I have been thinking a lot about the ruins of the music business in the last week–more so than I usually do, at least. I saw Christopher Weingarten’s rant on some magazine’s website, and I agree with much of what he said. I also saw that one of the Hype Machine people wrote a similarly sloppy and profane response, and I agree with a little bit of what she said, but not very much. Trying to defend Hype Machine, an unironically-named website which seemingly intends to eliminate the need for music writing, and for any sort of persuasive advocacy for music, is like trying to defend this device–it’s absurd that anyone could get behind anything so obviously anti-human.
Don’t get me wrong–nearly everything that has been written about my music has involved some really wince-worthy diction (there are probably 6 or 7 exceptions at this point)–and that does bum me out a little bit. But it is so much more disconcerting to imagine a world where there is nowhere left to even try to get someone to write a thoughtful take on my work, positive or negative. I have previously written on this website about my dislike of self-important popular music criticism, but tacitly allowing everything to be dictated by swarms of data, succumbing to a world without the exceptions to the rule, the John Peels and the Alex Rosses, is a cowardly way to face the future. It’s not only cowardly, though–it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what music is. When all music on the internet is increasingly served in the form of single songs and mixes with little to no commentary, for free (legally or illegally), a systemic problem arises with the way that music is perceived. Our method of consuming music becomes solely that: an act of consumption, which is (from the outset) scrubbed raw of any sort of ideology. The ideas behind music become more and more diminutive, because the conversation which is so rewarding for artists to be a part of is dying. The diversity of distinct amplified voices is disappearing, and sometimes it feels like all that will be left is a single complacent mass of consumers. All music has an intended social utility–to make you dance, to make you cry, to make you kiss, to make you wistful, to make you laugh. Good music has a resonant cultural significance, and good music critics have always sought to draw attention to the context of that significance, but apparently it’s not okay to write a bad review anymore, even if it throws the important things about a piece of music into relief. Are our skins really that thin? If you take away criticism entirely, music will suffer as an artform.
The malaise that I always overhear people complaining about, and that I sometimes catch myself talking about–the whole notion of popular musical development slowing to a halt, of everything having already been done–the whole thing is a fallacy. Music and its possibilities are infinite. The limitations are within us, and within what we are becoming. We (and by we I guess I mean the music obsessives of the world) need to stop forcefeeding ourselves mp3 after mp3 in search of our next fix without stopping to think every once in a while about what a song really means. Check yourself before you wreck yourself, as they say. Pretty soon it’s all going to be Ke$ha remixes.