Archive for May 18, 2008

The good old days

{ May 18, 2008 @ 5:52 am } · { Responses to Media Articles }
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“It’s not my idea, I heard it somewhere years ago.”
This quote has two-fold significance for this post. Firstly, the quote is my comment on the main point of this post. The premise of this post is not my idea, and if inclined I could probably find some academic articles that have made this point before me (see my last post about the value of academic writing about music: http://millie3120.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/music-journalism/). Perhaps that’s even where I heard it, but I can’t be sure because I can’t remember.

The second reason this quote is significant is because it could probably be truthfully said by many musicians and songwriters today, about their musical style and sound. But of course, contemporary artists wouldn’t say that would they? They wouldn’t admit to making something unoriginal. Instead, they’d list their ‘influences’, and claim to have somehow artistically appropriated the sounds of their favourite artists, while adding (they claim) their own spin on an old idea, to make something (allegedly) new. This was going to be the central idea to this rant, but then I thought about how such artists even get to a stage where we care who their influences are, and where we read about who their influences are. This lead me back to the music press.

So this is the new central idea to this rant (which is of course actually an old idea that I heard somewhere, as I proclaimed at the start): music journalism is obsessed with nostalgia.
It’s not entirely the artists’ fault if they sound like their favourite bands from thirty years ago, but with better instruments and more computer-aided mixing and engineering. For this post, anyway, I’m going to blame the music press.

An example I found is from the January 27th, 2007 issue of New Musical Express. The article was titled: ‘1977 – the year punk broke’, and was justified by the fact that it had been thirty years since 1977, which the article claimed was “the single most turbulent year in rock history”. The bulk of the article is a month-by-month recount of events in the history of punk, with particular attention to The Clash and The Sex Pistols.  The tone is generally one of celebration of the anarchy in the UK caused by both of these bands, and the way in which they flouted the rules of the time in many ways, the least of which was the sound of their music.

A few years before this, on the US front, The Ramones were bursting onto the scene with a similar attitude towards the music of the time: “We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard in 1974, there was nothing to listen to anymore. Everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin, tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos. We missed music like it used to be before it got ‘progressive’. We missed hearing songs that were short and exciting and… good! We wanted to bring back the energy to rock & roll.” (Joey Ramone, quoted by Billy Altman 1988).

My point is that while it’s great that these bands were rebelling by creating a new sound thirty years ago, the music press seems to celebrate such innovation so much that thirty years later, everything is, as Joey Ramone might put it, tenth-generation AC/DC. This kind of music journalism suppresses innovation by not allowing for the possibility of truly new sounds to be celebrated.

 Heath J

Music journalism

{ May 18, 2008 @ 5:03 am } · { Academic Research, Personal Opinion }
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We can’t have fun all the time. Sometimes we have to talk about what this blog is actually supposed to be about. So what’s so wrong with contemporary music journalism? What are the gaps which we are trying to fill?

One of the biggest gaps in contemporary music journalism is the lack of regard for academic studies, research and theories. When was the last time you saw a reference to Simon Frith or Shane Homan in Rolling Stone magazine? Even better – when was the last time you saw a reference to a godfather of popular music theory like Theodor Adorno or Pierre Bourdieu? That’s right – you’ve never seen these people mentioned in music journalism, despite their well considered, structured arguments, innovative perspectives and evidence through empirical research. Instead, what you have seen is the stoned-out-of-their-minds, ill-considered, rants written by music journalists who listened to an album the night before their review was due on the editor’s desk and have only heard of the artist they’re writing about because they read about them on Wikipedia. I agree that this is a far-out stereotype of music critics, but my argument is that the reasons people have for not paying attention to academic music writers are also based on inaccurate stereotypes.  So what are these reasons?
Well for starters I think that it’s very likely that many musicians and music fans agree with Elvis Costello’s assertion that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. That is, they might think that music is too personal and fluid to be done justice by academic analysis. The same people might think that analysing music ruins the experience of listening, by making the listener over-think their enjoyment so much that they forget to actually listen and have fun.

I’ll admit that I had this perspective, but through reading academic articles on various aspects of music, I’ve come to believe that academics aren’t trying to ruin music for us. Indeed, most of them are music fans as well, and they may even be more enthusiastic music fans than those of us who don’t bother to listen closely enough to music to analyse its meaning and the reasons behind our enjoyment of it.

Without academic research, all we have are sketchy observations and unfounded comments by friends about the discourses of patriotism in Bruce Springsteen, for example. But if we’re interested enough to read Anne Cranny-Francis’ analysis of the song and video of ‘Born in the USA’ (1994: 38), then we’ll see that our friend’s comment is not as crazy as it seems, but nor is our friend as smart as we might think, because it’s not the first time something like that has been thought or said.

However, as introspective music fans, we might like to think that we are the only person who has considered intertextuality in our favourite artist’s songs, and this leads to my next point: music journalism doesn’t cover academic research because music fans do not want to second-guess their interests and habits relating to music. For most, music is an unintellectual past time which serves as a pleasant distraction from their working lives. This is exactly how Adorno saw popular music (1992). For this reason, it doesn’t serve the purpose of music, especially popular music, to analyse its effect. It is enough for most people to accept that it simply is enjoyable, without questioning why. With this use of music in mind, reading about music is also generally more enjoyable if it’s non-confronting, and just tells us what we should be listening to this week.

Furthermore, from the industry’s perspective (which the music press arguably exists to serve), making fans question their listening habits could be dangerous; they might stop buying records! Even worse – they might stop buying popular records, which would mean they’d stop needing to buy the magazines to tell them which records to buy.

So in conclusion, it isn’t in the interests of the music press to channel readers’ attention to academic writing on music, because such a move would be self-destructive.

References:

Anne Cranny-Francis, Ch 3: ‘Pop/ular Music’ in Popular Culture, Deakin University Press, Geelong, 1994, pp 33-50.

Theodor Adorno, from ‘On Popular Music’ (1941) in Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan (eds.) A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, Allen and Unwin, North Sydney, 1992, pp 211-223.

Heath J