Pitchfork convinced me to buy that first Wolf Parade album and they were all "this is awesome and special."

[Andrew_TSKS]

Ooh, see, I disagree. Pithy, one-word "I don't respect this artist, here, let me jerk you off and congratulate you for agreeing with me that this record doesn't deserve to be taken seriously" reviews make me wanna kill, but a lot of what made me care about music criticism in the first place was the sort of much bigger, more expanded statement about music and culture in general that someone could take from a particular record. I say this specifically as a reference to Lester Bangs, who would use things like a review of "Fun House" by The Stooges to make wider statements about rock music in general at that moment in time, or a review of Talking Heads to talk about how hard it seemed to be for people to make personal connections in a time of growing impersonality in modern, urbanized culture. I think that's a lot of why I write about music the way I write on my blog; I see music as an art form with a really deep, intrinsic link to the overall disposition of the human spirit (god, did that even make sense?). I hear my own sense of alienation, paranoia, and social anxiety reflected in things like the way Mohinder's songs were all really fast and frantic. I wrote about that last month and probably took 3000 words to do it. These are the kinds of insights I think music criticism is uniquely predisposed to provide, and that's a lot of why I love writing about music as much as I love music itself. That's what I want from a music review site.

You're right that Pitchfork use their long reviews to be arch and witty and say nothing in a lot more words than that TMT review said jack fucking shit about a Nine Inch Nails album. But if a reviewer has something big and important to say and they can successfully relate it to an album (and I can see how the reviewer of that Wolf Parade disc does exactly that, which isn't to say that all reviews of that type successfully relate themselves to the albums they're supposed to be critiquing, and the ones that fail are just as bad as the Pitchfork reviews. But I'm losing my point), I would rather hear it than not hear it. And I'd rather read the sort of reviewer that regularly has those kinds of insights than ones that don't. For example: allmusic--a site whose reviews are almost entirely lacking in personality of any sort, and are therefore generally useless to me as anything other than an information source. And really, they're useless for that too, since they get essential facts wrong at least half the time.

[sashwap]

i can't even follow that CMG paragraph or why it was written about some rinky dink wolf parade album.

[Andrew_TSKS]

RAHR RAHR why am I so grumpy tonight?

[dieblucasdie]

i can't even follow that CMG paragraph or why it was written about some rinky dink wolf parade album.

uuuuuuuh.  CMG is Montreal-based, I don't think you can really fault them for taking a wolf parade album seriously.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Well, now wait a minute. I agree that without reading the whole review, it comes off a bit weird because there's essential context to the point the guy is making that isn't in the quote. But where Wolf Parade being rinky dink is concerned, I wholeheartedly agree with blucas [holy shit, am I gonna get grumpy again?!? I'll try not to]. Any record you get for review is worthy of respect as an artistic object. When you dismiss it as unworthy of serious consideration, any review you give is irrelevant, because you never even objectively evaluated the damn thing. So yeah, that attitude isn't fair.

But as far as making sense of the paragraph from the review on its own merits, the reason CMG is writing about the Wolf Parade record in that way is because Spencer Krug throws around a lot of "let's get out of the oppressive civilized world and roam free on horses running wild across the plains" sort of imagery. The reviewer is attacking the fact that indie culture has boiled itself down to a set of oversimplified lowest-common-denominator cultural signifiers, just like the mainstream culture has, and that the only difference between one and the other is which signifiers they're using. And he's using this comparison to point out that when Spencer Krug sings about getting away from it all using totally worn-out cultural cliches, he's really actually subverting his own point by singing about getting away from the mainstream culture using signifiers that the mainstream culture has created and turned into cliches in the first place.

EDIT: I just wanna point out that this is a pretty damn successful thread so far, at least by my standards.

[sashwap]

i can't even follow that CMG paragraph or why it was written about some rinky dink wolf parade album.

uuuuuuuh.  CMG is Montreal-based, I don't think you can really fault them for taking a wolf parade album seriously.

no faulting going on, just don't see what they're on about

[Andrew_TSKS]

see my post above. i think we xposted

EDIT: also, I should have lumped in that Boeckner guy who also sings for Wolf Parade into the previous post. I don't listen to that band enough to be really clear on who does what in the band, so I apologize if I accidentally muddied the waters.

[Ignatius]

I think the critical part of what you're saying, Andrew, and what I have a problem with, is whether or not "they can successfully relate it to an album."  And I think success in that sense usually takes a good writer, with a generous deadline...  So something like that Stranded book has a few really interesting and well-done essays on particular albums.  They're very personal, too, but I like them, and they generate interest in the music.  But a site like pitchfork or cokemachineglow tries to insert a very broadly-concerned essay into what is essentially a capsule review, to be published within a few days of the album's release.  I'm specifically talking about album reviews, not music criticism in general...  If you put a lot of thought and time into your Mohinder piece, I'd probably enjoy reading it, and it would probably give me an angle to get into them...  But I tend to think that reviews of current music are best when they're sort of quick and dirty, y'know?

[Andrew_TSKS]

Actually, I can generally write something like that in a day or two, if I'm connecting with the album heavily enough. That said, I see your point--if I wrote for CMG and they handed me albums on the regular that I was supposed to come up with deep, intricate analyses of on command, I would probably have a really hard time doing it for any album that I didn't love the second I heard it. I wouldn't have been able to do it for the newest Hold Steady record, that's for DAMN sure.

That's another reason why I see the 70s-era model as a lot better; back then, you didn't have to focus so obsessively on new releases. Lester Bangs was publishing lengthy and considered analyses of albums that had been out for years, and in magazines that were widely read, most notably Creem. So yeah, to a great extent I agree with you.

And really, although I like that CMG piece on that Wolf Parade album as a whole, and think it does connect well with the album the guy's talking about, he really doesn't write very clearly, and there are points during that essay where I feel bogged down trying to get through one of his sentences without losing the meaning somewhere in the middle. I think maybe the problem is that a lot of the people who write for sites like that are way young and ummmm overeducated. Lester Bangs barely went to college, you know? These days, all the hipsters have post-graduate degrees. They're too used to writing like a research paper. At least, that's a theory. Which may or may not hold water.

[Ignatius]

I could see that, as far as pitchfork reviews go, like... shit, I can't just tell you about Vampire Weekend... I need a THESIS.

[lastclearchance]

This is the kind of stuff that bothers me in particular about music reviewing...  I sometimes appreciate state-of-the-art type essays on indie rock or what-have-you.  And of course there's a place in reviews of particular albums or artists where it's totally reasonable and helpful to correlate their style or appeal to bigger trends.  But I often feel that reviews like this use the work they're reviewing as a soapbox...  This doesn't help me decide whether I want to listen to Wolf Parade or not, y'know? 

tsks already sort of covered all this but i'm going to say my piece anyway

do you really think in the age of the internet when in thirty seconds you can hear the damn thing for yourself you even need someone to tell you whether or not to like it?

frankly, "this kind of stuff" is all i'm interested in. or if it's a review i want to read a reviewer whose taste i know so i can get a sense of what they're saying about a record based on their taste trajectory

consumer guides bore me

and frankly, much love to ned raggett, and his stuff at amg is great, but in a lot of cases that's making the best of a shit situation, which is ever-decreasing word counts. i like reading what ned has to say when he has more words! but he doesn't usually get paid for that.

re: pfk in particular, i'm glad they're giving good writers space to write reviews because a lot of their younger writers don't know what to do with that much space. a bunch of the writers my age and younger have NO CONCEPTION of what indie rock was like as recently as the NINETIES.

also i sort of wonder about the ambivalence that a lot of pfk vets have about it...they are really hesitant to say anything good but at the same time there is an extent to which they owe their current writing jobs to their stint at fk so they don't want to shit on it either.

[coldforge]

The fact is: when you read a columnist who has devoted their entire life to a school of music—and I mean people who have lived twice as long as your internet reviewers—there is a depth and richness and attention to what they have to say on a record that makes this stuff look embarrassing, whether it's "if you like X you will like Y" perfunctory sounds-like column space, or if its up-yer-own-arsehole bullshit. It takes a lot of craft to get beyond "I listened to this record and this is how I felt", and someone like Kyle Gann or Virgil Thompson (though not, you know, Thompson himself, at the moment) completely remind you the purpose and place and worth of good music writing—and what it looks like—in the face of a false dichotomy like "describe something you can hear yourself by clicking an mp3 link, or poop out whatever immediately-conceived thoughts i have about American culture after 26 minutes of a 37 minute Yeah Yeah Yeahs album."

[Ignatius]

edit: coldforge is better.

[coldforge]

I actually didn't mean to sound as curmudgeonly as I did there. The point was not 'Indie rock sucks and you internet people are idiots', as it so often is; but more, 'we all spend a lot of our time reading about music on the internet and so we have kind of absorbed this incredibly restricted set of possibilities for how to talk about music in the current era, but it's not hard to actually see that music writing is a craft that can be practiced at an incredibly more sophisticated and satisfying level.'

[lastclearchance]

it helps if those talented writers are getting paid for it too.

[Antero]

I agree with all of this, and am wowed by the accuracy of that cokemachineglow excerpt. I've never read that site. Maybe I'm missing out.

You are and you aren't.  Some of the reviews/reviewers are just plain idiotic.  Sometimes they drop a really fucking excellent review, though - their review of the new Girl Talk album could not be more accurate.

They are very good at picking out people you've never ever heard of and giving 'em some face time, without overblown hype behavior.

This is the kind of stuff that bothers me in particular about music reviewing...  I sometimes appreciate state-of-the-art type essays on indie rock or what-have-you.  And of course there's a place in reviews of particular albums or artists where it's totally reasonable and helpful to correlate their style or appeal to bigger trends.  But I often feel that reviews like this use the work they're reviewing as a soapbox...  This doesn't help me decide whether I want to listen to Wolf Parade or not, y'know? 

I see what you're saying, Antero, and I appreciate that sort of writing too...  But I get a little put off when an album review gets to this point...  I think it's a personal thing where you have to decide to what extent a review should serve a functional purpose, and to what extent a reviewer ought to take on bigger themes, or whatever.  I suppose I'd rather have someone tell me whether they like something, what it might sound like, and whether they think I might like it.  For this reason, I've tended to retreat more and more from internet music criticism to this place here, friends' recommendations, and newspaper reviews.  Oldening bitter guy?  My take, anyhow.  In the meantime, I also tend to lean on AMG.  If you're crotchety like me, you might like it too.  I'll also admit that I'm still pretty bitter about the time Pitchfork convinced me to buy that first Wolf Parade album and they were all "this is awesome and special."

Like Andrew, I've found AMG pretty useless, and often completely wrongheaded.  The only use I've found for them is picking highlights out of the careers of more veteran artists that I'm interested in already.  Newspaper reviews are even worse - god, they like a lot of shitty music.

Criticism that seeks only to help convince the listener to consume or reject a piece of media is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed.  Aesthetic taste is such a personal thing that the simple opinion of an unknown third party, especially an unknown third party whose identity is largely subsumed beneath their affiliation with an organization, should be worthless to the audience.  I know two people whose musical taste I will place trust in, and that's partly because I'm so close to them that I know how to analyze their reactions with relation to my own.

I'm not trying to get all fuzzy here - I'm certainly far from an aesthetic relativist.  The point, though, is that if the sum total of a review is "I liked it!" or "I didn't like it except for tracks 3 and 7" or any approximation thereof, then that review is nothing to me.  Critical writing should be just that.  For a review to be anything more than waste paper it has to go beyond a rating.

Criticism should:
1) Involve itself in the act of viewing by drawing attention to elements of the work that deserve recognition (or remonstrance), and thereby deepen the audience's understanding of the work and the art in general.

((Good: Lester Bangs talking about the repetition of words and phrases in Astral Weeks.  Bad: Some Pitchfork clown claiming that Steve Albini's recording style was "overcompressed."))

2) Approach the work as a document with a context and content. 

((Good: CMG on Wolf Parade's new album.  Bad: Some Pitchfork clown spending most of a review of a Two Gallants album complaining that they sang a blues song with the word "nigger" in it.))

Why read an essay of any sort?  To be intellectually engaged and possibly learn something new.  If I want to find things I want to listen to, I listen to things until something clicks.  Hell, if the essay is engaging I'm more likely to track down the subject matter so as to better understand the essay - there's a reason that Lester Bangs' Astral Weeks review is the greatest piece of music criticism ever, and that's because it carries the potential of the whole of its subject in it.

[Ignatius]

Criticism that seeks only to help convince the listener to consume or reject a piece of media is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed.

That's not what I said...  And by newspapers, I wasn't referring to USA Today or your local Gannett/Hearst affiliate etc. etc. 

I don't want a reviewer to tell me whether I should get something or not, I want to know whether the record jibes with my tastes.  That's easy to accomplish, and it should work for most readers.  That's the least that I expect.  If I could have my favorite writers, or even good writers, whom I trust, etc etc. cover most records that come out, it'd be wonderful.  Bonus if they're not too constrained...  But that's never going to happen - so I'd prefer that reviewers (on sites like pfk, cmg, in weekly alternatives, in the times, etc.) be responsible to a general reader first, and work on their great essay later.

Defining what constitutes a good review is going to be a slippery fish, in any case - what you cited as an example of unpretentious, thoughtful criticism strikes me as pretentious and weakly argued...

I dunno, I'm losing steam...  Maybe I should come right out and say that a great deal of writers writing about music right now are absolutely unqualified to do so, and shouldn't even pretend to tell me or anyone else why Wolf Parade appeals to indie-rock culture's unconscious material guilt which is true and isn't true and consciously and unconsciously mitigates Wolf Parade's own politics and aesthetics...

edit: drink hurts my patience and reasoning.. bed time

[dieblucasdie]

I actually didn't mean to sound as curmudgeonly as I did there. The point was not 'Indie rock sucks and you internet people are idiots', as it so often is; but more, 'we all spend a lot of our time reading about music on the internet and so we have kind of absorbed this incredibly restricted set of possibilities for how to talk about music in the current era, but it's not hard to actually see that music writing is a craft that can be practiced at an incredibly more sophisticated and satisfying level.'

not very punk rock

[Killdozersnakeboy]

I quite like Dusted. Seem to cover a pretty good variety of music. Doesn't seem particularly cooler-than-thou. And they have a fourtnightly column on 7"s. All good.

edit. Oh yeah, I thought the NIN review was funny as well.

[sashwap]

Well, now wait a minute. I agree that without reading the whole review, it comes off a bit weird because there's essential context to the point the guy is making that isn't in the quote. But where Wolf Parade being rinky dink is concerned, I wholeheartedly agree with blucas [holy shit, am I gonna get grumpy again?!? I'll try not to]. Any record you get for review is worthy of respect as an artistic object. When you dismiss it as unworthy of serious consideration, any review you give is irrelevant, because you never even objectively evaluated the damn thing. So yeah, that attitude isn't fair.

But as far as making sense of the paragraph from the review on its own merits, the reason CMG is writing about the Wolf Parade record in that way is because Spencer Krug throws around a lot of "let's get out of the oppressive civilized world and roam free on horses running wild across the plains" sort of imagery. The reviewer is attacking the fact that indie culture has boiled itself down to a set of oversimplified lowest-common-denominator cultural signifiers, just like the mainstream culture has, and that the only difference between one and the other is which signifiers they're using. And he's using this comparison to point out that when Spencer Krug sings about getting away from it all using totally worn-out cultural cliches, he's really actually subverting his own point by singing about getting away from the mainstream culture using signifiers that the mainstream culture has created and turned into cliches in the first place.

EDIT: I just wanna point out that this is a pretty damn successful thread so far, at least by my standards.

ohhhhhh. makes sense now.and you're right about all albums deserving respect as an artistic object.

[narlus]

i think the nin review is kinda hilarious.

anyone remember Musician?  they have the all-time best review in the terse/snarky category.

their review of the self-titled 'supergroup' GTR was simply 'SHT'

 

[mrwednesday]

Very interesting thread, especially considering that the people who are involved actually read enough criticism to have a good view on it.
Whoever said that CMG is trash is absolutely right. Every once and awhile I get on and read a review to remind myself of why I have such strong feelings against the site, a reaffirmation roughly equivalent to a a toddler pressing his hand up against the stove AGAIN to remind himself how much being burned sucks ass. CMG actually sucks the fun out of music. They credit themselves with breaking all kinds of bands and it just seems really sad to me.
Anyhow, lemme rep Tiny Mixtapes. They seem genuinely ecstatic about music in general, and get me excited about shows. Their news stories are pretty absurd, but pretty funny, too. I guess you kind of have to expect at least some of that from people who spend large amounts of time with Wolf Eyes and Double Leopards records.

[davy]

they mentioned something in a news item last week about scientists having discovered the ruins of an underwater civilization centuries old, etc etc.

i scoured the internet for like an hour.

i guess the joke's on me!