Pete A. Nicholson

Sunday, May 2, 2010

What happens if everyone shouts from the rooftops?

Recently, one of the internet’s more ornery music scribes, Chris Weingarten, came out and said something that pissed a lot of people off: the internet and search engine optimisation are killing music criticism, and maybe even music as we know it.

In his rant, which you can watch after the jump, Weingarten singled out music blog aggregators like The Hype Machine, who, he said, far from democratising music listening, as they claim, are actually homogenising it, and reducing opinion to the lowest common denominator.

Weingarten’s most salient point, however, was how the internet’s obsession with being first, and yelling the loudest, is turning everything to shit.

‘The race to be first is currently the most fucked-up, nasty, Ebola virus devouring music writing from the inside.’ Weingarten said. ‘Let’s say I’m at a rock show and something interesting happens, like Jay-Z brings a guest out or Lady Gaga’s fucking face falls off… I could go to one of my editors and file one of the most evocative, lucid pieces of writing about it, I could have my photographer friend there shooting these gorgeous, artful photos, but the most clicks for that story will go to whoever got it up the fastest. Insight and artistry are no longer an end-goal, they’re afterthoughts.’

Writing about music, as well as listening to it and learning about it, Weingarten said, have become math, controlled by algorithms and filtered through the ‘bland middling taste of the internet hive mind’.

Now all that matters is racking up hits with ‘wet spitballs of non-news’, at the expense of saying anything worthwhile, or, god forbid, actually criticising something. (Pitchfork, he noted, recently stopped publishing negative song reviews, presumably to stay in the good graces of the record companies who give them their so-called ‘exclusives’).

‘If clicks are what matter,’ Weingarten concluded, ‘it doesn’t matter if the writing is any good. And that fucking blows.’

Weingarten, who writes for the Village Voice and a hundred other magazines, has a shtick particularly well suited to the internet age: he’s self-aggrandizing (he calls himself ‘The Last Rock Critic Left Standing’), combative (‘Here’s my complete list of newish, internet-famous indie rock bands with shitty drummers: 1. Pretty much all of them.’) and excels in self-promotion (he recently began reviewing 1000 records from 2010 on Twitter.)

And it is just this loud, caustic public persona has led a lot of people to ignore or write off his most recent rant, or to accuse him of playing into the same mentality that he so strongly derides. But in attacking Weingarten, many of these critics have lost an opportunity to take part in a dialogue we really need to have.

In a blog response to Weingarten, a Hype Machine writer pointed out that what Weingarten and others like him are lamenting is symptomatic of a greater problem, and that is that people are thinking less — about what they listen to, what they read and what they write. I would add that they’re reading and listening less, too — and, at the same time, wanting everyone to listen to them.

Increasingly, the way people relate on the internet reminds me of that drunk person at every party you’ve ever been to — the one with the wild eyes who only listens to anyone long enough to extract a few key words, words they can then insert into their next breathless rant to create the illusion that you, and the people around them, are involved in a conversation. Everyone wants to talk at you, it seems, and they all want to be first.

And it’s not just happening in music; there are parallels in literature, too. Not too long ago, The Future of the Book reported that literary journal The Virginia Quarterly Review now has ten times more submitters than they do subscribers.

Christopher-R-Weingarten-001-web.jpg

Weingarten on Twitter taking a stick to a couple of the bigger bands in his neighbourhood.

Creative writing courses all around the world are filled to overflowing with people desperate to write and be heard, which has led some writers, like novelist Stephen Orr, to implore people to leave that shit up to the experts.

This stance, of course, is ridiculous. But, as New Matilda wit Ben Pobjie pointed out, it’s also predictable. ‘An inherent part of believing yourself to be a born writer,’ Pobjie wrote, in a comment on Orr’s piece, ‘is taking action to convince everyone else they’ve got no business trying.’

Wanting people to read, listen and communicate in a way that encourages thinking, dialogue and discovery is not the same as wanting to go back to the way we did things before, where a few people wrote and everyone else had to listen.

People should be encouraged to write and talk about things they like, including music. But they should also be encouraged to read widely and to learn craft; to venture into places where they might discover strange, remarkable, challenging and beautiful things they’ve never seen before; and to participate in real dialogue and creative community on the internet, rather than just running to the top of the mountain and shouting at the top of their lungs.

Of course, I can’t claim any high ground here. I did a writing course. And just by writing in this thing, despite the fact I’m likely the only person who reads it, I’m contributing to the glut of humanoids in all forms of media clamouring to be heard, and only consuming as much writing/music/art as they need to spout off about it.

It’s not a matter of recreating the ivory tower of old media, as some have accused writers and critics like Weingarten of calling for. It’s more about listening and thinking and discovering for ourselves in an age where we’re often actively encouraged to do the opposite. To sharpen our faculties to see, in the masses of information we confront each day, things worth taking in and passing on and talking about, while filtering out the 89% of the internet that is actually just direct mail marketing with a dress on.

Like with slow food, so too with reading and listening and writing: taking it down a few notches, savouring the beauty and oddness of things, even if they didn’t happen in the last twelve hours, and extending our attention spans beyond 140 characters.

Which is why, trucker’s hats and over-the-top bluster aside, people like Weingarten are so needed right now. Weingarten’s willingness to call a piece of shit a piece of shit, and his eloquence to do it in such a way that encourages real debate about how the internet is changing the way we respond to art and each other, is something worth listening to and talking about.

Thanks to the venerable Arthur Magazine, who hipped me to Weingarten’s speech.

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