One of the reasons I started this here blog was my dissatisfaction with the existing dance music media. Possibly the most annoying music critic trend in general (and one that has really gotten on my nerves more and more from reading the critic-heavy I Love Music forum [warning, only go there if you want to become so annoyed that you begin ripping your hair out]) is that of the “narrative”. To be able to write a story in real time with musicians and “scenes” as the actors and settings seems to be the ultimate goal of these critics. I guess it gives them a chance to one-up on the people who came to fame with their retroactive narratives (yes, I’m talking about the obsession with Simon Reynolds that seemingly all dance music writers have) on different “scenes”.
Whatever the reasoning for this method of music writing, it fails on all real levels. Reality thankfully doesn’t follow a narrative, and to try to assign one is pretty worthless most of the time. The addition of narrative to the portrayal of Notorious B.I.G. made the film Notorious painful to watch. Life is much more like Dazed and Confused in structure!
It was Philip Sherburne’s blog post from the other day that set me off on this topic. In it he said:
Also, is it just me, or do the house and techno offerings of 2009 seem a little blah? Some scattered individual triumphs, or at least worthy showings, sure—but there still seems to be precious little in the form of an overarching narrative, or even competing narratives. Where’s the surprise? Whither the WTF?
This is not totally dissimilar from Ronan Fitzgerald’s post from last year where he bemoaned the lack of interesting critical discourse despite hearing much music that he liked. I just want to know what is more important to these guys, discourse and theory or the music? I understand the power of the written word to influence peoples thoughts and ideas, so it’s not as if I am discounting the importance of music writing or criticism. I mean, I am typing this on a music blog, right? I know it’s cool to be all Lester Bangs about it and put yourself up above the music, but I am a fan of MUSIC not of MUSIC WRITING. I could give a fuck about a writer if they’re not getting something more than their own ego across. And that’s not a diss to Philip in particular, but it is a diss of the accepted format of music writing that pervades just about every outlet that aspires to be something more than lowest common denominator crap.
I’ve mentioned Vince Aletti’s Disco Files book here recently, and it serves as a perfect example of how to do music journalism properly. What Aletti did was to actually document a naturally evolving musical form as it was developing, moving between the overground and underground fluidly. The format of a weekly article/record round-up is really not very different from what is possible with a blog right now. Yet he managed to do his thing without the assistance of an “overarching narrative”. He did follow trends as they rose and fell, connecting the dots between the old and the new in a way as to frame them so that people could easily understand today’s happenings in the context of what they already knew. His record reviews were far more functional in description than the long winded tripe that passes for “reviews” today. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see how similar his columns were to the way we do record round-ups here at ISM.
Why is this format of music journalism so unpopular? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that ego gets in the way of music writing since it gets in the way of the music itself so often. But I really see almost zero examples of this kind of documentation and analysis out there. Instead, there’s plenty of examples of forced narratives that end up simply propping up dying trends, especially in the world of dance music where everyone keeps their eye out for the “next big thing”. Philip Sherburne has been writing as much about dubstep as techno or house recently presumably because there are better stories to write there; don’t we have enough of that stuff already? I’m having a hard time understanding how he has become the default “techno writer” when he skips DEMF but goes to Mutek. Again, I’m not really trying to diss him (in fact, I am going to buy that new issue of the Wire so I can read the Moritz Von Oswald interview he did!) but my frustration with the approach of techno and house journalism is not waning even though the level of coverage of good music is definitely increasing on every level from the blogs through to magazines and bigger websites. Vince Aletti did a great job back when dance was really developing, why not follow his lead and try to create a better method of covering dance music that isn’t indebted to the rock-centric approach that clearly doesn’t work very well when applied to the music we love?
30 Comments
We need to think before we write. Instead of just a mindless pandering piece or an unsubstantiated gush, why don’t people really listen to what they are reviewing, cover the ground, and actually take time to hear what the purpose of the song is? Commercial, underground, whatever, use your brains, people.
Tom – I love you. I really do.
there’s my boy Tom, just the way I like him 🙂
I’ll grant you that the disco files is a pretty awesome undertaking, but I still fail to see why the construction of larger narratives should be disavowed or abandoned altogether.
“Reality thankfully doesn’t follow a narrative, and to try to assign one is pretty worthless most of the time. The addition of narrative to the portrayal of Notorious B.I.G. made the film Notorious painful to watch. Life is much more like Dazed and Confused in structure!”
Comparing the narratives that music criticism develops to a near B-movie biopic of Biggie is illegitimate. I don’t think any critic has ever undertaken the effort to describe the contours and fluxes of a scene the way that Notorious shoehorns its morality tale into place. Secondly, you’re comparing works of fiction to critical discourse. Dazed and Confused is a movie. If it were a piece of critical writing about music, it would suck. It would be ill-conceived and ill-formed and seem like the person who wrote it was high the whole time.
“I just want to know what is more important to these guys, discourse and theory or the music?”
Hmm, I’m guessing that, since they’re music critics and not musicians, discourse and theory is probably kind of important to them. Your argument as I understand it is: overarching narrative = result of writer’s ego = obscuring the world of music rather than revealing it, which somehow interferes with the pleasure of the “music we all love.”
the unique problem of music criticism is that music is too pleasurable. The art critic by comparison has much more license to engage in abstraction, hyperbole, and so on, because at this point the art object is first and foremost an intellectual object, then a commodity, and then finally a thing of pleasure. Since music is much more immediately about pleasure, we take offense more easily at it being inappropriately captured or rudely manhandled by critical discourse. I would argue that yeah, overarching narratives are bad, but only when they’re bad. A good critic, which I consider Sherburne to be, constantly has to evaluate the singularity of the object against the generality of his claims, and takes pleasure in the challenge of re-evaluating, refining and, when need be, discarding his conclusions. A bad critic has his mind made up ahead of time. It’s a tug of war between what you already think you understand on the one hand and the challenge of a new experience on the other. I think there’s still a chance to make a narrative out of this process that isn’t as endemically heinous as you claim.
i think there’s a distinct difference between someone looking back over a completed portion of music history and making sense of it all and trying to force a narrative on music’s evolution as it is happening. for example, Vince Aletti did not have the perspective to write the book that became Tim Lawrence’s “Love Saves the Day” despite being there at the time! of course, the nature of his columns and observations (“telling it as it happened”) was essential in the later writing of that fantastic book. i don’t think there’s any problem with giving things a little bit of time like this. the more shit we have detailing how things are actually going as they’re going down, the better the later summation will be.
you said, “A bad critic has his mind made up ahead of time.” i think that is pretty spot on, and unfortunately i think that is what ends up happening when a critic has some “story line” in his head. everything ends up being fit to that story line, as in my film example. i don’t have too many serious issues with Philip Sherburne but i think he could be better at what he does with a different approach!
i know for sure that the end of 08 saw a lot of critical complaint that no real “narrative” stood out. i looked around at the insane amount of good records i bought and thought that those records told all the story that needed to be told about that year.
I agree that music journalism tries too much to find a “narrative” in the music, which detracts from the pure experience of music… But, at the same time, I also think that music like all art is fundamentally a conversation. Part of the enjoyment of music is listening to or participating in that conversation, though sometimes it probably does get out of hand.
This blog self proclaimedly locates itself within a grand narrative of what is understood to constitute “the real shit”. Your pigeonholeing of shit into that which is “real” and that which is not is as grand, egotistical and violent an undertaking as the journalistic practices you seek to lampoon. Presenting your obviously subjective experience as untainted, pure and “real” is arguably the greatest conceit of them all.
“i think there’s a distinct difference between someone looking back over a completed portion of music history and making sense of it all and trying to force a narrative on music’s evolution as it is happening.”
100% agree with this. we need to remember that in the past when House or Techno was blowing up these were new genres/styles that had been in gestation for a few years, that were a direct result of local social and cultural phenomena. so by the time articles started being written about them as distinct new genres/styles there was a narrative there already. now, as you say, it’s seems there’s a forced search for these narratives
I would guess that maybe even some of the writers you’re talking about finally got bored of the berlin-centric-mnml-narrative and are simply looking for new inspiration.
this post is fit.
This is well rich coming from the blogger who, more than any other, has recourse to the ultimate metanarrative to ground almost *everything* he says about electronic music. To wit:
black = innovator (soulful, funky)
white = imitator (soulless, funkless)
…with some incipient racism even creeping through recently, as with
“Despite the ridiculousness of seeing 4 goofy white guys dancing behind laptops, they managed to play some pretty nice stuff.”
…’cos you know, white guys can’t dance (‘cos they just don’t have that innate rhythm that black people do, do they…)
for the DEMF round up and your open vein of ressentiment and self-hate in your sledging of that doco a few months back, when you wrote:
“The double standard set here in the comments is that including a Detroit artist wouldn’t be in keeping with what is “going on currently” in techno music, which is exactly the kind of bullshit that I am complaining about. This isn’t about “idolizing” anything, I don’t idolize shit. When it comes down to it, everyone can suck my balls. That doesn’t change the revisionist Eurocentric approach that this documentary takes. The fact that the filmmakers are American shows just how ridiculously far this attitude can be taken: they’ll fly to other countries to film while neglecting the guy in their backyard.”
…sounds like mythologising to me.
The question is more: why do you wanna tell this story, and why do you wanna attack Sherburne?
I don’t think Tom is saying ‘white people’ are soulless, I think he’s just trying to acknowledge that the majority of the music he likes and covers on ISM is created by ‘black people’ and or ‘white people’ mimicking music that which ‘black people’ originally created . I believe Tom gives praise to both ‘blacks & whites’ on a regular bases. Especially when he thinks they make what he considers to be good music. Tom just recently praised Juju & Jordash…
In reality I don’t think he needed to say “4 goofy white guys” but as a writer I think you must be descriptive at times, paint a picture. Also I think being ‘white’ can sometimes allow you to criticize your own race more easily since you belong to it.
I do not ‘belong’ to a ‘race’, and I don’t hold truck with anyone who wants to essentialise and stereotype people based on crude fictions about the essence of what they’re capable of (saying, doing, thinking, critiquing, narrating) based on ‘who they really are’… all of which is the stuff of very solid, sturdy metanarratives.
The oldest one of them: original creation
(in this case through the notion of ‘black innovators’ who are channeling some deep, innate, timeless rhythm that is part of their soul, etc…)
I take your point, Scott, but I also reject the assumptions out of hand. Nuff said.
x2
Honestly, most music criticism is about and for itself. I enjoy reading it, but the authors quickly hit a point where the music becomes secondary to the writing, and at that point who cares anymore?
Anyone who thinks that there’s nothing special going on anymore is out of their mind. Now, as ever, there’s more shit to pass over to get to the good stuff.
I’m often reminded of that unattributable quote, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Lets face it, one of the few things music criticism adds is a narrative. Otherwise we’d all be doing radio shows or publishing tip lists. That’s all The Disco Files really is, a compilation of tips and charts. In hindsight, it offers a lot of insight, but at the time it was published it was the Hard Wax weekly releases/Beatport charts of its day.
Understood. Its unfortunate that we even need to bring race into anything.
Its also unfortunate (and I’ve written this before) that slavery erased an entire group of people’s identity, language, religion, culture, etc… Worse is it created a deep seeded self-hate amongst many. I think the creation of ragtime, blues, country, jazz, disco, soul, funk, house, techno, etc… was a way to express these feelings of loss and confusion and for many to rediscover themselves. I’m not sure so many ‘white people’ have experienced this same thing. I don’t think ‘black people’ ” are channeling some deep, innate, timeless rhythm that is part of their soul, etc…)” . I think many have had a much different life experience in America then most other races. It does not mean that ‘white people’ can’t have these experiences, I think its just more rare.
This is off subject and going on and on so I’ll just say that I don’t think its stereotyping, I think its taking a look at the big picture and realizing that while we are all the same are environments and experiences are very different. Different experiences and environments may very well cause different types of creation. I think anyone is capable of seeing this.
supposed to be ‘our environments and experiences’ 🙂
Hey Tom
That was pretty well said. It’s been interesting the last few years finding out how it all happened, as you say a ‘retrospective narrative’ but I don’t know if it’s made me enjoy my nights out any more, probably less because it’s never going to match up to something that I had no possible way of being at…time to move on-time to forge a personal path forwards…
I think what Tom is saying here is definitely true when it comes to Simon Reynolds et al. But music will follow a narrative as any cultural artefact and it’s okay to have discussions around that if it helps with understanding of how certain things came into being. Things are better understood when framed within a context and sometimes journos strive for that context a little too much. Sometimes they explain the frame and forget to focus on the actual piece itself
I’d just like to say that, on a fundamental level, a narrative is simply a sequence of causality-bound events represented in some order. Real life does have a narrative; real life IS a narrative. Basically, if there is no narrative to the music scene then nothing much is happening: a status quo is being perpetuated and nothing new is occurring. I think that’s the best argument for narrative as a good thing: music would go stale if nothing changed.
I do fully agree with your point, though: a good year for music is a year when many great records were released, not when “things happened”. 2002 was a year packed with narrative incident: the “death of dance music” and the attendent flopping of big records, closure of clubs and stagnation of key genres. Music journalists had plenty to document but all those stories had the same conclusion: it was a shitty year for dance music.
The problem with Sherburne and his ilk is that they write for websites and magazines that make their coin out of documenting and pushing the next big thing. They aren’t going to cover the genuinely underground scenes because the interest is too niche – they’re interested in that level of exposure between the underground and the mainstream, where enough people care for coverage to be profitable.
The real danger of narratives is their totalising effect: the kind of “reality construction” that postmodernism rails against. Critics like Sherburne are so trapped in their need to find a next big thing and document its narrative that they lose sight of the musical world outside their own story. If Sherburne or Fitzgerald are suffering from musical dissatisfaction of ennui then they’re the sad victims of their own process. Heaven forbid they should see if there’s anything happening in progressive house, jungle or breakbeat: the story has already been told that these genres are dead.
I agree that it’s ridiculous to look for a linear narrative in music, and it’s especially dumb to criticize music for not providing a narrative.
Writing about music necessarily is narrative, but the narrative is the responsiblity of the writer. To describe music perfectly is impossible — the best description of a piece of music is the piece of music itself. A good piece of music criticism must in itself be entertaining, which means that it’s of necessity untethered from the music it purports to described, and it must tell some sort of story.
2 words, one picture can sometimes be enough ?
p o w e r ? O F ? l e s s
“the notion of ‘black innovators’ who are channeling some deep, innate, timeless rhythm that is part of their soul, etc…”
I don’t want to speak for pipecock, and this is going off topic, but I think when we refer to “black music” it’s not really about race. It’s about a musical culture and heritage forged through the black experience of slavery and oppression and segregation. It’s not an assumption of racial superiority in relation to the propensity to make good music, it’s merely a recognition of the historical circumstances.
Life has no narrative? Well, not for the whiny solopsist.
you all need to stop waffling and pontificating and just post up your mixes – if you really love music listen, play it and share it – don’t talk about it
i mean, you have checked our “Mixes” category, right? i’d put our mixes up against that of any blog, our collection of “writers” are really deejays primarily plus we get guest mixes from similar minded folks. we like to do more to make sure people know about the music we feel isn’t getting much coverage, but our mixes are no joke. check gmos’ most recent for an excellent deeeep mix, and as soon as my turntable is fixed i will be banging out a new mix myself.
Exactly what I was thinking. Ok, so it’s good to get buying tips from people who are exposed to much more new music than me but I don’t want a thesis on each track.
Uh I hate to break it to you but Dazed and Confused *is* a narrative, just a sloppy. As is the narrative you’re telling that there is no narrative for musical scenes.
People can’t help telling stories about things, even records. Sure, sometimes Sherbourne and Reynolds put the horse before the cart, but I’d rather read someone trying to make sense of both individual records and larger trends than PR pap or fanboy “this is hawt” wank. Those are narratives too, just particularly undemanding and uncompelling ones.
I haven’t read a ton of Sherburne’s stuff, but I think the worst perpetrators of the pretentious/narrative review are the little white earbuds kids. They’re far more interested in flowery writing than they are in kick ass music, and their elaborate descriptions more often than not tell me next to nothing about whether or not I’ll actually LIKE the track, or if it will be useful on the dancefloor.
Oh Count, why did you want to write for a bunch of florid know-nothings with crappy taste if we were so repugnant to you?
Personally, I think our writers do a good job of describing records, their usefulness to DJs or at least a suitable context to hear them in. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to take the temperature of critical/popular dance culture, especially while being cognizant of the social environment in which we’re living (Pete, you do a fantastic job of this). If I’m understanding it correctly, that’s essentially what Vince Aletti’s Disco Files accomplishes. I look forward to reading it and finding out.
“i think there’s a distinct difference between someone looking back over a completed portion of music history and making sense of it all and trying to force a narrative on music’s evolution as it is happening.”
But Vince Aletti’s writing was done at the time was first being made and played out, experiencing the music as part of a broader culture and society. He wasn’t reflecting on more than what happened last weekend — not a long stretch of historical road. Whether or not our writing ever matches up to the quality of Aletti’s or, probably more accurately, if we capture anything worth knowing about 30 years from now, we won’t know until it’s done and gone. Just like you, Tom, I want to write about this great music now.
I was only in it for the money.