Sorry, Chris Weingarten, but some drones can write. They want a voice. Their sting is called competition.
photo: aprilesole/flickr.
The line between drone-dom and leaping into the unknown is called perception.
In The Beach (2000), Richard was a jaded youth who had traveled far abroad to Thailand seeking something different—a unique experience—but when he got there, he realized he wasn’t the only one. In a curious series of events involving suicide and banana pancakes, he recruited a French couple and abandoned the tourist road. His case: “I just feel like everyone tries to do something different, but you always wind up doing the same damn thing.”
There is a fundamental difference between tourists and travelers. Mention Frommer’s to someone. If they cringe, then they’re a traveler. If not, then they’re a tourist. Travelers want to get lost. They want to leap into the unknown and experience the world as it is. Tourists want the greatest hits. Is The Hype Machine the Frommer’s of music blogging? Is Elbo.ws the Lonely Planet? Is MOG the Fodors? How would Richard ditch the map and escape the virtual beaten path through the music blogosphere?
If online music journalism was controlled by only an elite few, it would mind-numbing. Bland. Like gum from 1971. Like a rainbow in black and white. Taste is perception. It’s a point of view or a frame of mind. It’s relative. Music reviews? In ears we trust, or in Rolling Stone? The pre-blogosphere publishing era, where only a select few got published and got paid for it, now seems inherently degenerate. The era changed—a.k.a. progressed. Two thumbs up is now two million thumbs up.
Rock critic Chris Weingarten sees the negative flip side. He thinks The Hype Machine and Twitter have sent the masses into gravitational spin towards music mediacracy. Writing, reading, learning about music is “math”, he said last April at 140Conf, and “when you’re aggregating the shared tastes of thousands of people, that’s the very definition of the lowest common denominator.” He went on to point out that, “no one posts negative commentary anymore because no one Google’s for bands they don’t like.” Who wants to read about bands they don’t like? Criticism has been replaced by curation.
Weingarten has actually trashed-talked web culture enough that (even to his own surprise) there’s a panel lined up for SXSW next year, called Curatorial Culture: The Case Against Christopher Weingarten. The argument is this: “Cultural criticism is in fact far more diverse and productive when trusted to a representative democracy. This outbreak of curators is nothing short of a revolution and should be championed by those in the business of making music.”
Denying change is self-defeating. Denying creativity is world-defeating. Our world is a paradox without a crash course. The streets are filled with drivers who supposedly ‘can’t drive’ and writers who supposedly ‘can’t write.’ Perception is all you have. Run with it.
