So, these musicblogs--they're pretty dead, huh?

Seems that way to me, anyway. Can't remember the last time we had a good old-fashioned cross-referemced debate. Maybe the Ying Yang Twins, and definitely MIA, but it seemed like, aside from certain key points, the nexus of the discussion in both cases was ILM, or at least so I gather from reading, er, ILM. (Whose self-congratulatory nature is just endlessly endearing, by the way.) But still, that's two minimally vital discussions--the MIA one was great, but the YYT thing seemed ridiculous from the start--in 4 months, and I can't even remember what we had before that. Sure, the Dissensus folks still occasionally bat an idea around amongst themselves on their blogs, but even there, most of the discussion seems to take place on their chose message board. This doesn't even approach the rapid pace and intensity of two or three years ago.

Normally I would chalk this feeling up to my own inability to keep up a good musicblog. Lately, though, I've had lots of things to say, and have even been saying some of them. But it increasingly feels like what I'm doing is played out, done, over--not necessarily from my perspective, but in the attitude I get from everyone else, to say nothing of what I'm reading on other blogs, i.e., almost nothing, at least not about music, at least not in the vital, engaged voices I used to hear. I mean, check out the NYLPM sidebar--how many of those blogs came into being in the last 6 months? Remember when there was a new one every few days that seemed worthy of a link?

Let's just examine what's up with the old guard these days. Marcello stopped a month ago. NYLPM is still enjoyable to read, but Tom seems to barely post anymore. Jess is done, Skykicking is done, Woebot is done. K-Punk seems to mainly talk about anything but music. Simon cut down on posting and put a year or two of his life into writing a book about a 20-years-dead rock genre. Others have convereted to being either straight-up MP3blogs or just dispensers of short posts about songs. (Sasha's still working the short thing, but he always was, and his outside writing was far more central than than the blog itself.) There are certainly exceptions, some of which I don't read as much as I should--Gutterbreakz, Geeta, pop (all love), the Rambler, LPTJ, Le Fou, a billion others I'm doubtless forgetting. But still.

There are two primary reasons for this decline, aside from various personal reasons with the participants and/or the arguably waning vitality of the world of music itself.

One is MP3blogs. I don't think they necessarily set out to kill the old-style musicblog (although comments from certain folks have led me to think they're not entirely displeased with the situation), but the fact is, doing short write-ups accompanied by a song is both easier (if you don't care overmuch about quality) and, let's be honest, more fun to read 90% of the time. This isn't even getting into the philosophical concerns of them being better tools for our particular purpose, since simply letting someone hear what you're writing about is very powerful, but they do seem to encourage people entering the game to go that route, both because it's easier and because you get more traffic this way. That, in turn, seems to have diluted the vitality of MP3blogs themselves, because almost everyone converges around the same few artists week-to-week. Meanwhile, even the non-MP3-based blogs that have the greatest visibility follow much the same form of daily updates and short blurbs.

The other is the message boards. I quite deliberately stayed away from ILM for a while, but now that I've been sucked in, it, along with Dissensus, seems to be absolute death for blogs, especially once they reached a certain critical mass of participants. One of the great motivators for blogging rather than just writing like normal was always that you can get feedback and responses to what you post--absolute catnip for those of us used to an audience that more closely resembled a void--but the audience for the boards is bigger than almost any individual blog, and that plus the expressly discursive envirionment is much more encouraging of actually getting responses, so if that's what you're after, why not go to a board? Questions, links, and theories I would have in the past expected to see posted on blogs are now almost inevitably funneled to ILM, where they're batted around but it's hard to say that definitive statements really ever arise. People on the boards periodically debate about the vitality and importance of the boards themselves, but the fact remains that they are discussion forums, and no matter how much we might want to change Western hierarchies of importance and legitimacy etc. etc., the only dialogues in libraries are Platonic ones, sourced at some point to a single mind (or two or three), and there's a whole book's worth of good reasons for that.

I don't mean to complain about either of these reasons in and of themselves--hey, I spend most of my leisure time at work perusing message boards and short-form blogs--but I have always loved the particular blog form that was en vogue back in '01-'03. I love music, and I'm even a musician, but I'm also a writer and a reader, and at the end of the day I want to read about music almost as much as I want to listen to it, and MP3blogs and ILM, for all their good parts, aren't going to satisfy that jones in the way a substantial blog post will.

It may seem kind of absurd to talk about blogs as centers of reasoned discourse, but compared to those other two forums, they undeniably are. MP3blogs are concerned with desciption and persuasion, rarely going on for more than a paragraph or two, and while I've seen some great writing there, and even some great interprative readings, it's a lot fewer and farther between than on old-style musicblogs. And while you will ocassionally see a longer post on ILM, there's a strong impetus to get things out as quickly as possibly and without opening yourself up to insults; even the best longer message board post would probably be better off on a blog, where you wouldn't have to filter out all the conversational white noise, and where you wouldn't be expected to compose a reply as soon as you read it. A blog where there's no daily posting expectation and no particular word limit (whether self-imposed or not) encourages thoughtful writing, and allows you to develop your ideas (ideas!) in a way that the rapid-fire environments common today don't.

If this sounds like an elegy, maybe it is. I loved being able to read people writing at length about something they were passionate about, something I was passionate about too. I loved the musicblogs as a counterforum to the paid gigs that couldn't and still don't accomodate that kind of sprawl and particularity. And I loved the words, the writing itself, to say nothing of the ideas that were put forth. But maybe by a year or two in blogs had already attracted everyone who might be able to make use of such an opportunity, and maybe by a year or two after that they'd said all they had to say about the admittedly limited subject of music, or just, you know, gotten older. Maybe all those people have moved on to paying gigs, and don't have the leftover energy for blogging that they did back when it was merely a hobby. Or maybe Pitchfork just got less stridently indie; lord knows that served as an impetus for a number of musicblogs!

Whatever it is, I'm not posting this hoping for a resurgance--I'm just pointing out what seems to be a reality, and explaining why I think it's a negative. But I certainly wouldn't mind a fresh burst of energy, a new crop of writers, not just talkers.

Don't take this the wrong way--this isn't one of those "Well, I'm done, nice knowing you" posts that are so common in the blog world. As many people have pointed out, I always go on too long, and clap clap blog as a whole won't buck that trend. There's still lots of stuff I want to talk about, and there ain't no editor here that I can see, so I will be around for a while.

Of course, if someone wanted to give me a book contract, I wouldn't say no. Books are even longer, mmm...
posted by Mike B. at 12:14 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Flagpole reviews by me. The first is of the Farfisa-pop side project for the one of the Casper and the Cookies guys, and is servicable, (ADDENDUM: my review is servicable, I mean--the album itself is good!) but then comes Rob Thomas, and oh man, someone needs to spread the word about that album! Fucking hardcore! Shit.

Also, Hillary on a band apparently called The Orchid Tree.

posted by Mike B. at 11:12 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

I'm actually fairly happy with my comments on this week's Stylus UK Singles Jukebox, so I will go ahead and point you there in der realen timen. Me and Joe often seem to disagree on things we should agree on, but thankfully we're together on the Bobby Valentino, which is a wonderful thing to have come on the radio, and deserves much higher than a 5.86.

In other news: I am still apparently the only person who really dislikes the Juan MacLean, I am perhaps overly harsh with MIA, and I more or less admit I have no idea what "Come Up And See Me" is. Why didn't someone tell me it's an old song?! Oh, wait, you did? Damnit.

posted by Mike B. at 11:49 AM 0 comments

Well, perhaps I spoke too soon about Mr. Eggers' response.

The part that stuck in my craw in particular as I mulled yesterday was this bit:

It was our hope at McSweeney's, and continues to be our goal with The Believer, that the literary world could be one of community, of mutual support, of spirited but nonviolent discourse—all in the interest of building and maintaining a literate society. It's what we teach at 826 Valencia, too: that books are good, that reading is good, that everyone can and should write in some capacity, and that anyone pissing in the very small and fragile ecosystem that is the literary world is mucking it up for everyone—and sending a very poor message to the next generation.

Now, Eggers claims that this is the woo he's been pitching all along. But in my recollection--and this is as someone who's been out of the McSwyns loop for a year or so--it's never been put quite this explicitly, even granting that this was at the core of his arguments all along. And put this way, it annoys the hell out of me. You can see the obvious parallels between what I was bitching about yesterday in the old 'hood and the idea of "everyone supports everyone" that's being put forth here. (I imagine the more virulent anti-Eggersites would point out that the widespread resentment of McSweeney's stems almost solely from the fact that the Eggers cadre seems to only "support" a fairly small group of people, but that seems unfair; there's only so much they can do, and Eggers is always quick to point out the smallness of their staff.) The particular brand of support that seems to emerge in such situations always seems intensely self-interested, with the patina of communitiy laid on top, which as far as I can tell has always just made things harder, and in the end is a sort of nervous horse-hitching, a micobandwagon you calculatedly jump. This is a bit cynical, I realize, but especially at a young age, none of the writers I know are really capable of being supportive in the way Eggers is proposing, and that's why the competitive model has held for so long. I've been in enough goddamn workshops to know that "being supportive" is just the watchword we slide through clenched teeth. And, indeed, this may be the best response to the imagined anti-Eggers criticism above: Eggers believes in being supportive of stuff that isn't crap. I don't know if this is true or not--maybe he just doesn't want to say it out loud, which is certainly understandable--but that I could get behind.

What it's harder to get behind is the last bit. I've long argued that if an art is so fragile that it needs to be protected in this way, shielded behind some sort of protective mother-figure from the mean bullies of the critical schoolyards, then maybe it's time we put it out of its misery. If something we love so much has withered away to the point where it can't withstand a few jokes at its expense, it's better for all concerned that we choose the time and place of its demise, rather than letting it be pricked to death. But this seems an awfully pessimistic view of literature, and it seems equally dangerous to send a message "to the next generation" that the genre is near-death. Given this view, why would anyone want to get involved with writing?

I was a big fan of the critical ideas put forth by Eggers, Lethem, Julavits, et al, because they were much more nuanced than this. And, sure, maybe it's unfair to expect Eggers to convey these subtleties in the course of a paragraph in something called "a small correction." But then why include it at all?

One of the first things I posted to this blog was actually a (supportive) response to that Julavits essay in the first issue of The Believer. I just went back and reread it, and was shocked to find that it wasn't anywhere near as embarassing as I assumed it would be. So I'm going to point you to that, although I would request that you just begin at the paragraph beginning "First off..." This, anyway, was what I took away from the essay, even though it seems to have been a fair ways off what Julavits (who is not Eggers, etc. etc., but you know) was thinking.

Anyway, all that said, Mr. Wolk has an article on the Fall at the Believer's site, so go read that if you don't want to deal with more of my yammerings.

posted by Mike B. at 11:06 AM 0 comments

Monday, June 20, 2005

In brighter news: Dave Eggers' corrections have become much more light-hearted. "The quote helps put some juice into his piece, but Neal knows I didn't say it. 'New age of literary celebrity'? Oh man. I don't even know what that means." Ha!

posted by Mike B. at 5:10 PM 0 comments

I opened the special "New Brooklyn" section of the Times on Sunday to find: this.

And then I read it. And then I snarled and threw it away.

For those unfamiliar, let me explain: this is my former neighborhood. And by "former neighborhood," I mean I lived in one of the buildings described in the article. The stretch pictured at the head of the story was directly across the street from me, and the "Brooklyn's Natural" at the far right was where I often shopped.

This was the first place I lived in New York, and I have since, fairly recently, moved out.

And so I have a few responses:

1) "I guess we're pioneers, but we're not homesteaders, you know?" Pioneers? Cracker please. When I moved in it was July 2001 and there were only three other occupied apartments in the building. The first floor hadn't even been converted yet--we went down and took a desk and some envelopes and a sweater or two and a fog machine. There were no stores in the immediate vicinity; the only nearby bodega, two blocks down from the Morgan stop, closed at 8. Life Cafe opened a year after I got there, when Kristie was moving in. Cab drivers didn't even seem to know the area existed. And this is to say nothing of the people who'd been living there for years and years and years. The Catch-22 analogy is invalid, but if you want to push it, you're as much oil speculators as the brokers are. People like you chased my ass out.

2) Cheap? Are you serious? When I moved in it was already moderately expensive, but when I moved out those damn 800 square foot lofts were going for $2000 a month. Unfurnished! Some without walls! In what universe is this cheap? Oh, right: the universe of Rutgers dropouts in a band in Brooklyn. Which brings us to:

3) "It's dirty, it's cheap, and we can play music all night." Few quotes have brought quite such a chill to my heart. The dirty part is technically neutral, the cheap we've dealt with. As for the last bit? Well. What conditions have to exist in a building for you to be able to play music all night? Basically, there can't be anyone around who really needs to sleep at normal hours. In other words, no one living there can have a job. (Or children, but.) The problem is, dude, some of us did have jobs, and some of us did need to sleep. But y'all were playing music all night. And not good music. Oh no, not good music. What kind of music would you expect from a band with the word "Plastic" in its name, and made up of Rutgers drop-outs, one of whom describes the neighborhood as "like the new Haight-Ashbury"? That's right: hippie music. Motherfucking hippie music. Twenty-four fucking hours a fucking day.

Look, no band needs to practice "all night." OK, maybe La Monte Young, but if I lived next door to La Monte Young, I would have killed myself long ago. (Nice to listen to and all, but maybe not something you want to hear muffled and constantly, whether you want to or not.) I'm certainly sympathetic to the desire to play music at odd hours, and indeed, the ability to make noise was attractive to me. But make music by yourself, man. Do you really need to play with your band all the goddamn time? Let me answer for you. No you do not. If you do, you need a better band, or to stop playing music and get a goddamned job.

Speaking of which:

4) "Anybody you meet has got something going on." And that something is inevitably stupid. The thing no one wants to tell you about bohemia is that for ever legendary community that produced all this great art, there are 99 other scenes that resulted in nothing but horrendously narcississtic pseudo-art and a shared set of venereal diseases. Everyone seemed to have their thing "going on" because they didn't have to deal with being at a job for 10 hours a day--they had some mysterious outside means of support. And they all had to be supportive of each other no matter the merits of the project at issue.

So, in sum: no one discovers anything new in New York, they just move there based on a complex set of values (proximity to Manhattan/subway lines, amount of space, sociability of neighborhood denizens, demographic makeup of the building, etc.) and you should not be proud of where you're living unless you've done some nice things with your apartment. Also, you should probably get a job, it would either make your art better or convince you that it sucks. And both are fine with me. And, finally, the neighborhood merited an article like this maybe two years ago, and has since spread even farther. That the Times is behind the curve is unsurprising; that they were able to find a chode of this magnitude (the reportedly quite nice Mr. Travis Harrison, who seems to be having fun with the whole thing, aside) to say this crap is just mind-boggling.

posted by Mike B. at 2:18 PM 0 comments