Paste Magazine is dead.
The website is going to remain running, but the paper-and-ink, blood-and-guts actual product-- the thing that you hold in your hands and experience, that's gone forever.
This isn't a treatise bemoaning the changing landscape of printed journalism, nor a RIP piece on Paste. Truth be told, I've never purchased a copy. But despite the reports I'd heard from freelancers claiming that they weren't getting paid in a timely fashion, despite other iconic music periodicals going out of business, the news of Paste this year was kind of shocking. And because of it, I started thinking about this music criticism thing that I do, that I try to do well enough to get paid for.
The music industry changed with Napster. That's undeniable. It was one of those Pandora's Box moments. Free music, available for download over the Internet, was out of the box, and despite the continuing efforts of the RIAA and copyright enforcement agencies across the globe, it's impossible to put that back in the box. What's perhaps less understood is how Internet music piracy has changed the music journalism industry.
A digression: I'm not saying I'm against music downloading. In fact, quite the opposite. I think the solution to the piracy/downloading issues lies not in stopping people from downloading, but in finding a way to make downloading paid for. But, hey, that's a whole other blog post.
Now, see, piracy changed music because it opened up avenues between music and fans, musicians and fans, fans and fans, musicians and musicians, genres and genres. It was this great criss-crossing highway that made South Africa as close or as far away as the person next door. Afro-pop rubbed elbows with techno, country knocked boots with classical, hip-hop danced with ballroom. At this point, this genre-crossing has become so ubiquitous, it's not even surprising when Britney Spears sounds like she's been digging through vinyl in Bristol. In fact, it's almost expected that it sounds like she has.
And this same phenomenon changed music fandom. A site like Pitchfork, for all the heat it takes as a homogenizer of indie culture and taste, started out as a simple gathering spot for a growing subculture. There were maybe only one or two kids in your high school who had even heard of Pavement, much less listened to their records fifty times over, but suddenly there was this increasingly legitimate website saying not only, "God damn but "Cut Your Hair" is an amazing song," but also, "You're stupid if you don't think so." It became a gathering place, and as more gathered, those whose tastes were covered by Pitchfork in only anecdotal fashion began talking about experimental hip-hop, or dubstep, or even pop. Just as genres of music melted together, so did fans and their tastes. It's not weird to listen to Beyonce and Band of Horses anymore.
And that's a good thing.
Now, if you're a music fan, there are literally thousands of blogs to satisfy your tastes. If that's straight pop, there's Popjustice. If it's dance, there's Discobelle. If it's hip-hop, you can peruse 2DopeBoyz. And, hey, if you like all of it, there's nothing to stop you from picking and choosing what you like from each of them and the hundreds more. If you're a fan of music, the only limit to what you can find is the amount of time you want to spend looking.
That ease of access has enacted a profound change in music journalism. Prior to it, the job of a music critic was that of the discoverer. He went to shows with twenty people at clubs no one had heard of, to get a scoop on a new group he had remembered the name of from a half-heard conversation along a street corner, then came back and wrote a glowing piece about that band, exposing them to a larger audience and, in a way, playing a role in their ascension. The duties of the music critic were that of a diffuser; take something from a single point, and spread it out to a wider audience.
There's no need for a diffuser now. There's way too many avenues to patrol, and with the very nature of the Internet and social networking, there's no reason why a fan can't get the scoop long before a critic has even a sniff of it. So, given that, what's the point of a music critic?
The answer I've come with is stupidly simple, and I say that meaning that it's probably an oversimplification of a more complex problem. But, if everyone is able to see everything before the critic, then the critic simply can't function as a diffuser. It makes more sense, then, for the critic to act instead as a funnel.
Instead of spreading one thing to a wider audience, the music critic has to take a lot of information in and filter out the extraneous, the useless, the pointless, the unnecessary, and the just plain bad. If a person on the Internet has an infinite number of possibilities, then the responsibility of the critic to say, "You know, you don't really have to pay any attention to this."
The most interesting question the funnel idea raises is this: "Well, how the hell do you determine what to filter out?" Subquestion-- and the most basic query regarding criticism in general-- "How do you say what's good and what isn't?"
One of the points I've made on this blog before is that objections that are arbitrary are meaningless, and I think that idea finds an interesting home here. A lot of critics don't like certain genres, or certain tones, or certain sounds. They won't review a dance record positively simply because they don't like digital instrumentation, or they'll badmouth a country song because they can't stand nasally vocals. The decisions of these groups to play that sort of music, or to sing with that sort of voice isn't necessarily arbitrary, but the idea to say that one set of noises is okay and one set of noises isn't... well, that certainly is arbitrary.
So, in a way, that says we as critics shouldn't reject a certain genre of music or any music just because of the tones it uses, and that makes the question of what is "good" much harder to answer.
I've struggled for awhile with this answer, and its only recently that I've come up with one that I think satisfies most people, both lay persons and those involved in criticism: In any art form, personal taste is one of those things that's completely subjective. What people like and don't like can't be explained away but a critic. But that doesn't make music criticism pointless, because how we determine what's good or isn't has nothing to do with personal taste.
Rather, what we're critiquing is how this piece advances its art form.
Maybe you like Nickelback. I can't say that your taste is wrong, because what you like is subjective. But Nickelback offers nothing particularly interesting to the art form of music, not in song structure, not in lyrics, not in chords or tones or attitude or ideas. It's not a subjective idea that, "Nickelback just sucks, okay?" Instead, it's an objective evaluation of what Nickelback brings to the musical table.
As far as I can figure, that's how the funnel thing is supposed to work. Yeah, there's a lot out there, and it can seem pretty futile to try and say this lo-fi, hazy, 80s inspired dream pop band is better than that one, but its in examining how one pushes boundaries in comparison to the other that we can take a stab at becoming effective filters.
A week or so ago, Zach Baron wrote an article for the Village Voice entitled "How Kanye West's Twitter Killed Music Magazines." And he came to a pretty similar conclusion in his article about what social networking and the Internet, et al. has done to criticism. Attempting to adventure to brave new musical worlds no longer works, because everyone has the tools to get there first and plant their own flags.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that flags are being planted everywhere. The new job of music critics is to point out whose colors are worth noticing.
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