web 2.0

having access to the Internet does not make anyone more talented.
having access to the Internet does not make anyone less talented.
it makes people lazier, sure.
it can make people feel more knowledgeable - rightly or wrongly.

everyone a critic? sure.

as you were then.

the problem with definitions

Here's how I see it.

The Internet has changed nothing. Before it came along, everyone had the means to be a critic, to be a musician, to be an artist (especially if you start including dialogue as criticism or music or art). The Internet hasn't changed any of that - just offered alternative opportunities.

Sure, everyone's a critic now. Weren't they always?
Sure, everyone's an artist now. Weren't they always?
Sure, everyone's a musician now. Weren't they always?

I can sit in front of a table and draw a few lines on a piece of paper. Is that art? Does that make me an artist? Sure, I can sit at a computer keyboard and type a few lines about some record I heard (or whatever). Is that criticism? Does that make me a critic? I can sing lustfully to my baby as I'm tying my laces, or bang a few saucepans. Is that music? Does that make me a musician?

I don't really care what your answer is here, as long as it's consistent.

tightrope walking (reprise)

Thought I'd repost a handful of my answers to some of the comments elicited by Drowned In Sound's Music Journalism R.I.P? week.

tightrope walking

Correct. The monopoly of information has been broken. It had always been broken, to a lesser or greater extent. What does that prove?

Three examples.

1) There are builders outside, replacing my roof right now. I have the same access as them to all the tools required to finish the job - the scaffolding, the tin, etc. Could I? What do you bloody think?

2) All a tightrope walker requires to complete their craft is a rope strung between two poles. That's all I need as well, in theory.

3) School textbooks. We all have equal access to those, correct? So why do some learn faster and some slower? The Internet hasn't levelled off hierarchies (of power, of information), not at all. It's simply destroyed some and created others. HOW DOES THE NEW JACK KID DISCOVER WHAT MUSIC SHE WANTS TO LISTEN TO? WHEN? WHERE? Oh, by trawling through thousands upon thousands of sites themselves...thereby becoming (to all intents and purposes) "an expert". DOES EVERYONE DO THIS? Really?

Alternately, they turn to trusted platforms (P4k, DiS etc) who point them in appropriate directions.... which is what has always happened! There has always been hundreds of thousands of music fans, expert in their own fields. The Internet didn't suddenly change that fact: it just confused the field by flooding it with too much information.

Everett_True | 16 Jul '09, 00:30 | Reply

the person reading this article

Do they have exactly the same access to information as I do? Really? How so? Are they me?

Everett_True | 16 Jul '09, 00:33 | Reply

and

With regard to this point (again), marcusian123, "The information asymmetry is shattered, I can check out American bands the same as the next person."

There's a reason for that. You're motivated. You have a vested interest in doing so. Most users surfing the Internet do not. (Goes back to the classroom: why do some learn fast, and some slow.) Sure, it means that folk like you no longer need to lean so heavily on folk like me. And that's fine. Doesn't mean the same applies everywhere.

Everett_True | 16 Jul '09, 00:37 | Reply

there's nothing wrong with the music industry

Chris Anderson music industry article.

Really? How do you explain U2 and Pussycat Dolls then?

irrelevent but...

Checking the stats for this blog, I note that the second most popular city for visitors is a place I've never heard of, Fukuoka. Now, honestly: have you?

pop matters

Reprinted from Pop Matters, thanks to Lloyd again. Interesting, considering the current (minor) storm surrounding recent entries on my music blog.

Why we need bad reviews

Nope, I don’t mean badly-written reviews, though there’s plenty of them online, and offline too (don’t kid yourself). What I mean is that we need negative ones. Sometimes.

The thought occurred to me after seeing this tweet from Accujazz in late May: “What do you think? Do bad reviews of jazz CDs help or hurt the art form? Why do you think jazz critics and bloggers are so hesitant to trash”

Around the same time, ace writer Anne Midgette was thinking the same thing in a Washington Post column. “Loving music, to a critic, cannot simply mean bestowing praise. In fact, I think one of the biggest problems in the classical music field is that there’s too much praise. There’s an idea that our field is so small and beleaguered that we have to band together and all like everything all the time.”

Wise words indeed and a similar sentiment to what Accujazz was thinking. Is jazz also a field that’s become “small and beleaguered” that it needs to be saved from itself? I don’t remember hearing any writer or musician say anything like that but you have to wonder sometimes when you read pubs/mags/columns sometimes. Part of the impetus was Tom Hull’s Consumer Guide for the Village Voice. Like Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide (which it’s modeled after), Hull lists a bunch of notable albums that he likes and then throws a few little pies at some stinkers at the end. Christgau himself used to mix in positive and negative reviews in his guide until he got tired of trashing albums and wasting his time on stinkers so around 1990, he changed the format of his Guide to concentrate on the records he liked. As he always did, he reserved a list of REALLY crappy records for Thanksgiving time and his annual ‘Turkey Shoot’ column. Though it was always a popular feature, he admitted that he always hated doing it.

I can definitely sympathize with this sentiment. When I pitch reviews to editors, I tend to chose music & artists that I’m inclined to like or find something interesting in. I keep thinking “why should I waste my time continually listening to and writing about garbage?” I know it’s fun sometimes to get a good zinger in but it’s not for me.

But Midgette does have a good point. Even if you’re not fond of giving a thumbs down to an album, song or performance, you owe it to readers to speak truthfully about music and give an honest opinion about it, even if it’s negative.

Even then, I think there’s a context for it. Let’s say that a famous artist puts a new record out and your publication has to weigh in on it. A really negative review might imperil future cover stories or interviews but should that stop a pub/mag from being honest? Some would might say ‘yes’ if only because they wanna maintain a cozy relationship with the artist. Others, like MOJO (disclaimer: I write for them sometimes), will actually run an interview with an artist side-by-side with a bad review. That’s kinda gutsy though artists know that a pub like that will come back for more coverage with them regardless so it serves them well in the end, even if it doesn’t in the short term.

How about less well-known entities and bad reviews? For anyone who gets records sent to them by labels or trowels through MySpace enough, one sad obvious fact is clear- there’s a lotta crappy music out there. There’s a lot of good music still out there but that’s another story. Anyway, as you go through these hopeful acts, you’ll be looking for good ones to spread the word about. But what about the bad ones? Should you spit on them and make fun of them? Any honest writer would tell you that they’re probably tempted to do that but what’s the point? Why would you elevate a really bad unknown act and tell the world how bad they are? It looks like you’re being mean and picking on them for no good reason. As a writer, what are you trying to achieve when you do that except to show what a goddamn jerk you are? That’s why most writers usually pass on this type of criticism.

Jason Gross

the google story

Been ploughing my way through David A Vise's book, The Google Story, the last couple of days. It's mostly hyperbolic drivel - certainly up to 2004 (which is where I'm currently at) - along the lines of, "Google guys good: anyone who disagrees with them, or stands in their way (however big, however small), bad"; with a chapter given over to the One Interesting Guy they could find who used to work at Google (the chef). This is weird, because you'd think - what with all the lawsuits and controversies surrounding Google in recent years, not least major privacy and control issues - you'd think someone somewhere would have a bad word to say.

I'm not particularly pro- and anti- Google, the same way I couldn't give a fuck about most corporations whose abiding interest in generating money. I appreciate many of their services (for example, this very blog tool I am now using), shied away from using Google Mail cos of all the ads. (Do they still have those?) Like anyone. But the smug, congatulatory tone of this book is rapidly turning me against them.

It's taken till page 239, at the end of the chapter discussing Google's digitalisation of the world's libraries, for any criticism of note to emerge. I particularly like these two quotes.

"Massive databases of digitalized books are 'expensive exercises in futility', [Michael Gorman, then president-elect of the American Library Association] wrote, 'based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication [electronic] will supplant and obliterate all previous forms'."

Meanwhile, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, head of Bibliotheque Nationale, "wrote in Le Monde that the Google venture posed 'a risk of crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations have of the world... I don't want the French Revolution retold just by books chosen by the United States'."

Those damn French! Why do they insist on believing there's more than one way to view the world?

And not one word from the millions of creators whose livings were threatened by Google's latest venture... beyond to note that it would be good advertising for them.

hmm. interesting point

The following is lifted from the Sigur Ros message board in answer to my blog post here, and contains a couple of interesting insights: particularly the point about 'ownership'. I have no idea of the identity of the poster.

maaaa quote 3-7-2009 at 08:49

I've spent some time with Everett True in the past, including one day at his playing records in the indie 1980s. When he told me that he preferred The Razorcuts to The Byrds because he hated the canon of rock, I knew we could never really get along. For him, music is about ownership and building an identity (as it is for all of us, but most if us don't build such a public persona) - and so liking The Razorcuts, people he actually knew and could champion, helped make him central to the scene. The limits to ET's approach are summed up by his relationship to Nirvana, getting close to Kurt and the group in indie days, and retaining access during the period of mega success. This must have been a dream come true. But in terms of music, Smells Like teen Spirit, while a great record, has nothing to do with indie, with Beat Happening, K Records anymore. It's a straight great rock record, like More Than A feeling by Boston. Can you imagine ET admitting that More Than A Feeling was a great rock record? I'm sure he'd rather die. Which brings us to SR. Nothing he says here can take away the thought of the group playing ("new shit") Von to a hut full of family and friends in Heima. To me that is juat an inarguably honest, pure and musical performance. If it all ended tomorrow for SR, these people would all be making beautiful music somewhere or other, even if just for themselves. They're not a rock critic backed or created band particularly. They're a bunch of hillbillies who gave us a miracle and kept giving more. You get more sense out of 14 year olds posting comments on YouTube about Untitled 8 than Everett gives us here. He is good on 60s pop and girl groups though, and personally I owe him a debt for showing me how great the Supremes are.

the differences between a taste-maker critic and a critic

Polar Bear is Dying raises a very fair point in response to a previous post that cuts straight to the heart of my research. What is the difference between a taste-maker critic and a critic? Don't all critics influence taste in some way or other?

Um, you could certainly make an argument for that. But wait. Many critics don't look to influence taste. They see their role to inform, to provide a form of consumer guide: or to discuss and inspect without necessarily prejudicing the reader (this form of approach particularly favoured at more 'respectable' newspapers); or (lower down the food chain) to do whatever it takes to blag that free CD or pair of concert tickets. There are whole sections of the critical community that view 'personality' in a writer with distrust - "immature" is a word I've seen used several times in conjunction with the recent death of one of the NME's foremost taste-maker critics of the 80s and 90s, Steven Wells (and not particularly as a prejorative). Many (perhaps most) critics view their duty as to 'tell the story', describe the music - nothing more, nothing less.

I'm not saying that the latter can't be taste-makers. Of course, they can: especially when they have a certain consistency in their views which their audience learns to interact with. For example, David Fricke of Rolling Stone is a man who's never bothered pushing the 'personality' side of his writing, but clearly he's a taste-maker critic - many people, both within the industry and without, set great store by his recommendations.

Then again, there are many critics who would define themselves as taste-makers without any clear reason why. I'm particularly thinking of the sorry breed of writers that showed up at the UK music press mid-90s, having read nothing and experienced nothing except the UK music press itself (and perhaps a few years at university, which frankly amounts to bugger all). Were they taste-makers, simply because the intent was there? Or were they lacking the personality - so crucial to a persona like Steven Wells, or Nick Kent, or Everett True - without which, unless you're as trusty and consistent a source as Fricke, or Simon Reynolds (to give an even better example), you cannot fill that role?

(I'm not meaning to imply Reynolds' or Fricke's writing has no personality - clearly it does - just that that personality isn't central to their whole approach.)

Is it possible to be a taste-maker critic if no one is paying attention to your views? Now, that's another question entirely. To pull in a question I posed a few weeks back, is the critic defined by their audience? Because it sure as hell doesn't just lie in the intent. How can I be a taste-maker if I'm not influencing anyone?

So is there a ready checklist by which you can define a taste-maker critic? Of course not: like all definitions, it is mutable and flexible and determined by the medium it exists within. And yet I need to be able to state - as unambiguously as possible - what a taste-maker critic is, because without doing so, how can I define the changing role of the taste-maker critic in web 2.0 environments?

In the past few days, I've been engaging in a (one-sided) argument with the fine readers of Drowned In Sound over a particularly cantankerous blog post overview of dull-ass Icelandic band Sigur Ros. Most are down with the idea I should be free to write what I like, even if they disagree with the sentiments and feel the post is gratuitous and rather pointless. Interestingly, almost without exception, the entire (message board posting) readership of DiS seem - quite touchingly - affronted that I should be seeking to engage them in dialogue over my views, one staff writer even going as far to suggest, "I wish a little of the old True would come back instead of just trolling for hits".

It's almost like a entire generation of music fans have never engaged with a taste-maker critic - because this is what I've always done!

Oh, and here's a tentative checklist for a taste-maker definition... If I could be bothered, I'd draw some arrows linking and circling the following to indicate the relationships. Maybe one of my readers could oblige?

Taste

Opinion

Personality

Writing skills

Trust

one month of interrupted news

Very decent point made here about advertising on mainstream news sites on the web.

fringe benefits

There are way too many commentators and folk writing blogs with a couple of minutes to spare focusing on the slipstream. It's out of all proportion. No wonder no one bothers reading anyone any more - just looks for the capsule summary and grading at the top.

free

This is an interesting post, even if it contains no arguments just evangelicism. Like all prophets of his kind, Seth is unable to see past the medium he operates within, thinks life begins and ends on the Internet. Ridiculous. It's a shame his breed are so gung-ho because there is a fair amount of truth in what they're suggesting as UNARGUABLE FACT, FULL STOP.