Last week, Flavorpill Music Editor Judy Berman asked the ubiquitous Visitation Rites “us” to contribute a few lines to the publication’s official response to Rolling Stone’s “40 Reasons to Get Excited About Music” cover story this month. We too found it a bit sad (if not slightly disturbing) that the latter publication couldn’t think of anything more exciting about music in 2010 than the Black Eyed Peas (reason #1), whose invaluable contribution to our generation’s cultural bequest was honored by a feature article entitled “The Science of Global Pop Domination.” Asked to pen one of Flavorpill’s “40 Better Reasons to Get Excited About Music,” Visitation Rites produced the following flight of techno-optimism:
#5: Anyone can be a critic: “The ’90s may have taught us that ‘anyone can play guitar,’ but now any music lover with a working internet connection and a brain can share his or her enthusiasm with the public and rest assured that at least somebody out there will be listening. Having more music writers out there may mean a higher volume of shoddy criticism, but it also means that those of us who aspire to do more than post MediaFire downloads and paraphrase press releases can do so in dialogue with each other, prodding each other to come up with better and better explanations for why certain music makes us tick — and why it seems to be happening at this moment in history. Arriving at that understanding collectively — as a generation, even — is much more exciting than listening to what some snarky loner type sitting at an editorial desk has to say.”
Among other responses related specifically to the changing face of music writing in the digital era, Sarah Lynn Knowles (aka Sarah Spy) also contributed the following words on the promising (though admittedly controversial) proliferation of several blogger-run labels this year:
26. Blogger-owned labels: “Just within the last two months, we’ve seen Weekly Tape Deck and Gorilla vs Bear’s joint venture Forest Family, My Old Kentucky Blog’s Roaring Colonel Records, Wonder Beard Tapes from White Guys with Beards, Chocolate Bobka blog’s Curatorial Club, and soon-to-debut Trig Club from Yvynyl and Frightened by Bees. I know some have questioned a blogger-turned-label-head’s ability to stay unbiased once they’ve got a financial stake in product-pushing; but I think subjectivity was kind of the point to begin with, and readers will continue trusting tastemakers whose preferences align with theirs, regardless. Overall, I’m eager to see how this plays out — which labels (and others that inevitably sprout up behind them) fade after a one-off release, versus which evolve into something huger.”
Read the “definitive” list on Flavorpill.
For an adamantly alternative viewpoint, please view Christopher Weingarten’s “Music is Math” speech at the 140 Characters Conference today, in which he disparages the “bland middling taste of the internet hive mind.” Weingarten also contributed to the Flavorpill list; among his other highly viral one-liners, we find “crowdsourcing killed indie rock” to be his most memorable.
Words: Emilie Friedlander
