Idolator
One of the worst things about the earnest nature of music blogs at the moment—whether giants like Stereogum and Brooklyn Vegan or some kid happily posting up uncleared MP3s, where most copy amounts to recycled press releases or "OMG! Music is so awesome!" if it expresses any sort of opinion at all—is that it's now gauche to call out a crock. You get called a "reactionary" or a "hater" and these pushovers want to know why you can't just relax and enjoy the bounty of an era where every new band is more mindblowing than the last. But the wheels-within-wheels meta-coverage of Black Kids, the latest blog-crush turned (almost) real-world hype, has forced us to say something about this pathetic state of affairs. Because Black Kids are some bullshit. And it's not even their fault. It's our fault, which is to say the fault of bloggers and writers. Because right now no one should even know who Black Kids are.
I had planned to write this over the weekend, and a lot of what I'm about to say already started to slip out in my post about day five of CMJ. Hell, it's been written about elsewhere on Idolator, like Maura's post about the Oxford American article on blog hype, and we're hardly the only bloggers to voice similar concerns over the last few years. But after this morning's New York Times hit the doorstep, it feels like it all bears repeating. Loudly. If they're not killing music, which is sky-is-falling horseshit, then blogs are killing certain bands, mostly indie rock bands, one at a time, by acting like a surrogate network of Lou Pearlmans forcing kids without the chops or songs into the hard-touring, hard-interviewing, hard-pressed-to-come-up-with-material spotlight. And the hosannas heaped on what amounted to middling performances from a group (Black Kids) that should have been third on a five-band bill playing a small bar in a second-tier city feel like people trying to save face, and they're an excellent example of what makes the whole "blog band" enterprise rancid and ridiculous and potentially unstoppable.
Many of you are probably sitting there grousing to yourselves that you don't even know who Black Kids are or at least what they sound like, but isn't that par for the course in a climate where a four-song demo is ripped from a band's control and claimed the second coming in major newspapers and magazines (and Pitchfork counts if anything does these days), the blog dominoes falling one after the other? Black Kids may have evolved into something interesting in a year or two, but right now, at an impossible early peak of popularity, they're half-formed at best. Despite the routine and baseless praise, Black Kids' music is just a collection of indie-pop cliches—basslines ripped off from Peter Hook or James Jamerson, sloppy drumming, rudimentary guitar heroics, and the melodic fallacy that going "la-la-la" in a unsion shout qualifies you for Brill Building canonization. Like most bands still feeling their way around a practice space and each other, they've mashed these signifiers together to quickly write their first clutch of songs to see if it all works. And unsurprisingly, it's all still very much undigested.
Which makes the hype the usual consumer fraud, and Jon Pareles' half-hearted contribution to the hype someone turning a dispassionate eye to a real problem for young bands. In his defense, as a longtime critic for one of the biggest dailies on the planet, Pareles probably (rightly?) doesn't feel very distraught by the state of online journalism or the vagaries of being a band in the era of online journalism. But I do, and I gather anyone reading this site regularly does as well. As for his critical evaluation of the band, while the article mostly allows him to turn that dispassionate eye to the larger issue of blog-hype, he still arrives at the conclusion that Black Kids are "a pretty good band with more than its share of blogger-friendly hooks" and "unpolished but immediately likable." Which is faint, somewhat incoherent praise—what the hell are "blogger-friendly hooks"?—but praise nonetheless. Hell, the earlier Times blog report on the band reads like praising an invalid for not shitting their pants.
But the article is also a major news outlet at least stabbing at most of the problems afflicting indie rock and online criticism at the moment, even if Pareles doubles back on himself repeatedly—bloggers are usually there to puncture hype, but not always, and so on—and some of his assertions verge on laughable: "Lately, as downloaded songs tear apart albums and one-hit wonders come and go, indie rock has been one of the few zones where audiences stay loyal; they actively seek out bands, stay with them and give their music some undivided and repeated attention."
What kind of madness is this? Blog-era indie fans are among the most promiscuous music listeners around, and it's precisely this insatiable need for new bands among both fans and blogs desperate for more content that's forced Black Kids into this position. For every major band that fits Pareles' description like the Arcade Fire, where fans tape their photos to their lockers like they were Soulja Boy, there is an endless progression of "important" next big things to be forgotten about with the next iPod cull. The genre maybe have always been crowded with nonentities, but now it feels overpopulated with "bands to watch" to the point of polluting its own ecosystem, with listeners acting like game wardens mercilessly thinning the herd once they become bored. Most of these bands, even the ones more technically accomplished or even "interesting" than Black Kids, are obviously less than deserving of the attention. And yet it's almost hard not to feel bad for them, considering that if they get written about in July, they'll be forgotten by Christmas. (This is not exactly restricted to new, unsigned, or unknown bands either. Just ask Bjork, who apparently released an album this year.) It's a "one chance to blow" kinda deal, with the idea of a band refining or improving or changing a distant memory from an era with, you know, albums and junk.
And above and beyond the current vogue for conflicted, confused blog-hype trend pieces, the problem is really that Mr. Pareles—or anyone, really—shouldn't be writing about Black Kids right now, at least not writing about them as the linchpin in a larger narrative or calling their derivative sketches some of the year's "best new music" with a straight face. They're a minor league band unfortunately aggrandized into a position of prominence that their music can't support. The problem is that it's all minor league bands aggrandized into a position of prominence these days, having the life immediately sucked out of them by the two-month (and shrinking) press cycle. "Organic" growth on the part of a band—i.e. getting better and building an audience by touring and recording—is actually denied them when the blog ankle-biters swarm in, unless the band is refusenik enough to extricate themselves from the whole process. And obviously most aren't. And the kind of indie/indie-pop virtues that Black Kids trade on—unskilled but earnest bands playing against the limits of their abilities—have no place in the rather ruthlessly "professionalized" world of insta-attention, where you have to grow-up into a Totally Freakin' Mind-Blowing Band within months, sometimes weeks.
Or maybe more accurately those indie-pop/rock values become poisonous when transplanted to the music blog world. We all know that indie bands like Black Kids once thrived in supportive—cranks might say codependent—small city music communities for minor audiences. But these bands shrivel under the gaze of national press scrutiny, if there was any "scrutiny," and that kind of uncritical, codependent support takes on ugly dimensions when it's coming from "tastemakers" immediately pushing bands into the arms of major labels and MTV News pieces. Bands need someone calling them on their shit to improve past the status of a hobby. Empty boosterism is fine on the level of bands playing house parties, but it feels almost cruel to watch its effects on suddenly "important" young bands in 2007 and depressing to watch its effects on the musical landscape of 2007. And calling it criticism with a straight face is the biggest canard of the blog era.
As for what to "do" about it, well, you've got me. There's a growing feeling that you can't fight city hall, especially when, as a music writer, it's almost impossible to not feel like part of the problem in a climate where writing positively about any new band feels suspect. I don't like to talk about writing for Pitchfork because it's unseemly, and because I don't want to turn into Sasha Frere-Jones desperately trying to turn his old band in a major plot point. But in this case I feel like it's at least somewhat germane, and otherwise it would be the BNM elephant in this tiny room. Whatever the outlet, I spent most of this year writing only about records I loved, under the assumption that life was too short and word counts were too limited to waste time on crap. As a result, I piled up a lot of raves, including raves for a lot of new bands. At the time, it didn't bother me, because I believed in those records and still do, but now I'm not so sure that my all-love tack wasn't just inadvertently feeding into the debasement of popular crit. The feeling of being hyper-aware about looking like you're tossing around indiscriminate praise is, as Mr. Pareles mentions in his piece, a worry among many writers, at least the ones with enough self-awareness to actually be concerned about such things. Which is obviously not enough.
Like I said, these worries and gripes are not new. You may have voiced them before yourself. But they need to be talked about, if only so they don't get steamrolled by the defeatist feeling that this slack slide into international-scale boosterism is irreversible. CMJ and Black Kids weren't any kind of Damascus moment—this has been an issue long a-brewin'—but they did remind me that we're at a precarious point right now for the future of what some of us still call criticism. If nothing else, people always love to argue about whether or not critics and reviews are useful as a "buyer's guide," and many have also argued that if music is as oversaturated as everyone says at the moment, it follows that the intermediaries should be more important than ever, even if the MP3-and-no-contextual-information evidence seems to say that the converse is true. Taste is subjective, but right now there are a lot of untrustworthy voices out there, voices with little in the way of insight—hell, voices that don't even really want to start arguments—and yet are nonetheless regarded as the New Critics, at least among those old media types with the power to anoint such empty titles.
It's easy to have a lot of friends when you don't stand for anything—again, having opinions is called "hating" these days—and it's equally easy to look like you're merely out to snarkily puncture hype with no stance of your own when commenting on reviews and trends. But for the bands' sakes—which means for the listeners' sakes, since they can only benefit by a band actually getting, you know, good—a moratorium on slobbering praise, at least when it comes to newborn bands like Black Kids, needs to be imposed by those with the kingmaking abilities. Or maybe listeners just need to start imposing some sort of fine on the "critics." Or maybe people just don't feel ripped off when confronted by the bland realities of bands like Black Kids because they know there will be another mediocre train along soon enough that will at least entertain them until the end of the semester.
Comments
the saddest part is that there is basically only two results for bands like these: a. they become tapes 'n tapes, a band that's two years old but are already has-beens to their core fanbase, or b. they become voxtrot, and feel the pressure to capitalize on their hype (both zine and blog) and rush out a record that ends up being shit because they wanted to remain "relevant."
the problem is, it's hard to ask (or expect) ppl to stop having a voracious appetite for music readily available to them. asking the average blog reader/blogger to scale back on hearing/posting new music for the benefit of the bands they already like (or for the benefit of bands that they still will want to like in a year's time) would be like telling someone that everything in a grocery store is free but asking them not to eat so much.
Lots of good points. But isn't there a long pre-internet history of indie/college-rock bands getting a ton of buzz based on just an EP or two? And didn't some of them go on to become career bands like REM and Pavement?
Oh c'mon, Jess, as if you've never contributed to inane online hype via one of your growing total of BEST NEW MUSIC (no hype-o) and RECOMMENDED reviews for Pitchfork. Dan Deacon, Battles, Justine D, Times New Viking and, to a lesser degree, The Field come to mind. Can you really harp on about undeserved hype for nearly 2000 saliva-clad words when you're a propagator yourself?
Anything that speeds up the implosion/collapse of "indie rock" is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
@Little White Earbuds: Uh, did you miss the 241 of those 2000 saliva-clad words where I discuss just that, iI.e. "the BNM elephant in this tiny room"? It would be a fair criticism to say this post ignore that if I hadn't already brought up my own complicity or the appearance of complicity, as well trying to figure how praise even works within "the new model."
@Little White Earbuds: That would've been a good point to make if Jess hadn't spent a whole paragraph conceding it before your response.
haha xpost
But, I know, I know...reading is hard! We'll all get there together, I promise.
Heh. Are there any more self-agrandizing people in music right now than bloggers?
@unperson: Anything that speeds up the implosion/collapse of "rock criticism" is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
This is pretty much why I spend my new-music-discovery free time just downloading the Elephant 6 records I don't already have.
Or you can just like unpopular bands. Works for me!
I'm on board with most of what you said.
The Net Hype Factory is pretty much out of control at this point and it's nearly impossible to keep up with the inundation of "next big things" or "bands to watch" who more often than not end up being "meh"- so what's the point of more than casually paying attention?
The only thing you can trust is your own set of ears.
Still, good bands like Arcade Fire still stand the test of hype and time.
thank you for posting this. someone needed to say it.
navel gazing. ugh. i feel for you, jess. it seems like all you want to do is love music and share your love for it. you unfortunately live in a world where many people anchor their self-identification to their position in the race to know some thing before anyone else. "i've seen it all. i was here first." personally, i miss out on LOTS of music. lots of everything really, because i just don't care enough to compete in that race. but since you're writing about it are at once compelled to be a competitor and judge of the competition, i have a suggestion that i hope might help. write more pieces like this that tell people what really sucks out there. you sort of allude to the idea in noting that you've written about the stuff you love. so go ahead and tell us more about bands like black kids and why they aren't worth our attention, at least not yet. i find a negative review to have a much stronger effect on me than positive one.
and you might want to just focus on the music and stop worrying about the wannabes of the world. in the end, the music is what counts.
This is a really good essay, and I completely agree with pretty much everything in it. For the reasons you've laid out, it's clear that the hyper-compressed timeline of blog hype is distressing, depressing, and distasteful. The only thing I want to ask is: does it really matter? If Black Kids is truly meant to be an interesting and good band, they will get there, blog microscope on them or not. It certainly makes it harder, but so what? There will always be bands who are able to make it through the chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out blog machine and come out the other end with a great new album and a great show. And those are the bands we'll end up caring about. So what if we (the audience) have to put up with a bunch of halfcocked, overeager Next Big Thing bullshit on the way there?
Were the Strokes the first real participants (victims?) in this scenario? I don't remember this kind of web-based inflation before Is This It, at least not as we know it today. And it seems like we've been subject to a different monthly buzz band ever since. Some of them weathered the storm - the White Stripes and Arcade Fire, to be specific - but most went down like the Strokes themselves, unable to fulfill expectations and not allowed to progress naturally.
there are a few things at work here. there's the very not-new quest for the hip, for media-derived cultural capitol that has supplanted self-discovery (as a culture, we have taken the cliched "you are what you own" to heart without any irony) and any sort of introspectiveness on the part of a community or culture. this is pervasive not just in music and the arts, but even technology (the techcrunch's of the world), journalism, sports, you name it. perspective is a difficult and nearly impossible thing to command, and, recognizing that, the web chooses not to. who reads archives, anyway?
what we are buying into now isn't so much art or culture, but filters. if you self-describe yrself as a pfork guy, then you need to know who the black kids are; it has been deemed thus. that's hardly pitchfork or marc hogan's fault -- their job, as they have defined it, is to merely whittle down the music environment into something barely digestible. what happens, to put it in time magazine 2006 terms, is up to YOU.
the other side, though, is that if you are the black kids, this is a very good thing. suddenly you have gone from guys and gals spending yr free time in a band to an honest to god career, and i can't begrudge anyone that. even if they got panned for their shows this week (which, interestingly enough, most of the people i talked to didn't like but I hardly read that anywhere) (were they good? no. should we feel betrayed? hell no.), they are in a much better place than they were two weeks ago, no matter how little they were prepared for it. they aren't going to get rich off of the review, but they will be able to not have day jobs for at least a year, and isn't that victory enough?
i'm with you on being against the natural tendency towards blogs as quasi-journalism (citizen journalist as a phrase might be the dumbest thing to ever come out of daily kos; are you telling me a blogger is gonna go pull plans from the water board to research some story on toxic waste dumps?), and think the only thing to do is read less. or at least just read the people that you trust, the folks who aren't auditioning for a&r gigs with each post. idolator has been good at calling this out since you came on, jess, especially the drive-by posting style of mp3s without context/reason solely for pageviews, adsense and i have no idea what else. if you asked a lot of these folks to justify their blog you'd get a whole lot of blank stares and not much else.
anyway, although i like this post, it feels somewhat misguided to me because there's no sense in stopping this train, only redirecting to a more beneficial place. like, for instance, how can we work it so that internet hype = actual money for artists? how can we make people pay money for music again? how can an artist actually see a return for yet another mp3 ripped and posted on stereogum? because right now the primary folks who gain from internet phenomenon are the bloggers themselves in cache and the erection they get when checking statcounter. music and records and bands are just springboards to Something Bigger. at it's worst (which it very often is), it's cultural tourism of the worst kind. and fuck that.
I'll admit that this was a first draft flurry of stuff that had been nagging at me, and as such it's probably as contradcitory in its own way as the Pareles article that I call out. There's also no way to talk about this stuff without talking about my own role as critic, which inevitably I'm sure some people could easily see as self-indulgent. But I think the issue larger deserved airing out, even at the risk of looking self-aggrandizing, hypocritical, stuck in my own navel, whatever. Mea culpa, etc., but I hope the self-criticism in many of these statements/arguments was at least implicit. I'm no more or less off the hook than anyone else who writes about music in 2007, but frankly I think it's bullshit to restrict the dialogue because you can't argue from an unimpeachable position.
"issue larger" = "larger issue," obviously.
href="#c2733674">supastah: I think the sad part is that, underneath it all, these mediocre bands showed some promise of good things. For all the inevitable backlash, "Room on Fire" was, in hindsight, the stronger album. If Arctic Monkeys had been given more time to develop the kind of songwriting that produced "Mardy Bum," the US wouldn't have yawned at their follow-up. Black Kids may be meant to be an interesting and good band, but they will NEVER have the chance to develop organically. Everything will always be a reaction to the press surrounding this moment.
@GovernmentNames: While hype's always existed (Counting Crows were signed and gold less than two years after they formed), I think Jess' point about the tremendously shortened news cycle is true. By the time the tour bus comes around you've heard the EP, the album, the remixes, and are sick to death of the whole mess, ready for the next "underground" band that you've "discovered". And even with that REM EP, the band had been doing small shows and and building a fanbase and developing their sound well before they had the money to enter a studio.
Legendary bands have come out of the gate (Pixies), but everyone deserves at least 2 releases (album, single, etc) in near total obscurity before we turn on the spotlights.
"The problem is really that Mr. Pareles--or anyone, really--shouldn't be writing about Black Kids right now." ...and you're doing what, then, exactly? I agree with your main point, but anyone in PR/marketing will tell you that bad press can be just as good -- if not better than -- good press. just ask Travis Morrison. it's a little hypocritical that in order to fight the amount of press this band is getting, you write an overly long manifesto about them where a piece 1/10th this size would've sufficed. c'mon now.
also, it's a little extreme to paste yourself as the last bastion of honest, anti-hype music criticism ("As for what to "do" about it, well, you've got me.") Did you read Ear Farm's write-up about Black Kids? he didn't hesitate to trash them. you have to read more blogs before you can make blanket statements about them. the problem isn't blogs as a whole, it's the blogs that get attention. there are plenty of honest blogs filled with good criticism - people just don't read them.
My gut reaction to this is it probably isn't anyone's place (blogger, anti-blogger, professional crit, etc.) to determine the speed or trajectory of any artist's career - at the end of the day the artist gets to play it as it lays. But Jess, you know better than most that this is the hand dealt. For now. It's possible this style of insta-crit blows up in its own face down the line - wouldn't shock me. Which is not to say the romanticized '80s-style homegrown grind-it-out REM aesthetic is coming back. But if you get bit enough times by folks lobbying, like Yancey says, for A&R gigs and little else, you've got to stop trusting them and indulging their fantastical proclamations.
The problem herein is its your job to read these blogs (by the way, wouldn't hurt to call a few overzealous folks out here), while it's not for most others. If I can ignore, as Yancey also mentions, I do.
Still, this will undoubtedly be read by most as another aging generation's cry against the shock of the new - a critic mad at insurgents without the depth of insight to correctly determine what's right on. But it's not necessarly "gauche" to call out a crock. You're allowed to do that and ought to. No sense in wringing hands, you've got the big forum.
I don't believe you need to restrict the dialogue, but have some sort of consistency. The initial reason Black Kids received so much hype is because they went to a festival, almost completely unknown to anyone, and were all anyone talked about after (even though they played with "technically superior" bands with "lots of material"). So this happens with a new band and they get in the Times and they are to be stopped? If anything is inorganic it is this.
I know this is used so that you can turn a passionate eye towards the idea of blog-hype, but with so many examples and counter-examples it seems the music world tends to balance itself out. I know that your issue is too big too fast, but regulation with some sort of inane timeline is a ridiculous solution to state of music.
It's your duty as an American and a music fan to shame music bloggers until they get their act together and shut you up, or until they quit entirely.
@jessdolator: Hm, you're entirely right. When I saw you were the author of this post (which I read, don't get me wrong), my mind instantly raced to all the times I had seen your PFork reviews propping up, praising and (in the case of Dan Deacon especially) launching artists/records I felt were undeserving. In the process I glossed over your concession as to your own role in this situation. My desire to cut you down was stronger than my desire to make a coherent argument, which obviously didn't pan out well.
Anyway, I hope your post informs your future decisions as to whom you choose to laud as BNM and Recommended worthy. I know I'm more likely to pause and have another read (or spin) before hitting the submit button.
i would argue that this is not a new problem but simply an amplified version of an issue as old as pop music itself. i've got a buddy who did nothing in the 80s but listen to new bands, read all the zines and go to shows. he continues to rave about bands that he hasn't listened to in 20 years (sure the early dream syndicate and dBs shit ruled, but love tractor, quadalcanal diary, etc., seriously? who cares?). along the same lines i was reading old issues of forced exposure recently and saw some rave reviews that i guarantee you a 2007 byron coley would blush at having written.
my point is that a lot of people want their generation to be the BEST, and these people were writing fanzines in the 80s and 90s and are writing blogs nowadays. as a result a lot of bullshit is popular for a time. then there are others who thrive on hating on their own generation and those who sit somewhere in the middle. i'm not trying to argue that the filter of time is the best way to find "good" music as i think some of the most boring british folk has been heralded as genius in the light of the, now not so, recent brit folk revival (vashti bunyan i am looking in your direction). and we all often end up running in argumentative circles when discussing taste/popularity/etc. to the point where i'm not even sure what my initial point was... but this country gazette record i'm listening to right now sure is purdy.
@taylor t-sides:also, it's a little extreme to paste yourself as the last bastion of honest, anti-hype music criticism ("As for what to "do" about it, well, you've got me.")
umm... he meant "you've got me" in the sense of "i don't have a fucking clue either" not in the way you interpreted it.
@jessdolator: Issue Larger? Are they cool? Are they new? Are they from Brooklyn? Do they achieve total heaviosity? Oh yeah - I totally love them. I've loved them, for like, weeks....
Brilliant post, Jess, good for you.
@iantenna: I believe Jess = she, but thank you, I see now what you mean/she meant. dually noted. I strike the first sentence of that paragraph from my comment.
Meh. I like these overhyped bands. If they are good enough to stand the (overwrought cliche alert) "test of time," their talent will shine through eventually whatever the early hype was. I think average joe public still doesn't give a shit about any of these bands and is just happy that they can get their Nickleback for free.
In the meantime, my baser consumer urges are continually sated and I get to be excited about something for a few hours before I go to sleep and wake up for work in the morning. If I still remember who they are in a few months time I download the album and cast judgement accordingly. What really excites me (and I'm not saying everyone looks at it like this) is the potential these bands exhibit, not the expectation of hearing a fully formed product. Sure some bands will be affected negatively by the pressure, but I still believe the good ones will battle through it like good bands had to battle angry audiences and thrown bottles in years past. New age new challenges and all that.
I believe that 20 years from now, (most) of the truly good bands will be remembered (by critics and record collectors) and their influence will be funnelled into radio friendly crap while the rest of the over-hyped bands will fall into the relative obscurity they deserve, and the critics and record collectors will still freak out when some new band cops a few riffs from a record like Wizards of Ahh, becoming the next in a long line of artists reapropriating older records that no one really remembers and/or cares about.
I think the only people who are really complaining about this are the critics and hipsters because they suddenly don't feel as important as they used to.
No offense, jess.
@Little White Earbuds: Not to turn what I still think is a much broader issue that deserves the discussion--and many people are making some stellar points here, which is awesome beyond belief--into total inside babseball territory, but the point's been raised, so I'll just mention on the record that I just filed my (long overdue) resignation with Pitchfork. Cool? Cool.
P.S. Let's also get it on record that I'm a dude.
The blogosphere is a nervous system with a bachelor's degree and resentment.
@Little White Earbuds: Dan Deacon may be undeserving in your eyes, but he paid his dues to be gaining the buzz. The guy toured the shit out of the last two years, playing Portland something like six times (which for an East Coast act is unheard of), and it wasn't until around the fifth time that people started to take notice. He may have seem to have come from left field, but that's not really the case. He had time to tour and tighten his craft, which I think is what this argument is sort of boiling down to. Sure, he may be over-hyped, but at least he has some footing to stand on.
@jessdolator: You better be; New York doesn't switch hit.
@iantenna:
Can we please not compare today's "fandom scene" with that of the 80's/90's? Time was, if you got into some sort of active music fandom, you actually had to love the music enough to put in some WORK. You had to track down esoteric magazines and catalogs and pore through dusty racks at the local record store. You had to send off a $50 check to a Japanese mail order shop to get those rare b-sides. You had to devote hours to write up/draw up/paste up your 'zine, then hoof it over to your local print shop for some long hours cutting/pasting/binding before running all over town to distribute your work. Time was, you were motivated by sheer excitement about the music, not by the prospect of 50,000 readers, or ad money lining your pockets, or "VIP" invites to some VICE party.
Now, I'm not saying that there *aren't* any music bloggers putting in work today, I'm just saying that today, you have an option: you can be genuinely motivated by the music, OR you can just grab a blogspot account, take a peek at the existing blogs to see what's "hot," start throwing up mp3s, and wait for the traffic, ad revenue, and perquisites to start rolling in.
Idolator ponders the hype surrounding CMJ darlings Black Kids and how blogs and The New York Times threaten burgeoning young bands: What kind of madness is this?
@taylor t-sides:
the problem isn't that jess- or other anti-bloggers- don't read "good crit blogs," it's that most likely no one (meaning anyone form 0-50 ppl, obv. a gagillion times less than stereogum or gvb or whatever) reads these "good crit blogs," therefore their impact is minimal at best and kind of worthless to this discussion.
not to mention that stereogum used to be a decent crit blog until the $ came in and it became a "career," and they realized that "features" about old cindy lauper videos get more hits than real, actual writing.
Bruce Springsteen was on the cover of Newsweek and Time in the same week!!! After the release of his THIRD album!!! And he hated it!!!
also ear farm's shit about black kids wasn't an honest, well-thought out blogger takes out blogger fave type thing, it was boilerplate anti-pitchfork scorn, implying that black kids got BNM because they had "management connections" (which of course came post-pitchfork score), thus rendering his "their show was 1.7" conclusion dubious at best.
@Catbirdseat: did you read my first sentence? it is an amplification of a pre-existing phenomenon. obv printing a zine takes a lot more work (and money) than starting a blog does.
Great post. I've gone about this a lot already at my own joint (thanks for linking people to it, by the way), so I'll just add a couple things here.
In my mind the thing that will always set Pitchfork apart from the multitude of hype blogs is that they h ave an editorial stance. You may like or not like that stance, but they have it. Reading the site regularly enough, you get a sense for the what Pitchfork as an entity likes and doesn't like. You have to have that mix in order to be discerning and credible. The problem is that the blogs pick up on all those "best new music" and "recommended" posts and run with them, leaving the bad shit behind. It's an honest reaction--like you said, Jess, you only want to write about what you love. But that's the difference between why people don't trust most blogs.
Only partly related - why doesn't Idolator start integrating some honest-to-god album reviews? (or do they and I've somehow blocked them from my mind?)Both you and Maura have done a "hype blogs blow" post within the last couple weeks now - why not do more to bring an editorial stance here?
Wait, Jess is a dude? Oh, man. I've wasted a gallon of Astroglide.
guess i don't understand where the finger is pointing in your argument, jess. for better or worse, this is 2007, music 2.0 - post 'space, file-sharing, accelerated press cycles, etc.. the majors can't change that - which means we sure as shit can't either. so we all get to deal with it (the ever-expanding pool of bands, the 1.5 seconds of fame) and engage in whatever way we choose. end of the day it's up to blog/fork readers to buy it (the band, the buzz, whatevs) or leave it on the shelf.
seems the issue is that you think this new model FORCES people to scramble, to buy/consume just for the sake of having a finger on the constantly-shifting pulse. but does it really? that seems like a read for only the obsessives. i tried to see black kids at cmj this year, but couldn't get into any of the shows. not a big deal. i've still only heard one song - off their myspace page. i don't even remember what it sounded like. i'm still 100% ambivalent, and i'm just as ok with that as i am with all the breathless praise.
it's hard to make this argument, but i think black kids (or any other baby band that's poppin online) would sound the same whether or not the bloggers were paying attention. you say the internet forces these bands to change/adapt, but (like blog-readers) the onus is on the band to either buy into the buzz, shit stuff out, go on poorly-planned tours, bring in the remixers, and "capitalize," or just keep on keepin' on.
seems this gripe is sort of just a general fuck-the-state-of-things. but why rage against a machine that ain't changing, when it doesn't actually force YOU to change. sure, most bloggers are VOLUNTARY street teams for band x or y. and most bands are waiting for their Myspace-or-Youtube moment. but so what? stop reading those blogs. stop listening to those bands. buy it or leave it on the shelf.
"I think average joe public still doesn't give a shit about any of these bands and is just happy that they can get their Nickleback for free."
Uh, actually the Nickelback fans are obviously pretty happy to actually spend money on those records.
Yeah, the long tail rears up in the music world too. With no barriers to stop an endless stream of critcs and aggregation tools galore, maybe we really are heading for a future where we're not only famous for fifteen minutes, but for fifteen people.
@Matthew Perpetua:
Yeah, but record sales are still waaaaay down overall and if you think that Black Kids got more downloads since they put their music up on MySpace than Nickleback got in the last hour you are very mistaken.
But just for the sake of argument let me go on the redcord for a minute that I actually think Nickleback has some merit in there music. Wait. Wait. Hear me out----damn, I couldn't even keep a straight facing typing that over the internet.
Fantastic post, you didn't miss a single issue. Black Kids are exactly the right band to bring up in this case, being that they're (at the moment) completely unworthy of anyone's time. If the Pitchfork review is absurd, then bloggers should be sent to the insane asylum. The only good thing about this fast-food hype is that we get the crap right out of the way quickly so we can move onto more meaningful bands which will be remembered a couple days from now. Almost no one gets left behind these days, so if you're truly any good, you usually get your just dues. If you're not...well, see you in the next Idolator column!
The quick hits to the gut these bands receive teaches them a real lesson: man up or sit down. As it stands, I wouldn't even invite Black Kids (I am not racist!) to a House Party.
See, and I thought Pareles' pieces was full of subtle back-biting and gently bitchy backhanded compliments -- in a GOOD way. Like, in an "OH BLOGGERS, YOU'RE SO PROBLEMATIC!" kind of way. With a side order of knowing chuckle.
Jess, keep that fire in your belly -- I'm too tired and too old and too bored to care about how the indie rock blogosphere is killing baby bands. What I'm interested to see who can adapt and evolve in this insane environment. Because, dearest, take a look around. It's too late to stop the speeding train. Let's sit back and see who doesn't get pulverized, yeah? Because there are up-and-comers who will be able to stick it out. Sure, they'll be the lowest common denominator, but ugh, isn't that just the same old story? And won't we just keep pushing the underappreciated acts, and grousing that no one notices them -- until all of a sudden everyone does? Probably.
And dude, just because we, who are inundated with new music CONSTANTLY, forget that Bjork had a new album out this year doesn't mean that her core constituency did.
This weekend, I talked to one of my galpals from middle school who happens to live a few blocks away from me (this is kind of insane, btw, seeing as that was in El Paso, TX, but I digress...). She mentioned being into the "indie rock" and I was like, O RLY? WHO!?!? What did she cite? Bloc Party. Arcade Fire. Editors. She LOVED Smoosh and Tokyo Police Club when they opened for Bloc Party recently. And it was all I could do not to be like, OMG HOW 2005 OF YOU! until I remembered that normal people, believe it or not, still kind of process new music at a normal rate of speed. Its we gatekeepers that are overwhelmed.
And so I say, perspective, people. Perspective. Deep breaths. It's all going to be okay, I promise.
"Yeah, but record sales are still waaaaay down overall and if you think that Black Kids got more downloads since they put their music up on MySpace than Nickleback got in the last hour you are very mistaken."
Are you SURE? Where the hell are you getting your numbers? Like, do you mean the cumulative number of downloads Black Kids got since Pitchfork got a hold of them vs. how much Nickelback sold since 4 PM EST on Oct 22 2007? Uh, maybe????????
"the world passes by in a flash / from the birth of the earth / to the curse of your desperate math"
I mean, even if somehow the actual audience of Black Kids is equal to the number of people paying for a Nickelback record that came out several years/months ago, isn't the point that THAT audience cares enough to pay for the music? I mean, the Black Kids thing is kind of a bad example -- you can't buy their music unless maybe they are selling cds at shows -- but this conversation is primarily about artists who have a fanbase who tend to be unwilling to spend money at all on the records they enjoy.
@taylor t-sides: I will admit that I had never heard of Ear Farm before (I suppose my blogging liscense should be revoked) and I just read the Black Kids post, which is available for any interested parties to compare and contras..., since apparently their commenters now feel I "stole" this post from them because they beat me to skepticism over Black Kids by 12 hours and we raised some similar points.