Ryan Chavez was kind enough to drop a topic in my lap by posting this brief rant on the Hands Up board:
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/rocks/2010/08/how_was_your_saturday_we.php
This is starting to really piss me off. This person spent how long at the HPMA’s and couldn’t find one thing to constructively criticize? Where’s the balance here?
It seems like every time a music writer in Houston has the chance to become a critic, they lose their backbone and talk about the fucking weather. I’m tired of almost everything being a biased cheerleading piece that tiptoes around criticism. I’m sure laying in to the Arcade Fire is a breeze when you know you’re not going to run in to them at the bars you hang out at.
We have plenty of music writers and journalists here… I would love to see Houston find critics soon.
Ryan’s complaint raises a number of what I think are interesting points about music criticism and why local releases don’t receive what he might consider to be critical scrutiny.
1. Synergy. As a number of people pointed out, this particular piece is an article in the Houston Press about an event sponsored by the Houston Press. Similarly, Free Press Houston sponsors events, such as Summerfest, where a significant portion of the bands that they might have occasion to review are asked to perform. Indie Houston also does a lot of concerts. This does seem to create a conflict of interest, where these publications aren’t going to go out of their way, or even bother, to criticize bands with which they have a professional relationship.
On the other hand, Austin is home to ginormous music festival that hosts tons of local bands- and that festival is owned by the same individuals that own the Austin Chronicle, which is not known for refusing to spike local records. I worked there for a while, and I can tell you that negative reviews were by no means discouraged.
So what’s the difference? Well, for one thing, the Chronicle has, as far as I can tell, done a really good job of building walls between the editorial and festival sections of their business. While the Chronicle does cover the hell out of SXSW, it does so as a local paper, not as a sponsor of the event, even though it is one. Part of the reason this is possible is that SXSW is large enough to have its own organization- the paper plays no part at all in putting on the festival, and really any negative reviews it might run have no significant effect at all on the festival. By contrast, the small events in Houston are in part (HPMA) or wholly (Summerfest) organized/promoted by the staff of the paper. These events just aren’t big enough to have their own gravity outside the paper.
Which sort of brings me to my next point.
2. Maturity. The music scene in Houston is just getting to the point where publications/ people on the internet are interested in talking about it at all. Right now, the scene is at a point where the only people talking about it are the people who are excited enough about the prospect of being part of something that they’re willing to write a blog about it just because they think it’s neat. The scene just isn’t really mature enough for anyone to take an interest solely as a music geek and not as a participant in the scene, which is what’s necessary for tough, negative music criticism.
This isn’t to say that someone who’s involved can’t write reviews at all. I obviously do, so does Ramon, and, conspicuously, Jeremy Hart has been doing so for a very long time. But in all these cases, our reviews are informed by the fact that we feel really positively about what’s going on in Houston, because that’s why we’re writing about it in the first place. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, this gives us, I believe, a valuable ability to understand what local artists are doing, but on the flipside, it does tend to generate a lot of positive reviews. Jeremy, in particular, is almost relentlessly positive. And I don’t think this is a result of bias; it’s because he cares about music, understands musicians, feels connected to the local scene, and generally is a very positive and happy guy who tends to look for the good parts of things. There’s nothing wrong with that, but again, it tends to produce positive, though genuine, thoughts.
3. Talent. Remember that old saw “dancing about architecture?” Writing about music is hard. Writing a good review of a record you like is the second-easiest task of a music critic, and it’s still pretty hard. Now, it’s often been said (he asserted without support) that writing a bad review is easier than writing a good review. And that’s true- if you don’t care about being fair to the music. Slagging a record is the first-easiest task a music critic can give himself. And sure enough, critics in Houston are well-acquainted with this strategy. Sorry John. (By the way, Village Voice Galactic Empire, your archive search feature sucks! Still!!!) It’s pretty easy to slam a record without communicating any understanding of what the record is.
By contrast, understanding a record you don’t like, communicating that understanding, and constructing a convincing explanation for why you don’t like the record is one of the most difficult things a critic can try to do. Writing a negative review, or even a mixed review, that takes the music seriously and doesn’t slip into glibness, cliche or simple dismissal takes a lot of thought and skill- attributes that are rare in any kind of periodical writing, but especially in pop music criticism, which someone- Frank Zappa?- described as “people who can’t write talking about people who can’t sing for people who can’t read.”
I’m inclined to chalk this up less to an innate inferiority in music critics than to the fact that being a music critic is not a very well-compensated job, so people don’t take it very seriously. Which brings me to my next point:
4. Capital. Ben Murphy hilariously responded to Ryan’s post that music publications should “hire” him. If only.
I didn’t get paid a lot of money when I used to write for the print editions of the Press and the Chronicle, but I made about twice as much as I do writing for the web. I frequently spend more buying local records to review than I make from writing the reviews. But I guess I’m lucky, because I could be writing for a successful website like PopMatters, who graciously inform potential freelancers that:
Wow, publishing in a “reputable magazine.” Funny, I would consider paying your workers to be a necessary condition for having a “reputation.” They used to boast that their writers got interviewed on NPR or something, guess that doesn’t happen anymore.
When I read that for the first time, I pretty much gave up on ever writing for a living, because I figured if a website this size doesn’t have the money to pay writers, the money just isn’t there to be had.
But generally, readers get what the publications they read are able to pay for. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, they aren’t able to pay for much, so readers don’t get much. Eventually, as the Houston scene matures, it’s possible some quixotic soul may decide he wants to give an “honest” negative opinion of some stuff. But nobody will “hire” him. If they ever did, music critics today don’t have jobs. They have addictions.
And may I say, I really miss working at the Chronicle.
Good one.
I think record reviews serve several purposes, and that they should never be approached by each critic in the same way. Some of my least favorite reviews are the ones that seem more like earnest sales pitches than actual opinion. When I was given CDs I really didn’t enjoy for review I figured the worst thing I could do would be to turn in a boring review. I always tried to make my negative reviews at least be entertaining. Are they glib? They can be. Cliched? Probably. Do they avoid actually taking the music seriously? Often, yes. But to me, they are hopefully entertaining. There are also different ways to approach effectively reviewing something negatively.
>Some of my least favorite reviews are the ones that seem more like earnest sales pitches than actual opinion.
I think I mentioned this last week somewhere, but I never understood the purpose of a band bio until I realized how many “critics” just copy and paste from them.
>There are also different ways to approach effectively reviewing something negatively.
Certainly true. Speaking as a musician, a music fan and a music critic, I value writing that takes the music seriously more than I value writing that is entertaining. However, as a reader and a writer, I value criticism that is fun or enriching to read more than I value criticism that is musically scrupulous. It seems to me that Ryan is speaking more as the former than the latter, so that’s why I emphasized that aspect of it, but different values yield different results.
I’m not saying I don’t value writing that takes the music seriously, but certainly in the case of the DP record, I thought it was a comical record to begin with, plus I hated it, so what I said, while florid, is actually fairly accurate. Obviously me hating it is subjective, but then any review written by one guy is going to be. And, also, consider the place where the review was published — not exactly a hotbed for serious critical discourse. Not only that, but, I have never once bought a single CD based on a review I read in the Press. Not a one. And, that’s because I don’t give a shit about HP reviews. Sorry. They all suck if you ask me. Personally, I would have gladly written negative reviews for local bands. I have no fear whatsoever of doing that. Hell, I could write serious ones at that. There’s nothing sacred about a local scene. Most local bands are forgettable, just like most bands, period. The real question, for me, boils down to whether or not there is a place for critical review of music, and why. I honestly have debated myself on this very issue. If music critics are innately inferior, it follows that so are musicians. And honestly, if we want to leap towards the logical conclusion — the buck doesn’t stop.
I would like to add that I think Jeremy is real class act in Houston music and has been for many years. He is truly an asset to this town. And, I will add that I will gladly assume the mantle of glib and inferior as long as guys like him are doing this the way they do it.
I like this post a lot, it’s fun to revisit something I’ve basically walked away from, more or less.
By the way, D, what in god’s name put you on the path of that damn review anyway? I know you have better things to do than read garbage I wrote 5 years ago!
Don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the Press actually does not run record reviews anymore. So I guess someone there shared your opinion.
As far as how I got onto that article, Ramon and I had been talking about this topic and he mentioned the Abbatoir column. Unfortunately there’s no real way to access all of the Abbatoir entries (see my comment about the archive search), so I just blundered around the Press website looking for them. I actually had read that Dirty Projectors review when it ran and it stuck for some reason, I think because I later heard Rise Above and really liked it, so when I ran across that article I picked it as an example of dismissive negativity. Not that I think it’s all that bad; I’m yanking your chain to some extent.
It’s cool, I deserve it. and I already know what Ramon thinks about negative reviews, which is humorous considering how comfortable he is negatively reviewing anything he doesn’t like! He didn’t approve of the Abattoir column, and he has a point. It’s not constructive in any way. I mean, it’s not supposed to be, but then again — that sort of thing gets tedious very quickly.
If the Press shared my opinion, it’s a total accident. I didn’t know they quit running reviews as I never read the music column anymore. I don’t know how to defend this, but I think it’s a mistake.
Which DP record did Marshall write about? Because when I heard the stuff he posted from that album I was surprised at how much I liked it.
I wanted to respond to that thread on HUH, but didn’t. I’ll do it here instead.
1. As you say, true music criticism is difficult. It’s much easier to be a personality/wag/blogger and write that someone has posted a new song on MySpace blah blah blah. I would think that if there were fewer wags being upheld as true writers (seriously, I get so tired of “great article, man!” comments when one of the wags writes two sentences about a new song being posted on MySpace. That’s not an “article,” nor is it a “review”), we might notice more the people who are writing true criticism, like the Houston Chronicle’s Andrew Dansby.
2. Unless you’re a music obsessive with the time and the self-esteem to write without compensation, there’s little incentive to critique. That’s why it would be best if people supported the publications where it’s happening, where people are being paid to do it. I hate to tell people to support the Chronicle, for obvious reasons, but Andrew is a good friend of mine and he only has a job because people buy the paper. You should also support the websites where writers like Andrew and Danny are writing, or write letters to the editor in support of those publications/articles/websites. I don’t know how much longer good music criticism is going to be around with the newspaper/magazine(/news website) industry going the way that it is. If you cannot support financially, at least be vocal about supporting the people who are doing a good job, or watch those jobs go away. Then you’ll really be sad.
2a. You should also be vocal when someone is doing a terrible job. Oh, there’s so much more I’d like to say here, but I have a paper around here somewhere that I signed that says I probably shouldn’t say anything else.
3. As someone who handed over her 600-disc collection of local music to Andrew on her final day at the Chronicle, I can tell you this: most of those discs were bad. When you’re bombarded by lots of bad bands, it’s far more rewarding to write about the good ones. Why spend time writing about another terrible alt-rock disc when there are 10 other equally terrible alt-rock discs waiting for your attention? Do you write about all of them? Or do you say, “fuck it, I’m going to heap praise on Something Fierce,” instead?
4. Ah, but what if Something Fierce puts out a terrible album? Then it’s time to step up as a writer and say so, as long as you have context to back it up. I often held back on critiquing bands until I was familiar with their work. It didn’t seem fair to listen to one album, particularly a first album by a local band, and write about its downsides. I viewed my job as almost an historian. Compiling the history of a band in my head, comparing one performance to the next, getting a big-picture idea of where the band was headed, before feeling confident about the band’s terrible-ness.
I hate to use an example that will not resonate with this blog’s audience, but one of my final critiques of a local band was from this year’s Summer Fest. Tyagaraja released a new album that day and pulled out all the stops for his set. I liked the guy better when he was doing the Million Year Dance stuff (it felt far less pretentious, if you can believe it), but I’d still supported his solo career since he returned to the scene a couple of years ago because the guy can still sing. But that set at Summer Fest was obnoxious, long-winded, boring. The fire that the guy once had back when the Twitter denizens weren’t paying attention had been replaced with a false fire, something almost desperate. I said so in my write-up of the day. Suddenly I’m bombarded with these idiot hangers-on who told me I wouldn’t know good music if it bit me on the ass, completely ignoring the fact that I had supported this guy’s budding career for years and written positively about past endeavors. This always happened when I wrote something negative; I would be dismissed as a “hater” without the reader knowing anything about my past opinions. I guess what I’m saying is that aside from the little compensation of being a good music critic is that there’s often no reward for critiquing. You just get shouted at for offering an opinion. No one comes to your defense. You can defend yourself, but that looks desperate. It’s a suicide mission every time. Now, if the internet were an intelligent place where reasonable discussions could be had, you might see more criticism. Instead, people just leave hate turds on your work and you put your head down at your desk and think, “this is my job?”
(I realize this point comes off as whiny and pathetic. Whatever. You try doing it for years and see how your self-esteem holds up.)
5. Finally, the brodeo. You cannot be a plausible critic if you’re friends with the bands. Simple. Create some distance. Don’t put yourself on the guest list. Don’t take the free drinks. You can’t have a critical eye when your social life is wrapped up in the scene.
But, really, most importantly: be vocal and support the people who are doing a good job. Be very vocal.
I’m going back to my unemployment hole now.
Sara,
Thanks for the comments, and may I say that I’m sorry you lost your job at the Chronicle.
3. Very good point. It’s not very rewarding to write reviews of bad stuff just for the purpose of balance, unless your goal is review absolutely everything.
Regarding comments on reviews, one of the difficult things about being a critic, other than the work itself, is that you have to deal with people who don’t know what they’re talking about saying that YOU don’t know what you’re talking about. One or two of the bad reviews I wrote for the Chronicle got a large number of extremely negative comments. It helps if the band is good-humored about it, and it REALLY helps if you have a supportive editor and publisher, but as far as being a music critic goes, being able to ignore what people say about you is probably just as important as being able to separate yourself from personal bias.
Hey, Danny — thx for the kind words. Your check is in the mail… ;^)
I can see Ryan’s point, definitely, but I think he’s picked the wrong target in this particular case; I mean, if you’re a writer covering a music festival, you’re going to naturally shoot for the bands you *want* to see, right? Who goes to a festival/showcase/etc. aiming to catch all the bands they think suck? I know I’d rather see bands I’m at least interested in.
That said, I agree wholeheartedly with most of the above, although I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing, as Ryan seems to. As you point out in #2, now is pretty much the first time (since I’ve lived here, at least) where the local music press as a whole seems to give a damn about bands from Houston, rather than bands from elsewhere who happen to be playing in Houston. And to me, that’s a *great* thing, something that’s needed to happen for a long, long, long time. For many years, Houston’s media was nothing but a big middle finger to anybody who called this city home & made music here, and I think it’s a sign of Houston coming into its own as a “music city” that we’re finally taking some pride in our own.
I’ll admit that I *do* have to wrestle from time to time with how I feel about reviewing stuff by people I know and like personally; unless you’re a recluse, I think that’s just about bound to happen. Not everybody hits it out of the park every time, even if they’re your friends. I’ve been pretty fortunate, though, in that 95% of the releases I’ve gotten lately from people I know as people, and not just as email addresses on a screen, have been ridiculously good. (To me, at least.) There’ve been quite a few that surprised me, even, with how great they are. So I’ve been lucky in that respect.
And as somebody who writes about local stuff, I definitely will rip somebody a new one if I think it’s justified, even if I know ‘em. If I can make some kind of constructive, forward-looking statement about it, I’ll gladly do it. I tend to shy away from just flat-out destroying somebody and telling ‘em they suck, because I don’t really know that that helps anybody except maybe Music Consumer A, who reads the review and decides they don’t want to buy the album. Beyond that, as you point out above, shredding somebody’s work really *is* the easiest damn thing you can do as a writer. It takes a lot more thought to turn a full-on smackdown into a “I didn’t really care for this; here’s why, and here’s what could be better.”
The funny thing is that this whole argument is the reason why I stayed anonymous for a long damn time, especially in the early ’00s — I was afraid that if I got too close to the bands themselves, I wouldn’t be able to write about ‘em like I wanted to. (And then, of course, there’s the flipside, where writing negative reviews can garner the occasional death threat. Those are always fun.) Even now, if I go see a band that’s been bugging me to check ‘em out, I’ll purposely *avoid* talking to them before I see what they’re like, in case they suck…
And btw, as yet another e-zine run entirely on the kind, kind submissions of an all-volunteer staff, #4 made me want to hide my face in shame… ;^)
This is why I phrased this point as being about publications not being *able* to pay writers rather than as them not being *willing* to do so. I believe that if editors had their way, I’d still be writing for the Chronicle and these web reviews would pay $50 each. The money just isn’t there.
I await my fabulous riches.
For a musician, reading a well-constructed, objective review of your own work is invaluable. There are feature pieces and interviews for doing the cheerleading thing, and fun for the bands so they can say, “Look Maw, I’m on the cover of the Rollin’ Stone” (or the Houston Press, as the case may be). And writers can have fun with these as well, without resorting to just lazily publishing the band’s press kit. But record reviews, and show reviews, are REALLY important to the bands. I’m not sure to what extent they influence readers — I think positive reviews are a lot more likely to get people out to a show, than negative reviews are to keep people away from a show.
Maybe I am different from a lot of musicians, but to this day, my favorite review ever of my own band was also really negative — but it was truly inventive and funny as well.
I guess it shows how disconnected I am from things these days, but I wasn’t aware that HP wasn’t doing reviews any more. A backdrop to this whole discussion is that print media is facing a larger existential threat from the internet. That probably means fewer writers getting paid, less print space devoted to content and more to advertising. Surely that’s led to a decline in both the quality and quantity of coverage from conventional print media. Yet I’ve been pleased to see the online stuff has really grown and I have several sources to go to now. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the HP and Chronicle are irrelevant, but they are certainly less important than they used to be.
Kicking the dead horse a few more times here, but I feel odd remaining silent.
I’m new as a new writer at the HP, having written for Houstonist and contributed to Adam Newton’s Dryvetyme Onlyne. Suffice it to say, I’m really fucking sick of this topic.
That’s a bit of an odd statement, because back in February when this happened [headline by Chris Gray, by the way, not Brittanie], a lack of negativity amongst music writers in this town was a matter I offered up for conversation. I found myself arguing the “with an absence of bad, how can we tell what is good” line of logic.
Most writers disagreed with me – some, like Joe Mathlete, made claim that they didn’t see their role as critic so much as reporter. But the prevailing attitude was that the bad stuff is just something about which it is not worth writing.
I think this is akin to the “most local bands are largely forgettable” statement. The better acts rise to the surface, even if this is a big fish/small pond setting, and the forgettable ones are forgotten. At this point, I’m pretty much in agreement – and I’m not going to track down and purchase a release I don’t like just to give it a review spot on a blog for which I don’t get paid [note: htownrock.com will feature reviews soon if I can get off my ass and churn out a few]. But if it’s sent to me, I’ll give it an honest review, even if I don’t like it [see this one for Andrew Karnavas' Film Noir].
There’s no point in thinking that FPH is going to put together a festival and then believe that they’ll invite artists that they aren’t interested in playing or that they feel negatively about. That’s just stupid. Who in their right mind would assemble a show of things they don’t want to hear? That goes for anyone putting a bill together in Houston.
As for the HPMA showcase, Chris asked us to each check out acts that we hadn’t seen before, which is why I wound up at Kobain where the only band I knew was Buxton. Maybe the writer in question actually did manage to have a good time. Big deal.
So, enough kicking already. This topic should have died a long time ago. All I really care about is that the writers are honest, regardless of the band/writer relationship.
Marc,
Thanks for commenting and may I say that I’m sorry you lost your gig at Houstonist. I’m glad you’ve been able to get some work at the Press.
The thing about that earlier discussion is that any opinions about the function of music critics were mostly drowned out by opinions about how bands should be approaching their careers. So while I appreciate your exhaustion with writing about writing, I don’t think that there’s really been much of a discussion about what music writers say about music, which is an important contributory factor in our understanding of music, as opposed to what writers say about the music industry, which in my opinion is mostly noise. Although I can certainly respect the opinion that, as a topic tertiary to music itself, meta-criticism is not something on which we should be spending any time.
I’ve mostly lost interest in music criticism and I think its time has passed. In days of yore, reading a bunch of purple about music made sense, because, aside from the limited bandwidth of radio, criticism was the way you found out about new music. Unfortunately, you had to find out through the filters of an interloper. Now, if I want to find out whether I like something, it’s not hard for me to go to the source and listen to the actual music, rather than reading some clod’s written interpretation of it. So, for me, the question isn’t whether we need more negative criticism, but rather, whether we need criticism at all.
Well, you’re not going out and googling “rock band” and clicking on every myspace page you find, are you? My point is that almost everyone has a filter of some kind on their discovery process, whether that’s word of mouth or blogs or the radio or whatever, and I think music reviews still do serve as that filter for a significant number of people.
In addition, besides simply evaluating whether something is good or bad, criticism can also be a venue for analyzing how music works and what it means. I know that I almost always get more out of a music or film review after I experience the work for myself than I do before. Pitchfork had an essay on this a few years ago that I found interesting but can no longer locate.
I don’t have time to write a real reply to Marc and Sara’a comments right now, but I wanted to go ahead and take a second to thank them both for commenting. As recent casualties of the situation in #4, you guys have valuable perspectives on this topic, and I’m glad you shared your thoughts.