On Shifting the Focus A Bit

(This is the start of something larger, triggered for this purpose by an article I read the other day. It's incomplete, but feel free to leave thoughts, etc. in the comments.)

I like Idolator, I really do—it’s an entertaining read, and one that certainly fills a niche I find myself straining more and more to appreciate as I get older: making fun of shit. It actually is quite a talent, one with no shortage of perseverance and ingenuity, no less, to keep freshly ahead of whatever curve there might be, especially when limited to of pop music. But I come here not to praise Idolator, nor to berate it, because I don’t have the time or the mind for either. I would like however, to respond to one small (or not so small) aspect of Idolator’s initial public offering: their deviously-titled “The Idolator Manifesto on America’s Disappointing Music Nerds.” Don’t get me wrong, I feel through and through the breadth of the sarcasm and humorous overstatement, but there are sections from the first paragraph that I’d like to examine, if you’ll indulge me. First, this quote:

The music blogosphere was going to serve as the great equalizer, deflating the MTV-assisted hype machines and giving the asleep-at-the-wheel music mags a run for their ad money.

then:

For all the talk about the blogs as an antidote to the increasingly dunderheaded major-labels, their enthusiasm sometimes does more harm than good, and many of their championed bands suffer from the association.

There's nothing inherently wrong with these statements---the most established and prominent way to evaluate music blogs is through their composite effect on the popularity (or lack thereof) of artists, and blogs' relationships to traditional criticism and promotion. But what I want to talk about is the fact that, while assessing music blog effects is certainly interesting, it ultimately loses meaning apart from the causes.

So, what I’d like to look at is something that never gets examined when music blogs are discussed: the root cause of why they exist, and how that reflects upon the current state of music criticism, fandom and promotion. I think speculating as to the causes, rather than the presumed effects, might shed some new light on what music blogs are actually doing. First and most importantly, music bloggers are music fans, and their online presences are wholly constituted by actions upon those fan impulses. While certain music bloggers enter into the realm of blogging in order to simply "hype" bands, I think bloggers' internal rationales are much more complicated than that. Music blogging is not only a niche enterprise, it’s a niche blogging enterprise, which means that even the biggest music blog in the world draws a miniscule fraction of of a gossip, political or tech blog's traffic (Idolator, with its ties to Gawker, excluded), and music bloggers know this. And while there’s a natural desire on the part of bloggers to see a loved artist or band succeed, it’s a small part of the originating impulse, and music bloggers are much more selfish and incestuous (and fannish) than Idolator (and the many others who’ve written about music blogs) allows.

Current music fandom, especially the online variety, is much different now than it’s ever been, and is changing rapidly. Music fans have always been specifically oriented to and created from their relationships to the “apparatus” (to use Lawrence Grossberg's term)---or the complicated mechanisms that not only get the music to the listener, but work to “code” it as well, through promotion, distribution, etc. Modern music fans, especially those who spend a good deal of time online, are in a unique position, marked by, let's say, five factors:

1. all the music they like (or might like) is available free and rather easily online
   
2. that same music can be duplicated endlessly and without dissolution of sound
3. music promotion is ubiquitous and often disguised as entertainment
4. MTV, commercial radio and Rolling Stone have lost all music-related influence
5. both intelligent/progressive and popular criticism is more accessible and important than ever before on the Web.
   

Music blogs have emerged out of the modern music fan’s desire to participate in this climate, but with complex and interesting motivations. Bloggers have internalized the conflicting messages of online music promotion, criticism and community and formed a wholly unique online fan culture out of their perceptions of it. This is what I find much more interesting that what music blogs are capable of doing—why they’re doing it, and what they’re doing.

A quick primer on the underlying architecture of music blogs, or more specifically, how they’ve evolved. First, music bloggers themselves are an incredibly homogenous bunch (leaving in parentheses the fact that blogs need the Internet for their public venue, eliminating roughly 96% of the world’s population and most of its brown people—many of whom would probably love not only the free time to babble publicly about music they love, but also to know what the hell the Internet is). The vast majority of music bloggers are of the following composition (based on an informal, non-scientific survey, but also on a lot of common sense and observation): 1. White 2. Male 3. College-educated or in college (the number of MA’s and PhD’s is interesting) 4. Computer and web-savvy, 5. Residents of North America or Western Europe, and 6. Really into certain types of music, generally popular (read: not jazz or avant-garde or classical or opera), and enough to write about it on a regular basis. There are plenty of women, non-whites and those without higher education who write music blogs, but they’re definitely in the minority. Second, the interactions between music bloggers, mainly through sidebar links and comments on posts, but also through a message board (which I'll get to later), is very incestuous—a quality applicable to most any online community. Thus, it's probably not a surprise that music bloggers are the biggest commenters on other music blogs. It’s something interesting indeed when a comment is disregarded when not hyperlinked to an online personality, as if the lack of virtual presence betrays an evil intent. Comment boards and link lists (sidebars) are the most prominent self-promotional, self-sustaining and provincial aspects of the network of music blogs. And of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this incestuousness. It comes with the online territory, and it’s what separates music blogs from the online critical outlets to which they’re so frequently (and unfairly) compared. The music blogs that strive toward some (unreachable) notion of critical objectivity instead of the much, much more interesting and readable stylistic and curatorial subjectivity are not only rare, but also typically unreadable and poorly written by comparison. The best blogs, as a fellow blogging friend frequently notes, are the ones with writing that comes from fannish compulsion, not necessarily a desire to issue a critical polemic or punch up sales stats.

Of course, out of this impulse frequently comes promotion (buy-links are an unspoken rule), but that’s more attributable to the Web---the most thoroughly commercialized communications medium the world has ever seen. And it’s this neo-liberalistic impulse, where everything becomes a commodity, that carries over to blogs and bloggers. Even the music bloggers who lean more toward the out-and-out shilling for artists are still operating under the guise of personal taste. Of all the bloggers I talk to regularly, none of them will post what they don’t like, and I believe them. And that’s where the issue of taste comes into play, and though I don’t want to go too deeply into it here, musical taste is comprised of myriad factors, most having nothing to do with the content of the music itself. So when a blogger posts about some piece of music, it’s out of an affinity for it on some level that triggers the desire to create a post. Some write lengthy thought pieces, some recycle PR blurbs, but they’re all operating under taste impulses—wildly differing taste impulses, granted, but if all blogs operated the same way, that’d be scary to me. It’d be like…I don’t know…a “code” or something…like a journalistic “code”…or, er…I’ll stop there.

With this in mind, any music blogger with a sane temper and iota of intelligence can’t truthfully say that they’re “doing it for the artists,” or that "it's all about the music." There’s solemn altruism on one hand, and then there’s out-and-out self-delusion on the other. And it’s fine, of course, that bloggers, deep down, promote themselves with music rather than promoting the music itself. All manner of rankings and traffic meters are freely accessible, and are commonly cited as metrical indications of blogging “success,” leading to a prestige economy with mp3s as its endlessly reproducible currency. Then there are the ads. Personally, I find them unmentionably tacky on an aesthetic level, but I can also understand them. It is, once again, the Web after all. Music bloggers with ads has led, however, to an interesting rhetorical disconnect used by a surprising number of bloggers when asked to cite their rationales. On elbo.ws/vanilla (an bulletin-board-shaped orgy of music blogger insiderness long overdue for parody), it’s common to see bloggers citing artist well-being as their primary motivation in one thread, then asking how to maximize BlogAds profit in another. These aren’t bad people, per se (and I’m trying my best to avoid dipping into moral relativism here), they’re just playing by one of the unstated “rules” of music blogging. Of course no one is going to cite as his primary motivation a desire to get paid by posting mp3s and drawing traffic toward his ads, because it’s an awful promotional tactic and, honestly, it’s often not true. But I do wish that more bloggers would admit that, deep down, ads or no ads, they’re blogging for themselves, and that it’s okay to admit that.

Music blogs exhibit all of the telltale signs of a sub rosa fan culture, but one that ironically takes place in the widely visible realm of the Web. And it’s weird to think about music blogging in this regard—typically, fan cultures are rather quiet and secretive (excluding the archetype of rabid Beatles/Michael Jackson acolytes), and much of that is because most people don’t care about them. That lack of notice, in turn, defines their parameters to an extent. But on the Internet, all this gets turned on its head. Despite the personalized nature of blogs (no editors, frequent lack of regard for spelling, grammar, etc.), they can, at least theoretically, be read by anyone, anywhere. They can also be appropriated in any way imaginable, including as crappy critical or promotional outlets. Which leads me to two more points about music blogs as a fan culture—two points necessary for something to be regarded as a fan culture—music blogs are first, inherently positive, and second, generally disregarded by their more “mainstream” counterparts. Now, I’m the last person to offer that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to internalize the meaning of anything, but I think some more context regarding music blogs could perhaps (ahem), shift the focus a little bit, from one that approaches blogs as watered-down amateur criticism to one that sees them as a demographically slim group of (largely indie rock) music fans, avidly promoting themselves as much if not more than the music they post.

A group that exemplifies the notion of a fan culture, defined prominently and wonderfully by Henry Jenkins (buy the book here) as those “unimpressed by institutional authority and expertise, (and who) assert their right to form interpretations and form cultural canons." Then, he continues, "Undaunted by traditional conceptions of literary and intellectual property, fans raid mass culture, claiming its materials for their own use, reworking them as the basis for their own cultural creations and social interactions.” Now I’m not implying that every music blog lives up to this ideal, or that all music blogs are worthwhile reads, or that most are even actively aware that they’re doing this. But I think that shifting the focus a bit, and beginning to regard music blogs as an online fan culture, and a unique (if only highly symbolic) challenge to the hegemonic structure of corporate-owned media culture, can result in many more interesting conversations than just seeing them as a composite of their capricious effect on music popularity. Inherent in fandom is a groupish mindset (that’s where the “dom” comes from). Fans tend to embrace others with the same tastes, rather than reject them (which pits them against the prevailing isolationist stereotype of indie rock, but that’s for another time).

The uniqueness of music blogs as a fan culture extends to its motivations, and there is a strong propensity to work with a model parallel to the dominant one. Therefore, it’s impossible to speak of music blogs without mentioning their promotional capacity, especially because small (and even some big) labels often rely on them for grass roots pre-release pushing. But despite the clear involvement of blogs in the broad sphere of online music promotion (to the extent that some bloggers have quit day jobs to live off ad revenue), I still feel strongly that the originating impulse with music blogging---much more than with political, gossip, or tech blogging---is one rooted in fandom, positivity, and subjectivity, which can obviously present itself in bizarre, confusing, and contradictory ways. Music blogs exist in a parallel universe to the dominant methodologies of music promotion, criticism and distribution, and it’s important to realize that they have internalized large amounts of both forms, reforming them through the lens of fandom. Blogs aren’t close to being responsible for any sort of sea change in the music industry—they’re much too small to take credit for that—but it’s important to note that they are reflective of the current, confusing, up-in-the-air state of affairs.

Music blogs are indicative of a new agency possessed by music fans, and the desire of many to (symbolically) make their presence known to (theoretically) whomever would like to read and listen. So, I suppose I’d urge those of you with a propensity toward browsing music blogs to take a step back, put on your ethnographic glasses for a moment and look at them for what they are: expressions of the personal tastes of a slim demographic group of mostly males, merged with the unique (and problematic) materialism of the Web. They give insight into not only the prevailing (and intensely capricious) indie-rock zeitgeist, but also into what comprises an online “identity.” As much as it’s probably unfair to regard Idolator as just a “music gossip” blog, I think it’s equally shortsighted to look at the widely diverse network of music blogs as simply “agenda pimpers” or even amateur critics. Just shifting the perspective on blogs a little bit, from criticism to fandom, could unearth the existence of a largely unnoticed and misinterpreted, but fascinating online music fan culture. And it could also prove Idolator's slogan as on the right track: "All About the Music...If Only It Were."