Actually-up-now P&J 2005 thread

if you want to scroll through a bunch of chat room babble where 14 year olds jerk each other off.

I definitely regret not writing comments, though everything I wish that I wrote is stuff that I could not have anticipated if I had not read the published comments.

M.I.A. was a flop for a major label. No one has ever spun Annie at a high school dance. Hot 97 would play Cowboy Troy before they play grime. How are blogs tastemakers again?

I think that this is very short-sighted. Even the biggest music blogs are read by an extremely tiny fraction of the population. It's a tiny sliver of the combined audience for blogs in general. So there's a lot of hype about them and their power, and it's easy to jump to the "oh, they aren't directing the course pop culture at all!" because in the larger sense, this is true. But with blogs and Pitchfork and ILM etc it's more about a gradual nudging of the larger culture that may yield something bigger later on. I think it's pretty safe to say that a certain pocket of internet music culture influenced the signing and pushing of a number of acts who just a couple years ago would have seemed impossible to market to a US indie/hipster/alternative audience going on conventional wisdom. Annie is a good example of this, M.I.A. is another. And just because those artists didn't blow up and yield instant pop crossover success does not mean for a moment that it's a failure. Seriously, the fact that the Annie album sold anything at all and had the acceptance that it did says AMAZING things about how popism is growing among people in their 20s, and that could lead to good things down the line. So maybe it's not Annie or Robyn or M.I.A. or The Go Team who get to be the crossover stars, but things are changing. Attitudes are changing, both with the audiences and with the labels and promoters. It's a long game, and it's a group effort, but the culture changes and I think blogs are good tools for pushing things in the right direction.

I think some of xgau's comments back me up pretty tidily. Blog culture seems to be on to the next big thing so fast that all of the micro-movements refuse to make a dent in the large scheme of things. It's been, what, a year and we've already stopped caring about grime?

And it's not even an anti-blog argument!
1. No matter how hot something gets in the blogosphere or indie world, major labels are such fucking bunglers that they can't FIGURE out how to break M.I.A. or Annie, even though they sound like no-brainer hits to us.
2. It's a comment on our (and I've been guilty of it too) myopic view of the world now that we have places like ilx and pfork to nitpick. The fact that people treat CYHSY as some bonkers-super-fucking-famous band that's now a bunch of has-beens fails to realize that, in the grand scheme of things, to most people they're just some band that played on Conan.

As for grime, I don't know. That could be an unfair thing. The support for grime was mostly on blogs that were not particularly popular. Do we really want to pin the failure of that subgenre to take off on its supporters or the evident fact that even in the context of internet circles, not all that many people cared about it in the first place?

I think there's a really good point to be made about how quickly blogs move from one thing to the next, but it's not up to blogs to pick up the full-time promotion of any given act. I reviews a few hundred songs per year, and I try to avoid repeating acts too often unless I have some kind of personal justification. My goal is not to make sure that the artists get a maximum impact, my goal is to find songs that I like and basically report on my own tastes in real time. This is more or less exactly what almost every other mp3 blog is doing.

people forget how much of an impact mainstream-targeted marketing and radio play can have. who's to say that if more audiences were exposed to this stuff that it WOULDN'T blow up big? it just needs someone who knows how to massage the brains of the industry folx.

Yeah, I know it's a bad thing to bring up in a thread like this, but I seriously think that it's something that's slowly changing out in the world rather than just being an old tired topic around here.

I think people's expectations (good or bad) about what kind of impact a music blog can hope to have in the present tense is almost always way out of wack.

and say what you will about the diminishing influence of radio, 'laffy taffy' didn't sell nearly a million downloads in a vacuum.

Sure. But major labels are so scared of downloading that they won't take a chance on anyone!

And every blog-approved non-indie-rock genrefied success story they DO take a chance on--Ms. Dynamite, M.I.A., Lamb Of God--flops in their face! I just think it's more evidence that tramps like us are hella out of touch.

xp, I'd like to second this.

i watch a lot of tv, and i saw the "galang" commercial a few times, but it didn't seem to be around that long. it didn't have one twentieth the staying power of "pink moon."

in movie theatres.

where? nyc?

-- Whiney G. Weingarten (christopher...), February 1st, 2006.

Pay off Clear Channel and MTV.

Unless they are weird teenagers.

Either a pipe dream or a forecast.

One of is gonna be out of work in 10 years. And I honestly have no idea which one of us it'll be.

I do think that eventually there will be some music blogs with readerships that make the top end of what we have now look really amateurish, but I'm also certain that those will be corporate in nature.

Weingarten sonned by blogger in internet beef!

America makes good movies though.

Nah. Want to kick it up a notch?

the poll that completely ignores jazz like it doesn't even exist, year after year ... holy head-smacking tokenism. where's Nate Patrin when you need him.

on the other thread

Oh you cynical sarcastic ilxer.

with a bullet, tho

That's kind of the point I was making on the other P & J thread. With so many cds out there, it's the ones that get sent to to the most P & J critics that get more attention (duh). The Southern soul stuff on Ecko and Malaco and other smaller labels that I post about on a Chitlin Circuit Soul 2004 and beyond thread virtually never get sent to any critics. These labels get some airplay and sell copies to a mostly older African-American audience. It's the reverse for Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings--they're only promoted to an indie-rock audience. Oh, Alligator mostly just sends cds to older boomer critics into blues-rock.

Alex, unfortunately, is sort of a bore. And I'm not sure what the fuck you're saying.

I think the only people who are actually still 'challenged' by this in 2006 tend to be the bores.

(xpost)

Meaning that ILX types are a kind of intelligentsia and for better or worse we have an impact (and it isn't necessarily always for the better, given that punk led to indie and punk love (I'm a punk lover) wasn't better in comparison to disco love, but disco love didn't generally show up in "our" venues).

We are leaders, some of the time, often without knowing it, and why we like what we like, how we praise it, and so on, has an effect on what gets written and played in the future.

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music...Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most-rural sounding styles, and set a pattern for any future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial...

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. (Ed. note: Like Rick James, bitch!) To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. (Ed. note: Like Freestyle Fellowship or Bun B, bitch!) By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of blues-stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

Whiney, you're at CMJ.com, you've gotta get those up-and-coming college radio and indie-blogger rockists to widen their horizons. Jess and Phillip and a few others can't do it alone with their once-a-month columns at Pitchfork!

x-post

Demon Days is DOR?

We have dudes here who's job it is to find "regular rock records" for me because all I want us to cover is Prurient, J-Dilla and Black Dahlia Murder.

Look at this week's Radio Top 20. Oy vey! There's a lot of problems here that a two-page article on P.O.S. cannot fix.

1   CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH  Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
2   CAT POWER  The Greatest
3   STROKES  First Impressions Of Earth
4   WE ARE SCIENTISTS  With Love And Squalor
5   WILCO  Kicking Television: Live In Chicago
6   ARAB STRAP  Last Romance
7   BELL ORCHESTRE  Recording A Tape The Colour Of The Light
8   TEST ICICLES  For Screening Purposes Only
9   SUBWAYS  Young For Eternity
10   NOUS NON PLUS  Nous Non Plus
11   HOT CHIP  Coming On Strong
12   MORNINGWOOD  Morningwood
13   ACTION ACTION  An Army Of Shapes Between Wars
14   MY MORNING JACKET  Z
15   ANIMAL COLLECTIVE  Feels
16   EAST RIVER PIPE  What Are You On?
17   BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE  Broken Social Scene
18   DARKNESS  One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back
19   HIS NAME IS ALIVE  Detrola
20   BECK  Guerolito

The quote is from Elijah Wald; the bracketed thing is Chan's, right?

But what that particular Wald quote leaves out is the content of those old records (a content that Wald loves), which Wald goes onto point out is made (through misapprehension Wald thinks, though Wald's argument vagues out too much) to match up with European romanticism. (Yeah, and I know that "romanticism" is almost as opaque a buzz word as "rockism," but since it's not a pejorative around here it might not actually ruin the conversation.) Anyway, I don't think there was anything inherently conservative about the urban folkies and record collectors.

But in any event, the rock critics without whom there'd have been no "punk rock movement" (which isn't to say without whom there'd have been no punk) had some of the folkies' romanticism but they definitely were not plumping for the obscure and isolated genius - hard to think of the Troggs or the Chocolate Watch Band as obscure isolated geniuses. Or at any rate, I didn't think of the Elektra Nuggets anthology that Lenny Kaye compiled in 1972 as being about record collecting so much as about the return of something that 1972 had pretended to have outgrown ("pretended to have outgrown" might not have been Lenny Kaye's way of looking at it, but it was mine, and probably Bangs et al.'s).

(These are scattered thoughts, too vague I know.)

This tangent began with my dead-accurate point that what people like of our sociosubcultural ilk were saying in 1973 had an effect on what was said and played subsequently. Neither a rockist nor an antirockist point, from what I can tell, so no need to belabor the "how does Frank justify the Ashlees" thing on this thread.

I know there is at least one usual suspect around here who voted for it.

Give it time.