Metastasis

Music criticism is the challenge of describing aural aesthetics with hyperbole. Drums don't just hit, they "pound." Guitars "ram" through the mix, with "bulldozer riffs." Keyboards are the ethereal instrument, combined with synthesizers in recent decades to be the philosophers stone of texture and sound creation. By describing instruments and their sound in a song's mix, a music critic is attempting to accurately, and poetically, relate to the listener the vital importance or lacking of a band's sound. However, the difficulty of effective writing is that describing the salient characteristics of a song has produced a critical environment where the trend towards describing music as a method of promoting or demoting it, has resulted in sluggishly lazy "nothing" writing on music.

Over the course of this blog's existence, I may point out examples from prominent reviews of which I find this sort of guilt, but for now I'll stick to just exposition. The problem is, because music's premium insofar as accessing is slowly being lost, the critic really only works as an informer to the listener and not as a filter. If a listener can find songs and most music for free through downloading or anything, the critic's job is to make that easier by conveying the sonic qualities of a piece to the listener so that they can save time. However, from my experience in reading music criticism in news is that this practice of musical description has gotten completely egregious and out of hand. What appears to be happening is that creative writing majors go into music journalism ready to unleash their salvo of florid prose onto unsuspecting pop music acts. As an aside, in Pitchforkmedia's case, avant-garde writing and avant-garde music going hand in hand results in the absolute train wreck of being unable to decipher from the junction any context of the band or detail from the sound, leaving potential listeners with only a band name and genre.

So at the least, the end result of current music journalism is still favorable. Whether someone reads a review and ignores most of the actual content, they still get to add a band or album to their repertoire. This isn't always a listener's prerogative, though. They still wish to know whether a band's subsequent albums are improvements, or carry new sounds, illustrate artistic development, or maybe if the context of an album represents a shift in the type of popular music or a dawning of a new musical epoch. But even then, this is rarely the case in most reviews. Any sort of diatribe on the overarching change of music is being covered by the major music magazines as independent articles, a process which steals the music review mercenary's task which in this process becomes "use your post-secondary education to give group x enough description so that this news source can claim relevance." No longer are they granted the autonomy to go more in depth.

This isn't to say that music criticism isn't difficult, in that you're trying to fit one's most specifically well-written observations of a lengthy album while at the same time trying to capture the group's evolution (maybe) and relevance towards various marketable age groups. To the defense of music journalists, they are trying to cram as much information into a short paragraph as they can. However, since the division of labor has stolen most of the depth of the music review by abrogating the power of the reviewer to make important observations and granting it instead to the major music journalists who, beholden to most profit driven magazines more interested in politics than music, instead choose to focus on the most obvious and specific "music stories" of the time. The result is that the undercurrents of all music scenes are flooded over with stories on the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Kanye, and magazines like Rolling Stone completely missed the opportunity to dive into burgeoning independent and small label scene. And as we all know, those still waters ran deep.

I think the solution to all this is obvious. For one part, start giving music journalists the power to create their own narratives on albums they want to review, scenes they want to cover. At the same time, music reviewers should learn to focus less on how "hauntingly esoteric" the strings are on a pop song, and cut the verbiage out in favor of actual review of the quality of the music, or at least a detailed list of who should listen to this piece of music, what are its pay-offs, and anything remotely interesting about a song that would require a journalist to do more research than just listening to a single and then finding some sort of relevant article on the first page of search results on Google. Describing an album's sonic qualities and then awarding it two or three marginal stars out of five does nothing but let you know what sort of taste the reviewer has, or what kind of music the established magazine or website favors. We have the ability to listen to so much music now, and it should be the job of journalists to FIND OUT ABOUT IT and let us know. Despite the freak show of literary sex that is Pitchforkmedia, it serves everyone's needs of letting them know about music that is being completely ignored by the mainstream media. Yes, music magazines have stopped focusing on a lot of the music so that they can sell magazines, or they overtly focus on pop in order to sell, but this doesn't have to be the case! The division between popular music and the underground scene is arbitrarily made because cynical corporations think that Kanye and Britney Spear fans buy their magazines when they're on the cover and don't end up caring about the rest of the content. These corporations should realize that if you never appeal to a market, you simply will never capture it.

Record companies are falling into a sinkhole, but as a result, the internet has picked up the distribution and we are now heading towards an actual global music community that cannot be controlled by monopolistic enterprises. Music journalism needs to embrace that and work to create a musical criticism that works as one of my friends put it, as a "triage." Help us become a part of the community by raising our awareness of it. Yes, I still need some description of the music, but don't over-blow it. I know that education is expensive but for the most part, over-writing is a hindrance to clarity and most music reviews I read are guilty of doing so. Star or numerical ratings should be abolished, but that's another entry. I believe that most of what I'm saying, for the most part, is common sense. It becomes frustrating though, when my ability to decide what I want to listen to involves wading through creative writing exercises and knowing that for young music listeners without the internet, there isn't much hope to being an independent seeker of one's own music. While my thesis to this post was a more negative condemnation of obfuscating writing practices, I should end positively and say that music journalism has a lot of opportunity to change, and that there should be optimism for major communities to embrace the proliferation of access to music that record companies are so wisely relinquishing. And if that means advocating internet piracy, well...