Gossip is the new pornography

Via Idolator, Pheonix New Times music editor Martin Cizmar:

The [Pazz & Jop] poll was founded by former Voice music editor Robert Christgau, who is the worst music critic ever, in my humble opinion. I almost didn’t want to vote just to avoid furthering, in any way, his legacy of shitty writing.

Robert Christgau in Slate at the end of 2008:

When I was doing Pazz & Jop, more than 1,500 albums a year made some crappy critic’s top 10 or other. I dip into something like 2,500 albums a year, and the 300-plus I write about pass through my earholes in their entirety three, five, 10 times—good or recalcitrant ones even more.

Cizmar on his work ethicfavorite records of 2008:

Albums I didn’t even listen to:

Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs:The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Coldplay, Viva la Vida
John Mellencamp, Life, Death, Love and Freedom
Foals, Antidotes
Portishead, Third
Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark

For me, 2008 was a disappointing year overall for music. Not because I was disappointed with the output – compiling this end of year mix CD was pretty easy and there were another 10 good songs I left off but shouldn’t have. No, it was disappointing because so many bands I really like had decided to split up. Locally, The Cops, The Young Sportsmen, The Trucks and Ms. Led all played or will play their final shows in 2008 or early 2009. Nationally, the biggest voids left between the spaces my earbuds occupy were by The Long Blondes and Be Your Own Pet (the latter produced my favorite album of the year).

Maybe there was, as The Stranger’s Dave Segal put it, a “Vampire Foxes on the Radio(head) hivemindgroupthink”. I was never taken by Fleet Foxes – although tried my hardest to not take part in a backlash or denigrate the people that appreciated the folk-y, multi-part harmonies.

There were some interesting storylines that critics advanced throughout the year, with varying degrees of success. Rolling Stone tried to argue that the long-time-in-the-making Guns n’ Roses album Chinese Democracy was actually quite good but that meme never took hold. Metacritic’s composite of critics’ scores ranked it slightly better than James Taylor’s collection of recordings of other people’s songs and the same as the latest All-American Rejects record. Yet, I my most pleasant surprise was a record from a band I remember from my childhood whose time in between albums consumed my entire teenage years and all but a few months of my twenties. That was not GnR but The B-52s, who either found a fountain of youth during that time or found a way to actually stop aging.

The critic Ann Powers of the Los Angeles Times wrote an essay arguing that critics were turning towards poptimism and away from rockism earlier in the year and it probably is. Part of that is due to the disintegration of newspapers and the dearth of paying jobs for critics and writers; if your readership and editors are demanding that you cover TI or “American Idol” then Deerhunter or Fuck Buttons are going to have to be pushed out. Maybe the most telling example of the year where the line between mainstream and “indie” or “alternative” was blurred to me was when The Stranger opened up a shitstorm by offering free tickets to an upcoming Britney Spears concert. I sided with the alt-weekly rag as I support the idea of giving Britney tickets away in general and to me in particular.

To me, though, being a poptimist means finding joy both in the mainstream song that is sung by passengers on busses out of key and comes on the radio every few minutes and in the well-written song played in a club to a room of twelve people. Rock and roll remains to me what the great critic Robert Christgau called “my favorite waste of time”. And maybe that is what it is. I don’t know if I have any clout or credibility (although most publicists return my e-mails and I did have a vote in the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop survey this year) but that isn’t what makes this worthwhile. The most unexpected surprise for me was being asked to cover of Montreal’s tour stop in Seattle at the last minute and being blown away by the spectacle of the evening. I have also gotten several e-mails from small, local bands thanking me for writing just one sentence or paragraph about their band – there isn’t one or the other that is preferable.

There may no longer be a song or album that captivates an entire collective body (although in 2008 Britney, Coldplay and Lil Wayne gave it their best shot). For every person who says they like something, there is invariably going to be fifteen people to say that sucks or is lame. It may seem amplified in the blogosphere but good music is like what former Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart said obscenity, that he may not be able to define it but knows it when he sees it.

Taste is, of course, subjective. Anyone who says what they like is good and what you like is bad is full of shit. My favorite musical moments are not trying to “break” a hot new band before they are eaten up by the hype machine but when someone says to me “I actually really like that song” and the only possible response is “so do I.”

Top songs of 2008 mix:

1. I Know UR Girlfriend Hates Me - Annie

2. The Kelly Affair - Be Your Own Pet

3. Womanizer - Britney Spears

4. Transformer - Marnie Stern

5. Oxford Comma - Vampire Weekend

6. A Milli - Lil Wayne

7. Alice Practice - Crystal Castles

8. LES Artistes - Santogold

9. Fascination - Alphabeat

10. That’s Not My Name - The Ting Tings

11. The Fear - Lily Allen

12. Mercy - Duffy

13. Funplex - The B-52s

14. Jockin’ Jay-Z - Jay-Z

15. 4 AM is the New Midnight - The Marches

16. I’m Good, I’m Gone - Lykke Li

17. You and I - Ingrid Michaelson

18. My Year in Lists - Los Campesinos!

19. Wild Eyes - Vivian Girls

20. Starlett Johansson - The Teenagers

21. Gilt Complex - Sons & Daughters

22. Cape Fear - The Rosebuds

23. Oh My God - Ida Maria

24. Aly, Walk With Me - The Raveonettes

From Jody Rosen in Slate:

I ended our conversation last year by wondering aloud about the contents of Barack Obama’s iPod. We now know that our first black president is also our first rock critic president, with a canonical playlist—Innervisions, Blood on the Tracks, “Dirt off Your Shoulder“—that places him squarely in the mainstream of the Pazz & Jop poll votership.

In one case yes, said Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett. Writing on her PI blog (since taken down but Google cached here) about her art critic colleage at the Seattle Times, Sheila Farr, Hackett wrote (with the bitchy title “Seattle Times art critic signs off. When was she on?”):

After the Seattle Times eliminated her job, art critic Sheila Farr declined to stick around as an arts reporter. Her self-congradulatory sign off ran in the Times on Sunday, here.

Suffice it to say she’s the opposite of James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. What did she accomplish? By doing so little, she tanked her job. The decline of newspapers can’t be news to anybody who works at one. She performed as if we were in the old days, when jobs were a given. She turned her position into fat, and the Seattle Times is on a diet.

Acccording to her, she wasn’t a good fit for a newspaper anyway. (Thanks for taking the job away from somebody who would have been.)

Wrote Farr:

When I began writing about art 20 years ago, I never aimed to become a staff writer at a daily paper. The hit-and-run pace of newspapers is not my default mode, being naturally more inclined to research, contemplation and working my way to the core of things.

The core of things? Where is the review of hers that gets to the core of things? I want to be gracious here but can’t. She failed her newspaper, the arts community and readers. Now there’s an official hole where her unofficial hole used to be.

From TechFlash via Slog.