The Tiger Eats Its Tail And Thereby Achieves Consensus (my comments on Christgau's comments on P&J)

[koganbot]

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].

Comments

[koganbot]

Actually, when it comes to my point 2, I'm really clueless how to achieve the redistribution I want: subsidies? You can redistribute income but even the people with little money are going to concentrate their buying on what most other people similar to them buy. Or anyway, their diversions from the rest won't show up [EDIT: I mean won't show up in a poll or in most other people's perceptions as more than a blip, if even that]. That's one reason we get concentration of wealth and power in the first place. (Another reason is that the culture then rigs things further to keep the power concentrated, with most people who don't have power nonetheless endorsing and perpetuating the reasons for the inequality. That's my hypothesis, anyway.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Good/short/accessible policy book "Social Democratic America" has a persuasive argument for ways that the US could strengthen and expand current policy to start to achieve the kind of social democracies in the Scandinavian states, which would largely (he claims) achieve a reversal in inequality and movement toward subsistence and safety net that nations like Sweden and Denmark and Finland have despite arguments (which he characterizes as unconvincing) that those countries are different in demographic make-up etc. that I often see hurled around. Agreed that most of the argument about the future of musicians is tied up with the future of the general state of welfare and social programs in the US (I was a little confused by the Xgau essay there, since I doubt he would disagree with this).

Was also somewhat surprised at his weak defense for Gaga and refusal to engage with the folks he called out by name as being wrong. His argument seemed to boil down to "you're just bored with her" and "these three songs are good." (Which (1) I've always been bored by Gaga even when I generally like her i.e. don't find her very interesting but think she has some good tunes and (2) those three songs are pretty good; many others are much worse!)

And as far as I remember he doesn't even mention Eminem, whom he put on his top ten, which I found a little odd. Wish he would expound more on the slow convergence of Rolling Stone and Pitchfork, which could have been an interesting area to look at.

On a bunch of them

[(Anonymous)]

I took it that the agreement signals not conformity but community. That when we have a shared listening universe--which I think you rightly note exists in ways we haven't had before and Xgau and others might not recognize--we create cultural, commercial and political opportunities for engagement that make life better, culturally, commercially and politically.

How? He doesn't spell that out, but from various things he's said about politics, religion, art, etc. over the years, I suspect it's his faith and commitment to democracy, not voting but egalitarian engagement with others for their benefit and not just your own. Atomization/individualism can threaten that sense of social democratic community. Niche markets can become gated communities where those deemed weirdos are left out.

Re: On a bunch of them

[koganbot]

Niche markets can be gated communities or they can be fruitful tendencies. Rock 'n' roll was once a niche market. As far as I can tell, few P&J voters are voting only one market anyway. So it's damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you're voting niche you're gated and if you're voting beyond the niche you're atomized. But as I say below, engaging with one another doesn't mean liking the same things. Would seem to have more to do with understanding one another's different ideas and experiences.

[koganbot]

Okay. Presumably Christgau doesn't think that too few people eat at McDonald's and Chipotle. But if someone's hope is that we can get together and support a number of excellent alternatives in such a way that they achieve critical mass (so so speak), a poll of critics where you ask them to list their ten favorite eateries is not the right vehicle — unless he expects people to lie, and to vote strategically rather than for what they really think is best.

Even though Christgau did these things for years, he's never understood what the P&J poll is. That is, he'll take the poll results as a starting point for talking about what the year in music was like, while not seemingly dealing with the fact — or at least not mentioning — that we weren't asked to pick ten records to represent our year, much less the year, but rather the ten records we each, as individuals, thought were best. And though he obviously knows that P&J voters come from only a tiny speck of the social map, he's never really known how to push the narrower but more potent (and answerable) question of "Why do these people vote for this music?" much less make that question explicit to his readers. I'm damned if I know why he doesn't. As I said, it's frustrating to watch. I love the guy, love his ideals, love his persistence, but he fumbles around an awful lot. Of course, most critics who try social analysis fumble around even more — way more — so there's no constituency for helping him, or us, or anyone to get better.

In any event, questions such as "What should be on our curriculum?" "What music would we like there to be general knowledge of?" "What emerging or long-neglected performers deserve to be given special support not just on the basis of their artistic achievement and artistic potential but also on the basis of their having the potential to get somewhere socially, to make an impact on the culture?" are worthwhile questions, and something like Pazz & Jop can provide data. But P&J's job isn't to establish the curriculum, or to pick promising candidates. Those tasks are worthy, but they call for a different mechanism. In the meantime, shrinking our respective nets, or voting strategically rather than honestly, harms us, narrows us. (I'm sure that's not what Xgau wants us to do; but he does seem to want something of a narrower result, or one that's more focused, or something.)

And I see no fucking reason whatsoever why it's a good thing that Pitchfork matches Rolling Stone which matches P&J. The matching isn't a complete surprise (please read the cumulative advantage piece I linked above); nor is it inherently evil. But I don't see what it accomplishes.

The problem with rock critics isn't their supposed atomization (which folks have been griping about in pseudoprofundity since 1968 it seems, or maybe '73: I forget when "fragmentation" became a buzzword) but rather their unwillingness and fundamental inability to understand one another. That is, the problem isn't that my tastes are not much of a match for other critics' (which I don't really think is true, anyway), it's that there's no willingness to get to know one another's ideas and learn from each other's experience, no apparent payoff for succeeding and no negative consequences for failing or for not trying. (Well, I think the payoff is knowledge and the negative consequence is ignorance.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Hadn't read this when I posted above. Yes, I had the same thought of the weird almost gleefulness Xgau used to characterize the RS/Pfork result. But he didn't say enough about it for me to get a clear sense of what he was saying about the convergence.

It would be interesting to have other data on the P&J voters -- how many albums did they hear altogether? What were they? I imagine that when you get that granular, you'd find out whether, e.g., whether this group of critics largely listens to (say) 200-300 albums and no others (which would be a HUGE consensus of a sort given how much music is available) or if people really do have radically different listening patterns and happen to converge on a few flagship albums in a year.

My guess would be the former -- that of this group, there's a kind of unthinking convergence on a particular field of music that when examined might reveal omissions (other languages and cultures, other social groups, etc) or might reveal nothing in particular (or, rather, nothing in GENERAL and a lot of messy particulars). And then you might be able to generalize a bit to what social group this pack of critics represents, etc.

Semi-related anecdote that I figure I'll just stick here: Last week I visited my sister-in-law and was kind of surprised when she put on her 2013 pop playlist and played a group of songs that (1) I hated more or less and (2) critics likely hated (e.g. several were featured on the ILM "worst music of the year" thread or panned on the Jukebox) and (3) were broadly popular with her and her friends and colleagues. My open-mindedness (or whatever) to pop music or pop country didn't translate to her own map, even though on paper it would seem like a critical group that puts Beyonce at #4 or Kacey Musgraves at #10 (or whatever she was) might have room for a lot of the stuff. Generic distinction and social distinction weren't meaningfully related. I can imagine a computer that would put her country picks (which I'm forgetting now) on the same playlist with Ashley Monroe, but in practice there was a kind of wall between her listening and mine that had to do not so much with what the music sounded like or where it "fit" but something far more complicated about the contexts in which we listen to the music. (Life contexts, I mean.) I wonder if what music critics really share are those life contexts -- listening habits, sources for reading, philosophies, whatever -- and that the outcome of all that stuff together in a list doesn't matter nearly so much. (Still working this out.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

And given your next post re: "consensus" I can say that I don't mean that "sharing a field of 200 albums overall" is a "HUGE consensus" -- what I mean is to say that it would be a relatively narrow lens for music given how much music is available. And actually I doubt that that "same 200 albums" idea is true, just wondering about it.

[koganbot]

By "curriculum" I meant "syllabus," though "curriculum" might be the more interesting question (i.e., what skills we want the students to attain, not just what works of music we want them to hear).

[koganbot]

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.

And I should have added that not all the money goes to musicians. For instance, it will also flow to those who own the "intellectual property" or who benefit by being handsomely compensated by the owners of the "intellectual property," such owners sometimes being songwriters and musicians but often or ultimately being large corporations (though I can't give you figures on this, not having studied it). Not to mention what the corporations get through sales and such.

[koganbot]

Couple more comments of mine from the rockcritics.com thread, first in response to JD Considine bringing up Xgau's plumping for the supposed monoculture of the Sixties, second to an elaboration by JD, and Scott locating a fuller version of the Winner quote:

First comment:

Ah, the good old Sixties, when there were songs everyone knew: "Dixie," "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic."

I remember the Sixties as a time when Americans were actively, hostilely divided, probably more than we are now (maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think Fox News and MSNBC represent constituencies nearly as much as the anti-war movement versus the law and order people represented dangerously divided groupings back then, though I realize that my group names are vague and my perceptions then may have been inaccurate).

The Sixties more than now had local musical scenes that people outside the locale didn't have access to, and pop and rock fans then (as opposed to now) generally had no clue what was happening in e.g. country music, and no idea what was happening with the soul and r&b that didn't cross over. The only reason I had any idea who Conway Twitty was in the '60s-'80s was because a smattering of rock critics (incl. Xgau) would write about him. But in general people of my sociological grouping (whatever that was) would have had no idea he was a massively popular singer (I guess in the '70s and '80s more than the '60s, but you get my point). Contrast now to Blake Shelton and Toby Keith.

I just don't have an intuitive sense of the term "monoculture." (But if it is meaningful, I'd think it'd be I Love Lucy and Walter Cronkite, not the Beatles, the latter having a very divisive impact.)

One of the stupidest things I did was to give away my copy of the first edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock and Roll when I got the second. Most of the essays in the first are in the second (but not the pics), but two that didn't make the jump are Langdon Winner's on the Beatles and Paul Nelson's on Bob Dylan. In any event, I want to get the context for Winner's contention that Sgt. Pepper's briefly united Western Civilization in a way that it hadn't been since the Treaty Of Westphalia, if I'm even remembering what the quote was about, and who said it. (I do have the sentence at home, partially, quoted by someone else, but I'm not at home. And maybe I'm misremembering and it wasn't in that book. Google isn't helping me here.) [UPDATE: I was misremembering in that it was the Congress Of Vienna, not the Treaty Of Westphalia.]

I want to argue with it.

Sgt. Pepper's was the first rock album I ever bought, but I was initially afraid to do so because I feared my dad wouldn't let it in the house. I asked his permission. He said, "If you want to waste your money on that garbage, I won't stop you."

A few weeks later we were driving back from Philadelphia (a cousin's bar mitzvah) to Connecticut when a car driving south jumped the divider on the New Jersey Turnpike and rammed us. Our only serious injury was my grandma's broken rib, but because of it, and because our car was totaled, she was in a hospital in the nearby city of Newark, and we were several blocks away in a hotel. The walk from the hotel to the hospital took us through the black ghetto. I remember saying to myself, "Are ghettos really this tense? Or am I projecting my own nervousness onto what I'm seeing?" At thirteen, this was the first major ghetto I'd seen, though the town of Willimantic, CT, where we often went shopping, certainly had its low-income areas.

Two weeks later, Newark exploded into a major race riot that left 26 dead.

Christgau is no dummy and he knows how divided the Sixties were. I haven't read his particular thoughts on "monoculture." But why use the word?

[koganbot]

Second comment:

Congress of Vienna (1815). Treaty Of Westphalia (1648). Hey, 167 years isn't that long!

But I flunk history.

Christgau's "everybody" is hyperbole, and it might mean what you suspect, or even something slightly narrower: a lot of the people he grew up with, and a lot of people like them across the country, more or less. And almost none of their parents, I'd add, given that, from what I've read (which may not have been right, and as we know my memory rewrites things), virtually no one over the age of 25 listened to Top 40 radio, this being the case until 1964 or so. And I'm certain (though I can't prove it) that, without the adult and the general audience switching from radio to TV in the late '40s and early '50s, there's no way the youth demographic takes over the listenership of Top 40 and therefore for the Top 40 audience to be small enough for rock 'n' roll to score significantly and for someone like Elvis to become a superstar. And of course Elvis was an incredibly divisive figure too.

And maybe Xgau just means the "we" who e.g. Lester Bangs claims agreed on Elvis* — Richard Riegel to thread to dissent from this "we"; or me to dissent, for that matter (though I like Elvis way more than Richard does), since for me in the mid to late '60s, though I'm only six years younger than Lester, Elvis was old and out, a nonfactor one way or another, didn't define you whether you were pro or con and not important enough for me to be either [pro or con], not until the early '70s when Elvis becomes symbolically ubiquitous again as a garish figure. And, even though screaming female fans were something of a symbol of Elvis's early rise, I think (again, can't prove it) that his listenership tilted significantly male. Once read a survey (again relying on memory) from 1958, of students in some Illinois high school, in which the boys listed Elvis as their favorite by a small margin over Pat Boone, while the girls voted overwhelmingly for Pat.

But parallel to how American kids now can listen to music from Korea, and have more radio stations or the Internet equivalent to choose from, kids now (like kids thirty years ago, for that matter) are way more knowledgeable and conversant about the music their parents grow up on than I was.

JD, are you sure Christgau said "liking popular music" rather than just "hearing popular music"? In eastern Connecticut in 1963 if you wanted to hear "Heatwave" on the radio you had to go to Top 40 'cause it was the only game in town, there were no black stations,** but that doesn't necessarily mean you liked either the rest of the music you heard or the people who listened to it. I'd say one of the good things about Top 40 then was that potentially antagonistic musics (and via one's imagination) audiences had to rub shoulders. But I'd think that on black stations in NY or Chicago or the deep South etc. you could hear "Heatwave" on the radio without having to soil your ears with "Ipanema" or "Ring Of Fire." (I was listening to Top 40 in 1963 but got bored with it around June, so missed "Heatwave" by one month. Didn't pick up again for another three years, by which time the boredom had also come to include fear, but fortunately I gave way to peer interest and pressure. In 1966, at age twelve, I initially had no idea that the Motown acts were black, or that soul music was specifically a black music!)

Ha! I saw the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie when it was released in 1963, but I didn't realize that Conrad Birdie was a play on Conway Twitty until you said so just now. (Never noticed that Bill Haley & The Comets was a play on Halley's Comet until someone told me in 1997, so I'm not always the swiftest on the uptake.) Of course, Twitty's brief career in the Top 40 was in 1958 and 1959, so by the time the musical (opened onstage in 1960) made the big screen, the reference was lost on tykes like me.

[koganbot]

Second comment continued:

In any event, I don't think voters in Pazz & Jop 2013 are a parallel to the everybody who (possibly) listened to the same songs on the radio in Christgau's youth. If in 1958 we'd gathered together equivalent social types to the ones voting P&J now, the high numbers would have gone to jazz and folk, and maybe some r&b and classical would have registered, but rock 'n' roll would have only buzzed back in the background, and country would barely have blipped.

(This is a big stretch, but we could say that Kanye is a modern-day analogue to jazz of the '50s and (not such a stretch) that Vampire Weekend are an analogue to folk, and thereby notice that our jazz analogue sells well and reaches a broader ear than jazz did in the '50s (though actual jazz sold quite well then compared to now), while our folk analogue doesn't reach nearly the public the Weavers or the Kingston Trio did (or Simon & Garfunkel did a decade later, who are probably a better analogue to Vampire Weekend, except I've never listened to Vampire Weekend enough to know what I'm talking about). I'm not really making a point in this parenthesis, just having fun.)

*What Lester actually said was "We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis," which literally could mean not that we agreed a lot on Elvis, just more than we ever agreed on anything else; except he means the former, and it's still a ridiculous statement.

**Unless there were and I managed not to notice them.