08 May 2010 — The Weingarten Post
A couple of weeks ago, I was forwarded a link to Everett True’s blog in which he featured a presentation by rock writer Chris Weingarten, which you can see here. True posted his own thoughts on his blog, which were later posted on Crikey. I found his comments a bit of a mess, and not necessarily enlightening for anyone who isn’t exactly sure what Weingarten’s presentation was really about. True’s piece seemed directed at people already knowledgeable about the issues Weingarten raises, but wouldn’t really help anyone who wasn’t. So I’ve tried to tease out the main points.
Of course, it’s difficult to get past the tone-setting opener, in which he claims that the Internet has “officially sucked all the fun out of it (music writing).” Why the broader public should be particularly concerned as to whether or not writing about rock music should be fun isn’t really addressed, it’s just taken as a given that this is a very bad thing. Which may seem like a throwaway point, but it does seem to get to the core of Weingarten’s perspective. Several points he raises makes it fairly clear that he’s wedded to a particular culture of rock journalism, and he hasn’t necessarily examined why the status quo he’s defending was so much better for music fans themselves. But I’ll get to that later.
Weingarten’s initial target that he uses to frame his argument is a website called The Hype Machine, which is essentially an aggregator of content pulled from independent music blogs, to provide a rundown of the most talked-about music on the internet. You can read their mission statement here. The part that gets Weingarten’s goat is what’s written under the heading “why?”.
We are creating tools that empower independent voices that write about music. We think a select group of passionate people can produce more engaging conversation than a huge social mob, or a rigid hierarchy of editors. We amplify their posts and the audio they choose, to help this vibrant culture spread.
Weingarten responds to this veiled criticism of the kind of publications that he writes for, such as Rolling Stone, by suggesting that simply by collecting the most popular music from a whole lot of blogs and putting them together in a list is actually “the very definition of lowest common denominator.” He then goes on to say that “at least when we had a rigid hierarchy of editors, some of their favourite random shit would find its way into magazines.” I think that he has a good point here, in that the way The Hype Machine presents music makes it less likely that less popular music will find its way to listeners, as opposed to a magazine in which slightly oddball music has a chance of getting reviewed and presented in a prime location. And, if you look at the wider context of journalism in general, it’s fairly obvious that you get provided better quality material by organisations that exert strong editorial control over their content, versus those that mere recycle other content and rank it according to popularity. As it turns out, many other comments that Weingarten makes do relate to the problems that news organisations have been struggling with for several years now.
For instance, Weingarten objects heavily to the phenomenon of “firsties” – a term that describes the sort of comments that seem to exist purely in order to be the first at something, rather than to say anything useful. The problem, as he sees it, is that music writers are in such a rush to be the first to cover something that then becomes a popular topic that they increasingly end up covering every unimportant detail of every event that they attend – such as music festivals – in the hope that one of the things they write about becomes a meme. They care more about being the first to discover new bands than providing any sort of criticism, and that “insight and artistry are no longer the end goal; they’re afterthoughts.” This is obviously the result of an addiction to getting traffic on a website, and news sites are particularly guilty of this rush to create link bait. As Weingarten puts it: “when clicks are your lifeblood it doesn’t matter if the writing is any good.”
He then goes on to talk about the lack of negative reviews on music blogs, mentioning that “Pitchfork just bailed on negative song reviews… which I guess would be news if blogs hadn’t bailed on negative song reviews years ago.” The problem, as he sees it, is that “no one posts negative commentary anymore, because no one googles for bands they don’t like.” This is no doubt true, and it’s a slightly worrying phenomenon, if you think that criticism is an important part of any art-form. Of course, a ranking of the most popular music on blogs serves to filter out the music that people think isn’t any good, but negative criticism generally serves a higher purpose than simply telling people what not to listen to: it’s a means of engaging with ideas about higher values in art. Some of the time. Weingarten says that the lack of negative criticism means that “no one is left to say the new Broken Social Scene song sucks,” which he then goes on to say himself, thus either ruining his argument or suggesting that he’s the sole voice of reason within the music writing community – something that he comes across as believing for much of this talk.
Finally, he turns to the artists themselves, and tells us why this atmosphere is bad for bands as well. Due to the high speed nature of music blogs, “bands have to fight for blog attention all the time,” so that “bands have to offer websites a constant stream of art with their names on it just to stay alive.” In trying to constantly create something new that will go viral, bands don’t have the time to spend honing their real craft, which is (or should be) making music. I think this is a legitimate concern, and one that has been felt in many circles. Part of the problem is no doubt that it’s hard to see how anyone is making a living from playing music, so there are very few successful examples to follow. At the moment, the general consensus is that you have to come up with some crazy new idea of getting your music to audiences (a firstie problem of its own), rather than simply playing gigs and promoting them, then publicising an album when it’s released.
So, despite his general attitude that can be fairly grating, his perspective seems correct. But he glosses over a number of things, largely as it relates to the nature of the industry before all of these issues came up.
During his talk, Weingarten brings up the idea of a “stumble culture”, in which music fans discover new and interesting music through happenstance. This is something that he feels is being destroyed by factors like The Hype Machine, as what we are stumbling into is that which others have decided we should discover. There’s no chance of discovering something outside our usual comfort zone. But he suggests that things were different back in the day, when “we used to just stumble upon bands on the radio or MTV or whatever.” Umm, MTV? How is MTV a proponent of stumble culture, as opposed to a blog written by someone who has no commercial ties to the music industry? Is he seriously suggesting that watching MTV was a better way to discover music that strayed off the beaten track?
Secondly, in his criticism of “firsties”, he suggests an example where he might be at a gig and “something interesting happens, like Jay-Z brings a guest out”, whereupon he could talk to his editor and write an amazing piece about it, but it wouldn’t matter because the most traffic is going to go to “whoever got it up the fastest.” Now, I can’t help but feel that treating the coverage of who Jay-Z invites on stage (spoiler alert! It’ll be Beyoncé!) as being “something interesting”, let alone remotely worthy of an in-depth piece in a music publication, is not offering a convincing argument about firsties being the problem. That’s exactly the sort of news that should be tweeted immediately, and then promptly forgotten. If you’re bitter about firsties scooping you on that sort of bombshell, you don’t really deserve to be on a high horse about what’s killing good writing.
Likewise, when he claims that “good writing dies at the hands of search engine optimisation”, did he not think to apply this general idea to an earlier time? When you look over a rack of music magazines and all of them have photos of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Curt Cobain or Led Zeppelin, is it not fair to think that good writing is suffering from needing to constantly rehash the same article about a dead 60s icon in order to generate sales? Why is it not surprising to see that Rolling Stone’s front page has an article entitled “‘Let It Be’ 40 Years Later: A Look Back at the Beatles' Final LP”, and another “100 Greatest Guitarists” list (you know who ranks number 1)? Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Beatles article, but it’s always the same one, and, more importantly, it’s not great writing and it isn’t remotely provocative.
Weingarten also suggests that blogs are hiding something about their place in the music industry. The lack of negative criticism isn’t simply due to their lack of traffic potential, but because it would damage their relationships with record labels, who they depend upon for exclusive music content. This is a reasonable point, and one that is likely unnoticed, not just by readers but by many of the blog writers themselves. How many bloggers are aware of their internal censors at work when they choose to not attack an organisation that provides them with the material they use to draw in readers? But to suggest that this is problem is unique to blogs is simply wrong. Every publication – that depends on advertising to cover costs – runs the risk of having that commercial relationship affect what they write. Likewise, if a magazine wants to interview a famous band – something that will generate lots of sales for them – it probably won’t help if they give the band’s newest album a panning. Every publication that benefits from having a good relationship with the artists it reviews is placed in this same difficult position, and I don’t understand why bloggers (who’s commercial interest is considerably smaller than that of a magazine) are likely to be any more guilty of pulling their punches than anyone else.
I tend to agree with a lot of Weingarten’s sentiments, as I think that most journalists have good cause to worry about what’s happening to their craft at the moment, and what’s going to be left of it in the next decade or so. It remains to be seen whether or not there is a large enough audience who are willing to pay for thought-provoking, intelligent journalism to keep it operating in a healthy way. But when it comes to music journalism, I think we still need to be shown that there’s something worth saving to begin with.
UPDATED 13/05/10: I added the penultimate paragraph, which I’d been meaning to include originally, but forgot about.