The guy at the gig hunched over his notepad, furtively taking down his impressions on the show for his blog post later on that night, has become as depressingly common a sight as the raised cellphone camera. (Y’all need to work on your recall.) But New York Times critic Jon Pareles has taken show notes one step further.
At last night’s Union Pool showcase during the CMJ music festival in New York, we noticed a man scoring music on a staff as Dragons of Zynth finished their set. When asked what he was up to, he said he was notating the bassline of the song to find out later which track it was (he had the whole Dragons of Zynth album on a Sandisk Sansa e200 portable audio player).
Most of the time I’m lucky if my notes get more detailed than “the third one with the guitar that sounded like a duck,” “what an ugly jacket,” or “I’m hungry,” and this guy’s notating music in real time. Anyone who bitches about not being able to find a WiFi hot spot or from here on out is officially fired from music criticism.
Snapshot: The NY Times Pop Music Reviewer’s Live Music Notation [Listening Post]
Anyone who bitches about not being able to find a WiFi hot spot or from here on out is officially fired from music criticism.
Whew! Good thing I’m not a real music critic, or I’d be in real trouble!
Maybe it’s just because I’m a colossal nerd and I’ve been memorizing setlists and writing them down as soon as I get home from shows since I was 16, but I’m always perplexed by writers who bring notepads to a show. If you are going to be that big of a nerd, you should at least train your memory well enough to not have to do that and look like such a nerd at shows. I’m sure you miss more details of the show by spending half the time looking at a piece of paper than you’d forget by not writing anything down until after.
Ya know, in another life, I was a music critic for a metro daily, and lemme tell you, you need to take notes. It’s not just the setlist you have to recall. It’s between-song banter, audience hijinks, anything special. I never cared how many folks in the audience bugged me (“Who ya writin’ for? You better give the band a good review!) or even when I was even called out by musicians who noticed me scribbling away.
Notes are a part of the job, and you’d better get it right because, when you screw up, it’s the colossal nerds who will nail you every time.
Big props to Jon Pareles!
Notepads aren’t merely an aid to memory, though: often times, by writing about something in real time, you’re also making yourself analyze what’s going on in a way you sorta can’t after the fact. (nb: I’ve never actually done this at show, but I do take notes when I visit buildings I write about, and I figure in this case what’s true for a tourist trap experience is true for a concert experience.)
I’ve bumped into Pareles at a couple of shows, and he’s the nicest music nerd you’d ever want to meet. Years of, no doubt, crazy VIP treatment as the Times‘s chief pop critic don’t seem to have made him an asshole, which is kind of amazing. Probably the best Boomer critic out there (and he manages to hide his Boomerness fairly well).
I first noticed him doing this at a Mekons show at the Knitting Factory in 1989. It’s certainly safe to say few critics are capable of notating music (and that many of the ones who can are probably not as readable as Pareles).
Taking notes does detract from the visceral experience of being at a show, no doubt. But the same goes for sporting events.
Thank you, Daesu. I’ve taken notes for reviews at plenty of shows. Am I really that annoying? I try to stay to the back (because I’m also really tall and hate people complaining about me blocking their view) and be as inconspicuous as possible. I fail to believe this is 1/1000th as annoying as the glare from countless camera phones.
when you’re a 79 year old music critic for a major national newspaper, i think god forgives you for bringing a notepad to a show.