After reading Everett True’s piece in Crikey on Tuesday, I was struck by a great sense of irony — a proud music journalist bemoaning the demise of his career on the very medium he blamed for its downfall.
But the greater irony lies in True’s criticism of what he calls Web 2.0 music journalism and its inability for original thought. And how does True demonstrate his point? By using someone else’s tired idea that music writing on the internet is popularised, recycled content. But the opposite is true.
True confusingly belittles and borrows from Chris Weingarten. His hatred for web 2.0 music journalism, embodied by the website The Hype Machine, which True incorrectly labelled as search engine optimisation, is well known. But this is not the source of a homogenised music landscape, far from it.
The Hype Machine is similar to Google. It searches from a group of selected sites and aggregates them. At your fingertips are a plethora of music sites that offer opinions in narrow fields of interest. But this is a good thing.
Music writing on the web is home to niche experts. It’s here that genres have been reborn, careers launched, and trails blazed. All from an uploaded mp3, and few keystrokes from an unknown blogger. From obscure blogs about African cassette tapes that inspire bands such as Vampire Weekend, who go on to play to crowds of thousands — the amateur music journalist is wielding more influence than ever and the results are not always bad.
The Hype Machine should be seen as a resource, a music hub that offers sounds that won’t be heard on the radio. The majority of what’s published often goes unnoticed by the mainstream. It’s the stuff the older music journalists haven’t heard of yet and some of them are angry someone on Blogspot is scooping them.
True classifies this blogger as someone beneath him and it’s easy to see why he holds this sense of snobbery so tightly. His role is changing. Very few paid music journalist are on the forefront of music. The role of the paid music writer is now to look to the web for what is being written and to do so you must have some respect for the bloggers who work for nothing writing about music they love.
Thanks to myriad music blogs, I can access South African dance music, traditional music from Malawi or hear the hits of Peruvian clubs. The home of niche music writing is on the web and its influence is still expanding.
The web is on the forefront of musical exchange, whether it’s opinions or actual music, and it has left a lot of people struggling to catch up. I couldn’t think of a medium less in risk of homogeny.
That’s lovely you can do all that. But you’re missing my point. The vast majority of folk using The Hype Machine to access music or Google Search to access websites couldn’t give a rats’ arse about finding alternatives… and all these alternatives exist in their tiny little ghettos. (We call them ‘blogs’ nowadays, but don’t be confused in the change in terminology, or the fact that you can now access one from anywhere in the world.)
Most people use Google because they can’t be bothered to type in the full name of a website. And Google has even recently changed the way it operates searches for individual users so the most familiar sites always come up top – increasing choice? I think not.
Most people on the Internet judge music by the rating given at the end of a review, and then go to their favourite meta-site where a whole bunch of those ratings have been aggregated. Is that increasing choice, or simply reducing everything to a lowest common denominator?
You’re right about Chris Weingarten, though: I do find his manner distasteful and I do think he’s quite typical of the entire breed of Comic Book Guys who populate (and have always populated) music criticism. But I did like some of what he had to say, and he seems quite smart underneath all of that.
Have you examined, for example, the fact that critics in the annual Village Voice ‘Pazz And Jop’ poll voted for pretty much the exact same records as critics in the annual Pitchfork poll this time round? Sure, they’re all Americans… but it’s still pretty spooky, don’t you think? And how do you reckon that happened? That’s right: the wonderful Internet, bringing everyone closer together.
Personally, I love the way I can go seek out thousands of new blogs and writers on the Internet: especially as it means I don’t have to even go near the crap that passes for music criticism in the Australian street press in Melbourne these days. Personally, I love the fact I can find pretty much any music I can think of within seconds – and be turned onto hundreds of thousands more, simply idling away for a couple more seconds.
I suspect that you’re just as guilty here as what you’re accusing me of: are you at all familiar with what I do? I don’t operate within print environments, or very rarely. I blog. I blog. And I blog about music I love. And that’s pretty much all I do. I guess to such a go-getting judgmental critic as yourself that might seem supremely unimportant, not when there are thousands of others like me out there that you can just dip in and out of whenever it takes your fancy.
But it matters a fuck of a lot to me.
P.S. Oh and I really don’t think citing the fact Vampire Weekend appropriate from other countries’ cultures is a particularly good example of the power of the music blogger. Not something to be proud of, at all.