lawrence grossberg

To summarise his essay on 'Rock Cultures And Rock Formations' (p.131 We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture', 1992), rock music and, by extension, rock culture is defined by its audience (which in turn means that the definition is by necessity fluid, as that audience is not static but defined by changing cultural standards of class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender). Is this true? Has it ever been true? Does this set rock culture apart from other cultures? Whatever yr conclusions, surely it is odd that Grossberg seems to take it as accepted that rock is a 'youth' culture?

I'm only asking.

rock critics in their underpants

Everett True interview

ronan mcdonald

This man, he sometimes talks a lot of sense...

"The internet provides space for criticism and analysis of niche interests, which, because of space limitations, conventional publications do not. But this atomises cultural discussion, to the detriment of the wider public sphere. Those who want to join the arena for, say, performance poetry or the work of minor film-makers or installation artists may well be drawn to relevant websites, but this will disperse the arenas for debate and evaluation. Non-initiates are unlikely to stumble on the relevant sites, which may become, instead, hermetic discussion circles for those already won over to the cause. The danger, again, is that while everybody's interests are catered for, nobody's are challenged or expanded."
(p.15-16, "The Value Of Criticism", The Death of the Critic, McDonald, Ronan, Continuum, 2007)

Last night, following on from a lecture given by Gu Xin in Critical Enquiry Research (using her own model of cultural studies in the UK), we had a discussion about the fact that, although the 'opportunity' (and I use this word advisedly, because personally I believe this to be illusional) is now present for everyone to be equally creative, equal cultural entrepeneurs - clearly, not everyone is. Everyone has equal access to culture, according to some thinkers: but the over-supply of cultural goods causes homogenisation AND diversity. It's a bit like walking into your local Woolworth's or Cole's and railing at the lack of choice, despite the seemingly endless aisles. (Why don't you shop at the Saturday food markets, one masters student wanted to know. You try shopping at Saturday food markets with a three-year-old complaining every dragged step of the way, I retorted.)

The commercialisation of Western society has led academics to start equating creativity with profit, almost to the degree that art cannot be art unless it makes money. But wait! Who is deciding this? Who is funding the universities?

note 2

Definition of self when working to my full potential as a critic: I am not a commentator. I am a participant. I guess this is a feminist paradigm.

note 1

It's a mistake to think that the power of the music critic has been on the wane since the advent of the Internet. It had been on the wane long before that.

residual value (pt 2)

I was going to write a post on residual value, then realised that I was plagiarising - badly, and without much thought - from post-structuralists I don't even have names for. All I wanted to know is this: does a work of art have any residual value, beyond that invested in it by the reader/observer. If not, then what's the purpose of the critic. If so, then surely that value is a construct, artificial - no better and no worse than a popularity contest.

One reason I dislike the perfect '10' that Pitchfork gave Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation is the unspoken arrogance implicit in such an action, for - if we can all be agreed upon the fact that the merit of a work of art needs to judged upon both the author and reader's roles - not only does this assume that the work of art is the most 'perfect', flawless ever but also that the judgment passed upon it is from the most 'perfect', flawless critic the world has ever witnessed. The relationship is inter-dependent.

Like most of the western world, I prefer to read an interpretation rather than the 'original' (if it exists). The individual voice becomes all-important in Web 2.0, and how it relates to your paradigm.

It takes a panel of six peers to recognise an expert. Otherwise that expert does not exist. I sometimes feel this can be applied to my own role as music 'critic' and Australia.

residual value

I have long since doubted the power of my words - that any residual impact they may have fully lies within the meaning charged them by my readers, the fondness they have for this persona 'Everett True'. The notion of myself being the creator seems foolhardy at best. And what has my entire life as a critic been if not some sort of stance against the notion of critic as 'authority', from my first tentative steps at NME where I was unable to even construct sentences properly and my notion of a well-reasoned argument was the number of exclamation marks applied.

When I was in my late teens and attending gigs, I would grade them all accordingly (doubtless, in some sort of throwback to my strong mathematical inclinations) - but not in a straightforward, NME/Pitchfork/Q/Mojo way, rather as a form of numerical shorthand. One mark for 'performance' and one mark for 'enjoyment', thus unconsciously ackowledging the relationship between author and reader, the inter-dependency of both in the 'value' of art. Yet you could equally argue that I was setting myself up for a fall by separating the two values, 'objectivity' and 'subjectivity', that they cannot be separated anyhow.

authority

Does anyone out there believe I have any authority? Why?

everything is miscellaneous

Does anybody think that Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory can be applied to music critics? In other words, with the advent of the concept of the infinite catalogue, instead of everyone reading a handful of immensely powerful, hip critics, there are 500,000+ critics to read on the Web now and the residual power lying with these few is growing smaller and smaller (even accounting for immensely influential nodes such as Pitchfork and Australia's Mess And Noise).

According to Chris, 40% of all record sales are now in releases that sell less than 10,000 (as Wikipedia says, citation needed).

Or does criticism still remain about heirarchy - and all that has changed are the structures? Goddamnit, don't look at me. I don't know anything. I can't even write about music anymore without worrying about context. As I stated in Plan B a few months back, my greatest strength used to be that I took everything OUT of proportion. Being a parent fucks you up in so many different ways. I'd kind of always assumed that the critical heirarchy was based on the same philosophy that kept the men behind the Cold War so gainfully employed for so many years: but what happens when all notions of objectivity and balance are finally removed (cf: blogs, paysites such as amazon, eBay etc)? The centre is lost. The centre is lost. I might well feel that my interpretative paradigm borders on a feminist-slanted post-structuralism, but I don't necessarily enjoy seeing life that way.

a question

Have there been any famous examples of post-structuralists being reprimanded for plagiarism?

Hippy Johnny

Oh man. That'll teach me. Start deriding one critic without a proper appraisal of their work and they'll come back and bite you on the ass. I still think the title of Garry Mulholland's 261 Greatest Albums Since... is crap irony (like most irony) but man...he's got me. Ignore the fact he's way too hung up on the holy trinity of Bowie, Pop and, um, Massive Attack - and also that he sees fit to pass over It's Alive!, just catch this passage on the original Modern Lovers album.

"Warners had signed a rock band who'd written the first great songs about what a piece of shit rock was. Not rock'n'roll, that beautiful, urgent, furious, lovelorn, direct, animal, groove-heavy, panicky grasp for Now that had changed the world infinitely for the better. But rock, that fake blues, self-pitying, white, dishonest, flashy, grooveless, blokeish, reactionary and self-absorbed bunch of jiveass corporate soft-porn that had had the roll removed and replaced with suck-my-dick misogyny and misanthropy."

And he's got me yearning to hear the 1977 Congos album in a way I haven't yearned since...whenever. I think I better shifty on over to Drowned On Sound and beg them to take my appraisal of The Modern Lovers down.

Tuesday am

At first glance, Wikipedia appears to be a post-structuralist construct. Clearly, though, the editors have some very traditional notions of authority and the notion of 'the original'.

Note to self: examine network theory, with regards to the shift in power from a relative handful of empowered individuals ('critics') to a vast, way more levelled, playing field ('bloggers'). The playing field isn't entirely level, however: power still resides with a handful of immensely influential nodes (Pitchfork, Mess And Noise etc). So is it a mistake to assume that critics have been replaced by bloggers? Doesn't the power still reside in the places it's always resided: there's been no fundamental shift, even though the medium has changed. Shouldn't blogs be equated more along the lines of lower-level conversational taste-making down a pub or venue or refectory (etc)?

Post-structuralism (strategy)

• no essential meaning
• no solid foundation
• no original (no use in searching for origins)
• reality constructed by discourse
• denotations and connotations – no final meaning
• knowledge is a construct

• IMAGE-MUSIC-TEXT (Barthes) (audience rewrites the meaning of the text as they read it – the death of the author) (no clear divisions between criticism and creation)

How To Become A Musical Critic

"It is not so easy to cite instances of writers who fail because, being critics, they have neither literary skill nor musical culture. A man cannot become an expert in criticism without practicing on art of some kind; and if that art is not music, then he naturally confines himself to the art he is accustomed to handle, writing about it if he has the necessary literary faculty, and if not, teaching it." (George Bernard Shaw, How To Become A Musical Critic, The Scottish Musical Monthly, December 1894, reprinted by Da Capo, 1978)

"I could make deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music." (same source)

Notes on introduction

People don’t like the notion of ‘critic’, a supposedly objective observer who validates art through opinion. Now they have a big stick to wield and beat them with – the Internet.

The problem is one of definition. Elvis Costello or Frank Zappa or someone once likened writing about music to dancing about architecture. My question is, what’s wrong with dancing about architecture?

Quantifying criticism

Critics are guilty of devaluing their craft, by falling into the 21st Century malaise of wanting to reduce argument to a numeral, seduced by its certainty (cf Garry Mulholland’s The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk And Disco). Pitchfork grade albums, according to some obscure mathematical formula that utilises the Dewey System, thus treating criticism on quantitative terms – but how are they able to categorise a work such as Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation as a ‘perfect’ 10? This not only assumes a positivist approach – now seen as incomplete when it comes to determining much of human emotion – but also a perfect conflagration of events during which the listening experience must have taken place – ie: the weather outside, the quality of coffee drank beforehand, the sound quality of the recording system, the friends on hand for reassurance, and so on.

The first post

The idea behind this blog is to create dialogue (argument, discussion, comment, rancour) around my ongoing PhD topic - "Is there anything left to say about music?". The idea is to run a blog in parallel with a blog being set up by a group of QUT students, helmed by myself. I would like a uniformity of design, and to regularly update this page, otherwise I feel it lacks validity. The design needs to include hypertext links, visuals, audio. The uniformity should spread to the written entries. The blog will be used to test out ideas and theories, hopefully to shoot every last one down in flames. The blog will be based in and around Brisbane, but is not intended to be limited by any boundaries - real or imagined - imposed by my location within this fair city. The blog is intended to add colour, not lessen texture.