The potency of cheap wine and cheap music...

Here's a couple of choice quotes from an equally great essay... "Heard It Through the Grapevine" compares music and wine criticism as penned by John Lomax of the Houston Press... which is a sister publication of our own East Bay Express. (This comes to me from my Clink editor Mike Smith):

"Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence." -- Robert Fripp

"The potency of cheap wine and cheap music should never be underestimated." -- Cole Porter

Furthermore, describing what something tastes like or what something sounds like is almost impossible. In music, you could use technical music terms, but relatively few people -- including most critics -- know what things like tonics and augmented chords and arpeggios are. Or you could play the "sounds like this other band" game, but then you run two risks. One is that the band in question may not sound like the other one to anybody but you. (They may not even sound like the same band to you on a another day, or when you're in a better or worse mood, or on a different sound system.) The second -- a hallmark of many indie rock reviews -- is that you play a little game of hipster one-upmanship and intentionally compare them to bands that nobody but you has ever heard of.

Thus are born album reviews such as this: "Feral Imp sounds like what would happen if you locked People Running About in a garden shed with Helping Robo for Combat and told them to fight over the Autonomous Action Unit's stash of Special K. Their angular guitar dissonance shades a little toward Great Angus's jagged panache, though the deliberately cheesy use of horns on several tracks puts them squarely in the Royal Magical Library camp. But its on songs like 'Remove Brainwashing' and the Des Koala-like 'Continuous Destruction Punch' that they shine with an almost Big Bang Shot-esque intensity." (Don't bother looking those bands and songs up -- they're all really Yu-Gi-Oh cards. But I had you going for a second, didn't I?)

Damn. He's got my style of review nailed. If we could actually communicate what we meant in a review like the above, it would make sense and be interesting to the reader.

So, I propose a solution... like document models in XML (where one businesses way of understanding things learns how to see work processes through the eyes of another business), we need a way of explaining the little hipster nuances we employ in our reviews in such a way that even our mothers and grandmothers could understand if they had the gumption and time to follow our references.

Unfortunately, this means that I'll have to try writing a review where nearly every comparison is linked or footnoted so as to make absolutely crystal clear sense... and when I compare a sound to another band, I'll include a short mp3 snipet to demonstrate what the hell I'm talking about.

That kind of thing would take some time. If I can pull this off, it could mean a new breed of indie reviews won't be as worthless as that last paragraph in the quote above...

Posted by joebeone at Enero 7, 2004 11:15 PM