The Crisis of Music Journalism

"Music journalists." "Rock critics." "Music critics."

What do these people even really do?

I was reading an article in the New York Times yesterday on that band Sleigh Bells. They are really bad and corny (see playing in front of a massive American flag on stage while using a Jackson guitar) but that's not the point. Also the issue of hardcore washup hipsters (see the guitar player having been in Poison the Well but "grown up" and moved to Williamsburg from Florida) is not the point. What IS the point is the article itself - what the writer says, how she says it and why I think she says it.

Basically, the concept of music criticism has long since run out of steam. I have felt this for quite some time, but have not been able to articulate it until reading this article. I feel like there are two things going on here. There really hasn’t been anything good or exciting going on in pop or rock music for a long time. Like probably ten years or so. Secondly, rock critics have been trying to make their own niches for many decades at this point. There is really only so much you can say about music that actually makes sense and is grounded in reality. After a while, you get out into esoteric spaceland and start putting your creative writing skills to work without much connection to what is actually on that record. There are a ton of rock and pop critics, with countless more having come since blogs hit big, and they are all in competition with each other. Just as in so many other fields, you have to make yourself stand out. There is a problem here though. A real one.

You see, when you merge the two issues – a lack of interesting music and a glut of critics who ran out of anything original to say a long time ago – you get a whole lot of emptiness. Take this Sleigh Bells article for example. The way this woman writes about them, they just sound like the most interesting band in the world:

FIRST came the recorded sound: drums and riffs, some demonically heavy marching band. Next, a couple of guys with guitars, who immediately started messing with their pedals in the darkened club. Two minutes later there was Alexis Krauss, with ripped jeans and a distinct saunter. She raised her arms as she reached the microphone, the black-haired queen of this stage. White lights exploded behind her, over a wall of Marshall stacks…

Sounds pretty exciting.

The new record is unmistakably Sleigh Bells, with dense but bigger production that puts Ms. Krauss’s voice into sweet relief over Mr. Miller’s dark metal peals. It is even more guitar driven — Mr. Miller discovered a model, the Jackson USA Soloist, that he loves — and more narrative and lyrical, with a crisper focus on arrangements and harmony over beats.

And then you hear it. Not very exciting anymore. It’s actually pretty boring. I don’t mean to single out Sleigh Bells. It’s not like they’re the worst band in the world. There are vast chasms of yawn inducing, download and delete bands. But Sleigh Bells is the impetus for this.

So why is this? Why does the writer speak of the band like this? I argue that she doesn’t have much of a choice. She can’t just say that they’re shit. If you only ever write that bands are garbage, you won’t make it too far in the journalism biz. So you are left writing positively of bands that often are garbage. What do you do? Make things up. Who cares, right? You can’t get fired for exaggeration like you can in fact-based journalism. You take your creative abilities and run with them. Run far. Like a marathon far. I guess part of it is that she is writing for the New York Times, where 95% of the readership doesn’t know a thing about underground music. This a novelty for them.

But this is a really common thing, the overselling and overhyping of music, where everything is so overblown. I read shit like this all the time. The band will sound really great and exciting and like I said above, then I hear it. And I wonder what the hell the author was listening to. I imagine that it’s the same thing, but they have to find something to say about it.

Zionists hijacking a plane is somehow not terrorism

In yesterday's New York Times, the newspaper published an Op-Ed piece, entitled "Hijacking Their Way Out of Tyranny," heaping praise upon a group of Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, who attempted to hijack a plane and make their way to sweet Israel, where they could then join in the tyranny.

I could get into a lot of details, but I will keep it fairly short. My main point is this: if you replace "Jew" with "black" and "Soviet Union" with "United States of America" in the article, there is no way that the Times or any other mainstream paper would ever touch such a writing. Instead, we see the lionization of these beacons of freedom.

The article leaves out the part where they planned to take the plane by deadly force and had a bunch of weapons on them, as I found in December 18th, 1970's Times:

Subdue the pilot, nice. The author, and the editors at the Times, portray the attempted hijacking as not only harmless but absolutely morally right. There are no questions here; these people were deeply oppressed and had no choice but to hijack a plane at gunpoint. Beyond these barely implied exaltations of the hijacking, the Op-Ed makes no analysis of the event, focusing instead on the road to liberty and freedom the failed hijackers paved for Soviet Jews and other disgruntled anonymous citizens. I bet Palestinians wish they would at least put a couple of toll plazas on that road.

Finally, the author seems to glibly proffer the idea that the would-be hijackers were only going to take a twelve-seat plane, so what's the big deal? It seems that this isn't entirely accurate, as according to an interview with two of the then-recently freed hijackers in April 30th, 1979's Times, there were sixteen of them, not twelve:

It's not so much the devout Zionism that gets me here; it's much more the hypocrisy and inconsistency of what is terrorism and what is not. Generally, Zionists cannot be terrorists, according to the mainstream Western, and particularly American, media. They do whatever they want, with very minimal constraints. They can take over and kill a bunch of people on a ship in international waters that was to be delivering humanitarian aid to oppressed people, they can blithely kill countless innocent people (including those hot-button women and children) and they can run an apartheid-style occupation for decades. Do they get sanctions? No, they get rewarded like no other, calling anyone who acts to oppose any of this a terrorist. And here we see them still glorified for it all in the country's most revered and supposedly "liberal" newspaper.

Right on, Bob Herbert

Bob is my new favorite person at the New York Times. He seems way more "left" than the most of the rest of their people, and is very frank. All of which means he is a real, thinking person who says what he means and what he believes. He doesn't seem like a bullshitter.

He wrote this mostly great op-ed piece on Memorial Day:

If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.

YES, fucking YES. Why can't people get that? What the hell business do you have drilling a mile under the sea (assuming that people have a "right" to extract petroleum in the first place, which they don't) when you have absolutely no plan in place in the event of a ruptured pipe, aside from drilling a new well? So many people buy into that industry/business/capital worshipping bullshit where people can do whatever they want in the interest of "progress" and profit.

Some of the rest of it is straight-up liberal and oddly patriotic, but I guess you have to do that shit to get a job there and keep it. They aren't going to publish things that I typically write here, for sure. They've got an agenda, and it is not the same as mine. But the editorial board does seem to allow people to deviate from it, to an extent.

Read on:

When are we going to stop behaving so stupidly? We nearly wrecked the economy and we’re all but buried in debt. But we can’t break up the biggest banks, and we can’t raise taxes. Now we’re fouling the magnificent Gulf of Mexico and ruining entire communities along the southern Louisiana Coast.

And, by the way, we’re still fighting a futile war in Afghanistan that we’ve been fighting with nonstop futility for nearly a decade. (I’m sure the troops saddled with this thankless task were thrilled to see fans and teams demonstrating their undying support for their efforts by wearing fancy baseball caps on Memorial Day.)

For a nation that can’t stop bragging about how great and powerful it is, we’ve become shockingly helpless in the face of the many challenges confronting us. Our can-do spirit was put on hold many moons ago, and here we are now unable to defeat the Taliban, or rein in the likes of BP and the biggest banks, or stop the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth like a warning from Hades about the hubris and ignorance that is threatening to destroy us.

BP and the Obama administration have been equally clueless about halting the millions of gallons of oil that have flowed into the gulf since the Deepwater Horizon explosion more than a month ago.

It's nice to see someone hitting at Obama who isn't some conservative piece of shit who will take any chance they can get to take a dump on him, just because he's not conservative, and is black.

Bob Herbert, I will be on a team with him any day. Hell yes, Bob.

BP's"top kill" procedure to plug the hole did not work

At all. In the least. Still blowing thick, deep black oil. Not surprising, given the track of failures behind them:

The abandonment of the top kill technique, the most ambitious effort yet to plug the well, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas. Efforts to use a hose to gather escaping oil have managed to catch only a fraction of the spill.

And you know what? They aren't going to stop it until they drill a new well, which will take until August:

BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August...

That's at least another 180 million gallons of oil that will blow out, making it top out at easily over 300 million gallons. But remember, as Tony Hayward said, the Gulf of Mexico is real big, so it doesn't matter much.

In the meantime, don't expect too much, as they are basically throwing things at it and seeing what sticks:

A technician who has been working on the project to stem the oil leak said Saturday that neither the top kill nor the “junk shot” came close to succeeding because the pressure of oil and gas escaping from the well was simply too powerful to overcome. He added that engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work.

“Simply too much of what we pumped in was escaping,” said the technician, who spoke on condition of remaining unnamed because he is not authorized to speak publicly for the company.

Once again - "engineers never had a complete enough understanding of the inner workings of drill pipe casing or blowout preventer mechanisms to make the efforts work." Wow. They don't understand the equipment they are using. Good idea, especially when working with such a volatile and destructive material as petroleum.

Also, the New York Times is still lying about how much oil is coming out of there:

He said it would capture most but not all of the oil leaking from the well, which is believed to be gushing 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

We know it is much more than that. Much, much more.

Additional thoughts on Dr. Gates' Op-Ed

His explanation runs unfortunately close to one of boys will be boys. "You know how those Europeans are. That's just what they do."

Assigning equal responsibility would require the people in Africa who sold other people to place conditions on their sale, i.e. "You must treat them lower than animals," "Please whip and rape them," "Do not allow them to practice their cultural traditions," "Do your best to keep them as uneducated as possible, and make sure that they die young." No, Europeans created that system all on their own. Ridiculous.

Were there not a single native slave trader in Africa, Europeans would have gotten their slaves anyway. It likely would have taken longer and perhaps the numbers would have been lower, but European kingdoms and nations and militaries, especially around that time, were not ones to take no for an answer. They simply found an easier way to do it - they got other people to do much of the dirty work. Taking all those people by force would have been such a messy venture and cost many European lives. They would have been facing the military resistance of whole societies. When they employed some African people to do it for them, they saved themselves a whole lot of work. Those are some cunning people, aren't they? And they promised riches, technology and power in return. Who could resist?

There was no equal footing here. The mere fact that Dr. Gates mentions European "military outposts" on African soil should tell us something about what was going on.

Also, the European slave trade in the Atlantic world was a streamlined, well-devised, state-run scheme. The profits from it were obscene. Those profits built up Europe and the settler societies in the Americas (both North and South) and Caribbean. Of course, slaves also literally built the settler societies in these places. And this slave trade and its effects, including the physical colonialism that eventually came to Africa from Europe fucked the African continent into right now. So many people stolen (well over ten million, perhaps upwards of thirty million, whether by Europeans or Africans) from their societies, systematically, over hundreds of years, will have an indefinite effect.

"Complicit alike," he says. How?

Irresponsible assigning of responsibility

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the esteemed and much accomplished literary analyst and pseudo-historian (see his several televisions specials centered on Oprah Winfrey), published a fucked-up Op-Ed piece in the New York Times today. He ostensibly wrote to discuss reparations related to slavery, but all he really did was provide a slightly more sophisticated recapitulation of the argument to which white people love to cling, "I never owned any slaves, and besides, they sold their own people into slavery." Fuck.

Reparations aside, this is just a bunch of bullshit. Whose work is he doing? I guess you gotta be of a particular mindset for Harvard to have you.

It's really hard to get into in a blog, but I really can't stress enough just how off-base he is with all of this. Did Africans sell other Africans into slavery? Yes.

Consider this - "African" is not an ethnicity. It is an identifier of the continent from which you come. It's like telling the Chinese and Indian governments that they should get along better, as they are the same people. No, no one would ever say that. But they both are countries in Asia. Also, Africa is not a country.

There are (were) so, so many ethnicities in the African continent. Gates mentions that "the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups." If fifty is a few, then there were obviously a lot more. And, keep in mind, that African slaves in the Atlantic world tended to come from West Africa, leaving so many more ethnicities unaccounted for. So if there are presumably hundreds of ethnicities on the continent, there is no selling of "their" or "your" people into slavery. They were selling other people into slavery, people to whom they had no more connection than Germans do with the French. Did people say that Europeans were slaughtering each other during WWI and WWII? No, of course they distinguished between them. It was not viewed as a civil war, nor is it today.

Was selling people into slavery fucked? Yup. The people who did it were garbage.

At the same time, as much as Gates tries to stealthily scuttle these arguments, it is a fact that the people running this trade in Africa were not aware of what slavery in the New World looked like, as there was nothing resembling it in Africa. "Slaves" in Africa had rights, were allowed families, did not have their status permanently, hopelessly inscribed upon them and often times would be integrated into the family/clan that had enslaved them. They also tended to be part of the spoils of war, not a commodity purchased at an auction house. Finally, slaves in African societies did not form the basis for the social and economic structures of those societies, like they did here.

Gates talking about "elite Africans" visiting Europe is a complete distraction from the discussion at hand. Firstly, the slavery we are discussing did not take place in Europe. African slaves, primarily, went to Brazil, the Caribbean, and America. Any talk about reparations, the supposed base for his article, doesn't have a fucking thing to do with slavery in Europe. It's about here, in the United States. It's about African slaves building the country, for free. It's about providing an otherwise impossible agricultural foundation for the country that allowed it to grow and prosper in bounds. It's about all that plantation labor down south and sending all those raw materials up north to be processed in those factories and sent all over the place for immense profits. The slave trade was European, but slavery, primarily, was not. And the slavery that did exist in Europe was decidedly not on the scale, ever, that it was in America. It was not the same thing. There are no rice plantations in England. Portugal does not have a long history as a cotton producing wonder.

And even if his claim is true, that Africans had witnessed slavery first-hand, so what? So what if a few Africans saw slavery first-hand. We are talking about hundreds of years and a whole lot of people being in charge of selling to Europeans. A few Africans seeing it is a piss in the ocean. What were they going to do, put it on Facebook?

There are a bunch of other things, like how Europeans played off different ethnicities against one another and provided some with guns, which allowed them to easily overpower and dominate nearby peoples of different ethnicities. As a result, the people under attack then had to acquire guns, which were only realistically available through Europeans, who were only really interested in slaves, not whatever things those particular people may have valued. As you can see, this would create a quickly worsening state of affairs that is a combination arms race/ransom/extortion situation. Europeans are good at that, provoking wars. And then they made sure that there were people in power in these societies who were very amenable to selling them people.

Finally, this discussion on culpability is fucking absurd for one reason - it rests on the premise that Europeans had no choice but to buy people and force them to work for free. Think about that.

If the Europeans who showed up looking to take slaves away weren't so fucking greedy and heartless, then those people in Africa who wished to sell other people into slavery wouldn't have been able to sell off a single person across the ocean in that middle passage hell. As though they created a market. As if, for countless centuries, there was just this teeming slave market on the western shores of the African continent waiting for buyers, until one day, the magnanimous Europeans came and saved their failed economic dream. Like they flew planes over Europe towing banners that said "AFRICAN SLAVES 2NITE - ALL U CAN BUY." No, Europeans came to them. And came, and came, and came, and came. For fuck's sake, this position almost pities the Europeans, like they were naive heroin addicts or something, victims of the African pusher.

Yes, some African people had responsibility for selling other African people into slavery. That's obvious. To act like their blame is equitable to that of European traders and buyers is truly insane and is nothing but a lie.

When we poison the world...

we poison ourselves, as we are of it. It follows that we also poison our children.

I was part of a discussion earlier this afternoon about autism and its potential causes. Toxins, like mercury, were mentioned as one.

Nicholas Kristof, you shining star of the New York Times, you had a piece on this very topic waiting for me in my inbox. In it, he writes about new research establishing more explicit documentable links than ever before between deadly chemicals and developmental disorders.

It sucks that there has to be any investigation into this issue at all. How could it be anything other than logic? If you take poison into your body, whether you eat it, drink it, breathe it or it seeps into your skin, it's gonna fuck you up. It's also going to fuck up the children in you. This should not come as a shock. Really. Think about it.

I promise that it will fuck you up in some way, and it probably won't be obvious. It's not like you will suddenly have a third arm, or your skin will begin to fall off. Things like this are subtle.

Example - drink a gallon of antifreeze. You will die. Drink two drops of antifreeze, and you will likely not die, but it will have ill effects on your body. Drink two drops of antifreeze every day, and you will develop long-term health problems.

Think about children eating lead paint. Think about people working in a coal mine. Think about smoking cigarettes. Over time, sickness will come.

Our bodies are resilient, but there is only so much we can take and this world we've made poisons us with way fucking more than we can handle. Rates of cancer are no surprise. Autism on the rise, well that's no revelation.

Senator Lautenberg says that under existing law, of 80,000 chemicals registered in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has required safety testing of only 200. “Our children have become test subjects,” he noted.

Eighty thousand. Fuck. We're all test subjects. Unknowingly, unwillingly. Testing for no end.

Perhaps the worst part is that corporations have us paying them so that we may poison ourselves through our daily routines, especially ones of cleanliness:

Researchers measured the levels of suspect chemicals called phthalates in the urine of pregnant women. Among women with higher levels of certain phthalates (those commonly found in fragrances, shampoos, cosmetics and nail polishes), their children years later were more likely to display disruptive behavior.

What a deep irony.

So here we are, steeped in ignorance. It's a cultural and personal ignorance. I see several vectors behind this feigned blindness, all interconnected.

One is the intense desire for profit, profit at all costs. People in charge of manufacturing firms, chemical companies and drug corporations, almost always, do not give a fuck about the outcomes (not necessarily side effects, as they are often primary effects) of their endeavors. If they let such concerns get in the way of their money making, that would significantly hamper their money making. They figured out ways to make things cheaply and pay very, very little concern to anything that does not cut into their bottom lines. Until pollution and killing people significantly takes away from their profits, they will show no concern.

For fuck's sake, these people can hardly be bothered to pretend to care even when serious problems arise in the public eye. Once again, look at what's going on with Toyota. The people running that company should be on their knees, begging for forgiveness and mercy for being such heinous pieces of shit, but instead they're going around telling people about how hard they are working and trying to play it off as though they haven't done anything wrong.

Closely related to the greed aspect of these problems is the issue of a profound lack of knowledge. People simply do not understand most of what they create. Humans are real fuckin good at making things, but holy shit are there difficulties controlling them and knowing the full range of what they do. Again, and I will always go back to this, the human species has this biological flaw where if we can do something, we go ahead and do it to the furthest extent that we can with no concerns for repercussions. Atomic bombs/energy. Petroleum-powered global economy. Slavery. Cloning. Factory farming. On and on. We sure are curious.

Finally, there is the pathetic trust we put in others, especially our supposed superiors. What sorry supplicants we are, always deferring to those who tell us they know better. People simply don't believe that companies would make something harmful, and ESPECIALLY not knowingly. If it's bad for you, well then it wouldn't be in a store, right? Yeah. Pork rinds? And if these things were bad for you, then the government would take care of it! Yup. Check out the recent/current handling of the diabetes drug Avandia. Similarly, we willingly turn a blind eye to these kinds of things. We have ideas in the back of our heads. We know. How could it be ok?

Some thoughts on Haiti to consider, especially if you deal with idiots

And most of us do. From today's New York Times. Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for another great, thoughtful article on the world outside.

Why is Haiti so poor? Is it because Haitians are dimwitted or incapable of getting their act together?

Haiti isn’t impoverished because the devil got his due; it’s impoverished partly because of debts due. France imposed a huge debt that strangled Haiti. And when foreigners weren’t looting Haiti, its own rulers were.

The greatest predation was the deforestation of Haiti, so that only 2 percent of the country is forested today. Some trees have been — and continue to be — cut by local peasants, but many were destroyed either by foreigners or to pay off debts to foreigners. Last year, I drove across the island of Hispaniola, and it was surreal: You traverse what in places is a Haitian moonscape until you reach the border with the Dominican Republic — and jungle.

Without trees, Haiti lost its topsoil through erosion, crippling agriculture.

To visit Haiti is to know that its problem isn’t its people. They are its treasure — smart, industrious and hospitable — and Haitians tend to be successful in the United States (and everywhere but in Haiti).

Can our billions in aid to Haitians accomplish anything? After all, a Wall Street Journal column argues, “To help Haiti, end foreign aid.”

First, don’t exaggerate how much we give or they get.

Haiti ranks 42nd among poor countries in worldwide aid received per person ($103 in 2008, more than one-quarter of which comes from the United States). David Roodman of the Center for Global Development calculates that in 2008, official American aid to Haiti amounted to 92 cents per American.

The United States gives more to Haiti than any other country. But it ranks 11th in per capita giving. Canadians give five times as much per person as we do.

As for whether aid promotes economic growth, that’s a bitter and unresolved argument. But even the leading critics of aid — William Easterly, a New York University economist, and Dambisa Moyo, a banker turned author — believe in assisting Haiti after the earthquake.

“I think we have a moral imperative,” Ms. Moyo told me. “I do believe the international community should act.”

Likewise, Professor Easterly said: “Of course, I am in favor of aid to Haiti earthquake victims!”

So, is Haiti hopeless? Is Bill O’Reilly right? He said: “Once again, we will do more than anyone else on the planet, and one year from today Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now.”

No, he’s not right. And this is the most pernicious myth of all. In fact, Haiti in recent years has been much better managed under President René Préval and has shown signs of being on the mend.

Far more than most other impoverished countries — particularly those in Africa — Haiti could plausibly turn itself around. It has an excellent geographic location, there are no regional wars, and it could boom if it could just export to the American market.

A report for the United Nations by a prominent British economist, Paul Collier, outlined the best strategy for Haiti: building garment factories. That idea (sweatshops!) may sound horrific to Americans. But it’s a strategy that has worked for other countries, such as Bangladesh, and Haitians in the slums would tell you that their most fervent wish is for jobs. A few dozen major shirt factories could be transformational for Haiti.

So in the coming months as we help Haitians rebuild, let’s dispatch not only aid workers, but also business investors. Haiti desperately needs new schools and hospitals, but also new factories.

And let’s challenge the myth that because Haiti has been poor, it always will be. That kind of self-fulfilling fatalism may be the biggest threat of all to Haiti, the real pact with the devil.

You're being watched

And listened to. And read.

Really, I hate to be the person who's paranoid, and has this ubiquitous feeling that "Big Brother" is omnipresent, but it's true. And it's not an idea, it's not something I heard about from someone who knows someone who saw a person working on the phone pole who they "know" was from the FBI. This guy is from the NSA.

The targets - not "terrorists." Not even Muslims. Everyone is a potential target. Anyone. In this case, we hear about journalists.

This isn't a reform issue. Sure, it needs to stop. But it's an organization issue, not an individual issue. This is not Bush. This is the United States.

Sarah Palin Is a Vindictive, Calculating would-be Autocrat

Here is a lengthy article from the New York Times detailing Sarah Palin's rise to power and what she did once she got there - banning books, firing and hiring people at will, trying to destroy what's left of Alaska's wilderness - it's all there. It also lays bare all the "reform" she undertook. Fuck her. She is a traitor woman.

I want to make clear that I've been holding off on posting all this Palin-related shit, not wanting to jump into the stupid fray of bipartisan politics. I've been accumulating it for a few weeks, and it's just too much to not post. It's fucked. I feel like with John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, people have some idea as to what kinds of pieces of shit they are, as they have much more public faces, having served at the federal level for varying amounts of time. Sarah Palin is unknown and she and her handlers are trying to get her by on her small town "charm," essentially.

This has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. Fuck them both. This has to do with malevolence, intolerance, ignorance and stupidity.