Novelty Rock

[Jahfin]

From the Washington DC CityPaper:

Novelty Rock

By Jason Cherkis

Why good writers are the worst thing that's ever happened to pop-
music criticism.

Names—boldfaced, literary, award-winning names, names that meant
something to the right crowd—had been floated.

Eddie Vedder. Tim Robbins. Both big fans. Sarah Vowell. Again, huge
fan.

These were names brainstormed by Sub Pop Publicity Director Steve
Manning and his charge Sleater-Kinney—names of those who could write
the band's biography for new album The Woods. Manning thought his
label's most well-known current artist deserved a bio that would make
people take note.

The Woods was Sleater-Kinney's first album for Sub Pop, as well as
its first recorded by It producer Dave Fridmann. Every leaker and
gossiper had gushed that this time, the band had changed its sound.
So the bio had to be written by someone special. When Vowell
demurred, citing scheduling concerns and the label's looming
deadline, band members suggested Rick Moody. They told Manning that
the celebrated author of The Ice Storm was a longtime fan. He knew
their history. They knew his e-mail address.

A week later, Moody, the winner of a Pushcart Press Editors' Book
Award, the Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize, the Addison Metcalf Award,
and a Guggenheim Fellowship, turned in his Sleater-Kinney bio. Nearly
two thousand words. Manning thought it was long. Long—but wow. "I'm
clearly not going to attempt to edit someone like Rick Moody,"
Manning recalls thinking. "I showed it to the band. They thought it
was amazing.…After spending an hour with it, there was nothing I
would consider taking out. It was so well-done."

The packaging is well-done. A four-color booklet on cream card stock,
with retro-styled artwork of Lichtenstein skies and Sleepy Hollow
trees, it's the coolest commencement program you could ever get. But
Moody's words, the ones left free of the editor's scalpel, are not so
well-done.

Moody's lines slap at you like annoying, wet children blubbering for
attention. You can swat kids away. But you can't get rid of Moody's
rockist clichés so easily; they're so rampant as to suggest a fetish.
Two sentences in, he tries to prove the significance of Corin
Tucker's wail by giving us…Patti Smith.

As Moody tells it, "At first, it appeared that the weaponry, the
system, the strategy, consisted of a lead singer who had an uncanny
urgency to her voice, more so than anyone since Patti Smith, enough
to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up."

Please, not Patti. And please, not the hair-on-the-neck thing. Moody
goes on to describe not a band but a classic-rock mash-up. The bio
amounts to an EMP exhibit of Rolling Stone–isms. Document-era Peter
Buck, take a bow. Nod your crusty heads, Mr. Garcia and Mr. Page.

"This is to say that you should not be afraid of new things, dear
reader, which in this case amounts to a really much more ambitious
idea of how the studio can be used," Moody writes in full hype mode.
Why the warning? If the record really does jam like Led Zeppelin II,
then it's going to sound like seventh grade. That's baseball cards,
bar mitzvahs, and a lot of old-school comfort food on the classic-
rock station. Nothing too scary. Nothing we need Rick Moody to
prepare us for.

And he's just one of several literary rock stars posing as rock
critics. Dave Eggers has a semiregular column in Spin. Jonathan
Lethem weighed in on the passing of Joey Ramone for the New York
Times. An entire cast of McSweeney's cultists have been writing
essays on their favorite tunes in an ongoing orgy of self-love billed
as "SHORT ESSAYS ON FAVORITE SONGS, INSPIRED BY NICK HORNBY'S
SONGBOOK." And Hornby himself has insinuated his neocon fogeyisms
into both the Times and the New Yorker.

All of these literati attempts at criticism don't signal undue
influence by culture-studies departments everywhere. Nor do they
suggest that today's novelists and memoir-slingers are hipper than
their predecessors. No, they point to the fact that real rock critics
are fighting for space and that informed opinions are underpaid and
underutilized in mainstream media outlets. They mean that criticism
has become cameo—stunt casting.

"They're scenester dilettante guys," says one longtime indie-rock
publicist. "It's exciting for them to have a piece of it. They just
want to go to a party with Karen O.…They're not music people."

Hornby didn't start the trend, but the lad-lit author gave his
brethren their watershed moment when the New Yorker published his Kid
A review, on Oct. 30, 2000. The novelist had parlayed the success of
his High Fidelity into a gig as the magazine's rock critic in what
amounted to a brilliant promotional tie-in. He took the opportunity
to middlebrow-beat readers to death. Imagine Nora Ephron swaying to
the plaintive strums of Aimee Mann—described by Hornby, naturally,
as "Beatles-tinged." But it was Hornby's takedown of Radiohead's
glitch-pop that became infamous.

The review outed him as lazy—and he admitted as much: "You have to
work at albums like Kid A. You have to sit at home night after night
and give yourself over to the paranoid millennial atmosphere.…In
other words, you have to be sixteen.…Kid A demands the patience of
the devoted; both patience and devotion become scarcer commodities
once you start picking up a paycheck."

You can quibble with Hornby's faux populism, his rejection of a
critic's basic job description, or his complete misreading of a
band's recordings and appeal. But that would be missing the
importance of his review: It showed other literary authors that you
can get away with anything. All you need is a buzzy book and you too
can be a rock critic.

Hornby and his ilk—and their audience—were the first generation to
grow up completely under the influence of rock music. So Jonathan
Franzen explained his post–Oprah's Book Club status as jumping from
tiny clubs to playing stadiums and told a BBC interviewer that the
Mekons served as his muse. Being effusive on the merits of the Mekons
or the sonic digressions of Wilco offers a benefit you can't get from
writing for the New York Times Book Review: a bigger audience, one
that may buy that Wilco book and read that tedious essay.

In a column from December 2004, Eggers used a Pixies concert to flash
back to his college days and declare, in that second-person,
***** way of his, that "Doolittle was your Sgt. Pepper's." He
never actually got to writing about the show itself. In 1995, Moody
celebrated the release of David Bowie's Outside by declaring in the
New York Times that the has-been's latest "just might restore him to
his position of eminence at those American high school dances." It
was both overreaching and overwrought, not to mention laughably
misguided. Somewhere, even Cameron Crowe is blushing.

Overness, of course, is the flaw of every freshman critic.
Eventually, with the help of a tough editor, a more developed ear, or
a better understanding of musical history, the young commentator
stops awarding a Grammy to every backpack rapper or postrocker with a
concept album. The problem with author-critics is that they're
critics who refuse to be critical; purple prose is their abiding
principle. "I think criticism, more often than not, completely misses
the point," wrote Eggers in a much-forwarded e-mail exchange with the
Harvard Advocate in May 2000. "The critical impulse, demonstrated by
the tone of many of your own questions, is to suspect, doubt, tear
at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course
is completely the wrong thing to do to art.…Do not be critics, you
people, I beg you."

Don't call him a whiner—because then you'd be a critic.

A colleague once joked that the title of the author's Spin
column, "And Now, a Less Informed Opinion," may have been a pre-
emptive dis on the part of the magazine's editors. On seeing the
superhyped Yeah Yeah Yeahs and thinking that Karen O actually
appeared happy (!), Eggers wrote, "She confirmed what we all
suspected: that Karen O is the most original performer in music. Who
could ever challenge her for that title?" He goes on to digress about
his childhood—a frequent crutch in his columns—before crowning alt-
folkie/harpist Joanna Newsom the s***: "I picture her looking like
Emily Dickinson. Newsom lives, I imagine, like a feral woman-child.
Her dwelling is somewhere rural, and by a lake. But on a hill. On a
hill, by a lake. The house is old, crackety, painted red like a
schoolhouse. Maybe it is a schoolhouse!" Didn't he get the promo shot?

Eggers' navel-picking style has been adopted by most of the rock-crit
dabblers published by his McSweeney's magazine and Web site. Take
that column inspired by Songbook—a soggy thing that would've been
better left unread on the IKEA coffee table. Of the 41 entries
produced over the past three years, 14 invoke listening to a song in
a car, 12 are dipped in heavy nostalgia, nine reference college or
grad school, eight mention crying upon hearing a song's beauty, and
one begins, "In a linguistics class, I learned…" One links listening
to Belle & Sebastian with feeling empathy for African-American slaves—
"[n]ot to stretch an analogy." One is a "dedication to Billy Corgan
on his 37th Birthday."

Aside from the narcissistic prose, these authors share with Eggers a
lack of desire to engage with any culture outside their own alt-pop,
college-rock, new-folk, Time-Life-classics orbit. In a recent Dusted
feature, Moody praised the Roots' Phrenology thus: "I know this isn't
their most recent album, The Tipping Point, but that album has too
much drum machine on it. I dislike drum machines. In fact, I am
resistant to most hip-hop, because I like melody."

Melody—specifically, hemp-clothed melody—is in abundance in the new
music issue of The Believer, McSweeney's less quirky, famously snark-
free sibling. The issue came with a CD that featured bands that not
only sound similar but also dress out of the same closet, listen to
the same music, and smoke the same s***. Inside, Sleater-Kinney's
Carrie Brownstein interviews Karen O and Moody confesses a love for
outsider Christian folkies the Danielson Famile—and, of course, his
own record collection: Beefheart, Tony Conrad, and "the most
experimental David Grubbs."

Moody, though, is a much better writer than the average blogger or
Webzine contributor, a clutch of whom have dubbed the
author "douchetarded." The future of rock criticism may indeed be
online, but the writing is still made by a thousand Baby Bangses.
Especially at sites like Pitchfork, which presents its inimitable
pastiche of gushing, snarky, and ill-wrought five days a week.

And Pitchfork, at least, is cultishly influential. A recent rave on
the site put Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's self-titled debut in the No.
1 sales spot of online retailer Insound. The retrofied New York band—
think David Byrne fronting the Shins—released the album itself and
has yet to tour extensively. Matt Wishnow, president of Insound, says
his site has sold more than 1,000 copies of the disc, which makes
it "one of the fastest-selling records in the history of Insound."

According to Nielsen Soundscan figures, Pitchfork faves have done
quite well with minimal mainstream press coverage. The Fiery
Furnaces' Blueberry Boat sold 30,000 copies. Broken Social Scene's
You Forgot It in People sold 75,000. And the Arcade Fire's Funeral,
Pitchfork's favorite album of last year, sold 167,000 units.

"It's huge," says Wishnow, "the fall of the rock critic as celebrity
that we used to know—the Greil Marcus, the Chuck Eddy, the Christgau.
Peer opinion and access to peer opinion have been so elevated and
multiplied that people tend to know about [records] from a trusted
voice before the rock critic even does. In most cases, the rock
critic finds out about it after the average Insound or Pitchfork or
blog reader knows about it."

Pitchfork-driven sales figures suggest that criticism has gone the
way of the radio dial—into niche marketing. The Web is the reservoir
for poorly written reviews of obscurities. The lit mags do poorly
written nostalgia pieces for the NPR crowd. The working critics get
marginalized to the back of the book, to dwell in the pages not pawed
by 13-year-old boys trying to detect the dark shading that might be
Jessica Alba's nipple.

All you have to do is flip through any music magazine—Rolling Stone,
Spin, Blender—to see the editors' patience for real criticism. The
majority of Entertainment Weekly reviews are only 75 words. In Spin,
many reviews are whittled down to a couple of sentences before being
anonymously dispatched with a grade. That means fewer words to
suspect, doubt, tear at, take a record apart to see how it works (or
doesn't). Fewer words to change the way someone thinks about how and
why art is made and experienced—which is, after all, the real purpose
of criticism.

We're left with this sad fact: The only high-profile rock criticism
consistently worth reading can be found in a magazine whose mascot is
a fop looking at a butterfly through a monocle. The New Yorker
published a Lethem memoir about listening to Brian Eno that offered
more insight into its subject than any of his so-called criticism.
And the magazine respects in-house rock critic Sasha Frere-Jones
enough to give him room to write long. He's allowed to follow his
ear, covering everything from semi-obscure grime to MF Doom to Keren
Ann, all of which he's required to make accessible to an audience
that's probably more likely to buy The Mussorgsky Reader than any
book about Wilco.

Even better, he doesn't blow a big word-count on recollections of
high-school dances or dedications to Billy Corgan on his birthday.
He's become one of the most thoughtful rock commentators around—and
he's never even written a novel.