"Indie Grown-Ups"

[choo-choo-charlie]

What a lazy, pathetic excuse for music journalism. That reviewer (who is likely a freelancer) should be fired.

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

What a lazy, pathetic excuse for music journalism. That reviewer (who is likely a freelancer) should be fired.

 

This thing has gone viral...this site has probably had more hits over this stupid little review than they get for all the other postings put together.

[calvino]

Here we go:

http://blogs.seattle..._no_wrong_a.php

 

That gave me a good laugh. Wow.

[redpillbox]

It wasn't about Ryan or any poor behavior oh his part...it was about a bratty, self important reporter.

 

Ryan was playing a gig at the Benaroya Hall and this reporter/reviewer/blogger wrote a really obnoxious story about her experiences.

 

Shows up late for this intimate, solo gig; makes a small ruckus getting to seat; proceeds to tap out her review on her blackberry; gets annoyed when the people around her ask her to put the blackberry away; borrows a plane ticekt and pen from her 'date' to take notes; talks to her date and gets further annoyed when she is shushed...this was the gist of her 'review'. Complaints about how people at a show might actually want to hear the hear the music instead of her tapping on a blackberry or talking to her friend.

She walked out of the show early and mentioned NOT ONE WORD about Adams' performance.

 

The comments section on this review were hilarious.

 

Would post a link...but I can't remember where I found it.

 

That's pretty funny. It reads almost like satire. When you first posted this I thought for sure it must be written by one of our weeklies "The Stranger" which specializes in snark and indie-takedowns, but it's in the Weekly which surprises me. Maybe this is a generational thing? I can't wrap my head around it.

[augurus]

 

Has 'Indie' Become 'Adult Contemporary'?

 

October 26, 2011

 

by FRANNIE KELLEY

 

On Sunday night New York magazine published a piece by its music critic, Nitsuh Abebe, in which he says Wilco's leader, Jeff Tweedy, accurately predicted the general reaction to his group's recent album, The Whole Love, back in April: "I have no doubt that the second this record becomes available there's somebody sitting in a basement at their computer with the word 'meh' already typed up, waiting to post a review."

 

Abebe concurs with that assessment and goes on to explain it as a result of two things: first, the maturation of a certain type of indie music. Of musicians like Wilco, Feist, and Radiohead he writes, "These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they've taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple."

 

The second reason he says very few people are up in arms about the evolution of a style of music (and musicians) once beloved for its outsider ethos and "authenticity" into something that has been characterized as, variously, "dad rock," "for sale next to the register at Starbucks" or, even, as Abebe does, "NPR Muzak," (not that we're sensitive or anything) is our current oversupply of alternatives. If we're not into it, he says, we no longer have to throw a fit, because we're already on to the next one.

 

But some people will throw a fit, because some people like the feeling they get when they're in the middle of throwing a fit. Abebe's piece this week addresses these people, or, as he says, the "phenomenon" of people whose knee-jerk reaction to "adult contemporary" is to run screaming in the other direction — maybe even without listening first.

 

We at The Record think the debates music fans have — about what we listen to and why (to be "challenged"? to be soothed?), about defining ourselves through our taste, about what it means for the industry and listeners when major labels begin to exploit the idea of "indie" — are straight up fascinating. We reveal the way we see the world, and how we wish it would look, during these barstool throwdowns, these vehement Gchats, critical pile-ons and late-night Twitter beefs.

 

Abebe is clearly paying attention to these conversations, too — he's written about what might constitute an indie version of adult contemporary before, back in 2003 in a review of The Delgados' album Hate — and so I sent him a few questions to keep this one going.

 

 

Q: What's different about the 2011 version of this music compared to the 2003 version? Why the name "adult contemporary"?

 

A: That piece was written for Pitchfork, for a smaller audience with a certain kind of taste — so in that case, I was mostly teasing/marveling about the fact that there was such a robust pocket of bands making this classicist music, and doing well with it. I really don't think of this as an actual "genre," and my use of that word back then was a mild joke, or a question posed for that audience; I was seriously curious whether readers back then would one day wind up with kids in the back seat saying "God, Mom, do we have to listen to Wilco *again*?"

 

But at that point the music was still pretty stylized. Now, eight years later, more and more music coming from that direction has reached a place where, say, I might be asked to write about it for a general-audience magazine like New York; it seems to be familiar and comfortable to many more people. Some of it has become much less stylized, too, which is totally fine — lots of it is still beautiful, well-made, full of ideas, entirely worth listening to. Some of it is genuinely challenging!

 

I guess there are just two things that fascinate me. One is that a lot of listeners seem actively sick of these sounds, or have a slight knee-jerk about this *type* of act; you can really feel this contingent that has an urge to roll its eyes and run in the opposite direction. That's the phenomenon I was writing about in this article, because I think it's a pretty interesting one. The other thing is that a surprising number of people get *angered* if you point out that an act like Wilco makes fairly classicist American pop-rock music, something that seems to me to be a self-evident fact.

 

Q: In your piece for New York you say Feist was pegged as "a maker of middlebrow background listening, of NPR Muzak" after she put out The Reminder. What makes the name NPR a useful descriptor for this music?

 

A: I suppose you'd have to ask the people who really take pride in using that as a slur — they tend to use it more as a social-class insult, or a knock on the perceived audience, then as a descriptor for the music. But I think the insult they're shooting for is pretty well understood, mostly because there were a few years when NPR really *was* an effective avenue for certain types of indie musicians to get across to a big audience. (I am well aware that various programs on various stations cover a lot of different types of music, so I put the word "Muzak" in that sentence to absorb the slur a bit. You're welcome?)

 

Q: What do you think fans of music solidly in that genre are getting from their experience of it?

 

A: Well, it's pleasant, thoughtful, generally really well-made music. It has an approach that's pretty earnestly artistic, so it's not afraid of interesting ideas — but it tends not to get too out-there or challenging in a way that's going to bother anyone, which I would say is fundamentally generous. It's extremely good at being sedate and pleasant but still carrying some deeper emotions — and that might sound like a backhanded compliment, but there really *aren't* that many pockets of music that are good at low-key subtleties in that way, good at feeling ... reflective. (A lot of music is overbearing; a lot of the stuff that isn't overbearing is either cloying or emotion-free.) I am not remotely surprised or exasperated that people like this music — as a category, it's pretty reliably full of great stuff! And it's pretty. Prettiness is always an important and generally underrated force.

 

Q: How are the majors grooming and marketing acts for the adult contemporary space?

 

A: I'm not sure how to give a non-dorky answer to this, but I can say that I didn't have "the adult contemporary space" in mind when I wrote that. I was referring more to the way that there's this huge space of press, blogs, media, etc. that we think of as an "indie" channel, and it tends to lean toward covering that kind of music — and it *seems*, at least, like major labels have really identified that as an opportunity.

 

In the old days, someone could spend a lot of money trying to market a new act in some top-down, nationwide way, which involved immediately trying to convince everyone this was a Big Star; these days, it's surely more cost-effective to try and bubble them up through online buzz, which involves making them seem like just a great little niche band you happened to discover.

 

Q: What do the musicians in the genre get out of being labeled as such, whether they embrace it or not?

 

A: I don't know that anyone's really trying to label anyone, or officially corral them into little groups. What you *do* see is a lot of fans who are constantly making personal decisions about which ones they find challenging, which ones they find pleasant and which ones they find a bit tame or dull — and then arguing with one another, at length, about those estimations, sometimes deploying various predictable insults involving NPR, the middle class, the musical taste of America's fathers, or whatever else. And honestly, that's the part that's most interesting to me.

 

These musicians will surely just go on making the best music they can, and lots of it will be good or bad, depending. But whether people are interested in listening to it will often have less to do with whether it's "objectively" good or bad, and more to do with what those fans are looking for — whether they're

*inclined* to sit down with this cozy Wilco album, or this (actually quite dramatic) Feist album, or whether they're in a mood of eye-rolling and looking for something that works a different kind of way entirely.

 

Personally, I am not remotely interested in arguing readers in any given direction on that question — I just think it's fascinating to watch which directions people go, and who's getting sick of which sounds, and which sounds they suspect might be more satisfying, and all the various churnings of those politics.

 

Q: When you wrote about this genre in Pitchfork you said while you found the music "perfectly lovely," you thought "something else" would be "more rewarding." What is the something else you tried out?

 

A: I will answer that honestly, at the expense of sounding a bit ridiculous: Around 2003 I would probably have been into really over-the-top electro acts. (I might even have tried to convince you that a disc called Resuscitation, by a group called Adult., was the best thing in forever.) The R&B and hip-hop on the radio was also doing some amazing things — those were the years of every new Missy Elliott single feeling like a mind-blowing event. And I was enjoying a lot of European dance music: German techno, Dutch electro, etc.

 

Those are just my personal answers, though! I'm not sure I care if these things were "better" than the other options — they're just the places I happened to look to when the things I'd been listening to before felt like they were settling into a rut.

 

Q: Was it more rewarding? How so?

 

A: Learning new things is always rewarding! I'm probably most glad about the R&B part, because there were some years in the early 2000s where it felt like a genuine free-for-all of ideas — which is precisely the quality that got me into indie music as a teenager. There were times when driving around listening to pop radio gave me the same feelings I'd once gotten from tuning in to the local college station when I was 14. And I still get a lot from R&B.

~via NPR

[aricandover]

What a lazy, pathetic excuse for music journalism. That reviewer (who is likely a freelancer) should be fired.

 

What journalism? It's a fucking blog.

[choo-choo-charlie]

A blog published by a periodical.

[aricandover]

That doesn't make it journalism, it's blogger doing a terrible "job" of reviewing a concert.

[choo-choo-charlie]

Whatever man. Why are you arguing this point? We both agree that her review was crap.

 

I'd also like to add that I'm not implying every blogger is a "journalist" per se -- but traditional journalism as we know it is dying (or even dead to some), and music blogs are very much considered the new journalism in some folks' eyes. Maybe not yours.

[aricandover]

and music blogs are very much considered the new journalism in some folks' eyes. Maybe not yours.

 

I don't really take stock in any of that hooey.

[choo-choo-charlie]

I don't really take stock in any of that hooey.

 

Fair enough.

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

That doesn't make it journalism, it's blogger doing a terrible "job" of reviewing a concert.

 

That doesn't make it journalism, it's blogger doing a terrible "job" of reviewing a concert.

 

Funny thing is, this really crappy blog with get tens of thousands of more views than any well considered, professional journalist's print review of the concert.

 

It sucks (both the blog and the fact that so many will read it)...but it is the world we live in.

[Quixote]

As I read her would-be review, I was reminded of this:

[lazy locomotives]

Pissed Jeans and Fucked Up...the 'dad-rock' of 2024.

[kidsmoke]

These days, if something doesn't smack you in the face, it's 'meh.'

 

If I might use the world of beer as an analogy: This is why hipsters only like hoppy beers, and more and more don't have the patience to appreciate the subtleties of lagers, pilsners, saisons, etc.

 

I like hoppy beers, St. Vincent, dubstep, etc, but I also want to celebrate songcraft and beercraft for the honed arts they are.

 

I can't imagine anyone giving TWL a 'meh' after 5 serious listens. But who can spare the time when tripped out on streaming the latest hipness? Given time, TWL will go down as a classic. Same with the latest from Feist and Neko Case. Great songwriters like these are never dime a dozen.

 

And the whole 70's rock to punk reaction analogy just doesn't work. Sorry, Nitsuh.

 

(glad i got that off my chest)

 

I like this post & agree.

[augurus]

I like this post & agree.

I'm sorry, but that post is about as short-sighted as the hipsters (s)he is deriding.

[kidsmoke]

I'm sorry, but that post is about as short-sighted as the hipsters (s)he is deriding.

 

What do you see as short-sighted, about it? Seriously curious. Seemed very sensible to me.

[caliber66]

Because saying hipsters only like hoppy beers is stupid.

[kidsmoke]

Well, sure, if you read the analogy literally. I took it that the poster was saying, "Those hipsters who only like hoppy beers do so without realizing the subtleties of other types of beer."

 

I see your point. I guess I just interpreted his point differently. But I suppose hipsters have different tastes in beer, yeah.

 

I think this is mostly semantics. Maybe he should have worded it differently.

[caliber66]

It's also easy to be dismissive of opinions one doesn't agree with, because they are held by people (or groups of people) one doesn't like. Using "hipsters" as some kind of monolithic bogeyman that all share the same opinion is rarely, if ever, accurate.

[Sir Stewart]

Pissed Jeans and Fucked Up...the 'dad-rock' of 2024.

 

Exactly.

[tinnitus photography]

Pissed Jeans and Fucked Up...the 'dad-rock' of 2024.

 

so does that mean The Birthday Party and Throbbing Gristle are the dad rock of the '00s?

 

 

 

and Damien is already a dad

 

[choo-choo-charlie]

Thing is, this "reviewer" must not have been aware of the type of show she was going to, nor did she recognize it once she was there. It wasn't a rock show. It was an intimate acoustic performance. She even noted the stage setup - acoustic guitars, upright piano, banjo, etc. Not exactly a "rock" setup. I kind of see if like the Tweedy/Wilco thing; solo shows are "folk" shows while Wilco concerts are "rock and roll" so says the man himself.

[augurus]

The beer analogy is pretty much a way for the poster to just jeer at people who doesn't agree with him/her. There's a lot of generalizations in his analogies. And then there's the "I can't imagine anyone giving TWL a 'meh' after 5 serious listens". Okay, you can't imagine, but people like that out there do exist. It truly is a narrow-minded view of the world even if we're all in Via Chicago. While the typical hipster castigates The Whole Love and Metals for its "meh", Newbornghost is deriding the hipsters for an assumption of unexcited short-sighted view of the world. The beer analogy really doesn't work even if it's just a joke. Perhaps they have patience but a different taste. Newbornghost's polarizing view is almost in the same form as the generic hipster he's deriding, just with different opinions.

[choo-choo-charlie]

It seems that some people think Wilco peaked with Summerteeth. I've seen in plenty of places folks slamming Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as the beginning of the band's descent into "Dad rock." Those same people bash A.M. as being boring and calling Being There only "occasionally inspired." So, by that reasoning, Wilco has only released one good album?