Pynchon, Music Criticism, and New Year's Resolutions

I've been thinking lately I'd like to write longer critical pieces on my blog. After all, my background is in writing academic papers and not journalistic reviews. I've been hesitant because the tendency in the blogosphere is towards news flashes and nuggets, consumption but not digestion, to borrow a food metaphor from Chicago Reader blogger Miles Raymer.

Along those same lines, Raymer recently wrote this post that asks "what if patience was the new hotness?" The short attention span of bloggers and (presumably) their audience is especially tangible in the indie music blogosphere, where the lowest blogs on the totem pole simply post links to cool music videos and MP3s and even the better blogs must, to meet market demand, introduce their audience to new music more than they critically consider older music.

This is not just a complaint of the month, either -- a Pitchfork column from November posed some of the same questions. Chris Dahlen writes here:

We're not focused on judgment, [sic] so much as discovery. Music today has splintered into niches, and the cadre of full-time tastemakers can't even begin to keep up. As much as we can't stand reading mp3 bloggers, we're counting on them to sift through piles of online music to help us find something spectacular, or at least distracting...

I began to mull this over after my last post about Tori Amos, wondering if today's artists of the MySpace Age will turn out to have the longevity or widespread influence of earlier artists. Do blogging music critics, both professional and amateur, actually find something spectacular as they sift through the thousands of new artists available to them online -- or are they merely finding the latest distraction?

And can I tell you how unnerving it is to be one of the musicians being "sifted"? ;)

I hope there is an audience for deeper music criticism in the blogosphere. I personally don't feel as connected to some of today's hot new artists as I did earlier in my life, and I credit some of that to the dynamism of media buzz. When the Killers and the Scissor Sisters released their debut albums, they each spent a solid two weeks in my regular iPod rotation, then they waned a bit, then were replaced with new musical crushes. This year both bands released their sophomore albums -- and to favorable reviews -- but I still haven't gotten around to picking them up because I don't have a strong, time-tested, personally-identifable, quotable, my-god-those-lyrics-are-so-me-I'm-going-to-write-them-in-my-Trapper-Keeper connection to them. They were fun to hang out with, but they're not my best friends.

Raymer wraps up his comments envisioning a blogosphere where "would-be Pitchfork writers crank out Pynchon-length exegeses." And as a fan of Pynchon's convoluted, fast-paced, paranoiac voice, I'm intrigued by the prospect and potential of this style of music journalism: Hunter S. Thompson returns to Rolling Stone! Rolling Stone returns to actual music journalism!

Ironically, Boston Globe music critic Matthew Shaer wrote this column in Slate last month essentially asking Pitchfork writers to write less. Well, OK, to edit more. But more to the point, one would hope that a deeper future for music criticism would look less a string of adjectives sprinting towards a rating or approval, and more like Pynchon -- wordy, maybe confusing, maybe vulgar, but desperately committed to the search for meaning and significance within the Text (even if that search is completely artificial).

So this is my New Year's Resolution. (It's early.) I'd like to try more of this type of criticism on this blog and see what happens. I'll still try to write shorter posts, too, but I think it's important to give this a try because, at the very least, it's how I want my own music to be treated -- that is, with actual thought and examination. (Not that I'm at the point where I can be picky. :) )

On a final note, since several of you are reading or blogging in topics outside of music, I'm curious to hear if there are analogies to this in other blogospheres (e.g. politics). Give me your thoughts, and be as wordy as you want.

Never Was One for a Prissy Girl

It's not rocket science to decipher from my own songwriting that I'm a huge Tori Amos fan. The recent release of a 5-CD box set has sparked a number of retrospective reviews of her work, which I've found validating in an "I told you so" kind of way. Amos' last few albums haven't been musically strong, let alone as genre-busting and innovative as her earlier work, which has left me open for some gentle ribbing from people whose musical tastes I would otherwise listen to. (You know who you are.) But during her heyday, those of us who were hardcore Tori fans felt no need to justify our obsession, and the reviews I've been reading of the box set have been a glad reminder that her earlier work was solid and influential.

Paste Magazine had a review of the box set in its last issue (sorry, not available online) that started by charting the geneology of Amos' descendents, from the most immediate -- Alanis Morisette and Fiona Apple -- to the even more unlikely and distant cousins like Avril Lavigne. (Sorry anti-popsters, you can't shrug her off so easily.) I don't how to feel about the idea that at some Tori Amos concert in the 90s Avril Lavigne was maybe a seat or two down from me, but I enjoy thinking that the Amos Fellowship is inclusive enough to accommodate that idea.

Along those lines, this excellent Pop Matters article expands on that idea. The author is an unabashed (ex-)Tori fanatic (who, by the way, isn't afraid of also being critical of her recent work), and as such, she comments on the fan community:

In the age of hyperconsumerism, we don't have time to form relationships with our artists. We form relationships with our iPods and playlists, instead. The climate that made the cult around Tori Amos possible may now be obsolete. What we have instead is an endless stream of flashes in the pan and hordes of music aficionados whose tastes are as fickle as they are limitless.

And indeed, it's rare for fan culture to grow such deep roots today. I wouldn't chalk it up to hyperconsumerism. And I wonder if MySpace plays a role in it - on the ease of creating a "network" of fans who are casual or indifferent to the music or artist - but I rag on the 'Space enough. (And I just did rag on it, just there, didn't I? I really can't help it.) Tori fans coordinated themselves solely through email and web pages that were mostly hand-coded. ( I know! Can you believe it? And they didn't have cell phones!)

I'll be interested to see, in five or ten years, if Amos' influence is still cited in reviews of new music, or if anyone since her will have taken on such an influential role in emerging artists.