Weingarten on music and criticism in the internet-age
Christopher Weingarten used to play drums in that noisy great band Parts and Labor, whose new-ish record Receivers is skronky-lovely Jesus and Mary Chain static-pop. It is seriously a brilliant record, in part comprised and built from samples that their listeners and friends and fans sent them. Cool, right?
Nowhere’s Nigh by Parts and Labor
Anyway, Weingarten left the band to pursue his writing career and now freelances for Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Idolator, etc. And he’s pretty dang smart and funny. Yesterday he spoke at the 140 Character Conference, about how music blogs, twitter, etc have in part undermined actual criticism; how retweets, blogrolling, trackbacks, and crowdsourcing creates a situation in which the most palatable music gets the most attention.
I don’t know if I entirely agree with all his points, but Weingarten raises interesting ideas that resonate a lot with conversations Casey and I had when Rock Proper was in infancy. We had talked a lot about how the absolute flood of music and music writing on the net is actually making it harder to find good new music. We reminisced about discovering bands in fanzines, about listening past bedtime to the CBC’s Brave New Waves, and about the days when you would buy every single record released by a small label ‘cos you were basically guaranteed its quality. And using new technology as a platform, we’re trying to follow the ethic of those labels we loved as teenagers…
Anyway, some quotes from Weingarten:
“It’s easy to learn about stuff that is important to me; I want to learn about stuff that isn’t important to me, I want to be exposed to things! Crowdsourcing killed punk rock, crowdsourcing kills art… Crowds have terrible taste. When people start talking about indie rock on the internet, suddenly all this music rises to the middle! It’s not the music that’s the best, it’s the music that the most people can stand!”
And the full talk, (worth its 10 minutes):
