Pretty Goes with Pretty

Who's Hyping?

Last week's posts (part I, part II) seemed to provoke a range of responses, both here and elsewhere (Fluxtumblr, Idolator), all of which indicate to me that there are more than one thread tangled up in this conversation about scenes. Depending on your perspective, you might have a completely different point of entry for the topic at hand. (For instance, as I mentioned in the comments last week, I used to run a club not too unlike the Smell about eight years ago, hence my affection for local scenes.) Over the next couple posts, I thought I'd break some of the responses down to their crux, then see which paths might be worth traveling a further down. As I'm just scratching the surface, your comments (here or at your own blogs) are welcome as ever.

1. The actual quality of No Age, or the hype vs. the backlash. Pitchfork gave them a 9.2, Matthew thinks they're not that good. Probably you all have your opinions too. As I said before I've barely even heard No Age so I really don't have a horse in this race. In fact I prefer to not really have an opinion on No Age. Reading from a critical distance the various posts about the band just throws into relief the ongoing cycle of "genuine taste" vs. blog hype and backlash. When you like a band--Destroyer, Vampire Weekend, whatever--the online chatter about their unworthiness always comes off as "predictably dreary backlash"; as if all those bloggers out there hatin' on your favorites obviously aren't listening without prejudice. Of course, when you find that you hate a band getting such love--maybe TV on the Radio or Arcade Fire--surely you're baffled by all the blind idiot sheep on the web. It's the equivalent of hating slow pedestrians when you're driving and hating impatient drivers when you're walking, never realizing that you yourself are both.

2. By overpraising Nouns, critics run the risk of not properly positioning themselves to gauge their future trajectory. When I quoted Fluxblog last week, I apparently missed Matthew's real point, which he elaborated on at his other other blog, Fluxtumblr: "The problem isn’t people getting too big too fast per se, it’s about artists getting praised and shot through the roof before they even reach a creative adolescence." He elaborates in the comments to his post:

Well, I think purely in the context of Pitchfork, which is really at the center of this whole thing anyway, it's just a terrible idea to give a record like Nouns a score that breaks through the 9 barrier so early in their career because it's like, no matter what they do, you're going to be inclined to give a lower score the next time around because c'mon, how much higher can you get without looking nuts? Something that expressed enthusiasm and approval for the record -- which is cool, it's a nice enough album -- but gave them some room to move up even in terms of your institution's grading system, would've been much more sensible.

Though I find this logic flawed--Marc Hogan's comments in Matthew's post mirror my own reaction--I do find the topic more interesting, and less picked-over, than the old hype-vs.-backlash line. It's nearly the same argument, but it explicitly puts the ball in the court of critics. Matthew uses Pitchfork but the same question could be put to Dusted or the critics at the New York Times--i.e., any outlet that is concerned with engaging an album critically. Critics often base their opinion on only a few listens; deadlines sometimes force a critic to go with his or her first impression. Even here at pgwp, where there are no deadlines, I've written reviews of albums that, in retrospect, overpraised or underpraised due to the fact that I couldn't wait to find out whether the record would truly make itself at home in my head. So, how do critics navigate that scenario? Will Amanda Petrusich regret her 9.2 rating (or, for that matter, will Matthew come around on Nouns) in a few months? How should--how can-- reviewers accurately adjust their first impressions?

Later (maybe tomorrow), the rest of the threads: art vs. commerce and community vs. iconoclasm.

This Ain't a Scene, It's a Comments Box Part II: Blood Sweat and Uploads

[Earlier, Part I]

Despite all I've said so far, something has obviously changed. I’d have to be an idiot to think the internet hasn’t had some influence on the way bands come up, and perhaps on the identities and sounds coming from different scenes. “Lord knows I'm no internet utopian,” Barthel writes, “but it seems strange to deny that there are real communities online. They may not be able to give each other haircuts or provide venues for bands to play, but none of that is necessary for vital art to happen.” Vital art, no. How about vital audience?

On the surface, the internet era seems like it should be tailor-made for bedroom stars—those kids who don’t take part in any local scene, simply uploading their work to the global audience that might find their MySpace page. That's the way the net gets idealized—whether by no-name bands looking for exposure, lonely bloggers looking to flex their influential muscles, or desperate major labels. But is that the reality? Is that really the era we now live in? Last week Ryan Catbird asked whether it was conceivable for small-time acts to follow the "new model" set by Nine Inch Nails and simply give their music away for free:

I still think the more important question is: “What if an artist that hasn’t already built a career on the label system released their work directly, gave it away for free, retained their rights, etc.  Would it matter?”

The answer, sadly, to that one is “no, it doesn’t matter.”  Myriad small unheard-of bands are out there posting their albums for free every day, but there’s still no good way for them to get heard.

For all the chatter about how new technology/Music 2.0/viral marketing etc. has the power to “break” new artists, there are precious few examples of this actually occurring. 

Catbird is right, but one needn't be cynical about the 2.0 scenario either. The fact is the business models for an arena-rocking megastar and a DIY band from Ohio have never been the same, not in the 90s and not today. The degree to which different revenue streams are available—whether through retail sales, touring, or licensing—is tied explicitly to one's audience. That's where a lot of bands, bloggers, and fans get mixed up when it comes to the internet: there is an illusion that the internet somehow holds the key to bypassing all the dues-paying, skipping straight to the career opportunities and adulation.

If your music bypasses Hank in your hometown but reaches Henri in Paree, where exactly does that get you? Aiming for the bright lights of internet stardom without honing your chops at home—and building a tangible, carbon-based following—is a chimera. Which is just to say that bands should log off and rock the old-fashioned way.

For that matter, bloggers should log off too. For those wondering why bloggers don't "break" the new hot shit band, here's a newsflash: the internet is not the ground floor. If you want to break a new band, go see a local show and find a band that's toiling away in your own obscure back yard. Why do bloggers think they need to sort through the desperate pleas for exposure in their email inboxes to find the right bands? Your inbox is not the scene.

Yet, sadly, there seems to be a danger that in fact that is the new scene. Not to put too dour a spin on it—Barthel is right to say that it's wrong to claim internet culture as "inauthentic"—but the national indie scene is beginning to shake down into the kind of singular social hierarchy that would usually define individual community scenes. Look, for instance, at last year's end-of-year lists, almost all of which, across the board, were identical. Maura Johnston, in a comment to her own post at Idolator last week, said this:

If anything a big part of my frustration with indie rock right now comes from the insularity that's bred by the ever-shrinking mass—it's so informed by itself and only itself that it's sometimes speaking a dialect full of really really boring words.

In other words, the variety of subcultures that has made indie rock so invigorating for two decades is currently getting a little vanilla, as the most popular tastemakers, whether based in New York or Chicago or Toronto or wherever, seem to be aligning their viewpoints, even if unintentionally. So if the blog culture is somehow consolidating all the music scenes of the country into one generic über-scene—to the point that it's novel to point out that No Age played shows at a dingy club that holds vegan potlucks—then it's time to start looking outside of that scene. As Barthel puts it,"the best and more enduring American indie bands of the 90s, if they were part of a scene at all, existed on the outskirts of that scene." And the outskirts of this scene is your scene. So log off and go see a show.

Follow-up posts:

• Who's Hyping?

This Ain't a Scene, It's a Comments Box Part I: Reading Brooklyn Vegan Is Not Going to a Show

Last week I pointed to Mike Barthel’s post Punk Grammar in the context of the band No Age. But in fact his post has almost nothing to do with the band and much more to do with the idea of local scenes and how they are perceived—or, more specifically, how relevant they are—now that the internet has rendered the idea of “local scene” quaint.

As Barthel and others (among them the New Yorker and Pitchfork) have made apparent, the phenomenon of No Age is indelibly linked to their origin in the L.A. scene surrounding the Smell. As far as No Age is concerned, I find the whole conversation a shade disingenuous—just as discussion of Vampire Weekend was less about their music than about their class issues and musical colonialism. It’s an excuse for us bloggers to talk about something more interesting than the music itself, yet throw a band’s name around in close proximity, blowing their importance as a musical entity out of proportion. (For the record: I’ve heard two songs by No Age and am ambivalent to them; I have no critique to offer their music.)

The common thread I’m picking up in all this discussion of the Smell seems to be how novel it is that a band can come from a living, breathing scene—as if the pre-MySpace/Hype Blog Era has existed for generations, and the idea of a band bolstered by its local fanbase is something to be nostalgic for; as if unearthing the Smell scene is somehow akin to anthropologists analyzing the tools of an ancient culture. Worse, I find it alarming that people are surprised that such scenes still exist. Amanda Petrusich, in her Pitchfork review of Nouns, writes:

To an outsider, the Smell is idealistic and romantic…. Save Baltimore's Wham City, it's been a while since American music fans have had a similar hometown scene to get riled up about; regional culture has been fractured and marginalized by the internet, and being too focused on anything local—except produce, maybe—feels depressingly provincial in 2008. Consequently, it's weirdly thrilling that a community-sponsored, community-supported art space can attract (and sustain) such a horde of admirable bands.

Barthel puts this in the context of what he calls “the myth of the 90s” (perhaps more accurately the mythologizing of the 90s). As to why No Age is the band garnering allusions to the bygone eras of local scenes—surely Wolf Eyes had/has its own venue in which to nurture its sound and audience?—Barthel rightly notes that it’s because they sound like they came from the 90s. It’s easier for music writers to therefore conclude that everything about them is 90s: they buy t-shirts at thrift stores! they eat vegan cupcakes! they… come from a close-knit music scene the likes of which (not counting Toronto or Stockholm or Brooklyn or Chicago or apparently Denton) haven't been seen since Seattle at its grungiest!

Are we so glued to our mp3 blogs, tour date aggregators, and bittorent sites that we’ve forgotten about local scenes? Should we believe all these bands we read about every day are born whole, without coming up from some sort of hometown scene? More likely, those of us who were twentysomethings in the 90s, taking part in scenes of “hardcore bands and community centers,” as Barthel puts it, are now the thirtysomethings who stay home and write blogs instead—forgetting that there are new twentysomethings going to those shows, starting their own DIY spaces, birthing the bands we’re writing about.

I think, quite simply, that many people out there are forgetting about and/or ignoring the importance of being a local band first, national act second. Also writing about No Age, Matthew Perpetua worried on the band's behalf:

I don't think No Age is a fully-formed band at this moment in time, and I worry that they might get screwed over/screwed up by Certain People overrating their juvenilia, whether it's out of genuine enthusiasm, or because it is beneficial to Those People's brand. This rarely works out—either the artist hedges their bets, and feels no need to progress, or they develop their skill and create better material, and the audience moves on to smothering some other inexperienced band.

This is a concern I've seen voiced on behalf of numerous blog-annointed bands (again, see Vampire Weekend): that maybe we shouldn't get so hot for their debuts; maybe we should let them mature first. Since we're treading around in 90s throwbacks anyway, I'd just like to ask: why start now? Slint put out two albums. Drive Like Jehu put out two albums. Rodan, one. Dare I mention Neutral Milk Hotel? The list goes on—either bands that were lauded on their debut and went on to have long careers (Pavement? Palace?) or bands that had tremendous influence but imploded before they could make three records. So No Age now has two records out—in indie parlance, that means they're ready for their close-up. Maybe in a year or two each dude will go on to form their own June of '44 or Hot Snakes.

I think the fear of letting a band get too big too fast, lest they stunt their growth, stems from a simple confusion: the internet is not a local scene. One needn't "worry" about a band's fragile trajectory, whether it's No Age or Vampire Weekend or the Dodos; they're probably further along than you realize.

Related posts:

• Part II: Blood Sweat and Uploads
• Who's Hyping? (May 20)