Month: May 2012

I have heard many complaints recently about Spin’s Top 100 greatest guitarists of all time. I know that I was personally disappointed with Spin’s best of 2011 list. Music journalism is like a roulette wheel, where professional music listeners gamble on trends, often hedging their bets with a few surface level picks on an assortment of flavor of the moment bands.

If you were scour the pages of Spin, NME, or Rolling Stone would you find anything new of value? Perhaps, but more often than not these publication’s choices for best new music are quite puzzling. The problem is there are too many people these magazines need to please, too many different kind of rock and roll fans to service. So you end up with a kind of musical journalism for everyone, where no one in particular wins. Much like an election, these magazines produce the same mediocre results, year after year, for structural reasons that they cannot be expected to overcome.

There was a time when music cost money. Kids would have to save up their pennies to hear what’s new. Looking back, it is really quite incredible what has happened. It is as if the flood gates of abundance have opened and we will never again be expected to pay for sound.

The old world paid economy of music is what lead to the creation of the music formats we have inherited today. Music creation is very much hit and miss, you write one good song for every ten shitty ones. Traditionally, the good one would go on to be a hit that would sell records. The good songs were sold seperately as singles, while the others were reserved to fill out the live show. This format remained dominate for decades. The clever business minds of the music world needed to optimize the hit/miss rate and thus the album was born. You would package a few good songs along with a few of your throwaways into a single unit, an album. This was possible because music was a paid commodity, people would tolerate filler tracks because buying 12 singles was expensive.

I was watching Billy Corgan talk about how cool he is; also about how social media is affecting the music world:

I was watching Brian Fallon’s interview where he said something I found quite strikingly true and well put:

“A lot of people that come from a punk rock scene or anything like that, you’re always told that you can’t succeed; you’re not allowed to. It’s wrong to win, you can’t win. You’re suppose to be the beautiful losers; like the Replacements or one of those bands.”

Something about Pitchfork has always rubbed me the wrong way, but I’ve never understood exactly what. The most obvious answer would be that most of the bands it covers suck; as if engineered for obscurity. They often dismissively review ground breaking albums, otherwise totally omitting them. Many of modern music’s most annoying tendencies can be directly correlated to pitchfork’s influence (excessive reverb, nostalgia, awkward fusions on genres).