Matthew Levinson

Remembering to love the music/media (do you?)

Published on 23/09/06
by matt

It’s so easy to track bands down these days I can’t imagine what it was like before the internet. Bloggers, podcasters and p2p, great magazines and web sites make it so easy to get music. So do we still need music media? (Not media as in CDs and tapes but people writing or talking about music)

I’m sitting in on a panel about all of this at TINA next weekend with a bunch of music journalists including Adam Zammit from The Brag, Marcus from Mess+Noise, Dan Rule, Clem Bastow, Ben Eltham from Straight out of Brisbane and Julia Kosky from Brighton Boulevard. If you’re in Newcastle you should come, and if not, you should put in your two cents here. It’s called with a little help from my friends – who needs who: the artists or the media. Here’s the description from the TINA program.

Can one exist without the other? Without media and its producers and multifaceted productions how do artists promote themselves? Without artists there’s no content! The first of its kind for TINA this exciting panel will no doubt raise passionate opinions and often diabolically opposed ideas. Should artists be buying advertising to guarantee editorial? Is it in the pitch or more so about who you know or what you’ve got to offer? In the critiquing of performance and product, is it hard to remain subjective once you know the subject’s creator?

I think we need media, but then I would. If you can ignore that, I actually think it’s a symbiotic relationship between music makers and music media. Journalists need content. Musicians need exposure. But that over-simplifies it. Music journos are usually underpaid, out of time, part time or voluntary, and doing it pretty much 100 per cent out of passion, there are plenty of exceptions, but lets not dwell on those. Often they’re making music too.

“Writing about music is like talking about architecture” – Zappa?

That quote gets pulled out every time someone wants to make a point about music writing. I thought it was Zappa, but it’s been attributed to Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Burroughs, Elvis Costello, Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Nick Lowe, Miles Davis and John Cage among others. Usually they think the music should speak for itself. It’s an antagonistic position that pitches music makers against music media, but it strikes me as a strange state of affairs.

The media has a totally underrated role in shaping the direction of music. I get surprised how little a lot of musicians know or care about music’s context, or any music outside the mainstream. So good music journos can set the agenda. So can good music makers. Hurling yourself headlong into web 2.0 as a music maker is good because there’s so much opportunity for direct connection with fans, but there’s so much out there, and without something filtering you out of the matrix it’s hard to make a noise. Last.fm, myspace, youtube and the rest have shifted the equation. But, you need to find the good stuff amongst the masses.

Media has to be sustainable, keeping readers happy, keeping afloat through advertisers and/or grants. It’s important for music makers too, but for both it’s complicated by intangibles like artistic vision, fame/success, career, passion, cynicism and so on. Out of the huge pile of CDs over at Triple J, how many never get heard? So many of my favourite records took at least 10s of listens before I started to get them. How many of my CDs haven’t been heard enough? (I ask this as I listen to Morton Feldman’s For John Cage, which I bought this morning and is definitely an album that’s going to reward many listens).

If you’re a Basic Channel type, you’re not going to bother giving the journo signposts on the CD that you send in for radio play or review in the street press (influences, date formed, members and so on), but it’s those things that let journalists quickly establish a context. Is it rude to ask you to typecast your artistic vision with such a perfunctory gesture as influences-date-formed-members? I tell you what, there’s a box of CD cast-offs at every radio station in the country full of CDs, many of them great, that have been discarded by journalists who couldn’t find anything good enough to give them a go on the first pass. It’s a fine line though. I got a press release for the new Telemetry Orchestra CD the other day that read more like a business plan than new album buzz. Still, the demo CD-R or download has to convey something three-dimensional and lifelike about who the music maker is.

I’ve interviewed loads of bands and DJs and, as much as I hate to say it, it’s the ones with the best stories that make the best interviews, not the best music (sometimes it’s both). In the setting of an interview or pitching a release for a review it’s all about the story, and being scared or careless in an interview, not preparing, whatever, it’s totally counter-productive. I think music interviews need as much preparation from the artist as a job interview would. It’s not easy being articulate about your own art/vision when you’re put on the spot, and it really does make a difference being able to articulate that kind of thing.

It’s not a job though, noone wants something fake. But it’s hard to say something real under the pressure of a barrage of questions from a journalist who’s pushed for time. It’d be good to see more journalists/editors looking at interesting ways to cover these things – Mess and Noise does this really well – but most are lean and mean on music, it’s a 15 minute interview and you’ve got to file, now. PR flacks think music interviews are promo, so they have to happen before the gig, not after when you get a chance to actually meet the subject.

Most writers work around full time jobs. I work a nine to five editing three trade magazines. I also co-edit a great music magazine, freelance for a few other magazines and web sites, as well as doing a weekly radio show and DJing from time to time. Doesn’t leave much time for reflection. Most people are in a similar boat from my experience.

The Internet’s made it so easy to find music. Check the explosion of baile funk, crunk and grime. But blog culture, and its attendant influence on the music media, is cutting the self-reflection, individual thought and analysis. And it’s being replaced by something far more homogeneous. Reacting to a smaller pool of influence, hip kids aren’t inspired by the local scene leaders who subtly filter global trends. Instead they’re reading The Fader or Pitchfork and taking cues from that. So everyone’s suddenly excited about exactly the same Justice remix. These things are cool, but their omnipresence is a sign of a slavish obeisance every bit as restrictive as a decade or two ago.

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