Getting with the program
Peter’s recent post about how NYMag’s The Vulture suddenly declaring the new Jonas Brothers’ song-like product “kind of awesome” illustrates somethng mildly depressing about pop music criticism these days. There’s a sort of neo-populism happening among big-time critics, which poses as dismissive towards rarefied hipster niches and open-minded towards radio pop, highly produced R&B, and mainstream rap. The cutting edge of this anti-cutting edge criticism is occupied by Slate’s Jody Rosen (see his year-end dialogue with Robert Cristgau and Ann Powers for his smirking dismissal of those lame unpopular indie bands; Ann Powers occupies a somewhat duller edge). I think there’s a couple possible explanations for this, only one of which entertains the possibility that the likes of the Jonas Brothers don’t actually suck. I’ve started to harbor a Lilla-esque suspicion on this, i.e. that critics get a bad conscience, or a distaste for their own larger irrelevance, in their consistent and futile championing of a bunch of underground nobodies, and have a secret thirst to hitch up with the stronger currents. And I have to admit, whenever I have decided that something popular and presumptively sucky is actually “kind of awesome,” I have experienced a kind of ease, the dropping of contradictions: “Ahh…it’s good not to have to fight the tides.” To be on the side of the people, to feel their power, it is kind of awesome.
The problem is that we know neither the mainstream nor the counterstream is really producing TRULY TRULY TRULY OUTRAGEOUSLY AWESOME work. Neither Hall and Oates nor Sunny Day Real Estate, to take some obvious and heavily-freighted cultural markers. It’s all too difficult to parse any of it out of the contextual bath of kaleidoscopic referents. There is no square one to get back to. So you throw up your hands and say Shit, if it can make me dance… or, at least, convey a sense of wanting to dance…maybe that’ll be enough. And maybe it will. But for all the cool noodling that’s gone on since this decade petered out in the wake of Hot Fuss (something I say as a Killers fan in it for the long haul), the new indie format is conspicuously crap in the timeless-melodies department. And the pop format, which is all about instamelodies, earworms, ringtones, can’t draw a breath longer than the length of a commercial. Strangely complementary, these two sides of the critical coin seem destined to play subsidiary roles to Target ads.
I realize this is overly jaded, but for rhetorical purposes it gets across a point that needs to be made. Plus my TAS posting is a little rusty, which is why I’m chillin’ in comments for now anyhow.
— James · Aug 22, 01:45 AM · #
This is exactly right.
ps Is this the real James? Or is it James Nitro-edition again?
— Freddie · Aug 22, 03:56 AM · #
As a Seventies art-rock/heavy metal fan, I stopped caring what critics thought about music ages ago. Though, oddly enough, the critics’ darlings and the critics’ banes never seemed to have a problem with each other. After all, there was no band the critics loved more than the Velvet Underground and no band they hated more than Yes. But Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman played with Lou Reed, and none of them seemed to care what Lester Bangs or Christgau thought.
My disdain for music critics was only PARTLY related to the fact that they loved bands I detested and invariably trashed bands I liked. After all, there’s no accounting for taste. Problem is, I was never quite convinced that critics liked the records they raved about. There always seemed to be a lot of calculation in their reviews. For instance, when the Beastie Boys first came out, the critics could never just say “They’re great” or “They stink.” The critics always felt they needed a political theory through which the Beasties could be analyzed. Hence, early reviews always fell into categories: the “Like Elvis, they’re bringing black music to mass white audiences, so we must endorse them” category or the “Like Elvis, they’re white boys ripping off black music, so we must pan them.”
Critics’ calculation is usually pretty blatant, which is part of what makes critics hard to take seriously. I have no problem with a critic saying he likes Hannah Montana, IF I get the feeling he really does. I have no problem with a critic saying he loves some band playing in front of three drunks at a dingy club nobody’s ever heard of, IF I get the feeling he really does love that band.
But if I get the feeling the critic is merely using an artist (whether a star or a no-name) to make himself sound cooler or more relevant than he is, I tune him out for good.
Here’s a radical idea for critics: just tell us what you really like and what you really hate. If you’re worried that writing the wrong thing will make you look bad, you shouldn’t be a critic.
— astorian · Aug 22, 02:47 PM · #
About the state of popular music: 90 percent of the actual music comprises of a handful of simple formulas or an obvious mingling of those formulas. The use of these formulas started in the early fifties with new formulas being added here and there. There are probably formulas still being created but I don’t think I’ve heard them (I stopped paying much attention in the late 80s). And there is a limit to how many formulas you can create and still stay in the universe of western-friendly tonality. Add to this the fact there are more and more people making music because it has gotten easier and easier to play, record, and distribute music. And this has been going on for 60 years now. So most of what we are going to get—both musically and presentation-wise—is cliche rearranging. I mean that’s probably all that’s possible at this point, without submitting something that sounds completely shocking (and shocking for shocking sakes is it’s own cliche).
On the other hand, you can still arrange the cliches in interesting ways, you can still do the cliches so well that you transcend them. And the cliches still work, especially for kids, who are new to it all. I get a lot of pleasure introducing my daughter to different kinds of music. You hear it through there ears, to some extent. But it does mean that, as an adult, you are going to hear the same music you’ve already heard a million times repeated over and over in different guises. But then, no one is forcing you to listen to western popular music, right? Or to listen to music at all. It does freak me out when I hear Joy DIvision at the bank, though.
— cw · Aug 22, 03:57 PM · #
James is right, but there’s also another factor – the internet, by speeding up communication and effectively shrinking distance has drastically reduced the amount of time from band inception/first single to mass exsposure. This speeds up the hype/saturation/backlash cycle. In the olden days (80’s) when I was an young Anglophile, I used to get frustrated with the US’ glacially slow mass acceptance of any new band/style/innovation compared to the UK’s – but it didn’t take me long to realize that the UK press’ cycle of hype-every-band-as-the-next-big-thing (now read: championing the derivative/disposable pop flavor of the week) and then turn-around-and-destroy-them-the-following week was not necessarily preferable. This was partly due the small size of the UK music market, and the comparatively large size of their press (now read: internet/blogs) vs. the US inverse. Internet and instant, easy availability also ups the noise-to-signal ratio; I’m sure there IS good stuff, but there’s so much more stuff (much of it OK/competent, but not really special) to sift through, that the truly good stuff has trouble standing out. I guess what I’m trying to say is the internet’s effect on music distribution and commentary makes Brits of us all.
“‘Oo’re the Britons?”
“We are…We are ALL Britons – and I am your king!”
“Well, I didn’t vote for you…”
— CarbonYeti · Aug 22, 04:59 PM · #
@ cw: I instinctively cringed at your comments on music, but I had to think on why for a bit, because I think they may contain a fair bit of truth. It really depends on what you mean by “cliches.” Forgive me as I foray into abstraction.
To be interesting for longer periods of time, pretty much all music relies on varied repetition, whether you are repeating a theme, a rhythm, a timbre, or a harmonic idea. No repetition means no coherence, while rote repetition means tedium (the worst Philip Glass fits the latter). Varied repetition gives the listener something to grab on to while also providing interest.
One means of varied repetition is via gradual change, in which a repeated pattern is changed slightly and periodically. A lot of non-Western music does this, as does American minimalism, and Brian Eno and his acolytes. Another is to have two or more contrasting sections, which may or may not be related, and which reoccur by following some pattern. In Western music you see this in everything from fugues to sonatas to concertos, but a really basic instance is in pop songs with verses and chorus.
Varied repetition inevitably gives rise to musical form, which is just the outline of how varied repetition is executed. If this is what you mean by “cliches,” then I guess you are right, in that there are only so many forms, but your view is a little narrow. These forms-cliches do not go back a mere 60 years: They are centuries old, and some probably exceed the last millennium. And yet these forms accommodate a huge breadth of musical styles. Popular song form is not too different from a 16th century madrigal, or a 13th century chanson, yet no one accuses pop music of rearranging the cliches of the Renaissance.
If you mean that there are only so many pleasant ways to arrange notes, then I will have to be less nice. A statement like that can only be valid if you ignore countless means of stylistic variation, from tempo to instrumentation to rhythmic synchronization. Again, the diatonic scale (do-re-mi-etc) has supported 1500 years of music in various styles with no sign of exhaustion in my opinion.
— Blar · Aug 22, 07:19 PM · #
Matt — you make a great point here, one which has bugged me for a while. The thing that bugs me about music criticism is that it’s so passively positive. Go look at the metacritic scores in the music section versus the film section — there are almost no low scores in the music section. Certainly, the scores are much, much higher on the music side. That’s especially problematic considering I’d argue that the state of pop music is quite a bit worse than the state of mass-market cinema. Yet outside of a few specialized outlets, there just isn’t much pushback against the tides of terrible mainstream pop.
— Peter Suderman · Aug 22, 08:58 PM · #
This is such an interesting thread I am almost distracted from how depressing it might (but only might) be. Are we ready to face an indefinite future of derivativeness and fairly facile but amusing-enough borrowing and recycling? And, indeed, is that so bad after all? Take me back to the City of Pigs. (Oh won’t you please take me home…. Rock me Socrates.)
Yeti: Bush! Oasis! Blur! No, Oasis again! Embrace! Er, Prodigy! Muse! I mean The Vines! No? Uhm…The Gallows! Republica! U.N.K.L.E.! Tough times indeed.
No indication at all of where it’s all headed…not even of whether it’s Nitro or not.
— James · Aug 22, 09:06 PM · #
PS on an academic level, I have actually no real idea of how my own music falls within this schema, though of course I have my ideas. Is this because inspiration magically trumps logical nihilism? Or because it’s just tying on the blindfold? In which case would either of these be a good thing?
— James · Aug 22, 09:09 PM · #
Blar (are you perhaps a cave person?)
What I mean by cliche or formula is a little more precsise. You are right that basic forms go back hundreds of years, and I forgot to include country music in the popular category, and it’s form goes back a long way. But most modern popular music is based on a really narrow range of musical formulas, which are different then forms. DOn’t make me get too precise here.
Take the matter of chords. There is a big chunk of popular guitar-based music where you the most complicated chord that you will hear is a dominant seventh. That is becasue there are a few really easy, obvious chords that you can play on the guitar and they are all major and minor chords played up at the nut. E, A, D, C, G. Add a few simple bar chords (B, F) and that covers maybe 75% (I’m just guessing here) of all rock and roll harmony. And then there are really only a few ways that those chords get played. The signature is almost always 4/4. And then on the guitar itself there are only a few main ways those chords get played. Tthey get strummed up and down (think creedence clearwater) or they get picked downward with the pick hand just slighty resting on the strings so that you get a staccato sound (think heavy metal) or you use big downward strokes accenting the rythym like cymbal splashes: power chords (think Pete Townsand). Those few options combine with a few other factors to make up the most basic rock and roll formulas. Ones that we hear over and over. The form, in it’s most prosaic sense—structure of the sections—is only part of the formula.
— cw · Aug 22, 09:30 PM · #
Actually, power chords are stroked both up and down.
— cw · Aug 22, 09:33 PM · #
Ha! My preferred nom de cyber of the moment has a genesis that is at once somewhat personal and very dull, so I will spare everyone. But basically, yes, caveman. Caveman blar!
You are basically right about rock harmonies, though allow me to bore you with about half a dozen exceptions I thought of just now. The post-punk wave used a bunch of odd harmonies; either quartal (stacked fourths instead of thirds) or pandiatonic (pitches from the major/minor mode that are not stacked thirds). The Police, The Smiths, and U2 are the main perpetrators. It seems that a lot of 90’s rock uses major 7ths, major 9ths, and minor 7ths. Also in the 90’s there was a lot of music that had what might be called a pedal treble—one or two static pitches with a shifting bass—that was probably easy to do, but also sounded cool. Ben Folds and other piano-playing dudes have a much broader harmonic repertoire than many rock-guitarists. And Hendrix had his signature E7#9.
I’m just being pedantic because I like to. But a lot of what you say is a fair generalization. I’m still tempted to say “So what?” If Buddy Holly, The Rolling Stones, The Talking Heads, and Alice in Chains all relied on the same conventions, does that mean that each was merely rearranging the conventions of their rockin’ forerunners? They all seemed to find their own niche within a common set of conventions—which we might call “rock music”—without resorting to postmodern recontextualizations (a word Firefox’s spellchecker refuses to legitimize, by the way). So why should we assume that contemporary bands must now be trapped in a cycle of endless borrowing?
Also, I’m generally sympathetic to the notion that Postmodernism, in its reliance on tweaking established conventions, is ultimately self-defeating. By playing with these conventions, the Postmodern undermines them until there is no convention left, and he is out of material. It will be interesting to see how both high and pop culture reconcile this contradiction. I am not plugged into the trendiest of the trendy in pop music, but it seems that for the most part pop music has been incredibly resilient to the Postmodern temptation, the odd Cake or They Might Be Giants aside.
One last tangent: I think there may be a Postmodern fallacy: that having artistic influences means being hopelessly indebted to them. Influences do not have to trap people in this way, nor does some similarity to an earlier artist indicate a lack of creativity.
— Blar · Aug 22, 11:00 PM · #
“If Buddy Holly, The Rolling Stones, The Talking Heads, and Alice in Chains all relied on the same conventions, does that mean that each was merely rearranging the conventions of their rockin’ forerunners?”
Buddy Holly: he may have been a rockin’ forerunner. A minor forerunner though, right?
Rolling Stones: They definitly borrowed heavily from various blues styles, but they also added thier own twists that lots of people copied.
Talking Heads: They started intentionally outside the every formula they could recognize. THey got a lot of help from Brian Eno who was a definite innovator (who many people have copied). Once they stopped using him to produce they started being more of a hybrid of different formulas.
Alice in Chains: I can’t remember what they sounded like.
But my main point was that for cultural reasons, popular music for the last 60 years has stayed with in this really narrow range of musical options and a huge amount of recycling has been going on. I think one reason the recycling happens is because modern american pop (MAP) is mostly created by young people. Young people (damn them) don’t have the vast knowledge that wise elders like myself do. They also don’t always have the best taste yet. Taste usually requires experience to develop.
Another reason we seem to be locked in is that there is a low technical bar to entry to making MAP. The mechanism for weeding out the mediocher is pretty weak. If me and my friends want to do our Husker Du imitation at clubs and parties, we easily can. If me and my friends wanted to play Shostikovich string quartets, that is another matter. Not that Shos. is better than Husker Du, it’s just way harder to pull off.
If you define music in the broadest sense as intentional sound, there are endless arrays of things we could be listening to in our cars as we drive out to the beach. But as currently constituented, MAP has to be more than just music, it has to deseminate and proclaim certain cultural messages. What message would a teenager whose music consisted of caged crickets and splashing water convey? I am an zen art fag? In our current cultural environment he would probably be better off playing something Husker Du-esque
— cw · Aug 23, 01:13 AM · #
Again, all true, but I don’t see how it supports your larger point, that popular music is locked into a cycle of convention borrowing that allows room for little creativity other than “formula rearranging.” By the examples you cited you seem to think that merely in using formulae these artists are trapped by convention. My point wasn’t that these guys didn’t use similar conventions; my point was that despite using similar conventions they sound very different. The conventions of rock unify them to some degree, but that does not mean they are doomed recyclers. I see no reason to believe things are different now.
P.S. Alice in Chains was the arch-grunge band, more so than Nirvana in some ways. Think angsty and brooding, without the sense that they are a&b because it is cool. “Rooster” might be the most life-affirming thing to come out of grunge, in an odd sort of way.
— Blar · Aug 23, 02:06 AM · #
Alice in chains was a Seattle band, right. I was in Seattle during all that, but I don’t remember anything about them except the name. Alzhiemers.
I know what you are saying. I’m not saying there is no creativity. I’m not saying that there is no creativity in rearranging the conventions. I’m just saying that we are opperating in a very narrow field of possibilities here. That is why you keep hearing the same stuff over and over when you get older.
And I’m not complaining, just trying to explain. I don’t have to listen to it and I don’t much. And I still hear things that I like. But this conversation has made me realize how narrow the field is.
— cw · Aug 23, 02:52 AM · #
I guess I’m one of your damnable young people (younger, at any rate), but I’m darned informed about the scope and history of pop music, and music in general. Given my breadth of view, I just don’t think the field is as narrow as you think it is, even given the constraints of style.
An irreconcilable difference, perhaps, so the honorable thing would be to put it behind us, retire to the study, and partake in brandy and cigars, like gentlemen.
— Blar · Aug 23, 04:09 AM · #
Okay. I’m going to drink a beer in my study now.
— cw · Aug 23, 04:37 AM · #
I wasn’t going to like Mariah Carey until Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a two-page apologia for her, and then I did. That says something about me, and I can live with it.
— Wrongshore · Aug 23, 07:19 AM · #
I had a conversation with Jim Norton of Flak Magazine several years ago, regarding TV On The Radio and music at the time (2006), which roughly paralleled Blar and cw’s here. I think his thoughts in response are relevant:
“Music… well, the stuff’s subjective. One,
because we come to every group / album with our own set of
pre-existing preferences and prejudices, and two, because we all
perceive the overall framework of bands / movements / styles in
different ways based on our own breadth of experience.”
He’s absolutely right about that.
— Joseph M. · Aug 26, 12:31 AM · #