At What Point Does Consensus Become a Feedback Loop?

The answer is pretty much for critics to start listening to albums they know nothing about but have cool covers. I've found some neat shit that way.

My main point being.. I think a lot of people who work in the media rely on other media for their input. It's just a combination of word of mouth and entropy which bands, albums, genres, or what have you seed that wildfire that spreads and becomes this thing called "crit consensus".

I'm not speaking for all media outlets, obviously.. but most.

supposedly what xgau does (or at least used to, according to Lester Bangs) is throw a bunch of random things on, do some chores around the house and make a note when an album grabs his attention. Works for me!

My favorite part of ILM is finding about *old* records that I don't know about and hearing people's complicated reasons for thinking they're good. If music criticism were more along the lines of, "I think this album from 197x is really great and underappreciated, here's why," which we get a lot here at ILM, it'd be more fun. But music mags have to review what's new in the context of its novelty, which can be circular.

Congress, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the decision to certify going to war with Iraq.

xpost - i don't mind iraq being brought up, but obv. the scale is much much different! dizzee rascal isn't hiding weapons of mass destruction.

(x-post response to Stormy)

Maybe the same amount of people who have listened to and ranked jazz or black metal albums who may have listened to one hip hop or grime album this past year?

that other thread is interesting esp. because matos started it, and i think he's one of the best "consensus" critics in that he writes a lot in a fresh and interesting way about "consensus" records. He's one of the few generalist music critics that I can stand to read anymore (not to mention he's a nice dude).

A feedback loop is self-fulfilling. You like self-fulfillment all the time, it's fine. If not, maybe not. In terms of entertainment journalism, it is stultifying. But that's the nature of the business and it's been hardening for decades. Commerce and politics in our great country are built on feedback loops, often with predictable result. Some people, and I'm one, believe this to be a grim state of affairs, but not one without its hilarious moments. The Internet and blogs haven't changed this dynamic.

Anyway, the idea of a crit consensus has always made me laugh. For example, for that to be true you have to actually believe that what the critics, let's say, f'r instance -- in P&J, all 1500 or 1600 hundred of them, every man and womanjack of them, actually believe in the things they've nominated the way they've voted for them. I know that's not true, and so would any reasonably skeptical human being, although it's no fault of the poll, the polling or idea behind it.

And as for cyberspace reinforcements -- and it's been twenty years --
come up with much of a solid argument on how "hits" or "mentions" in the ether add up to the same impact of a single mention in, say, People, or TIME or the Associated Press reprinted in hundreds of places. (Some exceptions: One supposes if you could get Drudge to mention a band in some context of necessary goodness for his readers, people might rush to the store for it and other exposures would follow. Sort of like Ronald Reagan'd making of Tom Clancy.)

I think whatever consensuses there are, or feedback loops, or better thought of as elaborate fictions that blow away in the wind when the next new one comes along.

(no offense, George, but I don't think hstencil meant to bring Iraq into this discussion, although I'll let him decide that, since it's his thread.)

Yeah, none taken. It was just off the cuff.

Ironic, that.

This is so OTM it hurts. People have always watched or read the news they WANTED to hear for reasons, but now it's all the much easier to do that. Fox News being a great example of an extremely well packaged way for Neo-cons to hear news that supports Neo-con opinions, etc. Same goes for leftist outlets, although their prominence in the media compared to the right-wing outlets is lessening, or seems to, at least.

Anyway, the idea of a crit consensus has always made me laugh. For example, for that to be true you have to actually believe that what the critics, let's say, f'r instance -- in P&J, all 1500 or 1600 hundred of them, every man and womanjack of them, actually believe in the things they've nominated the way they've voted for them. I know that's not true, and so would any reasonably skeptical human being, although it's no fault of the poll, the polling or idea behind it.

Well, I'm not going to bring up P&J only because it always seems like every person contributes a HUGE variety of candidates, and so the "winners" actually make up a relatively small percentage of the "consensus" in that context.

I'm talking more about how a lot of crits' only source of taking an initiative in finding about music is reading OTHER crits' picks, as opposed to actually leaving the office and engaging in conversation with people about music, going to shows, and actually buying records on his or her own, as oppose to waiting to get them for free. There are so many people trying to "make it" (hence starski's "'despite the fact that we live in an age where more recorded music is available than in any other time in history?' Ironic, that." comment!), that many a rock critic can find it easy to fall into the role of being handed a large variety of mostly bland champaigne grapes to be served... which is not a healthy environment for discovery, juvenation, or morale in the music crit business.

Yeepers, really? How depressing.

i dunno, sound collector audio review does a great job of reviewing old recs.

It's good that there are such things. Keep in mind too though that a lot of us have been burned by the whole 'no, THIS is classic' consensus that sat on our heads for many years there, when the amount of outlets for written expression of music criticism was limited and that everything new seemed faddish. Not that I expected anything other than this, and not that the future could be told, but I remember the 1989 issue of Rolling Stone where the cover story was, indeed, the Rolling Stones for their Steel Wheels album, which of course predicted grunge and nu-metal as the sole touchstone. Both at the time and these days I figure it would have been *much* more appropriate to put the other chief band featured in that issue -- the Cure -- on the cover instead due to Disintegration.

A digression and a limited anecdote but I think it illustrates an unspoken...I wouldn't call it *fear* but a sense of "my gosh, we'd better not end up like THAT" feeling among many people. A (ha-hem) rockist response would be to say "well you're just a trend chaser" where in reality it's more a matter of wanting to give really striking work of the time its due instead of eternally tipping one's cap to the past. But the flip then is that all that stuff *from* the past might -- might, not must, an important distinction -- get a bit lost in the discourse, or that to talk about that in detail feels like you're avoiding the present. Not a problem for many writers I'll wager but I've had to deal with it and I can't be the only one.

But nonetheless you have to stick to your guns. So given one of my fave groups ever, Depeche, I started a Music for the Masses thread and just finished up a little proposal on something for another album of theirs, in both cases because I really do like them, I want to talk about them, and like eight billion, three million, five hundred and forty-four thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two listeners over the past few months worldwide -- I counted them all before posting this -- I either discover something new to me from the past or rethink something about the past that I enjoyed (or disliked!) in a new and maybe different light, and did so free of worries that somehow my soul had withered and died because I wasn't talking about how wonderful Interpol was. Though I admit this is a private bias. ;-) *flees Mr. Miccio*

So it's consensus only if you let it be it -- and let's face it, when it comes to end of year polls and Pazz and Jop and all that, is there any MORE artificial way of talking about music that limiting it to the music commercially released in the period of a revolution of the earth around the sun?

May be incidental to the hard and entrenched trend which simply employs a majority of people who are with the corporate journalism game. Factor in that Americans, as a rule, uniformly have been trained or brought up to detest criticism of any kind.

So you want to write a record review that's off the wall, doesn't go with the flow of received wisdoms in the place, or plainly and meanly critical, and you're immediately outside the hub. But those are secondary symptons of just not being the good campaigner for standard arts journalism in the corporate environment.

While in newspapering twenty years back, the pressure to conform was significant. Anything disagreeable, complicated or which could be construed as having less than a sunny, cheerleading tone, were matters met with some dismay. The managing editor absolutely hated getting letters to the editor and phone calls the morning after something ran. As a consequence, most writers just fell into line and were good soldier Sjvesks. Now it was not so matter of him not wanting a writer to write a certain thing but more one in which he wished not to be bothered or suffer a putting out in after action reports.

Another killer of variety and human idiosyncracy is the periodic quake that sweeps through editorial sections: "Ohmigod, we're losing all our readers. How do we get teenage simpletons and twentysomething nonstop partyers to love us?"

Then a paroxysm occurs in which everyone is instructed to get hip and produce things thought to be appealing to the young and fickle. Since everyone is, obviously, not tuned in to precisely what is hip to the young and fickle, nor all young and fickle themselves anymore, they are frightened and clueless. Then they start scanning the wires for
what others, presumably more hip, are championing. And how do they know the others are wiser? Maybe by the number of times its duplicated in the list of wire headlines in the monitor. See where we're going here?

So how to do conform to all that? Ah well, it's easy, as you know.

It crossed my mind but I think there's a much different dynamic at work. Fanzines, with only a few very high profile exceptions, were either local or of extremely limited circulation, and the only way to get to something in it was to actually get it or get someone to make a copy of it for you, etc. Nowadays so long as you have even one local library or a school with a Net hookup even if you don't have a computer yourself you've got access to Skykicking or Fluxblog for free. The quality point in terms of the writing then and now I'll leave to others to debate but surely there were proportionately as many forgotten fanzines as there are anonymous blogs.