Philip - keep up the good work! I enjoyed your essay in Clicks&Cuts2 very
much (the other two I couldn't make head nor tail of...) and the Microhouse
article in The Wire was an excellent introduction to a new microgenre (I'd
love to know more about the guy with the beard, the bass guitar and the
sausage dog - he sort of stood out relative to the carhartt-wearing Jelinek
and the shaven-headed Brinkman!)
Colin.
_____________________________
... and life is a song sung low and cool to rouse the gentle spirit
Jeff Noon
quoted 50 lines From: Philip Sherburne <psherburne@jeevessolutions.com>> From: Philip Sherburne <psherburne@jeevessolutions.com>
> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 10:50:11 -0700
> To: "'idm@hyperreal.org'" <idm@hyperreal.org>
> Cc: "'apiontek@yahoo.com'" <apiontek@yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [idm] reviewing the reviewers
>
>
>> 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
>
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