There is plenty to hate about music blogs: the snobbish attention to the obscure, the pissing matches, the breakneck pace of the tastemaking, and the overall shortage of deep analysis. But I read ’em, of course, because I don’t want to be left out. I like arguments about music. I like downloading unreleased tracks for free. I’m a music geek—and geeks seek validation by other geeks.

I’m just jealous that they didn’t have this shit when I was 23.

When I was fresh out of college in 1994 with an English degree and few decent clips, my only outlets were a couple of zines and the local daily—a mid-size Pennsylvania paper that I still write for. Back then I reviewed death metal and Alan Parsons, hip-hop and Disney soundtracks, indie rock and country “hat” acts. I’ve plowed through stacks of bad-to-mediocre CDs, and I’ve tried to keep up with the Billboard 200. Even though I’ve specialized more and more lately (particularly with hip-hop), I see the critic’s duty as one of self-sacrifice: Every record deserves at least one thoughtful listen, even if it’s the most commercially calculated piece of crap on the planet. Somebody has to set the world straight.

So, yeah, I’m a codger of sorts. I have a soft spot for intelligent reviews of uncool stuff. But as the blogosphere becomes the predominant place for people to read smart and vital coverage of music, there is proportionally less coverage of the uncool. I think the Web could use a few more musical omnivores. How many bloggers were willing to delve into Rod Stewart’s discs of cover songs? How many trendy sites treated Hinder’s hard rock as anything but a joke? When was the last time crooner Michael Bublé’s name popped up on an elite music blog, followed by careful exegesis? Would soul man Gerald Levert have gathered any attention from hipsters if he hadn’t passed away this year?

Don’t get me wrong—I fully embrace what the blogosphere does provide. It’s essentially a broad, asymmetric rebellion against the SoundScan regime and the stodgy business plans of the major record labels. Blogs offer what good fanzines used to offer: stylistic detours, obsessive detail, contrarian viewpoints, and a secondary economy that allows overlooked musicians to flourish, at least on a small scale. There isn’t much money in it, and it’s mostly done for love—or at least for the validation of other geeks. Alternative weekly newspapers like this one have long filled that role, too.

The problem is that—when compared to the worlds of zines or alt-weeklies—the blogosphere often feels like an arms race. Sites battle one another, writers battle commenters, commenters flame one another, and back up the chain again. An album like Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury, the No. 1 disc on the Washington City Paper’s critics poll, spurred so much good online commentary that I decided to scrap my review of it for the CP. Within a week of the disc’s release, it seemed as though every angle was covered. And that was just because of the debate on one site, Oliver Wang’s popular Soul Sides. (Never mind the fact that it was impossible to get a jump on the blogs. Clipse and its record label were so protective of the disc that advance listens were almost nonexistent until it inevitably leaked online two weeks before its release; those leaks had been thoroughly digested long before less savvy fans could hear the album.)

In the meantime, large chunks of the album charts have gone unnoticed by the most influential music blogs, an ever-growing group that includes, in no particular order: Stereogum, Fluxblog, Cokemachineglow, Pitchfork, Said the Gramophone, Music for Robots, BrooklynVegan, Gorilla vs. Bear, and the e-mail publication Flavorpill. Yeah, sure, they’ll sometimes write in-depth about the hottest popsters—the Timberlakes, the Stefanis, the Furtados, the Beyoncés—because those artists make concerted efforts to appeal to sophisticated listeners. But a scan of the current Billboard 200 shows numerous acts who would only get passing mentions by the elites: Chris Daughtry, Sarah McLachlan, Josh Groban, Killswitch Engage, James Blunt, +44, and Rascall Flatts, just to name a few. When a popular, ostensibly unremarkable band does manage to irritate the famous blogs, it’s often on the receiving end of the nuclear option. The new album by Jet—often dismissed as a simplistic, untalented garage-rock act—received a Shark Sandwich-style review from Pitchfork: No text, just a video of a monkey pissing on itself. Funny, sure, but empty, too.

So why aren’t those best-selling performers getting much coverage? Brian Raftery of Idolator, a music site owned by Gawker Media (which also owns several popular gossip sites) that has broader tastes than many of its competitors, writes in an e-mail that age is a big factor.

“While I hate to make generalizations about the music blogosphere, it is, for the most part, run by people who are still in their teens and twenties,” Raftery writes. “There are older music bloggers, of course—I’m 31, which is verging on brontosaurial in this world—but it is a young medium, with young writers. And the fact is, when you’re in college or high school, you are immediately supposed to reject anything that’s old, *and* anything that’s popular. So a Rod Stewart covers record has close to zero odds of being taken seriously—much less getting covered—in the music blogs.”

Of course, there are still thousands and thousands of words about uncool artists written online every day: Amazon, MySpace, and iTunes are filled with commentary by fans; NPR, Slate, Salon, and daily newspapers still do extensive coverage of music; Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and Blender have significant Web presences; and a few all-things-considered music sites appear to be thriving, including Popmatters and USA Today’s Pop Candy blog. (And when all else fails, there’s always All Music Guide.)

But is anybody forcing the average indie-obsessed young’un to stretch, to suffer through the process of writing about an uncool record, because he or she might have something fresh to say about a stale artist? It doesn’t appear so. The easiest knock against bloggers is that they lack editors. But the core issue isn’t that they need someone to tighten their prose. It’s that there’s no secondary voice saying, “You’re ignoring a wide swath of the culture, one that could teach you a lot about the music you already care about.” So while the blogs fight it out, looking to surprise one another with the depths of their coolness, I’ll be waiting for even bigger surprises: some intelligent, insightful writing about sucky, best-selling records. Maybe I’ll even try doing some more of it myself.

By the time you finish reading this, you will be done with a band called Tapes ‘n Tapes. If not, well, you were done with it months ago.

It is through no fault of Tapes ‘n Tapes. It simply released a debut album called The Loon. There will surely be at least one more album to follow from this nebbishy Minneapolis band. But no one will care. Why? Because it will be 2007.

The Tapes ‘n Tapes love affair started on Nov. 3, 2005, when respected blog Music for Robots posted a mash note devoted to the arrival of The Loon. “So today, we need to turn our joyous ears towards the frosty streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota to hear the current most amazing band in the world,” it gushed, posting an MP3 of the band’s song “Insistor.”

The same day, the blog Gorilla vs. Bear posted its ode to the glory of Tapes ‘n Tapes. “I got an e-mail from the band’s manager saying it would be cool if I featured a couple of the new tracks,” the blogger wrote. “So if you take anything away from this post, it should be that Tapes ‘n Tapes is really, really awesome.”

Blogger BadmintonStamps’ mixed review of Tapes ‘n Tapes’ Jan. 11, 2006, show (“While there were some less-than-stellar moments, the hits definitely outnumbered the misses”), did little to stall the hype. On Feb. 28, Pitchfork bestowed a coveted 8.3 rating on The Loon. In April, the group signed to XL Recordings—home to the White Stripes, Thom Yorke, and Devendra Banhart—which reissued The Loon.

On June 6, Sia Michel kinda panned a Tapes ‘n Tapes live show in the New York Times: “The band has all the buzz it could want, but it still lacks the confidence to develop a complex live identity of its own,” she wrote. Stereogum fired back at Michel (“Ex-Spinner Sia Michel knows it was blogs that rendered her former stomping grounds irrelevant”), and its readers did the same—except commenter “JT,” who claimed he didn’t “get the hubbub for that tapes crew...not that it’s bad, just boring.”

JT didn’t necessarily start the hate. But the hate spread like a virus. On June 7, a poster to Brooklynvegan wrote of Tapes ‘n Tapes: “am i the only one who really doesn’t understand what’s so special about this band?” In July, influential blog Said the Gramophone succumbed, too: “I have no love whatever for Tapes ‘n Tapes,” the blogger wrote. By the end of the month, the band had appeared on Late Night With David Letterman.

On Sept. 20, Stereogum kinda mocked Tapes ‘n Tapes’ inclusion in some MTVU programming gambit. Readers did the same.

Tapes ‘n Tapes soon found itself way down in blogger year-end polls. BrooklynVegan dumped The Loon at the bottom of its Top 40 list. It failed to crack More Cowbell’s Top 20. And suddenly, Tapes ‘n Tapes found itself shit on in its own hometown. A poster at Metacritic wrote: “Kind of fun to listen to. But grossly overrated and overhyped and not really that great.” Then he went in for the kill: “I’ve lived in the Twin CIties my whole life so I feel some hometown obligation to love and push this record but I can’t do it. Too much of a rip off. Most of them aren’t even from here anyways ;)”

On Dec. 23, local blogger Nice-N-DC slammed Washington City Paper for doing this story, which it claimed “was already diagrammed in Rolling Stone months ago” and declared the paper’s old-media ways “typical.”