I’m kind of combining some of my tweets from this morning into this post. If you don’t follow me on there I am @pipecock not surprisingly. I am more consistent in posting there than here even now so follow me if you don’t.
Read this transcription of an interview with Chuck Klosterman.
Klosterman is kind of a tool but has some interesting insights here on criticism and especially the criticism of music in 2018. I think dance music was actually way out ahead of the curve in the trend he talks about putting the context etc before the content. And this is why for years I’ve read these articles that make music sound revolutionary and then I hear it and it’s a boring ass techno song.
All we have now in dance music is writers breathlessly pronouncing the cultural importance of boring ass throw away garbage music. And if you disagree with that…. you’re irrelevant. And this ties into the part at the end of the transcript there that describes how being knowledgeable used to mean actually, you know, knowing about shit that happened before. And despite all the overabundance of reissues, that hasn’t changed that aspect of dance music writing. At best you’ll have writers breathlessly telling you how amazing and important some record that literally nobody heard was (like Charanjit Singh “inventing acid house” lolololol) and I mean what the fuck even is the point of that.
What you really don’t have in dance music writing is people who have some knowledge of history and some taste in music who can use these points of view to synthesize some kind of useful form of criticism from all of it. Like when I see some new artist hyped to death, my thoughts are: what is this writer’s history that leads me to believe that they know what is good at all in order to be making this distinction in the first place. And the answer is almost always “nothing”.
But the end result of this is not to find a wider audience for quality music that audience might otherwise not hear. The goal is to elevate an artist to the festival circuit of djing so they can get the big performance money their PR dollars have paid for. If you think about the dance music media in this context, everything makes sense.