The Tris McCall Report
Critics Poll 2007 -- Postscript
Tight corners.
The role of the critic in the age of hyperbole
Suppose I wrote a review of your next recording that went like this:
"The new Dogslayer album is a standard set of pop songs of average quality, played competently but without distinction by the band. The guitarist and drummer zigzag between performances that are capable and others that feel merely adequate. The singer hits his marks, but imparts little personality to the songs. The lyrics are neither embarrassing nor illuminating. Fans of the genre's conventions will enjoy their effective discharge here. The set is pleasant but forgettable, and will leave no lasting mark on the consciousness of its listeners."
You wouldn't much like that, huh? You might even hunt me down; beat me profusely about the mouth and cheeks. I wouldn't blame you: a review like that, particularly if it was reprinted on a high-profile music website, could really harm a band's career.
But wait a second: when was the last time you saw a review like that on a high-profile music website? I'm not talking about a bad review, now; those come with their own special cache. I'm talking about a review that says that a particular record is average. Not a disaster, not an affront to the senses, not even mediocre; but average.
Thousands of CDs were released last year. I played on some of them, you played on some of them, they were duplicated or replicated, handed to a publicist or a go-fer, slipped into a padded envelope, and sent out to critics to evaluate. Almost all of those CDs were average. This is indisputable; it's a mathematical fact. This is no indie rock Lake Wobegon we inhabit here. On any qualitative scale, there's a midpoint, and most everything is going to coalesce around that midpoint.
Artists are imitative people. For every musical visionary, there are a hundred other rockers who aspire to put out competent, wholly unremarkable reiterations of stuff they've already heard before. The entire musical-recommendation algorithm system is based on these imitative rockers: they are the datapoints in the web of association that's supposed to anticipate consumer demand. If the Dogslayer album sounds disturbingly like Spoon, well, great!, Spoon has moved some albums; we'll put a sticker on the CD that says RIYL: Spoon. Nobody who has logged time in the clubs will dispute that most bands play straight to audience expectation by presenting familiar sounds in familiar packages. They're chasing success, sure, but they're doing so by mimicking other artists who have resonated for listeners, not by breaking any new ground. In a very real sense, these bands are trying to be average.
This is perfectly fine. Entertainment does not, usually, require extraordinary measures; in fact, it's often the case that extraordinary measures get in the way of entertainment. I find pop music immensely entertaining, which means that I'm probably going to find an average pop record amusing. I don't need every album I play to be The Hissing Of Summer Lawns or even Prinzhorn Dance School. That would, frankly, drive me insane. I'm happy to spin a little Dogslayer now and then.
The trouble arrives when I am asked to assess the Dogslayer album. That's because it is, like a good ninety per cent of what the critic gets, an average album, a nice little in-genre exercise. The members of the band are probably NYC rock lifers who never gave critical response a second thought; they're concerned with plugging in, cranking it up, and moving the crowd. But then they got popular and graduated to the Bowery stage -- and with that came a manager, and an agent, and, inevitably, a publicist. The publicist's job is, among other things, to attach to the album something that reads a little like this:
"You have in your hands the stunning debut release from the multi-talented, multi-ethnic, multi-orgasmic DOGSLAYER -- the band that shook Manhattan. Chances are, you've heard the buzz about their sold-out performance with Horsefeeler at Bowery Ballroom, a show that Derek Stark of studioface.com called "heavy as a hammer, light as a rock and twice as solid". But even if you were one of the lucky few to get a ticket, nothing will prepare you for the sheer musical force of Bitterteeth. Recorded by Derek "Brick" Spank (first cousin to Carlos D!) on the very same mixing board that Joy Division used to make the B-side to "Transmission", the album envelops listeners in gossamer guitar, shimmering synthesizer, heavenly glockenspiel, delicately-struck drums, and the caramel voice of the incomparable Derek Bok III. Not since the heyday of SPOON has a band so effortlessly melded pop and rock to create sonic pop rocks. Shake it up, and feel your head explode..."
And so on. The first thing that the responsible critic does when receiving her copy of Bitterteeth in the mail is chuck this propaganda in the trash can. But even good critics aren't responsible every day; some days, they'll be tired and cranky and looking to make rent, and they'll be cursing the day they agreed to take on another review. Just a quick peek at the PR materials couldn't hurt, right? Two beers later, and Carlos D and the Joy Division mixing board have found their way into the piece; one whisky, and the Bowery show has snuck in there too, as has the heavenly glockenspiel, the pull-quote from the hipster website that the writer has never heard of before, and copious comparisons to Britt Daniel.
At this point, it is the responsibility of the editor to say "hold it, now, you're not evaluating, you're rehashing press-release copy." You're chuckling bitterly now, but magazine editors used to do this; they didn't always have the best taste, but they were decent watchdogs against rampant grade inflation. They may have been cokeheads and assholes, but they had some concept of journalistic integrity. Go back and look at Dave Marsh's record-rating guides for Rolling Stone magazine. Sure, he went over the top for some personal favorites (all critics should), but he was always willing to give the average record an average review. That didn't mean he hated it -- it meant it was willfully, purposefully unremarkable, an anodyne shard of entertainment, and he was calling a spade a spade.
Since then, the landscape has changed. Well, that's an understatement: what I mean to say is that the landscape has been torn asunder by earthquakes registering 8.0 plus on the Richter scale. Web traffic is increasingly driven by MP3 leaks, which means that any upstart capable of cultivating a tight relationship with an indie label's marketing department can set themselves up as a 'net rock writer. Many popular music sites are now in so tight with the big "indie" agents and publicists that it's impossible to tell where the promotion ends and the journalism begins. Sometimes the journalism doesn't begin: the site becomes a repository for commercial messages and label sales pitches.
Hyperbole tends to feed on itself. More disturbingly, it tends to encourage cliche repetition, and chase out oddball dissent. In 2008, the Internet has begun to look like one gigantic PR newswire. Almost all of the reviews I read on the Internet these days are unadulterated hype. Sometimes it's hype rewritten by really good writers; they'll figure out a way to re-word the main points of the press release in the graceful language they learned in their seminars at the 92nd Street YMCA. More frequently, it'll be hype rewritten by okay writers. They'll try to disguise what they're doing, but the dry bones always poke through the carcass.
In a climate like this, Dogslayer accumulates empty rave after empty rave. The band picks up so many interchangeable rave reviews, in fact, that they begin to think that they're entitled to all the superlatives that their (paid) publicist has picked out for them. Without really noticing it, the members of Dogslayer have come to believe that the job of the critic is to ditto the positive notice they've already gotten. So many of the reviews say the exact same thing, cite the exact same influences -- this must be how it works, right? Do you see what's happened? The critic can no longer praise Dogslayer. All she can do is repeat what's already been said or insult the band. Any deviation from the script written by the publicist will be taken as a weird affront to the myth that the label is building around the group. Should she trash the one-sheet and attempt to evaluate the record fairly, free from hyperbole, her review will be received as a pan. More than that, it'll be received as an unwelcome deviation from consensus, a mar on the Metacritic score, bitter, contrarian.
Our hypothetical independent critic doesn't like hurting people's feelings, and despite my nasty rep, neither do I. I hate it that it's come to this -- that bands and audiences now believe that the role of the critic is to be the publicist's validator and attache. As music marketers have become increasingly precious guardians of the conventional wisdom surrounding their wards, bands have rarely had to cope with reviews that call them what most of them truly are: average.
Part of the problem is that as the money has flowed in, careerism has overwhelmed the so-called "indie" rock. Many prominent indie rockers are in their thirties: they're not looking to rule the world with their music, they're looking to make a respectable middle income. There is no shame in this, but it again confounds the critic. When you're twenty years old, you tend to be surrounded by other twenty year olds with crazy dreams. They're living in warehouses and eating rats, all so they can rock; it's horrible, sure, but they're young and healthy. You can poke holes in their pretensions, and they're resilient enough to bounce back. Thirty year old musicians are different. They've got families to feed, bills to pay, and interpersonal responsibilities to attend to. That lukewarm review -- that refusal to play minor-league ball with the starmaking apparatus designed by the publicist -- is potentially taking the food out of the mouth of the lead guitar player's newborn kid. That doesn't feel quite so nifty to do. I don't relish the prospect of undercutting the moneymaker-myths that musicians in their thirties rely on to get by. They're dumb, but I understand why they're essential.
The critic enters 2008 on the ropes. She no longer feels welcome to speak her mind about "indie" bands; every time she does, she bruises and bewilders some aging rocker who is expecting not wild worship, but a boost to his career prospects. In the big musical clearing-houses that drive mass opinion, she's been replaced by the marketer and the associative algorithm -- and nobody really minds. PR copy takes the place of evaluative reviews, and that's cool with readers. As databases continue to be refined and patterns of music consumption are further studied and tracked, it'll be the algorithms that make recommendations, and the uploaded opinions of millions of listeners who define conventional wisdom. The critic is getting squeezed out.
What the critic needs to do is untether herself from the expectation that she's there to make a recommendation to buyers. This will be hard to do -- but it must be done if the critic is to survive. I once wrote in the Christmas Abstract that in America, every list is a shopping list. The critic needs to come up with a different kind of list: one that reflects her idiosyncratic and personal tastes. When the critic echoes conventional wisdom and the recommendations of the algorithm and the publicist, she needs to step back and ask herself what part of her singular God-given mind has gotten gummed up in the machine. Then she needs to about-face and march off in the other direction, and stake out narrative territory based on her own experiences, her own personality, her own wild whims.
* * * * * * * * * *
A few of you have written in to ask if I'm feeling angry this year. Gee, you think? I have been startled by human conformity before, and I've mainly reacted to it by retreating to my little weird world. But so many of our personal liberties have lately been ceded to the executive branch of the government that I've begun to get seriously uncomfortable in my own nation. I may be a loudmouth, but I'm not a barricade-jumper; I only get involved in the political bullshit if I think it's become life or death. Friends, I really think it's life or death.
I don't enjoy myself when I get this way. As my role-model Jeremiah could have told you back in 586 BC, it's not a fetching mode for anybody to be in. I'm tremendously grateful that you've read this far; we're pals, but you certainly don't owe it to me. For me, the Critics Poll recap is an experiment in real-time writing -- for five days, I just let it roll, straight off the cuff, and upload these pages once I'm finished thinking aloud. I never know how it's going to turn out, or what dormant obsessions of mine I'm going to arouse; I don't count your votes until the Sunday following the deadline, and I don't start writing until I'm done tallying them up. And then I don't stop writing
until I reach
the end
The album list
The singles list
The miscellany
Prior epilogues online:
That which does not e-mail me only makes me stronger. I need you to hurry up now, 'cuz I can't wait much longer.
