Laura's news from Dallas is terrible, disgusting--what "products"? But I have a side comment, one that I've sidled up to in this venue before in my role as popcult booster-philosopher. In my view, arts journalism and sports journalism are part of the same larger entity, cultural journalism. Both comment on human activities that include a crucial aesthetic dimension their practitioners are well aware of. When I decided I wanted to write journalism, sportswriting was my first plan--inspired by Red Smith and especially the great boxing critic A.J. Liebling. Who was also a press critic, meaning he belonged to two clans I see as parts of cultural journalism. David Carr, welcome aboard.
Recently by Robert Christgau
The Brisbane, Australia-generated and usually -based Go-Betweens were often slotted as a critics' band. This means that throughout their two-stage career--the first phase 1978-1990, then a decade of solo work with occasional reunions by principals Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, then a surprisingly, even unprecedentedly vital reunion period that launched with the 2000 album The Friends of Rachel Worth and ended with McLennan's sudden cardiac-arrest death at 48 on May 6, 2006--their reception by music journalists seemed to skeptics out of proportion with their medium-level though sustaining record sales and gig crowds. And indeed, it's not as if their music jumps out at you--you register its calm before its melodicism sinks in, and you'd call the thoughtful, sometimes slightly gnomic lyrics subtle before you'd call them witty, which in their dry way they often are.
But as Forster--whose best solo album, The Evangelist, surfaced two years after McLennan's death--now points out, the Go-Betweens were a critics band in another way. Ever since coming together as undergraduate aesthetes, they were mad dissectors of movies, fiction, and anything else that struck their fancy, and McLennan, a subscriber to The New York Review of Books at the time he died, did in fact publish film criticism when the band was young. So when a new Australian magazine called The Monthly asked Forster to be its music critic in 2005, he decided to give it a shot. If they didn't like his first piece, its subject the first Antony and the Johnsons album, well, nothing ventured nothing gained.
But as Forster--whose best solo album, The Evangelist, surfaced two years after McLennan's death--now points out, the Go-Betweens were a critics band in another way. Ever since coming together as undergraduate aesthetes, they were mad dissectors of movies, fiction, and anything else that struck their fancy, and McLennan, a subscriber to The New York Review of Books at the time he died, did in fact publish film criticism when the band was young. So when a new Australian magazine called The Monthly asked Forster to be its music critic in 2005, he decided to give it a shot. If they didn't like his first piece, its subject the first Antony and the Johnsons album, well, nothing ventured nothing gained.
Continue reading A Critics' Band--And How.
Like many of these for whom my headline has any personal meaning, I tend to put poll votes off. Want to mull the options over. Luckily, this was a slack workday for me, so this afternoon I had time to go back to http://najp.org/summit/watch/competition/
BTW, I'm struck that my two favorite sites here both cover regional scenes that boast a real measure of internal coherence and free-floating capital. The Web is supposed to make the world a village blah-blah-blah. But one thing this reminds us is that real villages are geographically coherent entities. Like words, geography will remain with us. And maybe too the general quality level of online writing makes more sense, and has more credibility, regionally than nationally.
BTW, I'm struck that my two favorite sites here both cover regional scenes that boast a real measure of internal coherence and free-floating capital. The Web is supposed to make the world a village blah-blah-blah. But one thing this reminds us is that real villages are geographically coherent entities. Like words, geography will remain with us. And maybe too the general quality level of online writing makes more sense, and has more credibility, regionally than nationally.
I've been dreading this, so that even after my deadlines were done last Thursday I kept finding other pressing concerns, such as the baseball postseason, which when it involves one of my teams is for me a religious matter (if there's music to cover I bring a radio). But having watched the full four hours of the National Arts Journalism Summit live (or is that "live"?) with NAJP chairman John Rockwell in his office on Friday, October 2, I found myself at a loss for commentary--I had plenty of ideas, but most of them were sour. To sum up my mood, very little presented in these visually hyperactive presentations spoke to the question that most concerns me in arts journalism--quality writing. Of course, some barely dealt with writing at all, but maybe I'll get there in another post.
I liked most of the presenters and learned from many of those I didn't. But I couldn't stand Jim/James R. Gaines, the former Time, Life, and People editor (and sometimes simultaneously publisher, as well as, to quote Wikipedia, "the author of four works of narrative history," which from their looks, if I had to guess--and for what they're paying me here, I do--I'd assume were at least moderately smart) whose Summit-nominated project is the multimedia online magazine Flyp. For me Gaines's money quote was a no-brainer in more ways than one: "The blog is the place of the critic." That's right up there with "The reader doesn't like long sentences." Both mean, "Keep your annoying ideas out of my fiefdom, you pretentious twit."
Still, I checked Flyp out, and clicked all the buttons on "Ted Hope's Excellent Adventure," where I found Rachel Fernandes's text an interesting account of an admirable and even visionary filmmaker. Can't say it stuck with me, however--I had to go back to the site just now to remind myself of what I'd read (and heard, and looked at). And before that I'd read and clicked some of the buttons on a newer arts feature, "Hungry Like a Wolf," text by Drew Stoga. The subject Shakira, who's in the running for the smartest pop star in the world--a funny and caring woman who's devoted enormous energy to UN-associated educational projects. So we got to hear her speak: "Every time you give a child an opportunity you are transforming his life, her life, and giving this child a chance to become a productive member of society."
One reason I love Shakira is that she's capable of better than that kind of do-gooding boilerplate, and believe me (though you don't have to, because in this participatory age you can check it out yourself), hearing her say it didn't improve it an iota. But she beat Drew Stoga, whose narrative included such sentences as "Working with hit-making producers such as Wyclef Jean (of Neptunes fame), Shakira produced a whole new sound that is very electronic, and dance- and club-oriented" and "She has never shied away from an artistic challenge and has always walked--or danced--down her own unique path." Yawn, scream, and repeat.
I dunno. I'm sure not everyone, not even here, will find those sentences as vague and empty as I do, and maybe I'm wrong and Wyclef Jean has had some hits recently (Sean Kingston's "Ice Cream Girl"? some Lyfe Jennings joint that escaped my notice?). But convincing the world of the fatuity of such prose, by example and advocacy, is my battle. So for me, Flyp is the enemy. Right now I'm leaning toward the Texans. But Iurge the electorate to vote for someone, anyone--except Flyp.
I liked most of the presenters and learned from many of those I didn't. But I couldn't stand Jim/James R. Gaines, the former Time, Life, and People editor (and sometimes simultaneously publisher, as well as, to quote Wikipedia, "the author of four works of narrative history," which from their looks, if I had to guess--and for what they're paying me here, I do--I'd assume were at least moderately smart) whose Summit-nominated project is the multimedia online magazine Flyp. For me Gaines's money quote was a no-brainer in more ways than one: "The blog is the place of the critic." That's right up there with "The reader doesn't like long sentences." Both mean, "Keep your annoying ideas out of my fiefdom, you pretentious twit."
Still, I checked Flyp out, and clicked all the buttons on "Ted Hope's Excellent Adventure," where I found Rachel Fernandes's text an interesting account of an admirable and even visionary filmmaker. Can't say it stuck with me, however--I had to go back to the site just now to remind myself of what I'd read (and heard, and looked at). And before that I'd read and clicked some of the buttons on a newer arts feature, "Hungry Like a Wolf," text by Drew Stoga. The subject Shakira, who's in the running for the smartest pop star in the world--a funny and caring woman who's devoted enormous energy to UN-associated educational projects. So we got to hear her speak: "Every time you give a child an opportunity you are transforming his life, her life, and giving this child a chance to become a productive member of society."
One reason I love Shakira is that she's capable of better than that kind of do-gooding boilerplate, and believe me (though you don't have to, because in this participatory age you can check it out yourself), hearing her say it didn't improve it an iota. But she beat Drew Stoga, whose narrative included such sentences as "Working with hit-making producers such as Wyclef Jean (of Neptunes fame), Shakira produced a whole new sound that is very electronic, and dance- and club-oriented" and "She has never shied away from an artistic challenge and has always walked--or danced--down her own unique path." Yawn, scream, and repeat.
I dunno. I'm sure not everyone, not even here, will find those sentences as vague and empty as I do, and maybe I'm wrong and Wyclef Jean has had some hits recently (Sean Kingston's "Ice Cream Girl"? some Lyfe Jennings joint that escaped my notice?). But convincing the world of the fatuity of such prose, by example and advocacy, is my battle. So for me, Flyp is the enemy. Right now I'm leaning toward the Texans. But Iurge the electorate to vote for someone, anyone--except Flyp.
I spent half of my working Wednesday listening to four CDs I'd heard at least three or four times before, all by bands beginning with P: the Paper Chase, Passion Pit, Phoenix, and the Pica Beats. By the highly imperfect but useful Metacritic test, Passion Pit and Phoenix are what used to be called buzz bands: Passion Pit averaged 76 by Metacritic's dubious calculation of 27 reviews, Phoenix 82 on 33 reviews. (If you want some notion of the Metacritic demographic, note that Jay-Z's new CD scored 65 based on only 21 reviews, and Brad Paisley's--close to my favorite album of the year, Nashville provenance or not--84 on a mere 9.) The Pica Beats scored 60 based on 6, the Paper Chase 55 based on 6, and are so obscure I was surprised to see they'd gotten into Metacritic at all.
So Metacritic's insular consensus makes two of these albums good-to-very-good, the other two barely passable if that. But for me, all are of similar mediium quality, probably somewhere up in Metacritic's 75 range, insofar as that number means a damn thing: in descending order, Pica Beats, Phoenix, Passion Pit, Paper Chase. But we'll get to that disparity later. The first point I want to make is that I ended up writing about the top two but not, except here, the others. The top two are what the Consumer Guide where I publish most of my record reviews these days calls low Honorable Mentions, while the bottom two new reside in a private file I call Neither, meaning not bad enough to pan or label a Dud but not good enough to recommend in even a brief review. If you review plays, chances are you write about everything you see, and if you review movies in a daily, the same (though not, of course, if you're writing a column at a monthly or even a weekly). But if you review records or books, of which there's an even more enormous quantity (cf. that Daniel Menaker essay I linked to last time), you spend a lot of work time weeding. I'm more obsessive about this than most. But for anybody who does the job with a modicum of seriousness, how "easy" it is--a common complaint in the post-your-comment era, especially on the part of guys who need something to do with their hands besides whack off now that cigarettes are no longer cool--is drastically compromised by this often pleasureless task.
But though it may be pleasureless, it's not knowledgeless. It reminds you of how much musical competence there is in the world and of what small consequence that competence can be. It helps you remember what the sub-average and the modicum sound like so you can more readily recognize the moderately distinguished when it comes your away. Every once in a great while it can soften you up to comprehend musical usages formerly foreign to you. And it compels you to experience all the dross that musicians, listeners, and music-bizzers believe should mean something in the world, and all the moderately distinguished it makes a big fuss over.
All of these records are melodic enough, but the two with the fuss are also slick. Since not long ago slick was uncool by definition, this is no negative by me. But because their style of slick--synth-dominated and high-register, no masculine rockism here--is one I'm not drawn to, I looked for something verbal to relate to, some reason to thrill when one of Phoenix's solid tunes or the Pica Beats' twee ones or the Paper Chase's furious raveups or Passion Pit's efficiently climactic choruses caught my ear. The two that made the cut offered minor verbal pleasures--Frances's Phoenix playful formalist repetition, Seattle's Pica Beats rich, sometimes droll or sharp, rarely obscurantist imagery. In contrast, the Paper Chase's politics veered toward nihilist rhetoric, and Passion Pit proved incomprehensible even with a lyric sheet--when I got to the word "urn" I decided enough already.
Just looked at Metacritic's top five reviews for both Phoenix and Passion Pit. Two of Phoenix's never mentioned lyrics, and only one had more than a phrase--Ryan Dombal in Pitchfork, pretty good stuff. Lyric sheet notwithstanding, not one of Passion Pit's mentioned lyrics at all. Though I'm down with the old complaint that early rock criticism was way too much about lyrics, I still think songs have words for a reason--and not just so we can hear a vocal instrument, either. I'm just an old-fashioned guy. But you knew that.
So Metacritic's insular consensus makes two of these albums good-to-very-good, the other two barely passable if that. But for me, all are of similar mediium quality, probably somewhere up in Metacritic's 75 range, insofar as that number means a damn thing: in descending order, Pica Beats, Phoenix, Passion Pit, Paper Chase. But we'll get to that disparity later. The first point I want to make is that I ended up writing about the top two but not, except here, the others. The top two are what the Consumer Guide where I publish most of my record reviews these days calls low Honorable Mentions, while the bottom two new reside in a private file I call Neither, meaning not bad enough to pan or label a Dud but not good enough to recommend in even a brief review. If you review plays, chances are you write about everything you see, and if you review movies in a daily, the same (though not, of course, if you're writing a column at a monthly or even a weekly). But if you review records or books, of which there's an even more enormous quantity (cf. that Daniel Menaker essay I linked to last time), you spend a lot of work time weeding. I'm more obsessive about this than most. But for anybody who does the job with a modicum of seriousness, how "easy" it is--a common complaint in the post-your-comment era, especially on the part of guys who need something to do with their hands besides whack off now that cigarettes are no longer cool--is drastically compromised by this often pleasureless task.
But though it may be pleasureless, it's not knowledgeless. It reminds you of how much musical competence there is in the world and of what small consequence that competence can be. It helps you remember what the sub-average and the modicum sound like so you can more readily recognize the moderately distinguished when it comes your away. Every once in a great while it can soften you up to comprehend musical usages formerly foreign to you. And it compels you to experience all the dross that musicians, listeners, and music-bizzers believe should mean something in the world, and all the moderately distinguished it makes a big fuss over.
All of these records are melodic enough, but the two with the fuss are also slick. Since not long ago slick was uncool by definition, this is no negative by me. But because their style of slick--synth-dominated and high-register, no masculine rockism here--is one I'm not drawn to, I looked for something verbal to relate to, some reason to thrill when one of Phoenix's solid tunes or the Pica Beats' twee ones or the Paper Chase's furious raveups or Passion Pit's efficiently climactic choruses caught my ear. The two that made the cut offered minor verbal pleasures--Frances's Phoenix playful formalist repetition, Seattle's Pica Beats rich, sometimes droll or sharp, rarely obscurantist imagery. In contrast, the Paper Chase's politics veered toward nihilist rhetoric, and Passion Pit proved incomprehensible even with a lyric sheet--when I got to the word "urn" I decided enough already.
Just looked at Metacritic's top five reviews for both Phoenix and Passion Pit. Two of Phoenix's never mentioned lyrics, and only one had more than a phrase--Ryan Dombal in Pitchfork, pretty good stuff. Lyric sheet notwithstanding, not one of Passion Pit's mentioned lyrics at all. Though I'm down with the old complaint that early rock criticism was way too much about lyrics, I still think songs have words for a reason--and not just so we can hear a vocal instrument, either. I'm just an old-fashioned guy. But you knew that.
Just a link, and not even about arts journalism--or even journalism, you could say. Though on the other hand you could say this fact- and insight-filled essay about the book publishing industry by Daniel Menaker is arts journalism. But the reason I'm calling attention to it is that this blog is for and about writing and writers, and whether or not a writer counts himself or herself a journalist, the chances are very good he or she is thinking about writing a book--because most journalists do, and because in this parlous employment environment writing a book feels like credible backup and/or stopgap. Menaker's piece puts that enterprise into perspective while exemplifying the kind of balancing act all of us who write for money are involved in (except perhaps that he never mentions the teaching fantasy and/or recourse). It was published in Barnes & Noble Review, which is celebrating a redesign and where I am lucky enough to have a column. That Barnes & Noble has a financial interest in promoting writing about books is obvious. That not every such interested party pays for so much good writing or countenances so much negative criticism may not be. A great outlet.
Or giggle, or shrug, or shake your head--and since I don't keep up with this stuff, my apologies if this link about the perceived future of electronic journalism in 1981 was old hat to the hip kids days, hours, or minutes ago. It comes to me courtesy of my old friend Larry Dietz, editor of the short-lived Cheetah, which was just today the subject of an email inquiry from a young scholar with a nose for cultural esoterica.
Another music mag raised from the dead--a big one this time. There've been rumors for a while, summed up here. Now comes definitive news that a dead-tree version of Vibe will relaunch as a quarterly, under the direction of its former online editor. The notion that "entertainment coverage" will proceed "daily, hourly, by-minute" doesn't exactly warm the heart of somebody who believes--in fact, knows--that good criticism takes time, especially given the special fondness of the r&b sector of the biz for the "listening session" in which reviewers only get to hear new recorded music in the presence of its proprietors, often just once. But it's a lot better than what we had at the end of June.
Together with the three resuscitations I noted earlier this month, I wonder whether the death-of-the-music-mag panic was even more recession-driven than I thought. Now that the economy is seen as reviving, venture capital comes out of hiding, end of story. I hope not, because I don't believe the economy can fairly be called revived until there's a substantial increase in the number of decent-paying jobs and a revival of the industrial infrastructure--I live off the "information economy," but I still take the Marxian substructure-superstructure model seriously. Maybe that will right itself--that is, be righted by a government smart enough to know that saving the "financial markets" is only the first step to recovery. If it isn't, yet another bear market could undo us all.
Together with the three resuscitations I noted earlier this month, I wonder whether the death-of-the-music-mag panic was even more recession-driven than I thought. Now that the economy is seen as reviving, venture capital comes out of hiding, end of story. I hope not, because I don't believe the economy can fairly be called revived until there's a substantial increase in the number of decent-paying jobs and a revival of the industrial infrastructure--I live off the "information economy," but I still take the Marxian substructure-superstructure model seriously. Maybe that will right itself--that is, be righted by a government smart enough to know that saving the "financial markets" is only the first step to recovery. If it isn't, yet another bear market could undo us all.
Every Friday Roy Trakin's Trakin Care of Business arrives in my inbox, and every Friday I skim it, trolling for Consumer Guide-worthy albums of the retro persuasion and shaking my head at Trakin's ability to blather endlessly about his grumpy old tastes in film, TV, sports, and, pretty infrequently for a guy who tried to make a go of a site called musicsnobs, music. His paying gig is apparently still with the trade mag Hits, the unlikely survival of which I cannot explicate without calling Roy, which I don't feel like. Two items this week concerned our mutual calling. The first celebrated roberthilburnonline.com, extolling the retired L.A. Times critic and his forthcoming Corn Flakes With John Lennon before going out with these two sentences:
Perhaps, just perhaps, Trakin's trying to flex his putative objectivity. Because here a few items down comes his Gripe of the Week--the fact that Hilburn's successor, L.A. Times rock critic Ann Powers, is being retained by the paper even though she's moving to Alabama, where her husband Eric Weisbard is starting a teaching job. Now, Ann and Eric are close friends of mine; I spoke for her when the Times was searching for someone to replace Hilburn. I thought and think she was perfect for the job--a left-populist intellectual with a passion for actual contemporary pop music as enjoyed by female as well as male fans, not something Hilburn or Trakin (or I) can claim. Like Hilburn, although in a different way, she has heart. But she also has brain--a better brain than Hilburn's, much less Trakin's. Clearly, she gets Trakin's goat. His account of Ann and Eric's careers gets many facts and nuances wrong, but hell, it's only a blog. I was much more struck by this opinion: "Powers will be brought in for what she arguably does best--those periodic, pseudo-intellectual think pieces about being an underappreciated woman in the world of rock."
This is vile--vagina envy at its most blatant. (That "arguably"--feh.) What Powers does best is think about music Trakin is not only too old and grumpy but also too male and white to hear, and then express her thoughts in much simpler and clearer English than Trakin is capable of. Here's a writing tip: never brandish the term "pseudo-intellectual," which IDs you instantly as a non-intellectual or an anti-intellectual because real intellectuals never, ever deign to use it. It betrays your fear that someone else is smarter than you.
Hey, just occurred to me--could Trakin have coveted Hilburn's job? Nah. Hilburn was old--older than me, even. But he wasn't grumpy. Trakin isn't that stupid.
That "it's" is of course a no-no. But in a writer of Hilburn's experience it's a typo merely--real glass houses stuff for an (unedited!!) slob like Trakin, who in the above passage uses "for" three times in three contexts within six words as well as adding an unidiomatic extra "the" to "benefit of the editor" and going out on an imprecise and overstated adjective hedged with a bloviating "rather." What's going on here?As he was in print, Hilburn is light and breezy, but without the benefit of an editor (?!), a little sloppy, even for a blog. For instance, for a professional journalist to use the phrase "has it's moments," with the incorrect apostrophe, even if it is an all-too-common mistake, is rather damning.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Trakin's trying to flex his putative objectivity. Because here a few items down comes his Gripe of the Week--the fact that Hilburn's successor, L.A. Times rock critic Ann Powers, is being retained by the paper even though she's moving to Alabama, where her husband Eric Weisbard is starting a teaching job. Now, Ann and Eric are close friends of mine; I spoke for her when the Times was searching for someone to replace Hilburn. I thought and think she was perfect for the job--a left-populist intellectual with a passion for actual contemporary pop music as enjoyed by female as well as male fans, not something Hilburn or Trakin (or I) can claim. Like Hilburn, although in a different way, she has heart. But she also has brain--a better brain than Hilburn's, much less Trakin's. Clearly, she gets Trakin's goat. His account of Ann and Eric's careers gets many facts and nuances wrong, but hell, it's only a blog. I was much more struck by this opinion: "Powers will be brought in for what she arguably does best--those periodic, pseudo-intellectual think pieces about being an underappreciated woman in the world of rock."
This is vile--vagina envy at its most blatant. (That "arguably"--feh.) What Powers does best is think about music Trakin is not only too old and grumpy but also too male and white to hear, and then express her thoughts in much simpler and clearer English than Trakin is capable of. Here's a writing tip: never brandish the term "pseudo-intellectual," which IDs you instantly as a non-intellectual or an anti-intellectual because real intellectuals never, ever deign to use it. It betrays your fear that someone else is smarter than you.
Hey, just occurred to me--could Trakin have coveted Hilburn's job? Nah. Hilburn was old--older than me, even. But he wasn't grumpy. Trakin isn't that stupid.
Jonah Weiner, my former colleague at the former Blender, offered a heart-rending example of the incipient schizophrenia of "poptimist" rock criticism with the lead of his July 27 essay on the death of music magazines for his new patrons at Slate, where I'd guesstimate he was paid as much as $130 more than us A-list freelancers used to make for a 135-word record review in Blender--and where the death of print is a cliche as sexy as the self-destruction of Britney Spears used to be back in Blender's heyday.
To the varied signs of the economic collapse we can now add a small but notable subspecies of urbanite: You'll recognize him (or her) by the ear buds burrowing into his head, the freebie SXSW tote bag slung over his shoulder, and the unintelligible mutterings about "melisma" and "twee-core" crossing his lips. If you see such a person out and about--likely wandering a neighborhood rich with coffee shops or, even better, two-for-one happy hours--remain calm but keep your distance. This is a music journalist, a type never famous for social skills, and he's in an especially bad mood these days.
Late last month, Vibe magazine announced that it was ceasing publication. The next day, word arrived that Spin was laying off a half-dozen staffers. In late March, Blender folded outright, and a few months before that, Rolling Stone trimmed its masthead. (Blender hired me out of college in 2002, and I worked there until its demise.) For this strange moment, at least, many onetime professional music nerds share a common experience with many onetime investment bankers: whiplash.
Second graf: the brutal facts you need to lay out to write any version of this piece, which I cited here in its radio and daily newspaper versions shortly after Vibe went under. Fine. First graf: bad college humor magazine version of a totally unempirical anti-rockcrit cliche I've been encountering since before Weiner was born. "Ear buds"--if everybody who wore ear buds was a rock critic, the music marketplace would be a much livelier thing, though I avoid them myself--the obsolescence of over-the-neck earphones is a pet peeve of mine. "Melisma"--a now justifiably familiar musicological term without which it is impossible to describe contemporary r&b like that of Beyonce, and if Weiner avoids it out of anti-intellectual pride, he's just indulging in his own version of hipper-than-thou, rock criticism's cardinal sin. "Twee-core"--well, I had to Google that one. 4720 hits, which ain't exactly a barrage these days. On the first page, the top one and one other linked to Weiner. Others referred to Los Campesinos! and the Pain of Being Pure at Heart, tuneful and funny alt bands whose out-front braininess might well offend a poptimist gangsta-sucker like Weiner. Not one was by a professional critic of the most minor standing.
Many editors--among those who think about such things at all, probably most--love this stupid cliche. They love to think rock critics are ridiculous. The reason is simple--they don't want to feel ignorant about pop music, although they are, or think about it, although they can't. Of course there are bad rock critics out there, but that's the last you'll hear from me on that subject in this post. Weiner doesn't qualify, although he seems to be working on it. Understandably, he's desperate for work. So he posits for such editors a version of "the reader," that unempirical figure via whom editors habitually personify their own prejudices: "Many readers who are otherwise passionate about culture have little time for music writing, irritated that it speaks in abstract, jargon-stuffed language about ostensibly mainstream entertainment." "Not me sir," Weiner declares. "I have muscles and everything. Just get me Access. And at least a buck a word, please please please."
I'd analyze Weiner's three-pronged analysis of why music magazines are in trouble if I thought he was saying anything that was both new and true, but I don't, and his lead pissed me off so the hell with it. The basic reason is too simple to justify a full if low-paid essay in Slate (which is at least paying something for professional thought). Magazine business? In trouble across the board due to loss of advertising revenues, partly an internet problem and partly a mega-economy one. Music business? In trouble across the board due to loss of sales, partly an internet problem and partly more complex than anyone can figure out. Double whammy. I feel for all my young colleagues, Weiner included. At least I had a real run.
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