Spotify: The new/old musical counter-revolution

I got two packages in the mail - a vinyl record and a compact disc. All on the day that Australian music lovers would point their fingers and laugh at my stubborn luddism. Hadn't I heard? Spotify had finally launched Down Under! I could now stream any song I wanted from a pool of over sixteen million tracks filled by virtually all the major labels and independents wanting to fill their own cups with a totally "new" musical model.

As many pundits would have you believe the Spotify "revolution" isn't one at all - it's not the Red Army storming the Winter Palace and declaring peace, bread and land for the people; it's like the bound and gagged family Romanov inexplicably sprouting laser turrets from their heads seeing the ghosts of Cossacks rising from their graves to mercilessly hound Trotsky and his troops back toward the Ukraine. Spotify is a musical counter-revolution aiming to quash the orgiastic "free" producer/consumer-led music rebellion once and for all.

It’s so deliciously evil it beats life back into Monty Burns’ desiccated heart and has him whistling Dixie and calling Mater. (Ahoy-hoy?) Here’s why.

The digital arms race
Ever since the dawn of recorded music, the industry at large has had its eye on one prize. That is, controlling the content, the media and the distribution of both.[1] When gramophone records first appeared it wasn’t uncommon to have the music on vinyl sold in shops that had totally vertical integration (ownership from top to bottom from producer of the content to the point of purchase by the consumer. Case and point: HMV or “His Master’s Voice.”) The Compact Disc was a shift toward higher-fidelity media and lower overall manufacturing costs per unit.

The CD was jointly developed by Sony and Philips in the late-70s, the format gaining acceptance among consumers in the late-80s when an economy of scale was established. Sony and Philips jointly paid for the research & development, marketing and manufacturing of both the Compact Discs and the machines that would play them. Then they could license the technology to other companies. It’s a no brainer – Sony and Philips were (and still are, to some extent!) multinational music labels with vast back catalogues and new talent ready to be pressed to polymer which proves almost pilfer-proof (until the late 1990s, as we all know.)

But what to do! The medium of playback and distribution went spectacularly rogue after a stylized cat roamed around harvesting the innards of beige boxes through squeaky telephone wires in the yawning sunrise of 2000 AD. The pirates, once thought guerillas with nothing better to do than trade tapes around and occasionally burn a CD for a few bucks a pop were now legion, moving torrents (oh I love this water analogy) of (almost!) intangible data across networks without proper authorization from their intellectual property holders. The content was there, like it had been since Tin Pan Alley and even centuries before. But the stranglehold on media and distribution methods had slipped the grasp of the industry virtually overnight. It felt like no amount of speech impeded Danes with expensive lawyers could ever halt their revolutionary advance.

Commodification ala mode and a cup of tea
So what now? Do the record companies under the aegis of RIAA and their cronies hunt down the pirates and strong-arm them back toward their sanctioned tripartite model of music consumption or do they spend more money than they’re prepared to on R&D to create a new medium and a new distribution method? The iTunes model seemed “revolutionary” at the time – you know, telling people to pay for something they could get illegally for free – lest the counter-revolutionary martinets bound in and lay down the(ir) law. “Our content was never yours to begin with and now we’re keeping it,” they bellowed. And lo, Spotify and its ilk emerged.

They own the content. That's a given. The clever rub lies thus: remove the medium and utilize a well known distribution network that has existed in its present broadband form for about fifteen years. They seek to change the concept or perception of content ownership back to an near pre-technological state much like in the age of travelling band shows of yore. Yes, you may hear the music but you can no longer hold it in your hands.

By removing the physical or even the illusion of physicality (files on a hard drive), the medium and the distribution is in a state of simultaneous allness and nothingness; it’s always “on” yet you can never “have” the music. It's "your" song when you choose it - like out of a jukebox - but once the last note decays, so is your claim over it (not that you really had one in the first place). You can “search” the (not your) collection but it’s never “yours” – they’re the gatekeepers and you pay for them to lower the drawbridge. Once inside their opaque vaults, they're able track your playing habits to sell you more of what you already want. Then you're their billboard as they publish every guilty play of Pat Benatar to your friends on Facebook. It’s like the IKEA of promotion – IKEA keep their prices low because they outsource the construction of the product to you. Now Spotify have got you to do their marketing for them, too.

If budding content producers are paid a pitiful commission, more so the better in the eyes of the industry. By melding (or abnegating) the medium, they’ve lowered the price of music and also its value. If Spotify spends the same amount of money paying for the rights to the new Gotye record (quelle horreur) and the entire back catalogue of Darkthrone, per se, then what is the differential of worth between the two? There is none. The only savvy trick the labels can pull is restricting the “supply” of Gotye (or someone just as horrible and popular) but that would distort the market and their profit margins (in this new medium-lite model). Make everything on offer the same (pre-paid) price per click, throw in some ads and the money rolls in regardless. Not much for those who wish to furnish Spotify with music, but big payoffs for those who control mammoth oceans - not paper cups full - of content.

But what really fucking burns my potatoes is that Spotify is the closest thing we have to the real pop music experience. Richard Meltzer in his inquiry/parody of the Aesthetics of Rock posited that rock and pop music is the act of making the mundane interesting and exciting. Shit, if you can make money off it, more so the better.

Spotify is accessible on a desktop computer which you more than likely stare into each day to earn those dollars to pay for, well, Spotify. For the fraction of a second your consciousness wanders toward the sublime tongue of rock and pop in all its tinned ferocity on your shitty laptop speakers, the music industry suits have not only breathed a sigh of relief, their tar-stained cackles can be heard from a blue million miles...

Like I said, it’s pure evil fucking genius.



---
1: Jones, S. Rock Formation: Music, Technology and Mass Communication, Sage Publications: Newbury Park, CA, 1992 p. 185.

Live Review: Melbourne Soundwave 2012 (TheVine)

It’s the time when metalheads and punks are vindicated for one week out of the year - Soundwave Festival. The event, now in its sixth ambitious year, is most likely the greatest expression of rock music Retromania that one could ask for. A phrase coined by acclaimed rock journalist Simon Reynolds (blame him for the term “post-metal”) in his book of the same name, which asks “is popular music addicted to its own past?” The short answer? You bet your arse it is.

The long answer? Read on.

Read the long answer at TheVine.

Interview: Fair to Midland’s Cliff Campbell (The Void)

Ripples of interest in alt-metal combo Fair to Midland have turned to crashing waves that have reached from shore to shore in recent times – and it isn’t hard to figure out why. 

Armed with hulking riffs as well as playful whistles and soulful banjos, they charm indie kids as well as their transgressive metal brethren with an energetic mix of southern twang and hard driving rock. However, it hasn’t been a smooth ride toward peer acclaim. Though picked up by System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian’s vanity label Serjical Strike in the dawn of the new century they parted ways in 2009. After much searching, they finally put ink to paper at E1 Music under their burgeoning metal sub-label.

Read more at The Void.

Review: Lou Reed and Metallica - Lulu (TheVine)

In the most unlikeliest pairing since Phil Collins and Bone Thugs N’ Harmony (or, perhaps, Orson Welles and Manowar?), Velvet Underground stalwart Lou Reed teams up with the biggest riff factory known to mankind, Metallica. Metalheads and old rockers alike waited with baited breath for the first samples to appear online and both were roundly disgusted at what they heard (it takes a lot to disgust a metalhead, especially these days). Now that the monstrosity is here, requiring two discs to soundly contain all of Reed’s bewildering homespun ramblings and Metallica’s laborious, repetitive riffs  — both of which announce themselves from the outset in opener 'Brandenburg Gate' — one quickly discovers stapling together rock legends does not a great record guarantee.

Read more at TheVine online.

Archive Interview: Cult of Luna - Enigmatic

This interview originally appeared in Buzz Magazine, September 2008.


Johannes Persson, enigmatic guitarist for sludge/doom band Cult of Luna makes the unlikeliest of friends up in the wintry steppes of Umea, their home town. “We have made lots of friends from people in Australia. One of the bands that recorded up here, you may have heard of. We’re very good friends with the Dukes of Windsor.” I was flabbergasted. The Dukes of Windsor? From Melbourne? Persson too was taken aback. “Yeah,” he laughs. “I thought I recognized the name of [your] town. They played up here in our hometown. I was totally blown away by them. Jack, the vocalist, has a voice that could not be compared to many people on this Earth. They’re a great live band too.” A ringing endorsement from a man who lives and plays in the extreme? Priceless.

Persson is one of eight members that includes some three guitarists and two vocalists in the gargantuan line-up of Cult of Luna had humble beginnings, with most of the core group playing in a hardcore band called Eclipse. “Well we just started to write slower and slower songs…eventually the band broke up and our sound changed so much that we decided to change the name of the band.” Persson says. Persson also quite earnestly enlightenens us on how a band with eight members forms one cohesive whole in the songwriting process.

“Well, we start off with a basic idea that someone in the band has. There’s no pre-defined structure or anything like that, we just jam it out. It would be a lie to say everyone has as much to say in every song, but it’s usually I, Fredrik (guitarist) and Erik (guitarist) that writes most of the stuff, and a majority of the songs come from me, to be honest.” Persson, not shy of telling like it is, even confesses that CoL’s latest album, Eternal Kingdom has its rough edges. “Well, some of the best songs on there is some of the best material we’ve ever [written], he explains.

“But some of the other songs could have used a few more jams in the rehearsal room before we went into the studio.” He also quashes the rumor that CoL recorded the album in a disused psychiatric ward, evoking images of a haunted menagerie of padded walls and blood-curdling screams. “Well, where we recorded was on the site of a big institution. It’s all been rebuilt now. There’s a cultural centre, music studios, etc.”

However, the use of a madman’s diary as the central theme to Eternal Kingdom is very much true, as Persson tells. “Well, a year before we started writing music, we did a T-shirt design for one of the characters, which was a hare, but with moose-horns. (laughs) - It was a hybrid kind of animal. Besides, when a story like that just falls into your lap you can’t not do anything with it. It was an interesting story and a good story.”

Persson, being the earnest and endearing musician he is also has a strong passion for raising moral and political issues through Cult of Luna. “Well, every album has to have a clear and [defined] issue running through it,” he tells me. “If you’re in a band and people listen to your music, you may as well say something important.” He even rages against the established music “machine”, critiquing the homogenization and routine dumbing down of popular music culture.

“When you pick up any music magazine it almost makes you want to poke your eyes out,” he laments. “[Musicians] sometimes get really stupid questions from journalists about the ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ lifestyle; it’s all uninteresting and it’s been done so many times. They ask you things like ‘what’s your quickest tap solo’ – f—k off! That kind of music journalism isn’t journalism at all. Having that said, we’re not a band that wants to point fingers and tell people what to do. But we’re also a band that doesn’t avoid controversial and important issues.”

Such as?

“Well, [for example], every time you pick up a magazine it [reinforces the] male-domination of the rock ‘n’ roll business and traditional male values. I don’t want to generalize, but a lot of the American bands have this jingoist, macho attitude. First off, it’s just plain boring; it’s very unoriginal and just lame.”

Living in a land of extremes ourselves, Cult of Luna would find themselves at home among the “cult” like following of the sludge and experimental doom movement, with Isis, Sunn O))) and Boris all touring successfully here – I ask, would Persson like to take his outfit down under? “Yes, we would love to tour Australia. We have many friends that loved touring there – in fact, every band I know that toured Australia say that it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. In that sense, we want to go to Australia as soon as possible…hopefully we’ll be there soon.”

---

Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved, Crushtor Media Services Pty. Ltd.

Collaborative Essay Project: Leticia's Contributions

In this post I present the work of my collaborator Leticia Supple on the critical examinations of rock journalism essay project. Leticia was the founder of MetalAsFuck.net and is a blogger, copywriter, editor and music journalist that resides in Adelaide, Australia.

The essays of Leticia Supple
The State of Play: balancing critical rock journalism with demands for content
Using the Force… or not. The place of publicity in contemporary music criticism
Studies in Criticism… or books versus trade

Remember to keep up with all our essays using the essay project tag here.

Thesis Diary #13: The Debrief

Yesterday I steeled myself against the wind to solemnly march into Tony Moore's office for my thesis mark. I could see bare parts of his desktop for the first time to which I remarked "Wow, I didn't even know your desk was made out of wood!"

He ignored mounting e-mails and handed me a miniature novel of examiner's comments regarding my thesis. Agonizing in what felt like a Oakeshottian duration of dithering, he finally announced that I had gained a distinction for my efforts.

A sigh of relief. I did far better than I expected.

Tony was supremely supportive of the mark; he knew it lay within me to achieve a high distinction and I agreed. He was impressed considering that I'd never taken honors classes (which apparently teach one to write in the academic style requisite for such long tasks) and that my previous degree was from outside the field of communications and journalism. He complimented me on my academic rigor despite these deficiencies and praised me as a "good writer"; I felt very humbled by it.

The comments and tips Tony bestowed will prove valuable for my book project with Leticia Supple on rock journalism. Some even provided additional sources such as a thorough BBC documentary on rock journalism that was screened in 2009 - which came as a surprise to both Tony and I!

As I left, he wished me luck, saying: "Remember to invite me to the book launch."

I shook his hand and smiled. "Mate, you're at the top of the list."

---
If you have an hour or two to kill and want to know more about rock journalism theory than you'd ever care to, my thesis is now available for download.

100% Genuine, Bonafide Corporate Rock: What is rock authenticity?

One of the ironies of “critical rock journalism,” writes cultural studies theorist Andy Brown is “that it is operated in a hegemonic fashion across the popular music market in the period of its pomp, willfully obscuring its actual commercial dynamics and its cultural and institutional role in shaping the rock canon and the rock audience.”  Critical rock journalism by its reliance on advertising dollars and the industry for its own copy or sellable capital (interviews from artists, advanced promo copies, etc.) is “inauthentic” by journalistic standards. The stories on artists or the industry, even if they do not engage with the sources directly service the music creators and copyright holders; those who have everything to gain from words being printed about them. What differentiates the “trade paper” or the “mainstream” from the “cool” or the “genuine” is a concept known as “authenticity” or “cultural capital.” But how do publications and journalists wield it and accumulate it? We must first deconstruct authenticity as an abstract and observe it in “action.”

Cultural capital is conferred on certain publications, granting them a subcultural “rock authority.” This gives rise to the conception of cultural capital as “cool” or “authenticity.” Whether its journalism thrives in the underground “zine” culture or written for “payola,” traditionally known as the act of labels paying deejays or journalists to promote certain artists, cultural capital is closely linked with “monetary” capital.

With the invention of the printing press and other more advanced technologies such as the internet and television, the “eye becomes more important than the ear” – a system of signification and meaning emerges in the form of a subculture with its own discrete and extensional rituals.  Thus we can point toward a rock subculture with its own internal consistencies and tendency for self and other identification. According to the philosopher Heidegger, authenticity is defined to “be one’s own self, as part of the history of one’s community.” In a broader philosophical context, authenticity is to say:

“that his or her actions truly express what lies at their origin, that is, the dispositions, feelings, desires, and convictions that motivate them. Built into this conception of authenticity is a distinction between what is really going on within me – the emotions, core beliefs, and bedrock desires that make me the person I am – and the outer avowals and actions that make up my being in the public world…We commonly suppose that authenticity has a considerable value even if it does not produce such extrinsic goods as wealth, fame, or pleasure.”[1]

The image of a rock band according to rock scholar and critic Simon Frith must have certain characteristics for it to be accepted as “authentic” by people who self-identify as part of the rock subculture and its various sub-divided subcultures almost as much as the sound and arrangement of the music, and be recognized as part of the “subcultural sphere” of rock music. If an artist exists in a rock subculture which is overwhelmingly dominated by corporate interests, how can an artist stay “authentic?” How can a “rocker” such as Bruce Springsteen dress like a working-class, thirty-seven year old “teenager” and be celebrated for it despite his multi-million dollar success?

Authenticity can be described as the performative “image” based aspect of the music as an experience, a cultural product and “within the ascription carries the corollary that every type of music, and every example, can conceivably be found authentic by a particular group of perceivers; it is the success with which a particular performance conveys the impression that counts,” especially if it is consecrated by a publication with cultural capital such as NME or Rolling Stone and/or if it is written by a preeminent and established consecrator such as Richard Christgau or Greil Marcus. 

Frith writes of a “continuing struggle between music and commerce [at] the core of rock ideology.”  There is a very real tension between identity vs. difference at the heart of this struggle; rock music has been important as a rallying point for a collective identity but the music industry itself has appropriated this phenomenon and incorporated it as a sales pitch: “market choices aren’t just a matter of self-indulgence,” Frith writes, but a link to communities; “musical tastes matter so much to people because…they take them to be a statement of what sort of people they are” and rock fans and those who “buy into” the subculture are not immune.  The rock music media culture seems to matter to individuals with “mutual interests leading to the sharing of accumulated knowledge and the creation of a specialized language (be it visual or oral) and other cultural products.”  By all accounts, the perceived “image” and expression of this culture through style is more important than whether it is performed in the service of fans, artists or corporate entities. The “what, where and who” of rock subculture is more important than the “why” and the “how.”

A trend or a scene must be defined and via its musical or visual style in order to be communicated to an audience as genuinely as possible. This is achieved by establishing an order, setting up exemplars of this order, making it concrete and then “initiating the collapse.”  By setting up a movement through the accumulation and expenditure of cultural capital, record labels via rock journalists can package the content for sale and target it to subcultural groups and conversely, attempt to dismantle older styles and “overcome human resistance” to make way for new trends. Such is the case of Nirvana in the 1990s.

Nirvana is an example of authenticity being embedded in the “cultural capital” that music press project to their readership in order to consecrate it. In the early 1990s Kurt Cobain, lead guitarist and vocalist for Nirvana, was at the forefront of the grunge movement. He became the template for its authenticity in this (albeit fragmented) subculture. Cobain grew up in a Seattle, Washington suburb called Aberdeen and led a troubled youth moving from house to house. He had no formal artistic education yet produced sculpture and poetry regardless. His past history was one of alienation, delinquency and homelessness. He also suffered from debilitating stomach cramps and was encouraged by girlfriend Courtney Love, herself a rock musician, to use heroin to ease the pain. Kurt and his bandmates (Kris Novoselic and Dave Grohl) were also known for their Bohemianism, subverting codes of gender and masculinity, kissing one another while in cross dress for an episode of Saturday Night Live in 1992.

Despite the semi-romanticized punk-rock upbringing and “slacker” ethos, Nirvana was one of the biggest alternative rock bands in modern rock music history. Carrying the flag for the Seattle grunge sound, a mélange of down-tuned, mid-tempo post-punk and metal edged riffs, their second record Nevermind topped the US charts in January 1992 and eventually sold over 9 million units worldwide. They were described in “sociological terms” as

“defining a new generation, the twentysomething "slackers" who have retreated from life; as telling unattractive home truths about a country losing its empire and hit by recessing as representing the final, delayed impact of British punk on America.”[2]

However the massive success that came with selling that many records would be considered unthinkable in terms of projecting authenticity in the 1960s and 1970s context (although relatively speaking, the Beatles et. al. sold millions without it effecting their authenticity); Cobain appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone with a t-shirt emblazoned with “Corporate rock magazines suck” on the front – he appeared to be the antidote to mainstream style despite embracing it almost in its totality; Nirvana in deed embraced the mainstream despite appearing to rail against it in word. Rock journalists also attempted to portray Kurt Cobain’s authenticity, placing him as literate in the rock subculture; one interviewer spied “scores of CDs and tapes are strewn around [his] stereo – obscurities such as Calamity Jane, Cosmic Psychos and Billy Childish, as well as Cheap Trick and the Beatles.”  What Cobain listened to matters in this context; the “why” is obvious – these bands were part of a canon of authentic rock that was once established by rock journalists.

The band was signed to the major label Geffen Records which was once cutting edge and alternative but now a major player; they made frequent appearances on MTV the international music channel (eventually releasing an acoustic record from an “MTV Unplugged” session) and even appeared on the aforementioned Saturday Night Live, a US national network television program. To demonstrate just how far Nirvana and Cobain operated outside of the perceived conventions of authenticity in terms of independence, he regularly appeared on MTV.  MTV is owned by Viacom, the world’s fourth largest media conglomerate. MTV operates on a simple business model as explained by media critic Robert McChesney in Douglas Rushkoff’s PBS documentary The Merchants of Cool: “everything at MTV is a commercial…sometimes it’s a music video other times it’s paid advertisements…there’s no non-commercial part of MTV.”  Keith Cameron writing for NME, positioning himself and the magazine as an authentic consecrator (as opposed to the publications part of “tabloid” tradition of pre-1967 trade press) of the rock field to authentically explain Cobain’s success:

As far as the tabloid music press were concerned, Nirvana were just too good to be true. Rarely had the rollercoaster dynamic of rock'n'roll been so extreme – unknowns shoot from nowhere to top of charts with incendiary musical formula. The all-important twist? They didn't even try! They don't want to be successful! Brilliant. And now, with the accountants still hiring bulldozers to gather up the money, they've begun to blow it all via smack, the biggest sucker punch of the lot. From nobodies to superstars to fuck ups in the space of six months?! That had to be a record.[3]

Despite this wholesale “sellout,” the style Cobain embodied was considered as authentic by the rock subculture and its readership regardless.   In fact, as journalist Simon Reynolds points out in his review of Nevermind for the New York Times, commenting on the irony inherent in “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “ teen spirit is routinely bottled, shrink-wrapped and sold. Mr. Cobain, acutely aware of the contradiction of operating in an industry of today’s youth with lyrics like “Here we are now, entertain us/How stupid and contagious.”

But even this conceptualization of subcultural “authenticity” is problematic. The symbolic objects that authenticate style are not born directly from the exponents of the style itself but by commercial interests which is communicated by the authenticity of the rock press; only those who participate in rock music culture and the lengths at which they “jealously defend” the use of cultural symbols, music and style differentiates those who identify with the rock culture and subcultures (punk, indie, etc.) and those who do not.  In the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of commercial music television such as MTV and the horizontal integration of the music press, fashion and other concerns, the Nirvana as pre-packaged rebellion trajectory is much more commonplace – the authentic counter-culture is now a field of cultural production dominated by commercial interests. McChesney thinks that:

“we're in a really interesting phase culturally where the notion that there's something distinct from commercial culture comes into question when everything's commercialized.... I think it's a troubling notion, the idea that our references are so commercialized now that all our dissidents, all our autonomous voices are getting their cues from MTV on how to revolt. And I think that's a real tension that's going on among young people today.”[4]

This rings especially true when considering the now disbanded rap-rock group Rage Against the Machine; – a politically-charged hangover from the heady days of left-activist counterculture that were supporters of socialist and even anarcho-syndicalist causes yet were signed to Epic Records, owned by global media conglomerate Sony Music Entertainment.

Zack De La Rocha, lead vocalist for the group has maintained his authenticity by being gassed by police during a concert and traveling to Mexico to engage with the left-wing rebel Zapatista movement. He insisted in an interview with Kerrang! Magazine that using the mainstream media to consciously promote the band’s political message and their routine refusal to talk to journalists has merely:

"[ensured] the protection of this band's integrity…That we were walking what we were talking, as opposed to just talking. We're dealing with a monstrous pop culture that has a tendency to commodify and pacify everything - it's happened to so many bands in the past. It's important that artists in my position set an example and there's a fine line between the promotion of a product and the promotion of an idea."[5]

The fact their message appears more authentic is more important than the medium it arrives on in their view and most likely the views of their fans. To a fashion, de la Rocha has transformed his own band into a prized commodity that oozes authenticity through reluctantly granting access to journalists. It gives those in the rock field a point of departure to determine who are the most powerful in the rock field and how to market this to a readership.
However, ultimately, whomever identifies with the alternative rock subculture is merely affording opportunities to major labels like “Warner [to] sell you the Throwing Muses instead of Madonna.” 

Taking Marxist positions that “all products of the culture industry are inherently inauthentic,” it seems like a non-concern amongst actors and participants in the rock field that legitimate rock’s authenticity. Modernist scholar Schumway argues with the example of Cobain and de la Rocha, their super-stardom in the rock field

“comes a new question of authenticity: is the star the person he or she appears to be on screen or on stage? The answer must always in the strict sense be “no” because to be a star is to be presented to the public packaged and mediated. The audience knows this at some level, and yet the desire to know the authentic individual persists. As David Marshall has argued, “the relationship that the audience builds with the film celebrity is configured through a tension between the possibility and impossibility of knowing the authentic individual.”[6]

The notion of the impossibility of an authentic individual is also conferred on to journalists that work in the rock music field. Jones argues that ideology plays a central role in rock music and rock subcultural authenticity; ideology and common sense. In his view, it is “common sensical” to view that a common human activity, i.e., music making has been “colonized by commerce” and that the authentic expression of style speaks more “truth” about the music than whether it was born out of autonomy or not, or to some unacceptable extent that would deem the music or band “inauthentic.”
  
It seemingly is the task of rock journalists and the rock press to communicate opposition or difference in their own fashion in accordance with staying true to the “cultural capital” that is conferred upon them by fans and others who participate in the rock subculture even though, through journalism, attempt to bridge that divide between “fan” and “star” without seeming beholden to either yet servicing both - lies the real irony. Authenticity in rock and its journalism is "authenticated" if one cares only about the image and care not not how it gets to you and "why."


---
This essay is part of a collaborative project with blogger, music critic and MetalAsFuck.net founder Leticia Supple on rock journalism and criticism. You can read her excellent and incisive contributions here.

References:

1. Guinon, C. “Authenticity” in Philosophy Compass, (Vol. 3, No. 2, 2008) p. 278.
2. Savage, J. “Sounds Dirty: Truth about Nirvana” in The Observer, 15 August 1993.
3. Cameron, K. “Nirvana: Love Will Tear Us Apart” in NME, 29 August 1992. http://bit.ly/lrFxNo
4. McChesney, R., “The Symbiotic Relationship Between the Media and Teens” in Frontline: The Merchants of Cool, PBS website, 2001 http://to.pbs.org/gQyD3g
5. Myers, B. “Hello, Hello...It's Good To Be Back: Rage Against the Machine” in Kerrang! 16 October, 1999 
6. Schumway, D. R. “Authenticity, Stardom and Rock ‘n’ Roll” in Modernism/Modernity (Vol 14, No. 3. 2007) p. 530.

Interview: The Man With the Mighty Axe – Marcus Siepen: Gamer, geek and Blind Guardian rhythm guitarist (Metal As Fuck)

He’s got connections in Blizzard Entertainment. He’s been playing rhythm guitar for 25 years and wouldn't have it any other way. He’s Marcus Siepen, and he’s the riffwraith for German power metal gods, Blind Guardian. Read on - and don't get too jealous, gamers.

Read the rest at Metal As Fuck.

Live Review: The Beards at Northcote Social Club (the AU Review)

The Northcote Social Club looks like a place that your grandmother frequented in the 70s when men's top lips were bristling with mustaches and beer could be bought for under a dollar. Textured floral wallpaper, shag carpeting and red velvet curtains greet you walking into the band room. I was half expecting to see a seniors bingo game in progress. Despite the antiquated decor, the beer prices had their origins very much in the present. But what of the bands accompanying The Beards on their 100 Beard Tour of Australia? Beards are pretty 70s, right?



Read the rest at the AU Review.

Push-Button Professionalism: The origin and evolution of the role of professional music critics

If you write on the internet, you’re blogging. There’s an indissoluble link between the two terms – if you have an opinion and have the means to publish on the internet, you are elevated into the “blogosphere” of online opinion. One can blog on virtually any subject they wish, including rock music. These bloggers offer music criticism with lighting fast rapidity and in some cases, keener cultural and intellectual insight compared with academically trained, and establishment-oriented “professionals.” Is there much truth to the charge of popular music academic Don McLeese when he asks:

"[C]ritical writing about pop music has grown steadily more irrelevant. . . . Pinning the entire rap on the Internet allows music critics to dodge some painful but necessary questions. How should journalists illuminate the zeitgeist at a moment when the dominant culture narrative is that there is no dominant cultural narrative? Do critics have any special license to serve as pop music’s cultural interlocutors when anyone with an Internet connection can attempt to do the same thing? In other words: if anyone can make pop music and anyone can be a pop-music critic, do we really need professional critics to tell us what it all means?"[1]

If we can curate to our own exacting tastes, access music from a variety of sources and similarly the criticism – how can one delineate between “cultural interlocutor,” loud-mouth blogger or publicist shill? How did we end up at this (non-)critical juncture in the first place?

Music criticism and journalism lends meaning to the subculture or “communities of consumers” as they may be viewed and as an extension of itself. The bands characterizing themselves as artists address their fans through the “interlocutor” or interpreter of critic and rock journalist. However, the force of community building is at tension with the forces of commodification as rock journalism derives its revenue through label advertising in order to sell their own cultural product. Labels seek to reach their markets through magazines. Then we must determine the initial impulse for music writers to start writing about this subject as well.

Charlie Gillett of the underground magazine Rock File wrote in 1972 that “records are the reason most of the journalists are [writers], which is often as frustrating to them as it is to the readers who have to plough through their copy. Records are bait and currency for the rock 'n' roll journalist; he gets ‘review copies,’ free from the record companies, keeps those he likes, and sells or trades off what he doesn't want.” But in 2011 a “music critic” (as defined as someone who actively writes about music with some degree of critical positioning) can download an album, perhaps before its release date and write a review with as much import as a piece written by a critic that works within the traditional structures of the industry and is recognized by others in the subculture as such.

Of course, back in the 1960s and 70s the media ecology of the music marketplace was firmly in the grasp of the music industry. Record labels and their holding companies controlled the means of reproduction (vinyl records, 8-tracks etc.) and how these products were manufactured and sold. Similarly, music magazines controlled the sphere of criticism and music news reporting. In the time of Gillett, Roxon and Bangs, music critics were handed records by publicists or editors and encouraged, “bribed” or ordered to write about what they heard or were charged with finding new sounds or emerging trends in music-centric subcultures. In some cases, these journalists almost uncritically championed styles they favored.

On the whole, critics were charged to communicate to other readers using their cultivated disposition – perceived or otherwise - if what they heard was culturally significant or aesthetically creative; it was their job to appraise whether the music in question was enjoyable, to determine to what extent and why. A reader would have to buy, physically pick up or subscribe to a magazine or street press, read the review and decide whether to purchase the album or single based on the resulting content. In terms of criticism, there was a literal and cultural distance from the work being appraised and the work itself; the record and the magazine existed in two parallel and distinct mediums as opposed to non-critical music-as-content mediums such as radio or television.

Radio ever since its invention and mass adoption, likewise with television in the 1980s, has exposed cultures and subcultures to budding trends in pop and rock music. The content of radio primarily is music (or arguably the commercials that bookend the songs), not music criticism. Once a song was played, the listener was at the mercy of the DJ to spin it again (until the 1980s, when home taping became prevalent although this phenomenon was not as wide-spread as record labels would have us imagine.) Almost all music in rotation at commercial or even community access radio stations was almost always readily available for purchase in record stores or in other outlets. The institution of the radio station serves to actively publicize music (or rather, the records) as a commercial product for retail sale by presenting it as the content itself. When media critic Robert McChesney posited that “there’s no non-commercial part of MTV” in the mid-90s he could easily have applied the same assertion to commercial radio of the 50s onwards (especially in the face of cash-for-airplay scandals known as “payola.”) In the age of media convergence, new media and portable, digital formats such as endlessly duplicable CD or mp3, the once prevailing view of music as a controlled, commercial product becomes problematic. Thus the role and usefulness of the “privileged interlocutor” is thrown into question.

In the twilight of the last century, the file-sharing service Napster along with scores of others forced a usually reactionary music industry to transition towards the portable and online era. Musicians and labels discovered to their dismay they could not merely legislate or litigate the control of their products back to them and how they were covered or evaluated in publications. The age of monetizing the content by controlling the technology was at a close. The advance promo “bait” as a currency to entice music journalists to write favorable copy – or any copy at all – lost all worth virtually overnight.

Likewise, the “underground” publications such as street-press or fanzines, revered for their authenticity due to their autonomy and limited production in comparison to the “mainstream” could no longer maintain this physical distance from Rolling Stone or NME once these blog-zines were only one click away. In terms of music criticism, the dimension between “insider” or “interpreter” and “consumer” or “fan” collapsed. Industry publicists, fans, musicians, technicians and professional journalists could all don the persona of music critic with a few simple clicks of a mouse. We don’t even have to read reviews; websites such as Last.fm, MySpace and ReverbNation allow us to hear music on demand and allows consumers to individually decide whether to purchase (or illegally download) the content for themselves. So do we need professionals to tell us what it all means?

In Australia, there are many fanzines and blogs that have risen from the grassroots to later be co-opted by the music industry to propel mutual success. FasterLouder.com.au, Beat Magazine, KillYourStereo, MetalForge.com, MetalAsFuck.net, Mess+Noise, Collapse Board, the AU Review and various others are examples of fan-established and maintained blogs or street press that have risen to prominence significantly due to gaining artist access via official channels. Sites and street press such as these are privy to the sphere of cultural production (to be discussed in detail in another essay) in terms of providing the basis for content creation for these sites. For record label, it’s arguably the last vestige of content control they retain.

In the origins of pop music criticism, when pop was to be considered “art” by academia and eventually the mainstream (radio, television, newspapers and other widely consumed cultural products intended for a mass audience) it was pushed by students and university graduates occupying positions of influence in the media or academia. Alternatively, publications such as the aforementioned Rolling Stone, Creem or Melody Maker (after it went “progressive”) were created to lead the charge for pop music and its adherents as an artistically authentic subculture and not merely as pleasure-driven kids seeking vacuous entertainment. Pop music critic authenticity was conferred upon writers by writing for publications that others considered to be representative of the subculture it was reflecting or shaping. In the internet age, the “professionals” are not chosen by the public, but the labels.

The labels offer the interviews, the advance copies, the free concert tickets to writers they believe carry this authenticity or popularity and are able to act as “cultural interlocutors.” “Amateur” music critics that garner a significant amount of traffic or attention do not tend to stay “amateur” for long. Labels on the prowl for more avenues to publicize their content will seek to co-opt these writers or journalists into their cultural production “sphere” or circuit. Whether the writer publishes his own blog or is employed by conglomerates such as News Limited or Fairfax Media, the task that falls on the writer to “explore meaning” in pop music is granted by the fact labels allow the writer to test these boundaries through controlling who gains access to these artists and who does not.

There is no question there are shills, “hacks” and other fan-writers who write nothing but borderline hagiography when afforded an opportunity to meet or talk to their favorite artist. Others pride themselves on acting as “haters,” harshly critiquing almost everything that they hear. Despite either method (or even striking a moderate balance of coverage) that guarantees the initial access, once inside the label-content circuit, one’s inclusion is not assured indefinitely. If new, more popular writers emerge and the writer in question does not deliver a return on investment (writing negative copy in a publication with declining readership, for example) they eventually are excluded from the circuit. At this juncture, it becomes apparent who is granted "privileged interlocutorship."

It would be naïve to assume that the most popular music writers are considered the “best” writers; its essentially a subjective position. In the view of the music industry, these critics and writers are given more access for the greatest return on investment. Even though music is stolen with more haste than it is bought, the intrinsic task of the privileged music critic is the same; to promote records through the discussion of it in mass media publications. But do we need them?

To answer simply, the co-opted critic may not be as insightful, incisive or knowledgeable about their chosen critic as one who is not. The “special licence” is conferred upon writer from without, by the source of the content being written about; not inversely as it did in the post-1968 moment until around 1986 and new media trends and transmission methods were integrated into our media culture. A critic that actively resists co-option may enjoy heightened authenticity through maintaining a critical distance from the industry cultural production circuit, much like those in the underground zine culture of the 70s and 80s. By rejecting the compromising “lures” of privileged interlocutorship may work in their favor in terms of shaping the musical zeitgeist in certain subcultures (such as punk and hardcore music for example.) This sounds like a romanticized authenticity rooted in the do-it-yourself punk philosophy, but ultimately the writer with the “all access pass” carries more authenticity as a music critic and journalist than the writer without one.

The simple, undeniable fact remains: the writer with the most reach is given that privilege and writes to sustain it; and that license is very much granted at the discretion of the labels and publicists. We don’t need these “privileged” writers, no; but in terms of getting the story and advancing the narrative of music criticism, we do seem to want them. The critics that elevate their craft into an art as much as the music they write about are the ones that deserve the privilege; but unfortunately may not always get it. As long as the participants of a subculture yearn for an authentic story behind artists and their products conveyed from the mouths of the artists themselves - critically or not - the “privilege” is there for the taking and increasingly, exists for our continued consumption.

This essay is an early draft in a series of critical examinations of music criticism and journalism. The project is being co-written by Leticia Supple, blogger and founder of MetalAsFuck.net. Read her first essay here.


---
[1]: McLeese, D. 'Straddling the Cultural Chasm: The Great Divide between Music Criticism and Popular Consumption' in Popular Music and Society (Vol. 33, No. 4. 2010) p. 436.