quoted 4 lines Regardless of all that, in an age where I can at least>Regardless of all that, in an age where I can at least
>try to sample the music before I buy it (MP3s, legit
>RealAudio, whatever), reviewers are just not that
>important to me at all. Sorry.
See, this kind of attitude -- and I'm not coming after you, Adam --
indicates a real problem with the market orientation of "the music industry"
and listeners' relationship with it. Maybe it's just my background in
academia (dropped out of grad school, which makes me a failed academic,
rather than failed rock star or novelist!), but I believe that good music
criticism should be precisely that, a critical analysis that attempts to say
something about what the music *does*, not just who it sounds like and
whether or not it's worth buying. Now, obviously, that's a lot easier to
accomplish when you've got 500+ words and a publication that's open to that
philosophy, as opposed to a 75 word blurb. But I think that our culture
suffers in general from this problem -- we've given up making meaning on our
own, and have become simply consumers. Listen to most people talk about the
movies they've seen -- reaction almost invariably comes down to "I liked it"
or "I didn't like it," not, "That was interesting because A, B, and C, and
while I felt that D was a bit of a hackneyed point and the director could
have handled E in a more original way..." etc.
Matthew Herbert has described his last album as being about the "failed
relationships" that define our culture -- he typically discusses the
relationship between consumers and corporations, or between citizens &
people in power. But I'm beginning to see the way that the relationship
between a *consumer* of a cultural product (record, movie, etc.) and its
producer (whether artist or record company) is a failed relationship in the
same way. Because the product fails to become the catalyst for engagement or
further creativity; it's just another product.
Cheers (or not)
Philip