A while back I wrote this polarizing article on the music business (punkglobe.com/takethemoneyandrun.html) which finally just got published by the very righteous PUNK GLOBE magazine, for which I am forever grateful. But this new Poptimist article in the new also very righteous Pitchforkmedia.com keeps shit realer than a mofo, or what have you. It’s gracious where I may have been a bit bratty, and makes a compelling argument for the joy of rock criticism and the individuality of taste, two things I perhaps failed to do in my piece. So here it is in its beautiful, thought-provoking entirety:

Column: Poptimist #19

The most upsetting thing you can say to a critic isn’t that their taste sucks, or even that they’re unprofessional– it’s that they’re being dishonest. “Pretending to like” is the ultimate dismissal: it contains all others. It’s an attack on the music– this stuff is so rank nobody could possibly enjoy it. And it’s an attack on integrity– after all, if you’re pretending to like something it’s probably because you’re shilling for some other vested interest. Worst of all, it cuts off the possibility of conversation: your every protestation of sincerity just sounds like smirk piled upon falsehood.

So it’s a non-starter as an argument, then? Not exactly: People do pretend to like things, all the time. At school, a friend once buttonholed me with a low expression: He’d met this girl. “She likes Depeche Mode,” he said gloomily. “Really likes.” He had felt forced to agree. They were thought very gauche at the time, but hadn’t I once…? Of course, I quite understood. I dug up my old tapes and lent them to him, and he spent an afternoon cramming for a second-date exam on the works of Gahan and Gore. Futile, naturally.

Letting your hormones rush your judgment is rarely dignified but there’s no harm in it, and it’s just one of the most overt ways in which the web of social expectation and interaction exerts a drag on taste. Teenage market research gurus TRU recently did some work on British youth [Full disclosure: Your author assisted writing copy on this survey for TRU's parent company], asking them a question about what factors led them to try something new. “Everyone else likes it” was one option among many. “No one else likes it” was another. Older kids picked both in roughly equal proportions: I suspect they were showing more honesty and self-knowledge than most adults would.

Everyone likes it / no one likes it: This reductive binary is the most basic expression of the real forces you see operating anywhere people get together and talk about music. It would be fun to set up a computer simulation of them, like the models biologists use to understand the movement of birds in flocks– a taste network, in which the strength of the everyone pull and the no-one pull could be fixed for each participant, and you could see if it might model the emergence of subcultures, backlashes and mass shifts in taste. This would be a world, incidentally, in which “pretending to like” is a founding principle– in which all taste decisions are socially determined along crudely mechanistic lines.

But there’s a difference between a sparrow and a music fan. A sparrow takes its cue from the behavior of its immediate neighbors– even though a flock of birds seems to move as one, it’s thought no individual bird has an awareness of the flock’s macro behavior. Music fans, on the other hand, are able to get some level of information about collective activity: these days more than ever. When you first heard Fleet Foxes, for instance, you had a fair idea of where in the hype cycle they were and the kind of people who were enjoying them. Did that affect your reactions to them? Surely in some cases, though let’s give each other the benefit of the doubt and accept that such background information can shift a personal judgment up or down a notch or two, rather than determine it in the first place.

Even that can seem repellent if you buy into an ideal of taste as a purely personal quality, an enlightened judgment that takes you outside the network. And this is where the critic comes in– a figure who can step beyond the compromised mesh to exercise taste in this sense, and pronounce a more measured judgment. To re-enter the network, to submit to its social pull on your opinions, is to betray your critical integrity.

Or is it? Another epithet that gets thrown at critics is “elitist”, and if you spend much time on the net it’s easy to detect a frustration with the very notion that an individual should get a pulpit to tell anyone else what’s good or bad. Not a feeling that particular critics are hacks, or that they’re giving a favorite act a raw deal, or even that they’re corrupt– more a sense that the mere existence of rock criticism is somehow absurd and offensive.

Here’s my back-of-an-envelope hypothesis about why this is: Rock critics emerged after the transition from sheet to recorded music had put the emphasis on the individual listener’s experience– which was also a consumer experience. The critic’s role was as a kind of ideal consumer, making an informed and expert judgment. Now that we’re moving more and more to a model where music is basically free at the point of consumption, that experience is changing. The emphasis is increasingly on displaying and performing your taste– sharing tracks, embedding videos, creating playlists. It’s not that music ever stopped being a social object, but the social elements are becoming hard-coded into the format of music again.

Where does this leave the old-style critic? High and dry, maybe: Their old role as an “ideal consumer” isn’t so relevant, and since they’re not addressing people who they enjoy a specific relationship with, their being “outside the network” becomes a disadvantage. This is one reason music bloggers have become so popular– as well as offering actual music they offer a personalized critical relationship (or at least the illusion of one).

But maybe traditional critics do play a role in making the networks of taste work better. The writer Cass Sunstein, thinking about politics in the internet age, has pointed out that access to a far greater number of information sources doesn’t mean access to a greater diversity of information: It’s much easier to find yourself in a self-reinforcing network where you never get to hear any opinion you disagree with. Which in turn makes it much more likely for bogus information to spread quickly through the system, something canny participants in that system can use to shore up their support base.

The thing is, though, that this doesn’t seem to happen so much in music: Enclaves of extreme purism certainly exist, and flourish, but according to many commentators– like Carl Wilson in his thought-provoking book Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste– the average wired and webbed-up modern listener is more eclectic in taste than they used to be. I’m not sure that’s true, but I don’t see current music fans as any less wide-ranging, though the depth of their knowledge in their very favorite areas would have made them a specialist in the pre-web era.

So if we think it’s a good thing that participants in a network get a wide range of information, then I’d say networks of music taste are “working.” But does this have anything to do with critics? Let’s go back to the binary we used earlier– “everyone likes it” versus “no-one likes it”. The question I didn’t ask was: Who does “everyone” include? In one sense that’s easy– it means “everyone I know.” But it also means a more general “everyone”: the wider context of people whose tastes you care about don’t precisely know, but can intuit based on… well, based on what exactly? Clearing-houses of information, like the pop charts, or the radio, or aggregators like Metacritic, or indeed powerful critical voices with a large enough audience to have some kind of identifiable constituency. Each of these information sources creates its own “everyone” to further map your own tastes against.

So the role of criticism in the networked, free music era isn’t to act as an authority or arbiter, it’s to be one triangulation point among many so fans can better make their own, highly social, judgements about music. This is a humbler position to be in, for certain, and not an “elitist” one. But it’s important enough that even if fans are more candid about their own networked

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/146843-column-poptimist-19

Canaris is Chris Brokaw’s 5th album and was recorded in June 2008 in both Hoboken, NJ and Cambridge, MA. Canaris is an instrumental album entirely for solo acoustic guitar - the first half ‘straight acoustic’, the second half acoustic plugged into amps and pedals. The album features a cover of Vlad Tepes’ 13 minute epic “Drink the Poetry of Celtic Disciple” as well as the title track, an 18 minute drone/feedback piece.

Chris Brokaw is widely known through his work with the bands Come (with Thalia Zedek), Codeine, and Pullman; and currently plays guitar with Fflashlights (with Doug McCombs of Tortoise and Elliot Dicks), Dirtmusic (with Chris Eckman and Hugo Race), and Thurston Moore and the New Wave Bandits. He also plays drums with The New Year who have a new album on Touch and Go in September.

Chris will be playing solo shows extensively through this year and the next. He has already begun work on a rock/vocal album which will be released in 2009.

Capitan Records will also release a duo album with Geoff Farina (Karate) of pre-WWII country blues songs, entitled The Angel’s Message To Me, in early 2009.

http://www.fina-music.com/catalog/index.html?id=103354

http://www.myspace.com/thechrisbrokawrockband