Recently by Robert Christgau

During a year-end blogathon at Slate featuring Jody Rosen, Ann Powers, and myself, Ann linked to a London Times piece that attracted a lot of attention. It purports to provide statistical refutation of Chris Anderson's long tail theory and support the truism that 80 percent of a retailer's profit comes from 20 percent of his or her stock. The whole thing's worth reading, but here's the nut:

A new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, the not-for-profit royalty collection society, suggests that the niche market is not an untapped goldmine and that online sales success still relies on big hits. They found that, for the online singles market, 80 per cent of all revenue came from around 52,000 tracks. For albums, the figures were even more stark. Of the 1.23 million available, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year.

Since many critics find the long tail theory professionally comforting, you can see why they're batting this around. And before I go on it should be noted that what they're batting around is only a piece of, well, arts journalism. It's a report on a report on a report--the actual research will be published in book form, to what they authors hope will prove royalties-generating hoohah, later this year. Could be full of holes that are now invisible.

Let us assume, however, that it's not. One of the authors is an economist at Britain's largest performance rights organizations; I bet he has good data and am willing to assume he isn't lying about it. Instead, look at the figures in the excerpt again. Think about them not as percentages, but as raw numbers. The 80-20 rule is based on a brick-and-mortar model in which stocking, say, 100,000 different items is at best physically impractical. Yet what we're told is that 52,000 singles made not inconsiderable profits in the course of a year (might be a longer period of time, but it still doesn't much matter). In that same period, individuals purchased copies of 173,000 different albums. Percentagewise, not so impressive. As raw numbers, staggering--inconceivable two decades ago.

Pondering this, I called my friend and boss Tim Quirk at Rhapsody, a subscription music service that pays to reprint some of my reviews, and asked him for some numbers. He told me that Rhapsody has nearly 700,000 albums by some 260,000 artists in its library, and that, amazingly, some 90 per cent of them are accessed by somebody or other every month--maybe artists and their mothers, but somebody. Perhaps more significantly, 15,000 Rhapsody artists get what Quirk calls "solid play" every month, and another 35,000 or 40,000 significant play. Once again, look at the raw numbers. These aren't sales--just streams. But they are paid for--for $15 a month, Rhapsody subscribers get unlimited streaming privileges to the Rhapsody library. That means there are 50,000 musical artists with a significant fan base among Rhapsody subscribers.


Now another set of numbers--mine. My chief claim to fame as a critic is that since the Consumer Guide started in 1969 I've reviewed some 14,000 albums. That may not be a world record--staffers at the trades go through dozens a week--but it's a lot. Working 12 hours a day 365 days a year, it would take me two years to hear all of them again once. Yet those numbers pale against 50,000 artists with significant fan bases. Of course, I hear and reject maybe seven or eight times as many records (often for just three tracks or so) as I review--that's how I do my job. As a critic, I believe that many of those 50,000 artists aren't worth people's time--even allowing for the genres I have no use for (let's say that's 25,000 of them). I believe I can point people toward music they'll get more out of than the music they listen to. That's how it works for most critics. It's one reason we do what we do. That means I'm just as glad some of those 1.3 million albums don't sell piece one. I don't think they don't deserve to. But though I'm not entirely sanguine about the proliferation of choices, I'm glad the long tail is out there. Which it is.

Bewailing as we do here the shaky health of arts journalism, I was shocked to solicit an assignment from the online-only Barnes & Noble Review, which had a good rep with a few contributors I knew, only to be offered not just an assignment but a monthly column. I was so shocked that at first I didn't know what to say--since leaving the Voice in 2006, all my paid writing had been short, and I'd gotten out of the habit of conceiving essays.

Fortunately, there was this blog, where I do conceive essays of sorts, but execute them off-the-cuff because I can't afford the time through thought and through composition require. And in fact I'd been thinking about a post celebrating a book by NAJP Fellow Tom Moon: 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. The initial conception was pretty sketchy, just an eleborated birth announcement, but as I paged through the book the ideas started popping and I didn't know what I would do. B&N answered that question: for a longtime specialist in capsule record reviews to describe Moon's compendium would be a perfect way for said writer to introduce himself to a new audience.

So, herewith a link to the inaugural Rock & Roll & at its new home. And herewith some commentary from Tom:

as you know better than anyone, books like this rarely get reviewed, and when they do, it's usually in a single paragraph, a mention in a gift guide, etc.

 

this is the first real appraisal we've had. it means a ton.

Isn't it nice when professional writers can get paid to talk to each other in public? Being a critic and all, I couldn't resist doing my share and maybe slightly more than my share of criticizing--ideally, the shape would have been a little different, maybe 5-10 percent more laudatory. One thing I would have said that maybe someday when I have the ear time, I'm going to pull out the classical list I generated and stream some of that stuff. Thought the Martha Argerich, especially the Ravel, sounded pretty good.

Idolator just posted an IM interview with an online record reviewer who, toilers in other fields should note, make just about zero money (plus what sounds like a promo CD or two a day, if that) for his arts journalism. This is a valuable undertaking; I'd read a dozen more, and recommend it to anyone who cares enough about arts journalism to visit this site. But I'd like to register three  . . . call them observations, don't want to say something judgmental like quibbles.

1) I can see no reason why this interview in particular (maybe not others in what seems to be a series) needs to be anonymous (or as the header has it, anonimous). The observations about the editorial process are general and, I'd say, quite mild--milder than one would wish, since who's a relatively responsible editor and who isn't it valuable info (though were he naming names the interviewee's desire for anonymity would make sense).

2) Interviewer and interviewee agree without further comment that the desire to be on "the vanguard of something" is an important reason to do this work. I would say that the desire to tell people about good music they're unaware of is one important reason to do the work. But so is elucidating the known. Kneejerk vanguardism is an important reason so much online record reviewing sucks. There's brief mention somewhere in there of the pleasure and profitability of enjoying and presenting music in the communal space of the club. And then somewhere else both guys brag that their year-end top 10s include almost nothing in anybody else's top 10. There's an unexamined and probably altogether unconscious contradiction there

 3) Guy's a professional writer. Maybe he doesn't have the taste or a knack for the somewhat ridiculous jewelbox concision almost all print record reviewing now requires. But most of the editors I work with keep an eye out for fresh talent. The right person doesn't always have to make $20. Makes me curious. Makes me wish I had just a sample of Windupbird's non-IM prose.

My post about Lexy Benaim's Kings of Leon review got a comment from Joe Levy that alarmed me more than it probably should have. Whole thing's worth reading, but here's what got  me.

No one listens to music on a sound system anymore. This gross generalization (I have a million of 'em, including "no one watches television on TV anymore") is an overstatement meant to reflect a generational truth, which is that stereos are no longer in fashion. A five-speaker surround-sound rig for your TV (which is used to watch DVDs and play video games, not -- as I've previously stated -- to watch television; that's what Hulu and Torrent are for), that's worth having. But big speakers for music? No thanks.

Now, I have long been well aware that MP3s and their various players have privatized music listening, as Joe goes on to explain and my post mentioned as well. But for some reason--even though my own daughter stopped using her boombox years ago, inspiring us to remove it from our perpetually cluttered living room--I'd never made the leap to Joe's gross generalization. As a critic, I depend on earphones to expand my listening time--crappy little ones, though I now own a decent pair for travel. But beyond the occasional self-evident Dud, where the act of criticism is putting the name of an album in a list, I find it very difficult to write about a record without having heard it over my perfectly adequate but hardly high-end sound system. Partly the issue is sheer audio--depth and presence more than detail. But more important is that for me music doesn't fully become music until it approximates a social fact by existing outside of my head.

The thought that most young listeners feel no such need--that at best they hear music in an aural environment that consists of their desk (though admittedly computer speakers can be jacked up to boombox proportions, so music fills a dorm room or a bedroom)--so troubled me that I thought I should do some rudimentary research. So I sent out an email to three recent classes I'd taught and got responses back from 11 students in the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music--obviously an atypical sample, since every one of them takes courses in sound engineering--and seven nonspecialist liberal arts types, all but one interested in arts journalism, six from Princeton and one from NYU.

Only one of the REMU students didn't have what I would call a good sound system, and even that student used a boombox at home. Three or four hooked high-quality studio monitors up to their computers, and three or four went more high-end than that--higher than me. Those who used headphones used good headphones, and several avoided them altogether to protect their ears. I thought a few rather heartening comments from these sound-conscious twentysomethings were worth quoting.

A constant music listener said he's "been known to save new, unheard music till I get home to my nice speakers, instead of instantly listening on the lower-quality iPod and its little earbuds." Reported another student of his communal living situation: "Between three other suitemates and two friends next door there are four good sound systems, all of which get louder than what my parents have at home. . . . I'm the only musician, there's one Spanish major, one English, two economics, and one Shaman (Gallatin lets you make your own major)." Said the most serious audiophile in my tiny sample: "It's fun to be with a small group of friends and actually put on a record. Rather than for quality, there's something comforting in the process of selecting an item to pay attention to for the next forty minutes with no constant interruption in sight." Finally, one monitor user had a somewhat less encouraging observation: "Around my house where 9 other guys live, listening from the atrocious MacBook pro speakers is very common, then tiny standalone speakers with a subwoofer is the next most common."

In a way, though, the liberal arts responses were also encouraging. Three of the seven did the heaphone-computer speakers thing, but only the one who's least interested in music limited it to that--one indiephile allowed as she sometimes played CDs in her home boombox "for nostalgia reasons," and a recent graduate who used to have a classical music show on the Princeton radio station waxed nostalgia about his family's '92 Nissan Pathfinder "with tremendously large speakers in the back": "the sound was awesome." (Here let me interject that I love to play CDs in the car, which becomes, I guess, a space simultaneously internal and external--especially in the dark, with nothing else to think about and my wife offering comments beside me.) But the other four had the modern version of the hi-fi--a Bose in one case, but more often good speakers hooked up to the computers where most students now store their music. What this says about CD sales proper is another matter. But at least in this sample of younger listeners with some sort of commitment to the arts, complete atomization and miniaturization is not yet the rule.

Kings of Leon are four inbred-looking brothers and cousins from Tennessee whose 2003 debut album got US critics slightly excited. I was dubious; as so often happens, I thought crits were attracted to the novelty of a concept the band had yet to fill out with material--meaning tunes, lyrics, songs. By the time of their next album, which I thought was much better, crits here had moved on to the next concept, a shift facilitated by the band's accomplished stupid act. But in Europe, where in this century American bands have entered the market with an entire government's stupid act against them, they'd caught on--presumably as avatars of some stupidly conceived authenticity, I don't have the energy to investigate the details. Anyway, having concluded (provisionally) that their 2007 album was neither here nor there, I liked the 2008 one better and went casting about the web for orientation. Soon I determined that by Metacritic's stupid metric, they'd gotten 100 from the UK's Observer Music Monthly and a 38 and 20, respectively, from reigning US webmags Pitchfork and PopMatters. And there in the middle was a supposed 60 from this paper I used to read a lot called The Village Voice. And in that review, by a critic I'd never heard of named Lexy Benaim, I found the following sentence:

But "Closer," "Use Somebody," and "Be Somebody" could only work at giant festivals: Through headphones or computer speakers, Caleb's echoey vocals just don't ring credible.

Turns out Benaim is lead singer of the Harlem Shakes, a local band of minor repute and small but not altogether nonexistent formal similaity to Kings of Leon. No previous Voice appearances. So I'm not blaming him. Given the logistics of the current Voice review section, where lengths look to be 300-400 words, I'm not even blaming his editor, the estimable Rob Harvilla, though I prefer Rob's writing to his editing. What strikes me about the part of the sentence after the colon is that it's at once so momentous and so unexamined. In the review, it has a context--Benaim's thesis is that this KOL album, which he likes somewhat less than I do (though more than 60--who makes these asinine calculations?), is their "arena-rock" album. Fine, don't like arena-rock; I don't much like it much myself, though I try to imply why when that taste comes into play. But the idea that a piece of rock and roll has to signify through headphones or computer speakers, while it obviously reflects the way many on-the-go young people hear a lot of music these days (hope when he's home that Benaim can easily hook his laptop up to his home sound system, which I hope he owns), is clearly worthy of a little exploration. There really are a lot of gradations between iPod and convention center. Instead, the assumption is left hanging.

Review lengths, which have been declining approximately forever, are a big part of this. In a 300-400 word review, assumptions are inevitably left hanging. And perhaps somewhere in the trackless expanses of web-based musical rumination, somebody--conceivably somebody worth reading--has done some version of this job. But even in Pitchfork, where writers are allowed to go on, I find very little of this kind of historical and contextual self and subcultural examination. After all, the privatization of music consumption that the iPod-computer speaker model assumes--and though I am a proud and stinky old fart, let me note that I have worn headphones around my neck daily for nearly three decades now--doesn't exactly encourage the mindset such examination requires. When people's tastes and judgments are atomized, idiosyncratic by carefully cultivated choice, they're much less likely to think outside their own aesthetic responses. They won't look for historical patterns because at some level they think they're immune to them even as they pursue the cutting edge just over the horizon.

Wonder if Rob Harvilla could figure out a way to write a column about this. Guy gets 1200 words or something. These days, that's Being and Nothingness acreage.

One reason you're seeing more back-and-forth in the body of this blog is that the bloggers have concluded that the comments are a kind of limbo--that few who come here go so far as to click on them. So for starters this is to urge everyone with any interest in "Call for Papers," the plea for an overview of what I'll call the new prog that I posted a month ago, to take a look at the comments it elicited--five in all, every one first-rate. In addition I got personal email from Joe Levy and Jody Rosen, who alerted me to a Sgt. Pepper piece he wrote in 2007 that is now in my NYU syllabus. So is the Jon Pareles Mars Volta piece I mentioned.

There is a problem with these comments, however, that comes with the blogosphere. The commenters, insightful and intelligent chaps that they are, basically share my feelings about this stuff. None of them trust the pretensions of the songwriting they cite. The suggestion that (NAJP Fellow) Sasha Frere-Jones's unnecessarily notorious "A Paler Shade of White"  deals with this question is of course true. But like all of us--even though he very much admires Battles, Spoon, the Deftones, No Age, and no doubt more--Frere-Jones too doesn't trust it. That's why he wrote the piece. What I'm looking for is a ringing, systematic, polemical defense in which the perceived shortcomings of danceable rhythms, blues changes, and foursquare structures are articulated. Not just that they're old hat, but that their old hatness signifies in substantively undesirable ways. That way everybody understands more clearly what's at stake.

In that respect, the most interesting comment was also the shortest: the suggestion that I check out Scott Miller's year-by-year song roundups:  As leader of the Loud Family, always one of those bands I felt I should like more than I actually did, Miller was an early exemplar of some of the trends that interest me. The way he describes the songs he loves--some very indie, some anything but--is tremendously suggestive. If only he or some acolyte could spin a worldview around those observations we might really have something to go on.

So I'm sitting at my desk minding my business and in shoots this email from NAJP fellow Orla Swift of the Raleigh News & Obsever:

Hi all,

I seem to recall someone conducting what I think was an informal survey of how many papers accept review comps for performances and how many pay for their tickets. Did someone in this group research this?

If not, can you just let us know your paper's policy? In the freelance budget crunch, the proposal to cut costs by accepting critic comps always comes up. Our policy -- not sure if it's McClatchy's -- is to always pay for events where our seat would otherwise be available to someone in the general public.

Thanks,
Orla

And here's my response:

Dear Orla
I always take comps, and see nothing whatsoever unethical about it--by the other logic, I should pay for all my CDs too, which would make rock (and all other, TV excepted and art a little bit) criticism even more a province of the upper middle class than it already is. When I was at the Voice and couldn't get a comp, the Voice would sometimes cover it, but I would always clear it first.

I must say that as I think about the ramifications of this issue, I get more boggled. Do you pay for interview time, too? Mais non--nevair. Yet which is more valuable to an artist--an hour or a concert seat? And which creates more of a sense of felt obligation? Detaching yourself from that interviewer's debt is one of the hardest lessons of celebrity journalism (which almost all arts journalism is like it or not), and one of the many reasons my preference as a critic is not to interview except under exceptional circumstances.

I may just blog about this at ARTicles. I seem to have half a post written already.

RC

Let me expand on this a bit. First of all, I don't really know what "seat would otherwise be available to someone in the general public" means. Does it mean clubs are excluded from the rule, even though clubs "sell out" all the time (unless the artist's mother shows up, of course)? Does it mean only in cases where there are no dedicated comps at all, which in NYC (don't know about Raleigh) are just about nonexistent? The way it usually works here is that a label and/or publicist makes a pre-sale "buy" and then distributes the seats to insiders--if not journos, retailers or nieces and nephews. I guess when venues provide seats it's different--they can sell what they don't give away till the last minute (but almost always have a few spots squirreled away just in case, you know, the artist's mother shows up). The only cases I recall at the Voice are a few benefits, the Sex Pistols in Atlanta (paid three bucks, as I recall, and didn't have to stand in line, which was the big cost), and a must-see or two where I went to a scalper last-minute.

Editors are so weird about what does and doesn't constitute corruption. I can understand rules that you can't accept meals or travel (both of which I've done my share of). But what I told Orla is true. Personal relationships are far more likely to corrupt, compromise, or at least inflect coverage than free tickets and CDs (I can think of several excellent critics who I thought had this weakness). And like it or not, most good arts interviews simulate a personal relationship. Yet newspapers and magazines have such an exalted view of their own importance to the artist that they insist journalists would just as soon just be critics attain "access" by hook or by crook--AS LONG AS THEY DON'T PAY FOR IT. While for other journalists, usually but not always worse ones, the chance to hang out with creative/famous folks is a major attraction of the job--for which they pay in expressed affection. Dumb.

Lower down on the totem pole, meanwhile, are the tyros for whom freebies and access constitute a perk far more important than their cash pittance, if any. I've also heard quite a few tales of publicists who treated established moi with kid gloves insisting on a quid pro quo with newbies at college papers and radio, and being quite explicit when the resultant copy did not meet their professional standards of obeisance.

Then there are the publicists who won't give established moi bubkes because--I suspect--they doubt they'll get anything they want in return. But that's between me and my amour propre.

This post is in part a response to Steve's comment on last week's post on the hip-hop vote, which seemed too substantial to answer in another comment. I wrote that post  because I thought the press was missing the story, as it misses so much about hip-hop both inside and outside of arts journalism. Let me repeat that I believe Russell Simmons and the likes of T.I. deserve a credit they're still not getting for Obama's victory, as do hip-hop fans. But in hip-hop even more than in most things, hosannas generally have downsides, and in that connection the Proposition 8 defeat was painful to me as someone who's dissed hip-hop homophobia for decades. I'll never forget the way-back time (1991, I think) when I joined the passionate African-American anti-homophobe Greg Tate in a tag-team interview with Chuck D, probably the most politically perceptive name rapper of all time, chasing him around and around the block not just on gay rights but on whether there was homosexuality in Africa without getting a straight answer. It was so frustrating, so dispiriting.

I came in early on the Prop 8 story, which was just starting to attract attention as the Obama triumph wore off. There's been a lot more coverage and commentary since, much of which complicates if not obliterates my conclusion that the hip-hop vote contributed to Prop 8's passage (Steve notwithstanding, I never said or implied it was decisive). Most of this stuff I encountered via Andrew Sullivan--wish I could provide links, but my skills in that essential blogging practice are poor and I find Sullivan's back pages hard to negotiate. So let me try to sum up. As Steve indicates, religion correlates more positively with opposition to gay marriage than race does, and of course, the Mormon church proudly took the lead in that outrage. And as many have said--including myself in my earlier post, because it was clear from the first exit polling--age correlates as well. Voters under 30 strongly opposed Prop 8, while my over-65 contemporaries supported it. This means that, demographically speaking, opposition to gay marriage is literally dying off. Moreover, as Nate Silver's "Prop 8 Myths" made clear, the generational generalization holds for black and Latino voters as well as white voters--the differential was only three points.

For hip-hop homophobia, this is the most telling stat. Moreober, as several Sullivan posts made clear, the anti-Prop 8 forces did a poor job of outreach to the black and Latino communities--and as Sullivan also reported, with suitable chagrin, gay voters were one of the few demographics to offer more support proportionally to Kerry than to Obama. Hip-hop homophobia is all too real--far nastier and more explicit than in country music, whose oldest audience was the most prominent demo to favor Kerry over Obama. But it was more pervasive and virulent 15 years ago, and it doesn't seem to be taking with the youth sector of hip-hop's audience (yes, there are now many hip-hop fans over 30, just as there are rock and roll fans over 60).

Reassuring, right? So what should appear in my inbox but yet another missive from allhiphop.com, this one helping a Detroit rapper named Trick Trick publicize his new album by expanding on its anti-gay content, some of the worst I've encountered in contemporary hip-hop, with an anti-gay interview. (Oh hell, here's the link. Don't tell anybody, all right?) Got me to download the record, I'll say that--and discover to my own chagrin that, on first listen, Trick Trick seemed to have somewhat more talent than most of the local nonentities Eminem hangs out with. Eventually some gay rappers got their own two cents in at allhiphop--apparently some of Trick Trick's contumely is based on a projected (I think) "reality" show about gay and transgendered rappers. (Talk reality the way hip-hoppers do and it serves you right to get bitten in the ass.). He also got a lot of gay bloggers, right up to Perez Hilton, to spell his name right. So I'll just leave it right there.

The post-election analysis I've read--and I've read a lot of post-election analysis--has been oddly silent on a theme well-represented in my inbox November 4 and 5: two emails from allhiphop.com, two from JLM PR for Russell Simmons's Hip-Hop Action Network. In a JLM sentence lifted whole by several blogs and closely paraphrased by allhiphop:

Exit polls across the country indicate that the largest constituency contributing to Senator Obama's victory are 18-35 year olds who are brand loyal to Hip-Hop culture.

Stop wincing at the syntax and the shameless marketing-speak that pervades so much hip-hop discourse and think about it. Not all of the President-elect's six-million-and-counting plurality can be attributed to "Hip-Hop culture." But if you'll permit me to approximate the figures from memory (most of them absorbed at fivethirtyeight.com), the youth vote was up one percent and went twenty points more Democratic, the black vote was up two percent and went five points more Democratic. Once it is granted that the hip-hop audience is far from exclusively black, hip-hop activists can in fact claim a major role in Obama's victory.

As with Rock the Vote, hip-hop activism goes back some, to the early years of Bush's reign, and hip-hop journalists have been a big part of it. Source co-founder James Bernard was executive coordinator of the Project Forum on Race and Democracy for the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2003, retired journo William Upski Wimsatt founded the League of Pissed-Off Voters (now, sadly, the League of Young Voters). Elizabeth Mendez Berry and Jeff Chang , two of the best writers hip-hop has produced, were working hard with and on the Hip-Hop Action Network in 2004. But Obama obviously has more traction with this cohort than John Kerry, and in 2008 very few its members followed the lead of hip-hop activist Rosa Clemente, who ran for veep on the Green ticket. Remember Bruce and R.E.M. doing their Kerry tour in 2004? The oddly less publicized equivalent was, to quote JLM, the "18-city RESPECT MY VOTE! Get Out The Vote Bus Tour," in which such headliners as recently released felon T.I. and street dealer turned supermogul Jay-Z hit 18 cities urging fans to register and vote--ending up in Toledo and then Detroit on November 4. On November 3, unrepentant crack dealer (he says) and platinum hip-hopper (that's documented) Young Jeezy, who had already spearheaded a registration drive in Atlanta, took advantage of Georgia's early-voting option by standing in line for two hours in Adamsville, then went and phonebanked for Obama. Anyone who thinks that means he's reformed should check out two tracks on his current album, aptly entitled The Recession: "What They Want," about the marketplace, and "Mr. President," about what Obama can and can't do.

The part of me that's permanently fed up with genteel culture, which is far from exclusively white, is tickled by all of this. I'm a known opponent of the gangsta myth that the street and the hood are defined by gat-wielding dope peddlers, much less that they're hard-working romantic heroes of unlimited sexual capacities and respect for their mamas. But because I listen to a good deal of the relevant music, I know that there's content and truth in those myths--as for that matter does Barack Obama, on record as a sometime admirer of Jay-Z. How the gangsta rap world responds to a black president with a moral vision that in the end is rather more severe than that of, for instance, George W. Bush, should prove a fascinating ongoing story not always as encouraging as you might hope from  this superb piece of reporting by published online at Vibe by Jeff Chang. But in the meantime, genteel culturati should try to absorb the fact that gangsta almost certainly played a larger role in getting a genuine intellectual elected president than they did.

Hip-hop partisans, however, have a postscript to consider. Not every election result in November 4 was humane, and for all the congressional stuff that went the wrong way (begone, Jean Schmidt and Michele Bachmann), the one that hurt me the most was the success of Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage in California. This defeat for tolerance has a racial component. Farhad Manjoo did a pretty good piece about it at Slate, and here's Andrew Sullivan's initial post:

Prop 8 Exit Polls

They show a narrow victory for marriage equality: 52 to 48. Every ethnic group supported marriage equality, except African-Americans, who voted overwhelmingly against extending to gay people the civil rights once denied them: a staggering 69 - 31 percent African-American margin against marriage equality. That's worse than even I expected. Whites, on the other hand, clearly rejected discrimination: 55 to 45 percent. Latinos were evenly split. But what matters, of course, is the margin of all the votes. It's still an exit poll, and those polls sometimes under-estimate anti-gay sentiment. So no assurance. But some provisional hope. If marriage endures in California, this debate is over - in America and the world.

Oh, and there was no gender gap. And a massive generation gap: the under-30s voted for marriage equality by 67 to 31 percent. The over 65s voted for discrimination by 57 - 43 percent

Insofar as the hip-hop audience is generational, you can say that this doesn't look so bad. But the raw fact is that hip-hop's record on homosexuality is abysmal. It is hip-hop that has taken a prejudice present in African-American culture and jacked it into some kind of cross between an ideology and a tic--the use of the word "faggot" as an insult in high school (and younger) culture, which was damn near universal a few years ago though I get the sense it's fallen off slightly the way slang does, was the direct result of the free use of that word in hip-hop (cf. "gangsta" and of course "nigga," and maybe the falloff can be attributed to a parallel falloff in the music). The hip-hop activists I've named combat this, and lately a few name hip-hoppers--Kanye West comes to mind--have explicitly dissented. But it hasn't been enough.

This kind of thing is why so many culturati prefer to remain genteel.

Predictably as the day of reckoning draws ever nigher, the most interesting arts story I've seen all week was in the front of the book--Jim Dwyer's About New York column in the New York Times of Saturday, October 25. Headline: "Digital-Age Voters In Electoral Limbo." Its subject, of special interest to me because I believe voter suppression is the cornerstone of the Republican strategy for  November 4, was yet another big-time problem with new-voter registration, this time involving Rock the Vote, a music-biz-rooted organization dating back to Bush I which reports that over two-and-half million prospective voters have downloaded registration form from its website in 2008. I think Rock the Vote, which sets up booths at festivals and concerts as well as running many celebrity ads, is a great idea. But I've never been able to rid my mind of a stat I encountered in an upstate paper a decade or so ago, which examined dozens of demographics and concluded that no American subgroup was less likely to vote than regular clubgoers. So when Newsweek's Jonathan Alter formulated a McCain-wins scenario in which collegians nationwide reported that, actually, they hadn't voted for Barack because they were "too busy," I shuddered. And after reading Dwyer's report that 100,000 Rock the Vote forms printed out with the wrong address, I groaned in agony.

That said, I found Dwyer's story slightly suspect. I've been a fan ever since he did the subway column in the much-missed New York Newsday. But like so many front-of-the-bookers, Dwyer, born 1957, looks down on flibbertigibbets. Something about MTV, Xbox, and the always-good-for-a-snark P. Diddy putting "a high gloss on the dreary nuts and bolts of filling out forms" makes him itch--just as something about the professionally hard-nosed reporting on the pop music world makes me itch. I couldn't escape the feeling that Dwyer was enjoying himself too much when he revealed that Rock the Vote had instructed young voter in New York State to send the forms to Albany rather than to their county boards of elections, as the law apparently requires. Still, Rock the Vote spokesperson Stephanie Young certainly stepped in it when Dwyer pressed her about how Rock the Vote planned to rectify the error: "Once they register with Rock the Vote, they print it out and send it themselves. We're out of it after that. Then it's on the State Board of Elections." Not a flattering printbite.

When I called Young myself, however, I found there was more to the story. Dismayed by both Dwyer's story and the problems he'd brought to light, which had barely surfaced before, Rock the Vote has put out an indignant response. And Dwyer had filed a somewhat more sympathetic follow-up piece--online-only, wouldn't y'know. Headline: an unflashy "`Rock the Vote' Tracks Registration Problems." Let me boil it all down.

First of all, Rock the Vote is now being somewhat more proactive than Young implied about these problems, which extend beyond New York state. It's doing investigations, sending out mass emails, and advising would-be voters how to rectify bureaucratic snafus (as Dwyer's second piece also did, and good for him). What's clear from both follow-ups is that some of this mess is on local election officials, who in New York as in most states are famously hidebound and incompetent. But there's more back story than that. Rock the Vote claims that it had the forms sent to state governments on the explicit instruction of the federal Elections Assistance Commission. Or maybe it was just permission--it's obviously easier to set up online forms for 50 states then for how many thousands of individual counties. Maybe it's making excuses. But I have a more paranoid hunch.

The reason I fear voter suppression is that I'm convinced that one fundamental purpose of the federal election law of 2002, Orwellianly entitled the Help America Vote Act, is to stop Americans from voting--to set up roadblocks in the name of preventing a fraud that almost never happens at the polling place (however much it does or doesn't happen at the registration level, the key to the overblown and poorly reported Acorn story). I wonder whether whoever answered Rock the Vote's questions at the federal Elections Assistance Commission was guilty of incompetence, indifference, or malfeasance. I wonder whether he or she deliberately misled Rock the Vote, secure in the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of young people wouldn't vote because their forms would get hopelessly delayed in the shuffle. There's one for the front of the book. No finder's fee.

The day of reckoning does approach. I myself don't believe the election will be anywhere near as one-sided as the front-of-the-book guys tell us, and pray that just makes me a hysterical arty-farty. Nevertheless, I'm spending November 1 through 3 with Obama's Alexandria, Virginia, office, then phonebanking in NYC on Election Day. I urge everyone reading this to put hours aside in the coming days and work for the candidate of my choice.