Pitchfork's Chris Ott takes No Prisoners

poors don't deserve to have their taste addressed let alone validated

Also weird how this thing THE INTERNET that he points to as being the savior of pure indie rock music criticism is also pretty much directly the riphook that gutted the entire music criticism magazine business that allowed people to make livings as music critics and that arguably gave music magazines the financial independence (via being able to depend on reader subscriptions) to be able to publish scathing whatevers without risk of financial retribution from their sponsors

Also weird because if you take his logic and apply it to any other segment of the journalism industry it falls apart. Nobody at the NYT is worrying that publishing an expose on Apple's labor practices is gonna put the squeeze on the ad cash pipeline from Tim Cook

Evan killing it

Is he still waving around the fact that he was accused of sexism as a martyr's badge? That was definitely one of his best looks so far.

record critics, how do they work?

alright now i know waterface is a sock, a true ottophile wouldn't let evan dilute his stance like that

Evan's contributing. You're not.

"if you're publishing really good stuff *for free* on your tumblr/blogspot/livejournal then the people who care will find it"

ha, does he think this works for musicians too?

xp

Yeah the parts of the interview where he says "if you're publishing really good stuff *for free* on your tumblr/blogspot/livejournal then the people who care will find it" is the closest we get to his sublimated Randian ideology that if you're truly talented and work hard then you will automatically, 100% be awarded

it's so absurd because every moderately successful artist knows at least one other artist, and often several, who he thinks of as much better than himself but whose work never finds its audience. dude is kidding himself if he thinks charisma & biz savvy aren't utterly crucial to any level of success

if i admitted it's short for regina not reginald would people be all like oh THAT regina?

To be fair, there's not much to contribute to a thread which is making the same arguments over and over again against a person who is making the same arguments over and over again.

Heavens to

hey man unless our betters vouch for us, all we are is dust in the wind

I don't think I diluted anything about my stance. What I said was the extent of my devil's advocating.

you're pulling a sliver of rational sentiment out of ott's quagmire of nonsense, phrasing it in a sympathetic form ott would never use, and defending it as if that's what people are critiquing. but i'm glad you're admitting to playing devil's advocate.

he's an editor

i'm not saying anything anybody doesn't know, but, for my own purposes, i just want to have it out there:

national wealth has been significantly erased and unrecovered since the crash of 08. share of income for those outside the upper %s have been flat or declining for a generation. future prospects for returns to labor are not good either. we have high, and chronic unemployment. *youth* unemployment and labor force participation are even worse, are as bad as they've ever been. the numbers for the non-college educated are even more terrifying.

innovations in delivery have rendered old physical media more expensive than they were once worth. turning a dime off ears and eyeballs was fairly easy when the desired information moved on a chunk of vinyl or a sheet of newsprint. bits are cheap, which is a benefit as far as it goes, but it means both the initial supplier (read: the artist/writer) and the middlemen&women have hugely reduced budgets to do their work.

and so, the music industry is collapsing. the media is collapsing. music media is suffering a double collapse, AND young people -- both as consumer and talent pool -- are in the worst circumstances they've found themselves in since we've had rock music. it's stunning to put it that way, you know? put all together i don't think we've seen a worse decade in terms of the headwinds to this particular li'l cultural enterprise. sorry lefsetz, the few bright spot successes of the new models (carly rae? pitchfork itself?) are minor countercurrents to an overall decline.

it's no wonder that music and music media are necessarily shifting away from a consumer-funded one to one more nakedly tied to advertising and PR (though that relationship was always core to the old model anyway). nobody else has any money.

look, the whole ocean is drying up. what's ott's great idea? try to pick off the last few little fish taking a drink? it's pathetic as analysis. get a job? what job?

confronted with this basic contextual blindness he doubles back and says the old media world was just as compromised (prostitution ads in the alt-weeklies!!) and nobody should have ever cared about the subjects of paid writing to begin with -- remember in his vid the contention was that those new boston bands didn't deserve or merit any "national" coverage in the first place, so obviously the women who wrote about them were just happy to be stooges for spinmedia's shadowy backers.

you're pulling a sliver of rational sentiment out of ott's quagmire of nonsense, phrasing it in a sympathetic form ott would never use, and defending it as if that's what people are critiquing. but i'm glad you're admitting to playing devil's advocate.

― da croupier, Thursday, December 5, 2013 2:44 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No, people were arguing with the idea that it is super easy to get another job, which isn't what he was saying, and they were arguing with the seeming double standard that you can use tumblr or youtube or twitter but somehow other large money making companies are bad. Yet his point was that those platforms give you freedom to cover what you want and in the way you want. So it isn't some contradiction. (There were a few other examples too.) So as I said I was just trying to keep it within what, as far as I could tell, was his actual argument.

xpost yeah, he uses guilt by association a lot: Pelly basically worked for a prostitution ring, Droste is a Nazi because his song was in a Volkswagen ad, etc.

meanwhile Ott appears to work for a multinational alcohol conglomerate

Booming poost goole

Haha does Ott really work for InBev. That would be rich

evan, if ott was simply arguing that creative freedom is most easily found outside of channels where corporations have the most control, no one would be debating him

which I have no problem with, but it's a weird position to get on that particular high horse about

yup! like i said, sub-breitbart. droste hates gays because he's gay and doesn't have kids, he must be against gay adoption. iirc that was his schtick for a few minutes there.

people who reach for whatever shit they can sling in the moment because they're in an argument and just have to win really get stuck in my fucking craw

xp to intheblanks

off topic and not to be sycophantic but i am particularly grateful that katherine (on ilx and wherever i've read her) always fights valiantly in discussion on topics related to sexism and music crit to avoid paying the the troll toll and to keep basic civility a base protocol. it's rare and appreciated.

goole otm+

evan, if ott was simply arguing that creative freedom is most easily found outside of channels where corporations have the most control, no one would be debating him

― da croupier, Thursday, December 5, 2013 2:57 PM (50 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah I agree that isn't all he was arguing, though I was trying to clear up the phantom arguments he never made in the first place. Saw some stuff misinterpreted imo and wanted to redirect energy to the shitty points that actually deserve it.

i do wonder how this week would be different for this lil circle of critic and critic-adjacents would be different if the videos were just "i like it out here. just a man, his camera, his pride in his trade, and his thoughts on curve. no paycheck on the line. no editor telling me the elders of zion want me to be nicer to curve. i hope someday you'll join me, and the world will live as one."

good one

forgive the second "would be different" there, the perils of no editing

I actually watched one of his Vimeo things from start to finish because that was literally what he was doing. Chris Ott, sitting in a chair framed by a sullen Massachussetts winter background talking about Curve

Or was that what you were referencing

indeed it is

no editor telling me the elders of zion want me to be nicer to curve.

idk, do you have to do this? he's indulging in a whole lot of down-punching foolishness but not this particular socialism of fools.

it was a low blow and i apologize. but my point is that stuff is beautiful. he's got a decent visual sense for a vlogger and a decent on-screen persona, but no one watches it so he has to get closer to the camera and call out all the assholes tainting the love between a man and his shoegaze albums by writing listicles for money

"No, people were arguing with the idea that it is super easy to get another job, which isn't what he was saying"

no, but he was telling everyone who gets paid for music writing that in order to be morally correct they should get another job, as evidenced by his pulling himself up by his bootstraps and getting one of the most competitive entry-level jobs in the world. and if not, then... forfeit all their income in the name of moral correctness? I said this earlier but if you want to tell me how I can and cannot make money then at least offer me a paycheck so I can do what you say

re: the "elders" bit pretend i wrote "the advertising-pr-industrial complex" or something

no thanks

(man, why did i write that post here and not on my own tumblr? i coulda made something of myself, no hustle. oh well, it's all my employer's dime anyway. during daytime hours at least)

look, I don't know who you are, and I don't have any issue with you, and if I've said something wrong or bad or entitled or upset anyone, I truly apologize. this isn't sarcastic, it's sincere. but it just seems like as a writer, and as a writer who wants to do the right thing and not be a terrible person, one is at a loss

i think this dude's got some good ideas in the mix but now that he's found god he'd be better served delivering the word more like pope francis and less like reverend phelps.

Reminder that ILX is funded by ads and that stet drops the guillotine on anybody InBev tells him to

question: why are people so fascinated by / willing to engage with chris ott? hundreds of posts. days of twitter analysis. etc

beats workin i guess

because he's an extreme example of an familiar impulse and ideology, with sexism and bullying as garnish

real answers: what he's saying are ideas that are kind of 'in the air' about the industry, what he has said has been needlessly crude and offensive to a lot of people, what he's said are particularly bad answers to good questions.

xp yeah, that

that's like asking "why are the kardashians famous"

plus goes without saying he solved the serious k + bennies code

Well I'm not about to go start reading the Marvel Puzzle Quest Support Group thread

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