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At last: Music critics on music criticism

Selected CMG staffers’ reactions to Eye Weekly’s interview with music critic Christopher Weingarten, a dude who reviewed 1,000 records in the past year via Twitter and has basically made his name trumpeting the death of music criticism, and who in this interview has some pretty fascinating things to say about how Pitchfork isn’t so much music criticism as elaborate “lifestyle marketing”:

Indie guy emeritus David Greenwald: “His opinions about Green Day notwithstanding there are points here that apply pretty directly to the Glow, methinks.”

New dude Skip Perry: “140 characters isn’t all that much fewer than many of Christgau’s ’60s and ’70s reviews and he listened to and rated every album, every year, for decades. Writing one sentence about three albums per day is not that big a deal unless you are a well-connected music reviewer who knows how to gin up the internet PR machine.”

Mod-rock apologist David Goldstein: “Well, 21st Century Breakdown is better than both the Passion Pit and MGMT records.”

Area buzzkill Chris Alexander: “Interesting, relevant, and wholly depressing.”

Rhetorical question enthusiast Joel Elliott: “I already started what could be a lengthy blog post about this that may never see the light of day, but…really? A wholly unoriginal idea that responds to the fact that music criticism has no context anymore by giving up and throwing out 1000 tossed-off reactions to two tracks off an album and calling it a review? Like, that’s it, we’re calling it a day? And what exactly, about his thoughts apply directly to the Glow? That we should stop putting actual thought into what we write and just accumulate a massive database of the first thing that pops into our head when we hear something? Is the concept of formulating coherent thoughts that are subjected to the rigors of doubt and analysis really outdated? Am I going crazy?”

Token college student Colin McGowan: “In a way, what we do is outdated. I do it ‘cause…well, I’m not sure why I even do it anymore; I suppose it varies from record to record, but I like to think there are people who think about music in the same manner I do. And I know there are, obviously, but I honestly don’t meet a lot of people who do. That’s not some ivory tower bullshit—not everyone’s going to have extensive analytical thoughts about Cam’ron or William Basinski, it’s time consuming and maybe kinda pointless—but I definitely feel alienated by the dearth of people who care about having, like, legitimate thoughts about anything. You know that character in Metropolitan who claims to only read criticism of great literary works as opposed to the actual works? My peers are something like that, but it feels like they’d read a list of the top 10 literary critics, then skim their Wikipedia pages.”

Guy who puts the word “content” in quotation marks Calum Marsh: “The only reason I can justify spending any time at all with any work of art or entertainment, from My Dinner With Andre to Transformers 2, is that every little morsel of popular culture or serious artistry is something to devote serious time and energy thinking about. But I think with music, more than movies and especially more than books, people tend to have knee-jerk reactions to what they’re hearing—maybe because aesthetics are more explicitly significant than ‘content’ or narrative than across other media, and aesthetics tend to inspire simpler gut reactions—and thus they can decide, just over a cursory listen on laptop speakers, whether something is great or terrible.”

My girlfriend, from my couch: “This guy (Weingarten) is annoying.”

Chet Betz: “Let’s talk about Illmatic.”

Area buzzkill Chris Alexander, doubling back: “It is depressing because we spend a lot of time on what we do, and I would hazard that a lot of the general, web-surfing audience (certainly most of my friends) behaves exactly like the one reader from The Onion‘s Pitchfork story: they check the rating, skim the review for one-liners, and move on. Twitter basically condenses those two things, and plus it’s new, so it’s easy to see the appeal for those with broad, not-particularly-specialized interests. I think the writer’s response to all this should be to write as well as you can.”

Joel again, less rhetorically interrogative and really just knocking it out the park this time: “I think there’s still this ridiculous presumption (and Weingarten seems to suggest it, when he acts like it’s a great revelation that the masses have shitty taste and don’t care about good writing) that music crits exist to inform and guide the public’s taste … rather than contribute to a dialogue, or even God forbid, help maintain a healthy and literate body politic.”

Indie guy emeritus Greenwald again, approximately 26 1/2 hours after originally linking us to the Eye Weekly interview: “I was probably too quick to champion this dude. I just want somebody to fucking give me a paycheck to write about bands.”

Clayton Purdom | 12/01/2009 |                

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