why (music) blogs suck

COMMENTS:

 Anonymous said: >the symbol almost replaces the music
Blogs and music are both information. You seem to be ranting about transformations of information. Just sayin'.  


 rmd said: yes, nothing wrong with transformations of information in general (as a physicist, transformations are my bread and butter), or symbols standing in for their referents for that matter.

but this seems to me to be a particularly insidious and powerful "transformation of information"; blogs seem rather apt at reinforcing the reflective impotence already pervasive in our late-capitalistic society. eg, link-blogging of culture as a stand-in for participating in culture has a very delibidinizing effect on me: curation is a seductive substitute for meaningful absorbtion/digestion/participation in discourse.

basically i am tired of blogs seeming like "just" a collective peanut gallery. or rather, i'm tired of all too many seeming like that. there are certainly some great peanut galleries out there; some have been incredibly vibrant and have rocked my world pretty hard. but i don't want this place to be one. i am looking to get something else out of the internet right now, and i think this place and the people behind it have the potential to do help me find that, whatever it is. naive, i know.  


 Bug said: I've read it over thirty times now and am still no closer to understanding what the penman actually meant by this.

"through the process of our appreciating them [, we] turn them into nothing."

What does this mean?
Seriously. It's not a rhetorical question.  


 tim said: Although I'm always afraid to sound like a technophile, I think that the interface of a podcast really cuts through the muck and blah blah blog kindof vibe most of the internet has.

Audio as an interface has a way more appealing track record of fufilling people than does the computer monitor.

Compared to written words (esp link-based boring snarkiness), speech and music are much more appealing abstractions (to me)...at least concerning the computer interface.

Plus you are not required to be physically at a computer. Big plus.

There's a competitive edge that seems to seep into bloggotry, which I really don't see as necessary for this site. The Club of Rome ('77, very punk year) suggested the idea of limits to growth, and were laughed at by the general public. I think there is no need to hold this place up to the standards of other internet communities, but rather to treat it as exactly what it is: a group of friends using the internet as a medium to do neat things at a distance when they can't do neat things in person. Not a replacement, but an evolving, temporary stand-in.  


 Alberto said: I don't think the problem is that we blog about music. Or that we read about it. This just become a problem if we do nothing but blog or read about it.

As long as we keep doing or listening to music, as long as we experience and feel the music, there's no way we -or anyone else- can kill music. But I get your point. Music is to be played, it was never meant to be written about or to read about it. And the same goes for almost any other artform.  


 rmd said: well, i think i'd disagree with "it was never meant to be written about or to read about"; for better or worse much music obviously is. but i agree with your sentiment: "if we do nothing but" is key. i was maybe just trying to say that i don't want this place to be another "nothing but" enabler.  


 og said: this comment is a little late, and directed at tim, but i like reading about things more than hearing about them (in general)... and am more likely to remember something that i've read than something that i've heard...

not saying there's anything inherently superior about the written word (vs podcasts)... for me, it's more fulfilling, whether on a sheet of paper or a computer screen (although paper is definitely preferred between the two)... i think this is not true for everyone and hasn't always been true for me...

still have only ever listened to about 3 podcasts in my life... i don't like listening to most voices after they've been processed by recording equipment...

don't mind hearing most professionals, though, which is good since i listen to a lot of radio when driving...  


 Musicnews said: Well instead of writing ybout music you could play and sing your ramblings and then post them.  


 rmd said: uh yeah thanks dude.

philip sherburne NAILING a point i was trying to make:

"...MySpace and MP3 blogs are essentially the yindie [sic] version of baseball cards--you internalize the first-order experience (the game, the players) by participating on this second-order level...."  


 irie said: An interesting point of view. The conductor Sergiu Celibicache even refused to record his stuff, because his opinion was that music only occurs and exists while individuals playing instruments at a
certain time together create music.I agree with alberto some posts above that you can't kill music. If music reaches you it gets alive again and again. It's like a painting from an artists that gets alive again when it's seen by somone who get's attracted to it in some way or another.  


 Frank Kogan said: bug said: I've read it over thirty times now and am still no closer to understanding what the penman actually meant by this.

"through the process of our appreciating them [, we] turn them into nothing."

What does this mean?
Seriously. It's not a rhetorical question.

Wish you'd made more of an effort to answer this, as it is an excellent question that I quite sympathize with. In fact, it's what I was trying to understand way back then, and still am.

Anyway, if you're still in touch with Bug (whoever you are, whoever he/she is), I'll try to give a rudimentary answer, just with an example.

Ashlee Simpson has recorded some of the greatest sung poetry in the history of sound recording. If you don't believe me, ponder the line "Sunday morning blues already about you" and ask yourself if you've ever written a song opening (or for that matter an opening line of an essay, letter, story, poem, or novel) as good as that one. But a condition under which the song was written was that it wasn't trying to come across as capital-P Poetry, was just a mundane attempt at communicating a mood and a condition, the language making no claim to specialness, was merely a few words among the thousands and thousands sent out every month in search of the consumer throat lump.* So the line's not saying, "pay special attention to me," for if it did call for such attention it would undercut its own expressiveness - the ache is an always ache, not a special ache.

But in saying it's poetry I'm calling special attention to it, potentially layering sheets and sheets of English-teacher-certified quality and piety between the readers' eyes and the actual line, so that "poetry" and "quality" are what you perceive and the ache of the week-in-and-week-out alwaysness can no longer reach to you through the praise.

So that's how a great line can be rendered precious and impotent by how we appreciate it. Calling it "poetry" feels almost like a lie, even though it is poetry. The word "poetry" has been contaminated by all the tedium and destruction inflicted in its name ("destruction" being the unspoken English-class message: "The assigned reading is poetry and you're not").

But not to call the line "poetry" also feels like a lie, not just for the obvious reason that the culture shouldn't be able to get away with sneering at the great stuff (Ashlee) and then consigning it to obscurity while lauding a whole bunch of lameness and mediocrity, but also because Shakespeare and Jeff Barry and Iggy have had moments as good as Ashlee and because they and "poetry" can at least temporarily be pried free from the tedium and destruction that accompany their presentation, if we somehow do it right.

Of course, when I wrote my piece, directed at the fading postpunk of 1987 (or the burgeoning indie-alternative music and fanzine network, if you want to look at it that way), "poetry" wasn't the word in play, wasn't the threat. As praise words, "punk" and "do-it-yourself" and "subversive" and "the untamed wildness of rock 'n' roll" etc. were far deadlier than "poetry" was, with "fun" potentially just as bad, and those were what I had in my sights when I was talking about how we transformed great stuff into nothingness via our gaze and praise.  


 Frank Kogan said: Yikes, I wrote the line wrong! It's:

"Sunday morning blues always about you."

I've turned into a damn bad copyeditor, at least on my own stuff.  


 Frank Kogan said: *I actually have no idea if Ashlee, John, and Kara had any idea how good they were being with lines like "Sunday morning blues always about you," or whether they considered it poetry or not. It's possible they did, though I wouldn't bet on it. But if they did they were wise enough not to try to present it as poetry.

But I'm not saying that words that do call special attention to themselves can't be good, and I hate pop being told to always know its place and not be "pretentious" and never to aspire to importance as much as I hate indie generally forcing itself to make a claim to specialness and daring. And Ashlee's ambitiousness was one of the things that exposed her to ridicule, at least from those taunters and wiseasses who listened enough to realize that she was ambitious.

Ashlee has had several moments of attempted "poetry," such as "Does the scent of regret ever haunt you?" which isn't completely bad, but is really really clumsy, and not nearly as good as that same song's non-"poetic" opening line, "What's she got that I don't have?"

But her being too humble and sensible are much greater threats to Ashlee than her being ambitious.  


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