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The Tiger Eats Its Tail And Thereby Achieves Consensus (my comments on Christgau's comments on P&J)
Posted this comment over at rockcritics.com:
Xgau likes to imply ideas rather than spell them out, which I find frustrating. When he says "the atomization of taste known as the long tail may have a cutoff" I think he means a cutoff in time (it's the atomization not the tail that's being cut off), and what he means by cutting off the atomization is that the trend towards more things in the tail and fewer things in the nontail will slacken and eventually reverse. What it is that's being atomized isn't as clear: year-end lists? poll results? critical taste? consumer taste? And — though he doesn't state this at all — I'm pretty sure that one of the things on his mind is that there needs to be enough concentrated critical support for talented but commercially borderline artists so that at least some of these artists will earn a living and a few will get significant attention. Something like that. And this means that the critical "consensus"* has to include support for artists who aren't getting enough consumer support. And also on his mind might be that consumer support for musical artists can't be totally atomized or no one would earn a living at music.
But I don't see where he's really laying out the issues, at least not the way I would, which is:
(1) Of all the people with musical talent and potential musical talent, almost all the money and attention go to a very tiny tiny tiny few. I don't have a number, but I doubt that 1% or even .01% expresses how tiny it is. Most everyone else is subsistence or earning a living through something else. And therefore lots of people don't even get to develop their talent.
(2) This isn't going to change hugely (here's my piece on cumulative advantage), but I'd think the task is to get more people out of the "tail"** and into subsistence and more people out of subsistence into the middle. And the way to do this isn't by getting critics to get less diverse in their musical interests but by getting the country in general to start diminishing economic inequality rather than what the country is doing now, which is to increase it. With more disposable income in the lower reaches, this gives the commercially marginal a chance to get middling and a chance for some of the noncommercial musicians and would-be musicians to become at least marginal.
(3) This is something I can't prove, but I don't see the world's taste (etc.) atomizing but rather consolidating. We experience the opposite in our daily lives because we see people in our cultural "neighborhoods" (of "people like us" in offline and online groupings) having access to things all over that they hadn't had access to previously (K-pop, for instance), so spreading their interests. But if we pull back the camera what we'd see (I believe) is fewer local styles of music and we'd see music overall, throughout the world, being less diverse in its sound (just as the number of spoken languages is diminishing), more people overall listening to the same things: so, as you and I have fewer records in common on our end-of-year lists, I'm nonetheless going to have a lot more in common than I had previously with the listening of someone in India or Korea or Australia, including people whom I'd previously had almost no listening in common with. That my votes included some for hugely popular acts (e.g., SNSD, After School) that most American critics haven't heard isn't a sign of atomization.
(4) I'd say too much consolidation, too much similarity, too much focus on the same thing, is bad (in music, in culture, in ways of life in general), while too little means chaos and you don't even get culture, and the species goes extinct. I guess something like that's what Christgau's thinking when he says, at the end, "It takes all kinds. And we're healthier as a culture when we agree on a bunch of them." The thought seems hopelessly vague, on his part and on mine. And I don't see where it tells us that it's good for critics to either agree more or agree less in a year-end poll.
--He doesn't mention this, but the number of voters in P&J is way off its peak, and from a quick glance at the rolls it seems as if potential new voters aren't trying to get in and the Voice isn't going out and getting new voters. (Maybe I'm just concentrating on the fact that I didn't see many voters from the Jukebox.)
*He's not using the word "consensus" the way I use the word, by the way. Rant about this to come in a future post. Is there now a consensus to change the meaning of the word "consensus"?
**"Think of a graph. The vertical axis is wealth and fame. The horizontal axis is the number of musicians. The curve is high at the left, meaning there are a small number of musicians with a lot of wealth and fame. It drops precipitously, then curves into a long line going to the right and getting ever closer to zero, meaning a lot of people with little or no wealth and power through music [EDIT: the long line being the tail].
Xgau likes to imply ideas rather than spell them out, which I find frustrating. When he says "the atomization of taste known as the long tail may have a cutoff" I think he means a cutoff in time (it's the atomization not the tail that's being cut off), and what he means by cutting off the atomization is that the trend towards more things in the tail and fewer things in the nontail will slacken and eventually reverse. What it is that's being atomized isn't as clear: year-end lists? poll results? critical taste? consumer taste? And — though he doesn't state this at all — I'm pretty sure that one of the things on his mind is that there needs to be enough concentrated critical support for talented but commercially borderline artists so that at least some of these artists will earn a living and a few will get significant attention. Something like that. And this means that the critical "consensus"* has to include support for artists who aren't getting enough consumer support. And also on his mind might be that consumer support for musical artists can't be totally atomized or no one would earn a living at music.
But I don't see where he's really laying out the issues, at least not the way I would, which is:
(1) Of all the people with musical talent and potential musical talent, almost all the money and attention go to a very tiny tiny tiny few. I don't have a number, but I doubt that 1% or even .01% expresses how tiny it is. Most everyone else is subsistence or earning a living through something else. And therefore lots of people don't even get to develop their talent.
(2) This isn't going to change hugely (here's my piece on cumulative advantage), but I'd think the task is to get more people out of the "tail"** and into subsistence and more people out of subsistence into the middle. And the way to do this isn't by getting critics to get less diverse in their musical interests but by getting the country in general to start diminishing economic inequality rather than what the country is doing now, which is to increase it. With more disposable income in the lower reaches, this gives the commercially marginal a chance to get middling and a chance for some of the noncommercial musicians and would-be musicians to become at least marginal.
(3) This is something I can't prove, but I don't see the world's taste (etc.) atomizing but rather consolidating. We experience the opposite in our daily lives because we see people in our cultural "neighborhoods" (of "people like us" in offline and online groupings) having access to things all over that they hadn't had access to previously (K-pop, for instance), so spreading their interests. But if we pull back the camera what we'd see (I believe) is fewer local styles of music and we'd see music overall, throughout the world, being less diverse in its sound (just as the number of spoken languages is diminishing), more people overall listening to the same things: so, as you and I have fewer records in common on our end-of-year lists, I'm nonetheless going to have a lot more in common than I had previously with the listening of someone in India or Korea or Australia, including people whom I'd previously had almost no listening in common with. That my votes included some for hugely popular acts (e.g., SNSD, After School) that most American critics haven't heard isn't a sign of atomization.
(4) I'd say too much consolidation, too much similarity, too much focus on the same thing, is bad (in music, in culture, in ways of life in general), while too little means chaos and you don't even get culture, and the species goes extinct. I guess something like that's what Christgau's thinking when he says, at the end, "It takes all kinds. And we're healthier as a culture when we agree on a bunch of them." The thought seems hopelessly vague, on his part and on mine. And I don't see where it tells us that it's good for critics to either agree more or agree less in a year-end poll.
--He doesn't mention this, but the number of voters in P&J is way off its peak, and from a quick glance at the rolls it seems as if potential new voters aren't trying to get in and the Voice isn't going out and getting new voters. (Maybe I'm just concentrating on the fact that I didn't see many voters from the Jukebox.)
*He's not using the word "consensus" the way I use the word, by the way. Rant about this to come in a future post. Is there now a consensus to change the meaning of the word "consensus"?
**"Think of a graph. The vertical axis is wealth and fame. The horizontal axis is the number of musicians. The curve is high at the left, meaning there are a small number of musicians with a lot of wealth and fame. It drops precipitously, then curves into a long line going to the right and getting ever closer to zero, meaning a lot of people with little or no wealth and power through music [EDIT: the long line being the tail].