music blogger’s round table
[warning: the following is crass, and not for the sensitive nor is it the crybabies, please do not email me about your distaste for profanity]
The Mel Gibson of music journalism, Rolling Stone’s, is best known for his profane rants against music bloggers, calling it the end of valid cultural criticism, calling it the “bland middling taste of the internet mind hive”. Or more accurately, “the ugliest, most insidious Ebola virus”, and that “you’re gonna want to shoot yourself in the fucking face”. I run a music blog and sure, I have my own criticisms of the incessant parade of claiming “firsties” on an artist, all of this chillwave obscurity, and hearing myself sound like an asshole when I start talking about RSS feeds and Google Analytics. But I also see it as the DIY culture saying “fuck you” to the so-called Tastemakers in music journalism who are propelled by publicists who shove artists’ campaigns down their throats because their publications are on their last leg. Ahem, Rolling Stone. I wouldn’t even put blogging and journalism in the same category, mostly because I don’t care about what it is, but that it’s an evolution of the way we consume music so you’d be wise to stop whining and embrace it.
I finally realized I’d arrived when I was invited to a Music Blogger’s Luncheon last week, with the likes of such mythological bloggers as Frank Yang of , Chris Budd of , and infiltrated by a few folks at the Globe and Mail, National Post, Spinner, MSN, and some publicity companies. I was going only to confirm that Yang was real, because I always saw him as this sort-of Wizard of Oz, operated by a small staff that claimed they were just but one Asian dude in his bedroom. Put it simply, I’m consistently in awe of him. I was bringing a publicist friend and told him not to embarrass me in front of my new friends by trying to pitch his artists. Forcing these people into social situations is no small feat, so I wanted to document it by pulling out my recorder and let them talk it out. The result was an messy conversation with two many voices that didn’t translate all too well in terms of flow, but I got a few interesting insights from it.
JD- you want me to talk? I’m not a blogger
PJ- yes you are, I’ve seen yours, you have an RSS feed.
JD- I do have an RSS feed.
JD- Why did I start? Because I saw Frank and I was like Oh My God, swimming in women every band wants to proverbially and literally suck his cock and that’s what I want, I want to be Frank Yang. And clearly writing for Spinner and MSN isn’t doing that. I wasn’t swimming in women I was merely bathing in them.
PJ- What is this piece even about that I’m going to be misquoted in?
Me- Chris, why did you get into blogging, was it also Frank’s women and blowjobs?
CB- No. When I first started my blog, after a year I was like, where are these women that Frank was talking about?
JD- What’s going on here? You’re giving her your card?
PJ- Yeah, so she can get my name right.
Me: Thanks. So going along with Frank’s following of women, what band or artist would you most like to fuck?
JD- Easy, St. Vincent. Annie and I flirted through the whole interview. 45 min later, she said she’ give me 10 percent of her royalties.
FY- She was probably motioning to her manager to get the hell out of there.
JD- Zooey Deschanel?
PJ- You want to romance her. You’d want to take her out to dinner, not fuck her.
PJ- I have a big crush on Alex Moshart from The Dead Weather, she’s hot.
JD- She’s a bit ugly right now, she’s getting fat.
MJ- She’s absolutely gorgeous.
BK- there was a band called Heavy Cream and they opened for Jeff the Brotherhood. There was this girl, she was the hottest girl I’d ever seen.
Me- You seem to have a boner for chillwave.
PJ- You can have a band that has so much buzz but it’s all perceived and they come to play a show and they can’t even fill up Lees Palace. To say that you like Wavves is to play into the story of Wavves. He’s a train wreck, the band isn’t very good, their live shows are a joke, but people like it for all the reasons that I hate it, so it’s kind of an unfair argument to say that I hate Wavves. People’s attention spans are so short that people are prepared to write off bands after one record or one year. History will tell. What would’ve you said for Radiohead’s Pablo Honey? Do you remember the early marketing for that? Hilarious.
FY- You don’t get a career anymore in music. If you look at bands like Arcade Fire, the record didn’t disappoint, but if you look at someone like MIA, everyone wanted to hear the record, until they heard it.
PJ- It’s a schizophrenic attention deficit disorder album. It’s a product of it’s own. Fuck that album, because she will still come here and she will play the Sound Academy it will sell out.
FY- Animal Collective. Did you see their Pitchfork set? It was an insult. Its crazy sort of like 15 beach boys records on simultaneously. But this guy is closing the second stage, kind of a big deal. He stood on a keyboard on a platform 3/4 of the way in the back of the stage just standing there and the first song was just a drone, and I was like, are you serious? And people were just peeling away, walking off.
PJ- Its that whole Brooklyn thing, that really sort of antiseptic party thing. For example, Neon Indian made one of the worst music videos of all time for Terminally Chill.
Me- Now they’re all just 8mm home videotapes.
PJ- Yeah, it’s the laziest thing in the world. I work for a music video channel. You know in the nineties they had these big budget music videos. And now everyone thinks Lady Gaga is groundbreaking. Lady Gaga is good though. She uses this beat, it’s one of my favorite electro beats of the last five years like “uhhhhhhh… ” I’ll play you the song, basically it sounds like, “uhhhhhhh”.
Bobby- for NXNE, I reached out to a couple people from Montreal and they were both like The Peelies. Hot French girls on guitars. So I was like, alright cool, give them a 3am spot and they lo fi funked their way through the set and my friend was like, I’m really feeling this- but if they were dudes, it’d be the worst fucking thing. The next day they came to the park and they were so fucking terrible.
PJ- I called Hedley’s performance at the Olympics the worst moment in Canadian music history and that did gangbusters. It was like, press publish and it was like, poooof.
JD- I did a top ten list for MSN and I did one for the Junos and I said worst wardrobe for a band that no one’s ever heard of went to April Wine and I didn’t even think about it- but I also said that Leah Miller has worst face. So I come home and I have this message on Facebook that says, “if you’re gonna write about April Wine, get your fucking April Wine facts straight.” And I’m like, “who is this guy that cares so much about April Wine, I just don’t’ understand why someone would care so much.” So I Google the guy, it’s the lead singer of April Wine.
PJ- That’s like going after that band, Gowan. You can’t go after Gowan, my friends went to go see Gowan at Casino Rama and the lead singer thought they were being ironic so he was pissed. But they were being serious. “You Can Call Me Larry”, that’s his best album ever.
JD- You know way too much about Gowan.
PJ- I got called a media faggot the other day. I hate that word so much, media. My writer created a list of the top ten most metal band names, I asked him- find the most metal, horrible band names like whore apocalypse, you know so the list went viral in the metal community and we started getting a bunch of comments and a bunch of the bands found out that were on the list and I got all these comments to my phone so I got this comment that said, ‘fuck you media faggot’ and I was like, I’m just gonna keep walking home now.
FY- I got called a sellout for doing some stuff for Spin. Saying, oh you’re such a sellout I used to love this site. Well for one, you just came here three months after I posted this and two- fuck you. My comments are pretty civil, they’ve never turned into Brooklynvegan or Stereogum comments. They’re nasty.
PJ- BV are the worst, because it’s that Brooklyn commenting community they’re the best at it, those gawker commenters- they’re like writers in their own right.
JD- Maybe because I’m a popular writer like I write for big magazines or whatever…
PJ- “Maybe because I’m like a really big deal”
JD- Spinner would be nothing without my exclusives this year. I’m writing for publications where complete crazies read it. Well now I’m coming off as a complete asshole.
PJ” Jon Dekel calls his audience, “crazies’” Jon Dekel Responds.
CB- The thing that pisses me off when I get a press release, they want me to blog about a band but then mechanism in the way they set it up is that I have to like a band on Facebook before I can hear it, or watch the video. Well, how am I gonna know if I even like it?
JD- Frank doesn’t listen to any band if an album isn’t personally sent to him.
JD- Is it music journalism, or is it music promotion? Especially with the companies that I work for its music promotion.
PJ- I think the end is when we’ll see the sales side blend in with the journalist side and it becomes one thing and that’ll be the end. Pitchfork was an interesting one because with MIA they had all this MIA news and exclusives then she took over their twitter account which was a huge promotional move, it did really well, they went through this whole cycle- and then the review came out and they shit all over the new album. they attacked the album for what it is which is inconsistent.
JD- The people that work for Spin, they understand it. But people like Jann Winner, he hates the internet, he’s gone on record over and over again.
BK- Rolling Stone, the last issue was like the 100 albums of all time, and it’s the same every month.
PJ- That’s the thing, lists are bullshit.
JD- If there’s one person that I can personally blame for the demise of rock journalism it’s Chuck Klosterman- it’s not so much him but the cult of Chuck Klosterman.
PJ-But there’s this fan journalism that is really despicable. First of all, step one is injecting yourself into the story from the very beginning, your relationship with the band from the very beginning.
JD- He’s really knowlegeable about music and his novels have even gone down-hill in the last few years. As a result, you’ve got all these people saying “I don’t actually have to do the work, I can just talk about my relationship to the story” And that became part of mainstream journalism. You’re further away from what it is, which is telling a story about a band. And it’s not that funny or interesting, but us writers keep getting hired.