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koganbotPosted 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].
no subject
Date: 2014-01-26 11:30 am (UTC)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.