Rules Of The Game #22: Night doesn't work, day doesn't work

[koganbot]

Latest column. I belatedly jump into the Sasha-Carl convo, though I guess my point was that the convo wasn't yet happening in their pieces. And I assert that the Backstreet Boys belong to the discussion.

The Rules Of The Game #22: Night doesn't work, day doesn't work

Not sure I connected my dots or made my points emphatically enough. In any event, when I start the paragraph "I had a lot of trouble getting traction from these two articles," I was no longer talking about "technical" problems but rather about how Sasha and Carl were flubbing their main tasks, which was to say what was actually going on with some of those indie bands and why it would matter whether or not they started using black idioms or expanding their social range, and Sasha didn't say which black idioms they ought to use, or why.

Also, you have to guess from this what I think the Backstreet Boys et al. are doing with their style, since I don't tell you.

At the end I'm vaguely suggesting reasons why a couple of indie performers are making the choices they do, but I extend my thoughts too little.

What indie performers are you guys listening to, and what do you think underlies their musical choices?

What Sasha and Carl point out is real, but they don't answer the question "So what?" What difference would it make if Arcade Fire put space in their music? Why shouldn't a bunch of indie guys choose to mumble?

If the potential of being compared to black sources is a block to indie guys effectively playing in the black idioms, why wasn't it a barrier to a bunch of ex-mouseketeers? Or why didn't it scare off liberal arts types like the Gang Of Four and Pussy Galore back in the day? For that matter, why isn't it a problem for emerging black artists, who are consistently being told they're getting it wrong in comparison to the Bronx standard, but seem not to give a shit?

EDIT: Here are links to all but three of my other Rules Of The Game columns (LVW's search results for "Rules of the Game"). Links for the other three (which for some reason didn't get "Rules Of The Game" in their titles), are here: #4, #5, and #8.

UPDATE: I've got all the links here now:

http://koganbot.livejournal.com/179531.html

Comments

Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is what I wrote back:

"think it's the rockcrit reader who wants indie exalted, while many rockcrits don't cooperate, though as more of the readers become writers on the ever-expanding Web, this dynamic may be changing."

This might be what I'm seeing since my own entrance to rockcrit via the internet c. 2001 -- too many rockcrits who remind me of me (as an indie reader).

I think that it's precisely this dynamic that Jess is bristling at in his post, and somewhat justifiably -- but as I said to dickmalone elsewhere, an obvious solution as a critic-not-"indie reader" would be not to let indie readers in to criticism (to which most of 'em would say good riddance anyway).

The premium on indie as a central focus comes from lots of voices in smaller venues, all multiplying rapidly on the internet, some reaching relatively large sizes (would include Stereogum here, probably wouldn't include Pitchfork, who belong in a kind of "side" category of indie 'zine, which is pretty much on its way out). But you can pretty easily ignore the vast majority these people (as you do -- especially to make your assumption about who's exalting whom -- and as I do, as most of these critics, including Jess, basically do anyway except when they're complaining about it) and find your true colleagues as you go along. If there's a breakdown at the moment, I think it's colleague to colleague; easier to make sweeping arguments when you pretend that Stereogum and any colleague-according-to-me have anything to say to one another (if Idolator and Stereogum have things to say to one another, that's probably Idolator's problem, and one that their editors will struggle with 4eva). But the truth is they don't, and don't really need to. EMP has maybe made some headway toward this at the organization level, but there needs to be something to let in more non-academic or non-"presentation" people.

Re: Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

When I say "indie reader," I'm using it a bit too loosely/pejoratively to describe the legion creeps who complain about, say, missing indie darlings in Stylus's ridiculously premature albums of the year post in a "news item" about the site's closing. (Which Stereogum used as an excuse to post an early year-end list.)

Re: Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*the "news item" came from Stereogum about Stylus closing down

*also, only my first parag after the quoted one was in my response, the rest of it is all stuff I was thinking about recently. One thing the internet has maybe done is limit the amount of time your thoughts can gestate before they go public. I hope the writers of these pieces aren't "sick" of these issues by now -- Sasha has already called a moratorium on discussion (what's it been, like two weeks?).

Re: Response (decoded)

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

For better or worse, no other genre's listeners are more concerned with the written literature on music than indie's, it's fair to say. (Hip-hop fans are very concerned with the history of the msuic, but not so much with the stuff written about the music.) And the music itself very much concerns itself with this literature, with ideas about what rock is or could be. A lot of musicians are drawing their cues from rock of the 60s and 70s, and if you're not familiar with not only the music but the culural context of the music, then the music itself is a lot more barren. And as a result, the majority of critics, of whatever genre, are essentially indie/art-rock fans who are exploring these other musics. That's why genre critics can get so frustrated at other people's addressing of their chosen fields, I think--it seems about as valuable as someone who grew up listening to bluegrass talking about Black Dice.

What do you think EMP should be doing?

Re: Response (decoded)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This is true, but it's just hard to reconcile my feeling that so many indie music listeners are reading it with the seeming reality that so many of them aren't thinking about it. There's an anti-intellectual streak in the tickerblog circuit that would probably terrify me if I paid attention to it more.

I think EMP is doing exactly what it can do at the moment (it's a place where people go to give presentations -- this is what it set out to do, and barring "branching out," I don't expect more from it). I just think that their specific format is too intimidating and closed-off to ever really spark the kind of drawing-in that a publication could. (If you don't consider yourself a writer already, it's almost certain that you won't consider yourself to be a presenter, but you can be a thinker who doesn't write (publicly) or present.