The Fulfillment Of My Dreams

[koganbot]

Tom posted this on his Blue Lines tumblr (the main motive being to make a funny about rolling joints, I think):

The Trade-Off

Things People Did With Albums In 1989

Listen to it privately
Listen to it with friends
Admire the artwork
Read the sleevenotes
Evangelise to friends and acquaintances
Discuss it with friends and acquaintances
Write about it in a zine
Get excited prior to release date
Imagine what it sounds like based on reviews
Find a store that stocks it
Lend it to a friend or borrow it from a friend
Roll joints on it
Display it in your room

Things People Do With Albums In 2009

Listen to it privately
Listen to it with friends
Listen to it with strangers (eg via last.fm)
Read about it on news sites, review sites, Wikipedia
Evangelise and share it with friends, acquaintances and strangers
Discuss it with friends, acquaintances and strangers
Publically review and criticise it
Get excited prior to leak date
Share news of it
Hunt for a leak and judge the veracity of it
Remix tracks
Make fan videos or art
Interact directly with the people who made it
Display it as part of your online presence

Sorry to be self-centered but...

This assumes that in 1989 (1) the beings that reviewed records were not people, (2) that strangers didn't read and comment on each other's fanzines or writing, (3) that people only published friends and acquaintances in their own fanzines or magazines, (4) that people didn't talk to strangers, e.g. in bars or on campus, (5) that reading reviews on paper was only related to imagining what something sounds like, (6) whatever else I forgot.

But given that 2009 has the capacity to do better what I and people like me were already doing in 1989 (even though 2009 isn't as different in kind as that list implies), with many more people doing it and with everybody having the capacity to do it more often, so that 2009 might be considered something of the fulfillment of my 1989 dream,* how come the convo in 2009 isn't smarter than it was in 1989, how come my writing isn't far better now than it was then, how come my ideas haven't developed exponentially rather than circling around the same old same old, how come the music isn't better, etc.?

*1986, actually

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

[Warning: this is quick and contemporaneous and I'm not sure how much of it is bullshit.]

One answer is that, like The Dolls and Ashlee etc. etc., you're waiting for your audience to find you. (I imagine the re-formed Dolls are doing better now than they were when they started touring, but clearly the audience they have now isn't that mythical audience who should have listened to them at the time.)

Without an audience, you don't have anyone to test your ideas, or for you to test your ideas against, or to push you toward new ideas. We have instant preservation in the form of online communication but we still act like doing rock criticism is an act of faithful oral history. But oral histories aren't, as far as I understand them, laboratories or seminars or even lonely hearts clubs -- oral histories allow us to continue to retread the past, for the most part in the way it's been tread many times before. There's a feeling of needing to use the past for the purposes of the present, and to do that I think more people have to have some consensus not just of what that past is, but also in its pastness not just being pastness, its pastness being a tool that we can use for our future instead of a wax museum to see what came before. (Early rockcrit wasn't a wax museum by default. There was no one doing it yet, and the yarns they got to develop have gone largely unexamined because many critics are afraid to spin their own yarns, or see those older yarns as being alive and in play. There are exceptions, but there isn't a large enough community that understands that it's their JOB to keep creating new stories and histories while dragging the oral histories into the present.)

Frankly, the best critics that I read seem to have little to no understanding of the history of rock criticism; they're writing and thinking and talking in a bit of a bubble in which it's like no one has paved the way or asked questions for them. Which can be good, but a lot of good questions have been asked and need more development; and the new questions tend to be weaker retreads of older ones. It seems that, for instance, "rockism" is a desperate attempt to find a "disco sucks" of the present that fails to really find one and instead pins disparate impulses to one big nebulous thing. (Ditto "popism.") Discussions of the fluidity of taste and "catholic criticism" and blah blah blah are taking a major step back from work that's already done by guys like Simon Frith in dealing with the role of value judgment in a systematic and provocative way. In part it's needless reinvention of the wheel, and in part it's the lack of sense that rock criticism is a fundamentally non-linear (and accidental) continuum that needs to be borrowed from at all points for the freshness of its ideas and its challenges and questions, many of which were tossed out there and left to die.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Reinventing the wheel doesn't work for me as a metaphor - as I seem to keep saying the web is a very tactical environment, very fluid, if yr on page 7 of an argument very few of the people reading remember what was being said on page 3. So ideas generally DON'T develop well in it. You grab and extemporise and make up what suits you at the time. "Tossed out there and left to die" is the natural fate of everything online: publish, then filter as Clay Shirky puts it. (And yes, there's a problem if our filters are terrible as may very well be the case.)

This is totally different from a zine in 1989, particularly the kind of zines Frank was involved in (as writer or reader), where the reaction doesn't have to be quick, where you have time to think through ideas (though there's still the intimacy and instancy Frith, say, couldn't take advantage of) and space to present them well. Filter then publish.

(This is also the hidden issue in my original post - nowhere do I say HOW MANY albums each of these things is happening to)

This is horrible for someone like Frank who has ideas and wants them to develop and is stuck in an environment which sucks for doing that. Maybe there are people who've cracked the development-of-ideas problem in fields other than rockcrit and we can learn from them.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess reinventing the wheel isn't quite what I'm going for here. In fact, one issue is that so many challenges and questions have been internalized that returning to the original problem doesn't seem to sync to the present, even if it certainly does (what Richard Meltzer was doing at Shea Stadium is similar to people going to pop concerts they feel uncomfortable at, except the regression is that the newer critics tend to dismiss the music, or consider it a side-issue, as well as doing makeshift anthropology on the fans, e.g. the High School Musical concert tour bullshit that came out a few years ago).

So it's not so much reinventing the wheel, but taking the wheel for granted? I'm not sure. It just feels like there's a major disconnect -- your "page by page" metaphor may work better to visualize it.

[koganbot]

I remember Krugman quoted some adversary saying publicly "I never said X," and Krugman pulls up on the Internet the transcript of an old piece where the adversary says exactly X, Krugman's moral being that in this Internet age it's much harder to pull off such dishonesty. I'm not at all sure he's right, though.

One thing that zines like WMS and Swellsville and Radio On had was an editor-ringleader-master of ceremonies, so there was someone pushing things in certain directions. Someone like that can act as both a prod and a memory, if a discussion is willing to have a discussion leader, and people are willing to lead.

Actually, most of the problems I see online were in full effect in WMS as well - e.g., scapegoating and straw men, people not knowing how to understand what others were saying and not knowing how to communicate and evaluate their own stuff, etc. My guess is that in the long run the Internet will do better not worse at dealing with these problems.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the most widely adopted model for this kind of truth-keeping is known as "fisking -- essentially line-by-line critique, and it's both powerful and powerfully distorting: all too often a kind of parody of close critical reading; because it bets on the laziness of the reader of the fisking NOT to click through and reread the original, but instead to jump from gratitude for the fisker for putting the legwork in, to absolute trust in his/her authority, reliability and honesty

the profusion of information leaves us all time-poor: as a consequence i think we far too often sub-contract even the close reading and the checking; which is bad for our own ideas

[koganbot]

I think "reinventing the wheel" is a fine metaphor, and I'll repost here what I posted on your new Blue Lines thread:

Fundamentally, I don't buy this. The Internet is some wires that connect computers, thereby allowing people to write and talk and sing to each other by way of their computers. What we loosely call "Web communities"* create habits and conventions about what to communicate and how to go about conversing, but there's nothing in the wires that prevents people from thinking through ideas and finding others who want to as well.

Rockwrite types and musicwrite fans are generally no good at sustaining intellectual conversations. They can't do it face to face, they can't do it on paper, they can't do it online. It's not the medium, just the predilection, or the lack of one. And in some cases it's a lack of basic skills. But they do come up with ideas, sometimes extraordinary ones, and the ideas do lurch along, though I'm not optimistic that the good ones will last.

*And yes there's a difference between the Internet and the Web and I was just reading about it the other day and forgot what I read, and I'll read about the difference a month from now and forget it too.

[Worth going to that thread to see how dubdobdee misinterprets what I said, and the potentially interesting discussion that can arise from that misinterpretation.]

in the wires

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

one thing that is different is the discreteness of connectivity:

magazines come out chunk-form and are unrevisable, hence there's a spike of pressure to get things right and sorted and argued through before deadlines, and a particular ecology of triage in respect of urgency before publication, geared to a long quiet period after publication where you can take everything in

the internet is the city that never sleeps: triage in respect of urgency is constantly jostled by new information (or old information in new form; or old information in old form but you forgot); and because you can always go back and rewrite any time you like, you sorta kinda don't need to get all your ducks in a row at time of discussion, hence can postpone "thinking stuff through" (ideally you're offloading this onto others, and some of us do just this, but lots don't; and i think there could easily evolve a consensus where "getting it better" is always postponed, because it can be retooled later)

Re: in the wires

[koganbot]

Disagree. The problem isn't that people don't think things through before posting, but that they can't or won't understand each other's response, and can't or won't make the effort to make themselves understood, and they drop out of the conversation while all issues are still open and standing. As I said, this is the problem in all media among rockwrite/musicwrite, past and present.

Re: in the wires

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

would WMS have had more prudctive arguments d'you think if it had come out say monthly? (obviously you'd have needed a staff and funding and... and ...)

as it was you were champion gunslinger taking on all-comers, AND the one trying to ensure the bouts happened and took their proper full time -- i think these are probably incompatible roles (and will be viewed as such even if they're not: makes you look like judge and contestant)

Re: in the wires

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i don't disagree with the claim that the problem seems unchanged even as the geometry of the medium has changed quite a lot: i am less certain about the claim that, because the problem seems unchanged (as the geometry of the medium has changed quite a lot), the causes of (and hence solution to) the problem are unchanged, and hence not really related to structure -- intuitively this seems quite unlikely to me, unless you reach for quite clumsy and overarching sociology

why are people bad at understanding each other's responses? because they come to the conversation with the wrong skills? (probably somewhat true, but more so now than when? and is this just a rockwrite issue?); because the structure is not set up to help? (an editor's solution: may be wrong, but it's how i'm trained to tinker); because rockwrite is self-selecting, and skews away from logic, patience, or whatever else it maybe be obtains in science or law or history or whatever? (= clumsy and overarching sociology?)

Re: in the wires

[koganbot]

Your word "structure" is confusing me, also I am about to leave the house, so briefly:

Hardly restricted to rockwrite, but certain issues may be more or less potent for rockwriters, e.g., rockwriters may be more susceptible to reverting to hallway feelings and justifications, etc. But yeah, it's overall cultural, including hardware, software, who gets paid (if anyone) and when and for what, and so on.

Alternate universes: e.g., when I talk about WMS I'm talking about early WMS, 1 through 7, which of course is before you were on board. In fact, in many ways it was a far better magazine in its later version, but much less a call-and-response proto-ilX zine. So an alternate universe might be, how would WMS been different if you and Simon Frith and someone like Dave Moore and someone like Tom Ewing had been involved in the early issues? What about Lester Bangs, who often got lost in his rhetoric but was someone who kept returning to his questions.

My guess is that frequency of publication would have made a lot less difference than I would have thought at the time.

My guess by the way is that the Internet era will eventually do better, that the advantages of the Web will eventually kick in, and the convo will progress.

Re: in the wires

[koganbot]

(Doesn't seem to me that "hallway-classroom" is a structure. At most it's part of a structure. It's a set of internalized only-partially in-effect behavioral conventions that not everyone adheres to, so hallway-classroom is just one side of a multi-sided dynamic.)

[koganbot]

A half-assed clichéd explanation for the relative strength of 1989 was that because creating a conversation required more effort and the convo occurred less frequently, it attracted more creators and innovators. Of course, the world of 2009 has its own potentially stimulating challenges.

Maybe music criticism just had more that needed saying then than now - which isn't to say that Moggy et al. can't hold their own stacked up against most of what was coming out then, just wondering why they and everyone including me aren't so much further along.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Since when has "more people doing it" ever correlated with "it being better"?

[koganbot]

GDP?

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

You got me!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The motive was to try and make some notes about activities that happen around the album (or around music)! I obviously need to be more precise in my descriptions, and probably the focus should be on the change in EASE of doing each of these things, rather than a comparison of the things themselves.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

One interesting thing about it has been the way some people reading it have assumed I'm pro-89 and some pro-09

[koganbot]

I think it was the stoners who thought you were pro '89.

I mean, laid out in prose and discounting seeds and stems, it looks as if the advantage should be all '09, especially for intellectualizing; maybe one of the problems is that the 'Net is way better than something like WMS for socializing. Now, there ought to be a way for me - author of "The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life" - to turn this into an intellectual advantage, but I've yet to do so. Maybe I simply have the wrong personality.

[koganbot]

"Strangers" may be the key word in your post (from my point of view). Strangers can be the basic problem and the basic opportunity: strangers don't know or necessarily care about your wheel, but may have invented a wheel of their own that you very much could use.

still under the gun...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

... back at bsf

but just to say that bsf is (in some ways) about exactly this topic: how d'you create the room everyone wants (now and then) to be in with everyone else

isn't the bottom-line what you said about meltzer and rorty: if only you had a gun, you could force them into a room and not let them leave till they understood each other

with magazines and newspapers in the 80s, there was still the ghost of a gun -- if you weren't present in those pages (in that room), you were nowhere

but fanzine culture created a whole bunch of other pages you could be on instead: you no longer had to force yourself to stay in the presence of people you differered with, or find a mode of tolerance or things you agreed on

on the internet, there is nothing to keep you anywhere close to or patient with the arguments of your foes: nothing to enforce even minimal stabs at understanding

what's the gun? it can't be hostile force, it's too easy to flee -- it HAS to be elective attraction (haha the power of love)

KRS had the right idea

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

patient, both sense: same latin root as passion and passive

Re: KRS had the right idea

[koganbot]

on the internet, there is nothing to keep you anywhere close to or patient with the arguments of your foes: nothing to enforce even minimal stabs at understanding

Ah, here's a point where I'm more optimistic than you:

What's happening is that we're far more cosmopolitan and connected than we were fifty-five years ago (let's take the release of Elvis's "That's Alright Mama" as our comparison date, which happens to be the year I was born), so if we choose someone else taken at random, anywhere in the world, we're more likely to know what's up with him and he's more likely to know the same about us. But paradoxically we experience this as greater fragmentation because (1) we've broken up into more "pieces" (i.e., short-term subgroupings), and (2) we are more - not less - in touch with more of the pieces, so (3) we are less - not more - likely to think that someone is either with us or off the radar. But since (4) I and you are more rather than less likely to be pulled by distant and different pieces than we formerly were, and therefore (5) you and I might experience this as our becoming more different from each other, hence more division and less understanding, when in actuality (6) this pulling away makes us each more in range with a larger world, despite the feeling that we are less connected with each other.

So what I'm saying is that we perceive more social "pieces" now than we did in the past, both through internal "fragmenting" and greater awareness of distant pieces, but that we're less not more able to avoid knowing something of what's going in in some other piece. So even if, say, you become less closer to or able to understand Simon Reynolds, and vice versa, nonetheless, through Simon, you are more likely to be closer to and partially understand someone distant that you'd have known zilch about otherwise. And vice versa.

Barring wholesale economic and ecological collapse (which unfortunately isn't out of the question), I see this process as inevitable. Again, it might feel like fragmentation and estrangement, but the actual movement will be towards greater connection to and understanding of the world.

Re: KRS had the right idea

[koganbot]

My guess is that the U.S. radical right, Al-Qaeda, and the like are attempts both to use this connectivity (which helps them to expand their membership) and to fend off the understanding that comes with the connectivity. Of course, I know little about them, so I'm talking out my ass.