Longboxing at Strawberries™
We may never again know the level of overwhelming media saturation responsible for Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice and Kriss Kross, but star-making was, for almost fifty years, an extremely profitable and exciting industry. It was also a closed industry, which made for seismic popular rebellions, and undercover, street-level shifts in taste like Hip-Hop, Punk and Grunge. None of this will ever be possible again because the Internet ruined and devalued everything and made everything boring and reduced music to content, etc.
Digging around old high school trinkets and posting videos of my Cure cover band has loosened my self-editorial collar somewhat. Which frees me to tell you that Milli Vanilli were great. They were outstanding performers. They were beautiful, innately sensual young men. Their songs were all, admittedly, exactly the same, but no more than many of the early Beatles and Elvis singles.
When their gimmick cracked, nobody I knew was offended, shocked, or felt betrayed. I can’t imagine Kurt Loder gave a shit. People had been goofing on Milli Vanilli from the moment they debuted. Even if they had sung on the records, they were still one of the most perfectly-packaged, massively-promoted pop acts of all time. They would have flamed out as a dated, image-heavy teenybopper fad, like Color Me Badd and Gerardo.
If people are wittingly (or unwittingly) working to preserve this kind of classical music industry—with its predictable fad cycles—due to their investment in said construct, can we, all of us who have rejected or are by-now amused by this pattern, start calling it out? There’s no “release cycle” anymore, there’s no value to a release date: it’s when and whether people respond to your material, that’s it. Your album doesn’t exist unless we all decide its existence is worthwhile, e.g. that it’s worth our investment—and my brain aches to put it in these terms but what we’re investing is time.
Not a new idea, but to put it explicitly we’re trying to find trusted sources to help us make the most of our daily information intake, and so information has an experiential premium. Advertising cannot penetrate our selective/elective use of time, it can only accompany our journey, as it does on the subway. This is why artists famous as Beyonce and Mariah Carey are now releasing music extemporaneously.
It’s not a Network, it’s a Silo
Anyone who writes for a publication feels some sense of self-identification with the brand, and through the various real-world and virtual interactions you have with your compatriots, you feel a separation from the world you write at (key here: you cannot write “for” anyone but yourself, please see Neil Kulkarni’s excellent rant on boilerplate industrial music criticism, highlighting pallid NME blurbs imbued with the emotional sweep of an astrological forecast). The inescapable separatism that goes on here, with good writers and even young hacks who puke makeweight content and go on gushing, ridiculous interview assignments, is extremely problematic. You live in a value bubble. You inherently “respect” the views of your peers, whether out of professional duty or personal affinity, but that transaction is colored by your shared status as critics, and as partners in a brand. It’s a kind of cultural cabin fever, and your perception of and response to the culture around you is irretrievably altered.
Pop music can be interpreted absolutely and relativistically, but since relativism both allows for and sidesteps absolutist thinking, it’s a bottomless editorial fount. You’ll find that most people who get paid to have ideas (whether they write them down or not) adopt a relativistic outlook for this reason. Relativism excuses them from developing a committed, personal stake in their given arena, which I think is shameful.
This sounds sort of Everett Truth-y, but we’re all victims if the thing we’re talking about—or using as a water wheel to talk about other things—isn’t what it used to be. The music industry may not be, but you can’t reduce the music world in 2012 to some State of Affairs With the Following Effects on Culture because music has always been more than music. It’s always been a movable feast, of tradition, art, attitude and emotion. You put your Venn intersects together, you know, you want this much attitude, art and tradition, you listen to Bowie. You want this much emotion and tradition, you listen to R & B, whatever.
From the critical vantage, music’s purpose is not that complicated. But when the music is presented inside the review? When you’re reading the first paragraph and seeing some factorial value ascribed to this music as you hear it?
In the past, the review is protecting you or helping the artist. Beware this record: it sucks. Or, you suck if you don’t own this record, or this record will fill the hole in your life. That reviewer, from that world, knows his or her brief. The artist knows, the label knows, and the fans know. You will or won’t buy that record, and the magazine will or will not have influenced you there. Actual Good Music is now an open, infinite and evolving referendum. “New” music is increasingly a response to that dialog, and so more about dialog than music. And when you’re getting that record as part of a meta-textual review—when the review for all intents is the release of the album—on a website funded by advertising from a multinational, publicly-traded clothing or automobile corporation, that is a fucking Lutheran scenario.
The architecture here, the Album, the Artist, the Magazine, the Review, the Critic, the Reader…we keep propping this up and the magazines keep interfacing with artists along classical lines and yet the records don’t take off. The old patterns of promotion no longer engender traction.
Why? Because the only real traction is driven by the audience, by their referendum, and their excitement. You can’t lead them anymore because the Internet is a map, and they can find their own way. In this way, you appear presumptuous in suggesting they need help.
