Pretty Goes with Pretty

There Are No Perfect Blogs, But

I joked the other day that my ideal blog would be a perfect mixture of drone, old-timey country, and Feist.  Not a joke: I guess that's kinda what Pretty Goes with Pretty is, though my ideal blog would update more frequently. The truth of the matter is that I pilfer all my best musical finds from a handful of other blogs working harder than me. So, here are the blogs that have been conveniently pushing my tastes along in 2011. If I could figure out how to put 'em all in a blender and create one super blog that publishes perfect mixes daily, I would. If you like the music I've been posting here of late, you have the below people to blame for 85% of it.

The Adios Lounge
An eclectic mix, especially good when LD gets into the old stuff (honestly my tastes diverge from his when he goes past the 70s), or goes on an in-depth excavation of a band or musician, such as his epic Clarence White posts (search it on his blog).

Altered Zones
Unfortunately it's gone belly-up as of this week. Altered Zones was a good punching bag for anyone who wanted to shit on hipster trends of the last 18 months or so (and in truth it had too many press release-like posts to be 100% trustworthy), but frankly I found a lot of good music this year thanks to that blog.

Aquarium Drunkard (@aquadrunkard)
Justin Gage has been running Aquarium Drunkard for six years now, so this blog should be no revelation to anyone. It's a great mix of old and new—a balance that seems harder to pull off than you might expect, given how few blogs pull it off well.

The Cargo Culte (@theallseeingi and @cmetz)
Friends of mine, so full disclosure and all that, but in any case a Cargo Culte mix is worth delving into. Heavy psych, old-school punk, Vietnamese 60s girl groups—every mix likely goes somewhere you haven't been before. And of course the mixes are only half of it—each mix is paired with a heavily researched tale from the fringes.

The Decibel Tolls (@thedecibeltolls)
Kenny Bloggins is a contributor to Altered Zones and one of the more dependably great ones at that.

For the Sake of the Song
Kinda like the Adios Lounge, For the Sake of the Song is at its best when it goes back in time. The mixes—songs linked by a common word, or just straight up random—almost always contain a few real gems.

Rawkblog (@daverawkblog)
Dave Rawkblog is my go-to for reverby indie rock or newfangled songwriters. Some of my favorite songs of the year—like Little Scream's "Heron and the Fox"—are due to his hunting. The main Rawkblog site is a great source for new mp3s and news around the bands he likes. What sets it apart from a lot of pseudo-newsy and/or band-breaking blogs is that Dave legitmately stans for the bands he adores, and doesn't bother posting for bands he's ambivalent about, no matter the buzz level. All that said, I might even like following his tumblr more, just because it's a little more off the cuff and more about what he's thinking about, less about what he's listening to.

The Rising Storm
The best blog going if you're looking for lost classics of the 60s and 70s. Folk, psych, pop, etc. It's essential.

Singing in the Wire
Almost everything I know about old country music—or heck, any country music—is courtesy Paul from Singing in the Wire (previously Setting the Woods on Fire). I credit him for my newfound love of Tom T. Hall, Hank Snow, the Delmore Brothers, and many more. Not to mention this is the music that is shaping my son's toddler-hood!

20 Jazz Funk Greats
Being honest, I never read this site. I've tried a few times but I can't get on board with a lot of their words. But musically their taste level is pretty fantastic. It occasionally gets too dance-heavy, but the ambient and more "headphone-oriented" tracks are almost uniformly excellent.

Swan Fungus (@evanhlevine)
I was a big ambient/drone fan about 12 or 15 years ago, but somewhere around the new century I lost the thread on the genre. A year or two back I stumbled into Swan Fungus and have more or less been following Evan's lead when it comes to that music. (He posts about a lot more than that, but that's how he hooked me.)

These blogs are the source for a lot of my musical development of the last year—country, ambient, psych, etc. Now, that said, there is a whole other group of bloggers out there who used to do more typical music blogs but who have all migrated entirely to tumblr (not counting paid gigs), where the emphasis (in my eyes, anyway) has become a lot more about the writing and lot less about sharing music (even if music is still the topic). Eric Harvey, Jonathan Bogart, Nitsuh Abebe, Mark Richardson, Brad Nelson, Marc Hogan... I'm probably forgetting about ten or fifteen others. I find that in recent years my ears have moved further and further from theirs (sorry, I'm just not super into rap and pop! sorry!), but great writers are great writers are great writers.

A (Re)Statement of Purpose

The New Year is always a time of optimism and ambition, as well as a shaking off of the past. That's definitely the case for me and for this blog. The content at Pretty Goes with Pretty has suffered for at least the last year, maybe more, due to a number of reasons—not least was I had a kid and I wrote a book. Funny how blogging (both writing and reading blogs) can slip right down your priority list when a little life change comes your way.

Well, I still have a kid, so everything in this post ought to be taken with the appropriate grain of salt. But I am definitely done writing my book, and for the most part done thinking about my book (unless you want to talk about it).

I started thinking about writing Spiderland back in late 2008, and started in earnest by the spring of 2009. Putting myself in that headspace required me to revisit the 90s. The side-effect was that most of my listening hours were spent listening to music of my youth. If Pretty Goes with Pretty is meant to be a kind of self-interrogation of my own listening habits, that necessarily meant digging up a lot of nostalgia. Only I didn't want to be a nostalgist. Nothing against the music of my youth—actually, I'm really glad to have revisited a lot of it—but I don't really have an interest in playing the "back-in-my-day" card quite as often as I feel I have in the last year or two.

Avoiding nostalgia, then, often meant not writing at all. If I blogged once in a month, I considered myself a success.

Meanwhile there was a time management issue. I was still consuming new music, and new-to-me music, but was finding myself with less and less time to write about it. Obviously family time has taken on a whole new meaning. And of course when I did have time to write, I needed to be focused on the book. By the time I was completely and utterly finished with the book sometime this summer, I was so backlogged on things I wanted to write here that I just... gave up. My quarterly Listening Hours posts went by the wayside despite my trying to sustain them (I do have a bunch of unfinished drafts I couldn't bring myself to complete). My thoughts on things I was reading on other blogs were too difficult to get out in any kind of timely fashion. The blog had become an albatross, so I mostly abandoned it except when it was, occasionally, easy.

So, here's to looking forward: I love this blog and I love writing about music and I love what to me has long been the premise behind this blog—to trace my own listening habits and try to discern how one choice leads to the next.

Oh, that's the premise? Yeah, exactly. The last time I felt I wrote something that falls under that umbrella was probably last January (not an omen, I hope). With a metaphorical purging of my duty—it was a duty, or felt like one—to engage with 90s indie rock, I now hope to return to what I like best about this blog.

Starting in January I plan to bring back my Weekly Soundtrack posts, which track what albums I listen to in full each week, and/or which songs defined my week. I also plan to reinstate my Listening Hours posts, though perhaps monthly instead of quarterly so I don't feel overwhelmed when the time comes to get them out. I don't know, we'll see about that. And, hopefully, we'll see other things happen here too. It's all still a bit up in the air. But the point is that something is actually going to start happening here. Promise! Unless you want to pay me to write for your website instead. That's always an option, fyi!

Meanwhile I'll probably still continue to be most active on Twitter, where the 140 character burst seems to best fit my schedule; and I still try to keep up with Tumblr though that sometimes proves difficult (mostly I just reblog without much commentary—unless you ask me a question.)

Glad I got this off my chest. See you in four months when I return to sheepishly retract my bold proclomation that I'd become more active.

• Sammi Smith: Today I Started Loving You Again

PGWP Reviews Pitchfork Reviews Reviews

Probably the worst trend in twenty-first-century indie rock is the degree to which people care about Pitchfork. Clearly they have a far-reaching influence--hell, even ABC News is asking them for recommendations--but so what? It's easy to get caught up in talking about Pitchfork's every move (is it suspect? is it genuine? is it naive? is it cynical? is it defining our culture? is it behind the curve?), and I've been guilty of it myself in the past.

At the beginning of this year I wrote a post, titled How Did It Start?, in which I said this:

It started with burning out on everyone's end of year/end of decade lists, which began in August and are still going strong in some corners of my RSS reader. All that Radiohead, all that Animal Collective! Never mind the Arcade Fire and the LCD Soundsystem and the Dirty Projectors and the Grizzly Bear. God, even the stuff I liked in the first place I was beginning to dislike. It brought home in an acute way both how much and how little my tastes align with Pitchfork. It doubly brought home how redundant most blogs I read are—how much they echo Pitchfork, how much they hold their noses at Pitchfork, how much they watch Pitchfork like its ratings were horses rounding the track on Derby Day.

With that last line I made an unspoken vow to myself that I'd stop contributing to the all-eyes-on-Pitchfork mania that hampers indie culture. Every time I see someone comment on a band's Pitchfork score--or worse, guess what a band's future score will be or whether an album will be annointed with a "Best New Music"--I silently translate their comment to what they're really saying: I don't value my own opinion. I don't have an issue with Pitchfork or its influence (if Spoon or Arcade Fire are debuting in the Billboard Top 10, I think I should only be happy for its existence); I also follow and interact with many of the site's writers via tumblr or twitter or ILM or this blog. As individuals they're uniformly among my favorite people to talk music with on the internet. So again, I don't have hard feelings against Pitchfork when I say people need to stop giving a shit about Pitchfork.

Obviously I've broken my vow with this post. But in fact, if you'll permit me to be this meta, I'm not writing about Pitchfork but rather Pitchfork Reviews Reviews, an anonymous tumblr blog that critiques and comments on Pitchfork's content every single day. When I first heard about the blog I didn't bother to follow it because I knew it would aggravate me. But I caught some reblogged posts and found the writing entertaining and well-considered so I started following.

Inevitably, I've become aggravated anyway. I think the most frustrating thing about PRR is that the guy is actually a pretty good writer with a lot of ideas and energy and optimism. I'd welcome reading his thoughts on whatever album he's into that day. But instead I get his obsessive critique of a site whose influence, while admittedly great, he's blown utterly out of proportion. It pains me to read his blog posts because they shout louder than anyone else, I don't value my own opinions! Reading his blog is like watching Rock Star, the Mark Wahlberg movie about the guy who aspires to be the lead singer of a tribute band until he gets the opportunity to sing lead for the band he lionizes. This guy is like the ultimate fanboy when he should be a writer in his own right. 

I was finally set off by his recent post on Altered Zones, the new Pitchfork-assembled conglomerate blog whose mission is to headhunt left-field acts who might not otherwise get coverage on the big site. There was cackling and cawing all around the web when Pitchfork announced the new blog last week. It really pained me to see so many complaints about a site that hadn't even launched yet. People have a reflexive, often negative, opinion about Pitchfork, which they inevitably undermine by following every move Pitchfork makes. What people don't seem to understand is that complaining about Pitchfork's influence is what gives Pitchfork its influence. If you really hated it, why can't you ignore it?

Not that PRR hates it. He lauds it as much as he slams it, to his credit. Nevertheless he has his eyes so close to the screen that he doesn't even seem to realize there is a real world out there, full of people making music, talking music, writing about music. Music, not Pitchfork.

I digress: it was the Altered Zones post that finally set me off. He seems to have granted Pitchfork so much power that he expects them to act as A&R for the acts they discover, rather than a) music critics or b) trainspotters.

so anyway, instead of recognizing the potentially devastating effects that fame has on young artists, Altered Zones digs even fucking deeper and Pitchfork’s spotlight protrudes even further into the underground, allowing them to stamp their imprimateur on larger and larger swaths of independent music until no kid playing lo-fi music is safe from the spotlight shining in through his bedroom window regardless of how premature Pitchfork’s arrival is. and how is some 20-year-old with a laptop and a drum machine supposed to turn down this crazy exposure? Pitchfork’s endorsement puts backlash targets on bands’ heads, and then he/she has to deal with the internet populated by contributors who’ve dedicated their presences to “DELOREN IS WURST BAND OF EARTH!?!!!!!”? how could that not fuck with you when people are saying it about YOUR band and you only have 2 songs out!!?! and one’s a cover!!! and whereas in pre-internet times you needed a decent full-length or a stellar EP to be critically validated, and the press and labels and the public might even be PATIENT with you, now fourteen bloggers thirsty for the earliest conceivable scoop are ready to lavish praise like you are the Second Coming on your song, and then once they’ve patted themselves on the back for discovering you at the earliest conceivable second, the expectations are yours alone to deal with. did you read all the track descriptions? Hipster Runoff must have fallen out of his chair.

This attitude really sets my teeth on edge. It's not the first time I've seen this critique of Pitchfork--that they are somehow hurting indie rock by annointing bands too early. Seriously, it's not Pitchfork's responsibility to shepherd bands into healthy careers. It's their job to critique what they hear. If some band comes along and knocks out one song and a cover and they're both fucking outstanding, I'd call out Pitchfork for slipping if they didn't cover it! How is Pitchfork supposed to know whether a band has a healthy attitude toward recognition? It's true that the cycle of hype and backlash turns as fast as a toilet paper roll, but it's not Pitchfork's duty to determine the pace. It's also extremely presumptious to think the bands that may or may not be covered by AZ are obscure by choice, fastidiously escaping Pitchfork's spotlight. These bands don't need protection or coddling, nor does Pitchfork need a policeman or a cheerleader.

I know this is largely being directed at one anonymous dude, but it really ought to be directed at everyone who blogs about music. Let Pitchfork do their thing. You do yours. Music (and writing) will be better for it.

tl;dnr

Don't know if you saw it or if you cared about it, but Drowned in Sound dedicated the week to articles on the death of music journalism--perhaps four days too many to cover a subject that I feel has been beaten to death. I'd be curious to know from DiS's stat-counters how popular the series was (compared to other week-long series on, say, slow-core, shoegaze, or alt-country). Personally I feel invested in only one facet of the issue. I don't care much about the ramifications of new technologies, and I don't care much that business models are crumbling; I just care about good writing.

I gather that there are, in fact, two problems at hand. The first (less interesting to me but more interesting to people trying to make a real living off of music writing) is tied to the music industry itself. As the industry dies, so goes the financial viability of all its ancillary industries. Yeah, artists don't get paid. Also, magazines fold or go online, where the advertising opportunities are fewer and less lucrative. So the writers looking for money are, to put it mildly, in a pinch.

The second problem has more to do with the quality, variety, availability, and unfiltered nature of music writing itself, now that so much of it is on the web. One of today's DiS articles, by Ringo P. Stacey, tries to differentiate between the death of "criticism" vs the death of "writing," using as a jumping off point Christopher Weingarten's recent rant (worth a watch if you haven't seen it, though I do have some problems with its content). I think that's a much more worthwhile topic to bellyache over, personally--less the authority of the critic than the pleasures of great prose. I grant that many writers need to worry about getting paid, but writers--and I mean very specifically those of you/us who consider yourselves writers--ought to put quality of output ahead of everything, regardless of platform or paycheck. This is one thing Weingarten says in his rant that I think is right on (though I still loathe Twitter). Were the general quality of music writing on the web to increase, I wonder whether or not everyone's game would raise. Other writers, musicians, fans: everyone. (I'm not trying to put myself above it: I have a tumblr and it's full of half-thoughts. It could be better. I'm also not trying to say that good writing doesn't exist--but it could exist more.)

Stacey ends his article claiming that "to date, although online critics have triumphed, the best music writing is still originating offline." He also claims that there are a lack of good editors when it comes to online writing (true!). Couple that with Ben Myers' "Day in the Life of a Music Critic," also posted as part of the DiS series: "I maintain a blog but it is worthless. Blogging isn’t writing, it’s masturbating." Clearly there's a disconnect happening here. Everyone looks to the web for music, and thus for whatever text accompanies that music, whether it be from Pitchfork or DiS or me or some other amatuer who says little more than "Atlas Sound + Panda Bear OMFGyessssss!" But the guys who consider themselves real writers aren't bringing their A-game to the web--unless they get paid for it! If they don't get paid, then they're not writing, they're masturbating. Great. But FYI the readers don't give a shit whether you got pait for what you wrote or not. They're looking for great content. So let's all think about that when on the one hand "blogs are masturbation" and "all the good writing is happening offline" while on the other "music journalism is dying" because no one reads print mags anymore. Not only that, but most readers/consumers of content are not differentiating between sites with true mastheads and sites done by dudes in their living rooms. If the reader isn't discriminating but the writer is, then the writer is in a pickle.

In the comments to Stacey's post someone complains about the glut of music--too many people can make, record, and disseminate music nowadays for people to keep up with or process. That seems tangential to the present discussion but it does give cause to bring up the parallel--anyone who wants to can write about music nowadays too. I'd actually argue that more people are reading about music today than ever before, thanks to the internet! Unfortunately many of the providers of content don't consider themselves writers, and many who do seem to consider their blog their "side thing," less important and not worthy of quality control. That could have some relation to the sentiment I often hear from the more cynical mp3 hounds out there who think writing about music has become irrelevant now that we can simply listen to anything we want. That misses a crucial point: writing about music is itself an artform. It's not mere utility.

[Related: Tom Ewing did a post today that rounded up a list of newish youngish writers out there. Some I know, others I don't. Worth exploring.]

Let's Not Be Assholes

The news of the day today was that the new Grizzly Bear had leaked—three months before its official release date and apparently of a quality substantially below what the band intends. This post at Idolator, in which people were actually asking Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste outright if he would point them to the link for the leak, or better yet be a sport and leak a higher-quality version, was the most entertaining thing I'd read about it all day, though also the most depressing.

Back in December when the Animal Collective album had yet to leak there were similarly entitled claims, appeals, and threats related to a stupid rickroll that got out of hand. In both cases the moral of the story is this: don't tease indie rock fans. We deserve our music when we want it, without payment. We place no value on a musician's artistry. Albums have become like bounties one can collect on, holding them up and shouting to the masses "LEAKAGE!"

I'm sick of it. It's gotten to the point that it's just... gross. And sad.

I'm not innocent. Though I've never been to a bittorent site or downloaded a full album prior to its release, I have hunted down individual mp3s, often amounting to a full album, through places like Hype Machine. I don't acquit myself of anything. I will say: I've never pointed other people to a full-album download for a record that hasn't come out yet. I've always felt like that was kind of a dick move.

Anyway, the point is, whether I've participated or not, I've typically accepted that that's just the way it is these days. Leaks happen. People get excited and it's there so they download it. But then two weeks ago Touch & Go essentially went out of business. And a bunch of people who care deeply about music—independent music—were laid off as a result. A bunch of smaller labels that depended on T&G's distribution aid were left to figure something else out. It might be too soon, but could some of those smaller labels go belly-up as a result of this?

It sucks! And sure, you can be cynical about it and see nothing new under the sun here—the current climate of downloading is ruining record labels big and small, yawn. And Animal Collective's album leaked but they also hit #13 on Billboard in their first week of release (selling a whopping 24,000 copies... see, it's still sad). And Grizzly Bear may well hit a similar mark. But come on: think about a label like Touch & Go, one of the most venerable indie labels of all time. It's all but gone now. And we're all a bunch of assholes for helping them toward their ruin. You think they'll be the last? You don't have to be the douche twittering in Ed Droste's face to be complicit in all this.

 Chill on the Grizzly Bear and all those other records. Just let them come out when they're supposed to. And if the leaks are out there, don't be the asshole who flashes the big blinking arrow. Let the bands retain a little control over how and when their art is consumed—and for god's sake give them some money. Hype don't pay the bills, bitches.

I'm just a little tired of it all. I feel like someone's parent right now, lecturing on a subject you've been lectured about a million times before. All I ask is you just think a little about what hunting down a leak is all about—or worse, offering a leak to others. You're being an asshole.

It’s a Matter of Trust

It’s the month of lists, you’ve no doubt noticed. It’s an entertaining yet tedious time of year: we get to find records we might have slept on and argue over albums that are underrated or underhated. Maybe it's the lack of galvanizing consensus albums this year, or the oft-repeated complaint that everyone's favorites are too boring, but I'm detecting an odd, if fascinating tone to the usual kvetching this time around. It's not the same old sux/rulz dichotomy: rather, there seems to be a distinct lack of trust, a suspicion of the listmakers' motives.

Over at Idolator, Dan Gibson asked readers—genuinely!— “Have you had any luck yet with the mysterious albums that seem to populate the middle of these lists? Is that Girl Talk disc everyone seems to list any good?” To wonder aloud whether an album frequently appearing on everyone’s list is actually any good says something about Gibson’s lack of faith in his music-consuming peers. It’s doubly amusing considering he is asking the vague entity that is “Idolator readers”—many of whom are probably the same ones putting Girl Talk on their lists. Is Gibson going to feel any more inclined to download Girl Talk based on some commenter’s recommendation? (Not likely, when the next commenter will say it’s overrated.)

I don’t think Gibson is alone. It seems to be assumed by all readers that somewhere on any given top ten list, a gap must exist between the truly outstanding and the merely good. The question is, where is that gap? No one’s list includes that important detail, hence no one’s list is trustworthy. Add to that one's  personal knowledge of how few of 07 picks still get regular play around the house. Surely the same will happen with these 08 releases. All the more suspicious then: these lists must be designed to swindle you out of your time, money, and belief that indie rock can change your life. Right?

Too, we have no reference point: okay, you’ve got a top ten—how many albums did you actually hear? How can I possibly know how discerning you’re being? Shit, you’ve got a top fifty—are you just ranking every album you bought? How can I possibly know how discerning you're being?

It’s easy to mistrust the hobbyist bloggers—all of whom, surely, are too lazy, stupid, or sheeplike to stake out their own personal tastes, independent from the domineering tastes of Pitchfork’s critics or the Machiavellian commercial interests of Stereogum. I mean, it’s one thing for Vampire Weekend and Lil’ Wayne to show up on their lists—it’s in their editorial interests, right? For some reason? Cuz they're pro?—but why would the hobbyists, for whom nothing is at stake, claim to like these albums? They’re clearly drinking the Kool-Aid and can’t be trusted. Right?

Then there are the Kool-Aid dispensers: Pitchfork, Paste, Q, et al. As this ILM thread demonstrates, such lists are to be dissected in order to determine each publication's true motives, for surely it cannot be that they like all these albums. Probably they’re catering to their readers’ tastes—but, predictably, they must throw in a few albums from outside their stock genre in an attempt to display the illusion of critical breadth. So there's a "token" hip hop act, a "token" dance album and a "token" pop album. You see through it, don’t you: these mags are puffing themselves up in hopes you don’t notice how critically corrupt they are. Right?

In further effort to show how on-the-pulse their critics are—because even the publication knows its list is bullshit!—you're made privy to their individual lists. See, staff-derived lists place undue weight on populist albums like that dastardly Fleet Foxes record that appeals to everyone but is no one’s favorite. (right?) So it racks a bunch of points in the staff polling and places high on the list, way ahead of that one actually outstanding album that not enough people spent time with, hence its inclusion on the low end of the top 100. But the individual critics’ list rectifies that! Except that all that amounts to is a bunch of jerks that, other than their inclusion of Fleet Foxes, are just trying to show off how obscure they can be. They’re not being honest—if it were that good, we all would have heard of it. Right?

You can’t win.

What does it mean, as an avid reader of indie music blogs, that you suspect the motives of every blogger you read? Can no one steer you right? Is every blog's purview too limited/populist, too wide-ranging/obscure, too professionalized, too amatuer? Must you depend on Largehearted Boy’s list of lists to surmise some nebulous overall endorsement of ten supposedly outstanding records? Maybe you do. Maybe that’s also why so many people view this year’s indie releases as boring. Reading so many reactions to the lists that have come up so far is like seeing a mass realization that the trainspotters we depend on aren't flagging down the right cars. (Don't look at me: when  I get around to posting my list, you’ll see some of those boring releases, too.) How's that Stephen Stills song go? If you can't find the blog you trust, trust the blog you're with?

I don't really know what it all means. I just sense some collective feeling that indie rock—or was it the critics and bloggers?—let us down this year. Or we let ourselves down, by not trying a little harder to find that album that really meant something—to me, to us, to music. It's probably out there: who found it? Pipe up!