Watched Christopher Weingarten's much tweeted (as opposed to bruited?)-about presentation at some Web 2.0 shitstorm wherein everybody tells you how much better your life will or will not be because of social media technologies that, in reality, only a very small, but very self-important segment of the population (myself included) abuse regularly. Basically Weingarten traces the devolution of music criticism from elite critics getting coke and vacations from record labels (his hyperbole, not mine), to the Web 1.0 era wherein young folk writing for Pitchfork and the sainted, departed Stylus became the outlet through which bands were broken, to today, when, because of leak culture, "All the review does now...is reinforce the opinion someone already has." This is bad because "crowds have terrible taste" thus enabling the rise of Fleet Foxes (about whom Weingarten and I are simpatico) in an NPR echo chamber because the "link economy" requires outlets to report on not what they want to report on but "trending topics" like Phish at Bonnaroo and so on and so forth. The general thrust is the oft-whispered (usually) refrain that bottom-up cultural consensus is bad because popular taste always regresses to some sort of mushy gray mean and that top-down outlets (like those that employ Weingarten, who is an outstanding critic, and certainly deserves to be employed by said outlets) are required to...I don't know...mediate popular taste? Validate it? Are we even talking about popular taste here? After all, Weingarten saves his invective for indie rock bands and the outlets who cover them; his example of the deleterious impact of "crowdsourcing" is Fleet Foxes – cited immediately after he bemoans the fact that his indie rock-fan friends are so self-segregated that they haven't heard of Lady Gaga, the present epitome of American popular taste.
Really, Weingarten's presentation was a grade-A rant, seeming more like a string of tweets at points than a coherent argument. "Crowdsourcing killed punk rock" is a wonderful bon mot, but what the fuck it actually means, I have no idea. Couple that with Weingarten's counterintuitive embrace of Twitter, which would seem to be the present epicenter of mediocrity and genre stratification, and you can reduce his speech to "things suck. Things will continue to suck. We will all be unemployed. Without gatekeepers, everything will sound like Fleet Foxes. In the absence of editors, a 140 character limit is a boon; anything worth saying can be said in 140 characters. I have a Twitter account. Make your tweets interesting." At the very least, though, it was certainly entertaining, and one detects that Weingarten has gotten at a core emotional truth: that those of us who enjoy reading rock criticism, and want it to have meant something, will have to do without in the future as crit is commoditized down into what Liz Colville aptly termed "the WHAT." Thus I cannot deny having derived great pleasure from watching Weingarten eulogize the dodo all the while staging a dance on its grave and hawking the very gun that wiped it out.
You can follow Christopher Weingarten @1000timesyes on Twitter, where he is the midst of reviewing 1000 new albums this year in 140 characters or less, and thus far has remained true to his own creed.
