NYC iLMers: popmusic panel with SFJ (3.29.04)

Which is to say that I'm not going to be there.

WHAT: “Noise from Underground: Pop Criticism and Cred in the Era of MP3s, Zines, and Blogs”

WHO: Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic from The New Yorker (moderator); Tunde Adebimpe, musician, TV on the Radio (Touch and Go Records); Anthony DeCurtis, contributing editor, Rolling Stone, executive editor, Tracks, and editor of “Present Tense: Rock & Roll and Culture”; Amy Phillips, blogger, moreinthemonitor.com; Knox Robinson, editor in chief, The Fader; and Brandon Wall, editor in chief, prefixmag.com; Michael Azerrad -- author of "Our Band Could Be Your Life" and "Come as You Are"; founder and editor in chief of emusic.com.

WHEN: Tuesday, March 29, 6:30 p.m.

anyone for a drink before hand to help the medicine go down?

b b, where and when?

Here's the abstract I sent in.

This is quite possibly the most fatuous thing I have ever seen.

http://www.emplive.com/visit/education/popConfBio.asp?xPopConfBioID=479&year=2005

i cant go from this office into a lecture hall without a pause and a coctail..does anyone know about Augies or Sip?

I wanted more than I got. But I'm still glad I went.

I think the panel made it pretty clear that they didn't have a terribly high opinion of blogs, given the focus on the need for "professionalism" in music crit writing. It was irritating to see that they wouldn't concede that the harping on professionialism was a requirement of abiding by "our" rules of discourse (music crit world? journalism? pick your our of choice) and therefore insular/classist/educationalist, etc. Cos you know, the NY Times is all stuffy cos they refer to everyone as Mr. and Ms., but we don't do that at [Publication], so it's not like we're being inculsionary? Or exclusionary? Who knows, honestly. There was some discussion of the "cred" that comes from blogging, but probably meant more in the social currency sense. Hence the use of street talk, I suppose.

I was more annoyed by the Q&A period. There was NO NEED for the fanboy to spend 5 minutes cooing over F-J's column on Conor Oberst. The questions from the journalist students in the audience were also annoying because it was pretty clear that they assumed that the blogs/internet were anciliary to the print media. (That and a lot of them had fuck all clue of what was on the internet.)

So yes, I was disappointed. But I've also been to great free panels/conferences, so I might just be spoiled. (Going to one today, but it's not music related, so no chatting about it here.)

Oh, and ilm also got a mention from Amy Phillips, but she quickly noted that she not affililated at all with the board, i.e. this was not a plug? I was amused.

(maybe i'm just defensive about this sort of thing because i have to go speak on a similar panel in three weeks, except, you know, actually comprising people who both blog and write "professionally." also, anthony decurtis, omg wtf. who's curating these things, caligula?)

(And you don't know how hard I was fighting the urge to say that Columbia sucks and they needed to get over their Ivy selves, this applying more to the audience than the panelists, but.)

But they were, as someone earlier said, very hesitant to define anything. I was also hoping they would talk more about whether or not they felt print and internet music writing was all part of the same pool or whether they were two different animals altogether. The guy from Fader-Knox- was fairly annoying and disappointingly immature.
I was very surprised they didn't talk about Pitchfork more, even there were a few mentions here and there.

I was sitting on the windowsill and happened to look down only to see a girl next to me write, "Look into: Pitchforkmedia.com?"

i also went expecting to be appalled by sfj, and was entirely charmed by his manner. yet, this thing failed entirely to be a pannel. Knox, i felt started off making the right points -- by going after the professionalism bias -- but got so off target i went brick in the face for him.

i was dissapointed that noone got much past style and audience and into a discussion of role. style will always be style, and pannel after pannel can chat it all around. audience is a toss up and gets wierd when you consider what impact the consideration of audience can have on the art of criticism. but at the end of it --actualy, at the begining of it all -- lies the question, "whats the damned point?". in this topsy-turvey world of blogs and all sorts of non-mainstream media, how should music writers consider themselves as players in a greater community?

i would have asked, but i couldnt get up there with all the students and make people sit in that hot room any longer.

and really, i know this was columbia (and i gave up on the ivy league being a hold-out of purely for the chat of it discussions in my student days), but why must every discussion at a university be about how to learn the students into being better workers ... (not that it was overwhelmingly jobby last night..but i hate the air of it).

Also, I'm not gonna lie, he is quite an enviable position. It is always easier to dislike someone you are a bit jealous of.

he threw me with what i thought was a entirely moronic pov in a back and forth over radiohead in slate ages ago. since then ive probably been unfair. ive definately lost my reflex "go piss up a rope" mentaility, but stil find his writing unremarkable. i occasionally enjoy points made on the blog, but never like the new yorker stuff (nor dislike it).

still, i respect him and what he does, has done.

i expected him to be a bit more precious last night and was pleased to find him so easy and charming. i never found his writing to e that of "the smart new writer" i was told he was but last night he was a speaker who was charming and smart..

which reminds me i thought the very short discussion of spell-checking last night was amusing.

Hahaha - "I'm not wearing my mother's hat!"

Mark - what about Xgau in the 60s?

Funkiller DeCurtis basically reads stuff online only "for research." Azerrad says his eyes glaze over when reading something long (the best stuff online is always compact) and stressed the circle-jerk aspect of blogging. Knox Robinson's insults lobbied towards DeCurtis were totally reflexive and unconscious, anti-rockcrit-establishment stuff that just spilled out of his mouth. In fact, I'm not sure he was sure what he was saying much of the time.

Audience questions: dumb. I'm-saying-this-to-hear-myself-talk questions. If-I-was-listening-I-wouldn't-ask-this questions. Questions-that-are-not-questions questions.

The whole thing was just a tad dull, at least for anyone who's remotely involved in the kiinds of things they were talking about; this was, after all, a panel discussion for Columbia's J school, and probably worked for that audience much better than most everyone else. Knox actually had some good points, points he just completely failed to verbalize properly, to the point where I wanted to stand up and offer to to it for him. (Sasha called one of them "horseshit," but then I've seen Sasha on this very site agreeing with basically the same idea, as better articulated by probably Sterling Clover.)

Most everything you'd think the panel would be about -- MP3 blogging, the whole advertised issue of "cred," etc -- didn't really even come up.

Where are these blogs? The only one i can think of that comes close is Ethan's, and I'm not sure that fits into the "not neccessarily able to say it in the kind of style that's "professional" enough for a lot of publications." And this isn't a diss to ethan, i like how he writes, the whole style he has! But I'm not sure anyone fits this (yet)

(squirms uncomfortably in seat)

But I did like Amy's emphatic, "I am *not* affiliated with that community," or however she worded it.

I was looking for whoever "whoo"ed! Actually, during the downtime, all I could do was speculate about which audience members were ILMers brought to life.

When you write a blog, no one's asking you where you went to school before they let you publish your posts. That's what I thought he meant. Amy Phillips alluded to the issue of racism/sexism/classism when she noted that given her particular identity, she had trouble getting pieces on performers who were not white folk female singers, but that's not tied to the professionlism issue per se.

I was still sort of hoping that someone would raise the mp3 blog as a more active form of critical music dialogue. Not only could you read someone's take on music, you could listen for yourself and leave comments or not and engage in debate with the reviewer. You can't really do that with traditional media. (Well, sometimes I start shouting at the article, but it's not quite the same.) But mp3s seemed to be raised only as a gimmick to increase site traffic and thus expand one's audience.

And I am all about voicing the inner Girls Aloud fangrrl as well as the 50 year old exurban housewife lover of Yanni and the crunk fans. It's about giving everyone a chance to express their voice, whether or not I agree with them and irrespective of whether or not they work for a music magazine. *shrug*

Where are these blogs?
Deej: the usual suspects, no? Even tho' they aren't all exclusively southern, you got: coke blunts, can i bring my gat, the shrimp, gov names, gel weave, etc. etc.