Authentic Listening: Are We Selling Out Our Tastes?
A few days ago I confirmed for myself how out of touch I am with indie music when I took a look at Pitchfork’s albums of the decade list. Of the 200 albums listed, I’d probably heard maybe half of them, and of that half I probably actually liked about 10. I tried again to listen to the albums they are really big on (e.g., Kid A, Supreme Clientele) and was left convinced I should probably regard a high Pitchfork rating as a personal negative indicator. If Pitchfork is associated with a band when I first hear about them, I’m probably best off not bothering.
I bring this up only because I am also reading Greg Kot’s Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, a journalistic look at the music business over the past decade (it reads like a series of Fortune stories—not an insult, just an impression) in which Pitchfork features prominently. Even though I am writing at this moment for what some might consider a “music webzine,” I was pretty surprised at how influential Pitchfork is reputed to be. Some of the industry people Kot interviews makes Pitchfork sound like the financial rating agencies: “I feel the next step for Pitchfork is literally dictating to bands what to do next,” a guy in an indie band tells him. ” ‘Okay, can you just paint a little more green on that album before you release it?’ ” That would mirror the way ratings agencies told banks what to adjust in securities in order to secure AAA ratings to keep the bubble going. These were oftentimes the securities destined to become “toxic,” becoming the assets no one could value properly and no one wanted on their books.
Of course, music has always been impossible to value properly with a rating. Associating an album with a number may drive its sales—Kot has several anecdotes of Pitchfork’s rating pushing units to distributors and on—but it pushes casual consumers into consuming the rating rather than engaging with the music. The number promises the idea that a bunch of others are out there listening and approving, so it is okay for you to get into it as well. That’s not a terrible thing, but it contradicts the prized notion that we have unique and personality-defining tastes.
What is striking about Ripped is the longing most of the people Kot talks to have to see the music industry destroyed. They have a fantasy, it seems, that pop music will at last cease to be a commodity and become authentic art again. That’s a nice dream, but it may set people up for unnecessary disappointment. Music seems more a matter of hype now then ever before, and the fact that amateur hypers are the driving force is even more depressing than when it was professional PR people. If I make a mix CD and give it to a friend, that’s a way of building a bond, enhancing the friendship. If I put a bunch of tracks on an MP3 blog, that’s something entirely different. Now I’ve crossed the line into being a freelance marketer, a wannabe A&R person. I want strangers to applaud my taste under the auspices of “sharing.”
It’s no better if I talk about my musical tastes on a social network—the context changes the relevance of what I am saying and my opinions can be aggregated and sold as demographic data, or could lead to my friends being hit with certain sorts of targeted ads. By the terms of service, my opinions become part of a commercial public record.
So while the intentions of musicians probably haven’t changed much over the past decade and may have a chance of becoming purer in the absence of a consolidated music industry, the intentions of listeners are much more likely to be altered for the worse, with music becoming, more than it ever has been, a counter in an endless game of self-promotion and self-definition. Our intentions in listening will be harder and harder to keep pure; the temptations to sell our tastes out by blogging/tweeting/social network posting about them will continue to increase. It may be too late for me (see first graf above) but the rest of you may be able to save yourselves. Tell no one online what you’ve heard.
Comments
Nice insights. This is something I’ve been thinking about recently, namely the contemporary function of the music press (blogs, websites, etc) in relation to the consumption and production of music. Are we all just (mostly unpaid) A&R zombies, or are music writers actually doing something more important/critical? It’s a topic that requires much exploration, especially now that Pitchfork has undoubtedly become the hegemon of the independent music world (and it’s quickly crossing over to be even more). But I think it may be mistaken to romanticize an arguably mythical authentic listening experience since, in the past, there were other historical structures that largely determined how taste was structured. I’m not saying that you are making this romantic claim, but only that it’s important to emphasize the fact that there has always been a hierarchy of power regarding the construction/reproduction of taste, but that blogging, for example, is the current historical mode of taste-construction. So the means of influence have changed, and the reasons (self-publicity, personality-defining, etc), but it’s always been the same game.
I hope you keep writing on this topic.
Comment by parallelliott — October 9, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
Thanks for reading—I’ve written about the subject before, particularly about the way taste is situated sociohistorically and the way taste functions as cultural capital and the way that the idea of unique taste serves as a consumerist ideology and so on. I agree, there is no one authentic, pure listening experience, but I think commercially controlled social media has brought us to a new place with arts consumption, one that further entrenches the market as the only social institution that matters and one that everyone will insist has “democratized” arts. It seems that technological-commercial innovations are typically passed off ideologically as democratizing.
Comment by Rob Horning — October 9, 2009 @ 5:54 pm
Hey, Rob—
Interesting thoughts, as usual. I do wonder—if you haven’t answered this question in previous posts—what kind of contemporary music you do enjoy.
I followed your link to the Pitchfork top ten, and while I don’t follow Pitchfork (or pride myself on my cool), I have to say that there isn’t a single album on the top ten that I don’t like. Kid A has always been a divisive album, and one that people feel pressured into pretending to like. (I actually do like it, but I love most things that sound synthy, glitchy, and melodic—Tomita and Wendy Carlos are two of my favorite musicians—but I understand that it’s not for everyone.) But what is it that you don’t like about The Moon and Antarctica, for instance? That’s such a gorgeous, heartbreaking album—and even now, it feels like an original; Modest Mouse is one of those bands that very few other groups have tried to mimic, perhaps because it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. The album is very sharp lyrically, as well: full of perceptive, idiosyncratic songs about love and lust and loss and dislocation, etc., etc. And Funeral, far from being a current hipster staple (in spite of its inclusion on this list), is considered incredibly uncool by a lot of people today precisely because it appeals to so many “uncool” people; it’s so catchy and tuneful that even soccer moms can get into it, which is the kiss of death. Do you really dislike the songs on Funeral?
The Sigur Ros album is gorgeous, though if it had come out in a different period it would have been branded prog or new age, and dismissed for that reason. Some of the other records on the list just strike me as great pop. If you like dance music, it’s hard to beat The Avalanches and Daft Punk; even if there are better techno outfits around, you’d have to agree that these guys are good at what they do. I’m not a hip-hop fan, but that Jay-Z album has some killer singles.
In other words, this top ten list has a lot of range, and seems to be made up, from top to bottom, of excellent music. “Excellent,” as you point out, is subjective. What I’m trying to find out is why, subjectively, you aren’t into to any of these ten very different, ambitious, and exciting albums. When you make the curmudgeonly blanket statement that you dislike almost everything you’ve heard on the list, I worry that you’re closing yourself off to the pleasures of popular art altogether.
Comment by Daft Commenter — October 10, 2009 @ 10:40 pm
What I listen to tends to be guided by stubbornness and inertia in equal parts. Sometimes my thinking about these questions of taste reflects my searching for an excuse for that. When I was younger I put too much stock in liking music that I “discovered”—an approach that became entirely untenable even as the 1980s ended (and I as I grew older and met more people who already knew about any music I might have found). Then, I was guided by a notion of music as intellectual currency in a market for hip credibility. I reject that market now, but it has left a residue. My concern about social networks and such has to do with the way they make markets for credibility, authenticity, and all the other lifestyle canards.
Although I think a lot of what happens is this: we get older and music isn’t so important to our lives anymore. We blame the music for this instead of the process of aging, so it starts to seem that music isn’t as good as it used to be because it can no longer claim our attention so immediately. Usually, liking some piece of music takes effort and concentration and a certain amount of determination.
I guess I’m not into ambitious pop music anymore. I do love Jay-Z’s <i>The Blueprint</i>.
Comment by Rob Horning — October 11, 2009 @ 11:02 am
Rob
Currenly writing a piece for the Herald newspaper in Scotland on how our increased eco-awareness will affect culture both in terms of its production and its consumption. Turning to music, I’m asking if projects like U2’s 360 tour will become politically unacceptable in the future. Will eco-conscious musicians of a fundamentalist bent perform only acoustic and by candlelight in future? Your thoughts would be appreciated. You can PM me or post here.
Comment by Barry from Scotland — October 12, 2009 @ 5:46 am
Rob,
Given your post, I’d be really interested in what you think about the Hype Machine, which is basically a music blog aggregator (hypem.com). While I haven’t used it to determine my preferences or tastes through its ratings system, I have discovered a whole bunch of new stuff.
Thanks for your work.
Comment by Geoff from Dallas — October 12, 2009 @ 3:41 pm
Geoff—I haven’t used Hype Machine really—think I looked at it a few times when it first started and was in a consolidation phase rather than an expansionary one with my music collection. I think the blogs like those being aggregated are best when they are an expression of someone’s taste and don’t seem driven to scoop other people. The aggregation filters out that personal quality.
Barry—Think eco-consciousness in incompatible with entertainment unless you consume your own eco-consciousness as a form of entertainment, which nullifies the primary motivation for green-ness. Their might be some novelty to scaled-down eco-formances, but the more sensible way to balance out the energy “wasted” in mega-spectacles would be for the performers to do a lot of exhorting of audiences to “make a difference” and that sort of thing. They may be accused of hypocrisy, but when has that stopped entertainers before? Suspending our disbelief about their hypocrisy is a basic requirement of enjoying pop culture.
Comment by Rob Horning — October 13, 2009 @ 12:02 pm