Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
As a fan of edited writing, I’m less enamored with blogging than most. Folks get upset when you talk in undemocratic terms, but I’m just not sure that good bloggers wouldn’t have become good print writers.
Which makes the self-mythologizing that much harder to stomach. For example, imagine an MSM type (or, since this is a music blog, a music critic) saying the following about himself:
“People need something to believe in. And if they can believe in you [blogger Gina Cooper], then they can believe in themselves.”
This quote comes from a less-than-cynical Washington Post review of Matt Bai’s new book about the netroots movement, The Argument.
Some have equated bloggers with the old pamphleteers, but, to me, this just seems like another incremental step in the constant churn of new technology. Nineteenth-century critics complained about the proliferation of newspapers in similar terms, as if too much opportunity meant that everyone would suddenly take up the pen.
Seems like you could say the same thing about a sporting goods store. Is the mass availability of golf clubs going to take anything away from someone who’s good enough to go pro?
13 Responses to “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss”
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September 25th, 2007 at 9:39 am
The self-mythologizing is a bit much, but come on, there are egotistical assholes in every medium, including print media. The Gina Cooper example isn’t really too far removed from, say, Norman Mailer (talk about self-mythologizing!).
September 25th, 2007 at 11:36 am
I’m not certain I follow your argument. Do you really mean to say that you’re “just not sure that good bloggers wouldn’t have become good print writers.” Or do you mean the opposite, ie., that you suspect most wouldn’t make good print writers? There are tons of bad bloggers, but that doesn’t take away from a central reality of blogging: bloggers can say things that for-pay writers can’t. Having done the CP thing and the Post thing, I know for a fact that I spent a lot of time curbing my natural instincts because a lot of journalism is basically paid advertising. (Reviews of forthcoming shows, for example.) The kind of honesty that Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer brought to the game decades ago is a thing of the past, and the idea of somebody printing one of their eviscerations of some artist’s “product” is unthinkable now. For instance, I wrote a review of Lake Trout that was just vicious. My ed. at CP refused to run it, saying basically “who wants to read an overwhelmingly negative review?” Me, I thought of it as a public service. Saving people from buying terrible Lake Trout albums is a laudable goal, or so one would think. The bottom line is that in writing for print there’s a definite limit to which one can call a spade a spade, because the free press is definitely not free. That’s just a fact.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Mike,
I recall a highly discussed Simon Reynolds negative review of M.I.A.’s Arular, and online the Pitchfork negative review of Travis Morrison. So negative reviews by for-pay writers sometimes happen, just not so often.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Good points, Curm. That Travis Morrison review is legendary. One question: do those Pitchfork people actually get paid?
I guess I was thinking most about the copies of Spin I’ve picked up over the past months. The whole thing seems to be advertising, including the “hard-hitting” articles. When rock was young and the folks who published rock mags were stoned off their asses, there was more room for curmudgeons spewing bile and vitriol. Now everybody’s a “pro”, and knows how the game’s played. And it’s not played, for the most part, by pissing off the people who keep you in business. I happened to pick up L. Bangs’ review of a Canned Heat LP last night, and it was bitter, spiteful, and hilarious. I can’t think of anything–aside from that Morrison pan–to compare in who knows how long.
September 26th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
Comely Mike, have you never seen a negative record review in City Paper? Have you never seen a negative record review in the Post? How about in a big-advertiser pub like Entertainment Weekly?
Of course you have. The argument that blogs are better than old media because they allow writers’ opinions to run unfettered is tiresome and inaccurate. Old-media critics were and are paid to have opinions.
And which advertiser do you think put the squeeze on CP not to run your Lake Trout review? The National Association of Footbag Manufacturers? Maybe your editor didn’t run your review because writing an overwhelmingly negative review of a crunchy-chewy fratboy band from Baltimore is pretty much shooting fish in a barrel.
And sorry, but times have changed since “rock was young.” For one thing, the music business has expanded dramatically, so you simply can’t have generalist critics offering yay-or-nay opinions on the five or 10 big records that come out in a week. So much music comes out these days, in so many microgenres, that truly “big” records are few and far between.
Most music editors would, I imagine, prefer to run either an insightful destruction of the new 50 Cent album or a thoughtfully positive piece about some new “underground” phenom a la first-record Clap Your Hands Say Yeah than print a low-stakes negative review of a localish hippie-boy band.
September 26th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
“I happened to pick up L. Bangs’ review of a Canned Heat LP last night, and it was bitter, spiteful, and hilarious. I can’t think of anything–aside from that Morrison pan–to compare in who knows how long.”
Thank God. Lester Bangs’ detrimental influence hasn’t extended to EVERYTHING he did.
September 26th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Yea, yea, yea. I hear ya. And you actually make some good points, GG. But I stand by what I said because a) I said it! and b) while I do see negative reviews in said publications, said negative reviews are all based on boring factors surrounding the tedious issue of “whether the music’s any good or not.” Who cares? Maybe what I’m trying to get at here (and thanks for the help) is that music critics’ narrow focus on the incredibly dull issues surrounding “musical quality” is in itself incredibly boring, which is why the only people who read music reviews are sad geeks. What people like Bangs tried to get at (and it’s important, unlike the new album by “Go! Get Clapping!” or whomever is that, while pop music is a boring sham and incredibly stupid, it might still save your life! He was playing for real stakes. Folks nowadays (us included) just like the sound of our own voice.
P.S. You should be ashamed of yourself, Michael. Say what you will about Lester, the fellow never wrote a dull sentence in his life. If people copied his mannerisms without his genius, that’s hardly his fault. Blame us humans. We’re mnemonic apes.
September 26th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
That IS who I’m blaming, Comely Mike. Lester Bangs was great, a genius. It’s the fact that he’s been so widely imitated that’s a total disaster.
September 26th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Sorry. You’re totally spot on. They’ve embraced the self-indulgent mannerisms and left the genius behind, his imitators. Me included, naturally.
September 26th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Quoth CM: “The bottom line is that in writing for print there’s a definite limit to which one can call a spade a spade, because the free press is definitely not free.”
Also quoth CM: “Maybe what I’m trying to get at here…is that music critics’ narrow focus on the incredibly dull issues surrounding “musical quality” is in itself incredibly boring.”
Yeah, I totally see how the first statement equals the second! No, I don’t. First you blame the media machine for neutering criticism, then you blame the music critics. Whatever.
It’s not impossible to write good criticism, and by that I mean something that adjusts the reader’s thinking on a given topic. Thumbs-up/thumbs-down criticism has never done that, no matter what the publication venue.
Thing is, I have a sneaking suspicion that music blogs aren’t ushering in a revolution in direct-to-the-reader thinking-adjustment. Rather, they’re empowering just the kind of it-rules/it-sucks writing you complain about above–and a particularly histrionic strain of it, at that. Or worse, they’re turning folks who are supposedly “writers” into aggregators, people who think collecting, posting, and pointing to a bunch of individual songs or albums is enough.
I’ll take Alex Ross long-form on Sibelius over 100 music-blog posts on just about anything, and I don’t even listen to classical.
September 27th, 2007 at 8:25 am
I stand by both comments. There’s something straitlaced (if not straitjacketed) about criticism nowadays. I think part of the problem lies with the pubs and part with the writers themselves. Maybe you put your finger on it. Thinking of the music critic as somebody who attempts to “adjust” a reader’s thinking makes him or her sound like a psychologist. Music criticism is entertainment, except that all too often it doesn’t entertain. I used to write it, but I generally can’t read it anymore, unless I happen to actually care about the band. It’s pretty formulaic stuff, which is why I always end up back at Bangs/Meltzer/et al. They came at pop music from the doubters’ angle of “Why should I even give a shit about this stuff?” They didn’t only open up the form, they opened up the argument, taking it beyond the level of “The Nationals’ first three releases were blah blah blah”. They raised the stakes to a point where somebody like me, who suspects there is nothing sillier in the world than a person who takes the idea of rock seriously, could sit up and take notice. I don’t give a hoot about Beirut, the Black Keys, Architecture in Helsinki, or the Shins. I certainly don’t want to know how they SOUND. I don’t want to be told I’ll “want to shake my booty to them.” What I want is an entertaining argument about why the fuck I should even care. Today’s music critics, who are geeks (I should know), assume their readers are geeks too. It’s a good assumption. Who else would read such shit? I make an exception for the great Chuck Eddy (he’s having a laugh and he wants you along) and Robert Christgau, who despite his myriad faults often says hilarious things and at least has the decency to keep things brief. Unlike me, again.
September 28th, 2007 at 7:53 am
Not a psychologist. More of a psychopomp.
September 28th, 2007 at 8:00 am
Ditto. Or perhaps in my own case, the better word would be psychopompous.