A Response to the Guy Who Didn’t Like Something I Wrote

Wordpress pinged me and told me that someone didn’t like a Pitchfork review I’d written, and had also linked to my blog in doing so.  Which is all fair game, of course.  You write for Pitchfork, you answer to a pretty big audience.  But there are two unique things here that made me want to respond to his, er, response: first, this guy appears to devote a fair amount of time to this sort of freelance indie ombudsmanship.  Second, he does it in a sorta Matt Drudge kind of way.  He Googles me, finds the “about” section of this here blog, discovers I’m a grad student, and then sets about disabusing me of my ostensible ignorance as to my own career path.  It’s more or less Jay Leno-quality material, and he over-qualifies his own arguments enough that I have no desire to go Conan or Letterman on this guy.  Besides, he seems okay enough, and what does the world need with more drama?  What he has done is trigger me to start blogging again, and allow me to perform a very minor public service.  His understanding of grad school is pretty underinformed, and maybe other people think the same way he does.  And maybe I can help by explaining what the hell it is me and my colleagues do.  Sorry to some people: it won’t be shitty or catty or snarky.  So. 

First, this question: “who the hell else is going study your research once it’s published?“  It’s a good question, and one I’ve been asked a lot.  There are two answers.  First, I’m working on my dissertation now–just getting started on the research, actually–which is a very specific piece of writing.  It’s basically written for five people.  Not, as our friend suspects, the “the 5 music cretins with PhDs in the Sex Pistols” (<– huh), but instead myself and my four committee members.  I chose this committee–a chair and three others–because they’ve done the exact same thing that I’m hoping to do: researched and wrote a dissertation, published a bunch of stuff in academic journals, got a job at a research university, and so on.  I’m doing this research not because I anticipate it appealing to a huge audience, but because it’s the last requirement I have to fulfill in order to obtain my PhD.  It’s not a book (yet. Fingers crossed!), but more or less a big, fat (probably around 180-200 pages) research paper.  Doing this research, which should take a few years, also fulfills the function of teaching me how to do more general things too: formulate questions about particular phenomena, observe human behavior, ask people what they think about stuff, filter tons of data into something manageable and readable, write.

But don’t get me wrong here, like all grad students, I hope that my dissertation will be something that I can turn into a book, which would be published by an academic press (the second answer).  This would be incredible.  Can you imagine?  If it did happen, though, it would be several years into the future, maybe even a decade.  Still: how cool is that?  But to go back to the original question again: not many people will probably read it.  Thousands, maybe.  Academic books, if they’re good and widely applicable, will circulate around academia, perhaps a chapter or two will get assigned for students to begrudgingly read.  Maybe you’ll translate it into a guest spot on NPR, answering particular questions about something.  Maybe it’ll get you a better job at another university.  But to be clear here: academics aren’t operating under the assumption that their work is going to make them world famous, or even as specifically famous as, for people studying pop music, for instance, a Robert Christgau or Greil Marcus.  They’re first and foremost concerned with “contributing to a literature,” or adding to the work of other scholars who have done similar research, in the interest of helping everyone (ideally, sure) get a better grip on a problem that exists, and then contribute to further studies, etc.  It’s only later that Malcolm Gladwell makes millions off your ideas (The Zinging Point).  (His other point about grant funding drying up for guys like me is actually pretty spot-on.  Especially in the economic climate in which we find ourselves right now, the humanities are the first on the chopping block for most universities.  Which sucks.  We need people studying culture along with people inventing medicines.  That’s for another time.)

Second, this question: “What the hell are you going to be adding to society by furthering research in this field?“  It’s phrased in an unnecessarily douchey way, and it’s a loaded question obviously, but the basic idea is valid.  This is something my particular corner of academic education is constantly struggling with: legitimacy and larger relevance.  But at the same time, and more importantly, this is a fundamental question that anyone can ask themselves: is what I’m doing for a living serving society in any meaningful way?  I think there are very, very few people who are lucky enough, smart enough, and who can sacrifice enough of their time and energy, to add to society in a meaningful or lasting way (the ways I think he’s talking about).  Social workers and other civil servants, medical professionals and disease researchers, philanthropists and serious, long-term volunteers, investigative journalists.  I’m missing a ton, but you get my point.  The rest of us–me, this blogger, billions of other people–have to get by hoping that they’re doing well enough by others, feeding their families sufficiently, or just plain not doing harm.  Which is all noble in itself.  Now, I’m sure he didn’t mean his question this way.  But maybe he did, and if so, I think it’s an elitist standpoint to assume that the vast majority of people on the earth who won’t “add anything to society” aren’t therefore doing shit.

Which leads directly to my next point.  I’m not only doing research, but I’m teaching.  This is important, and another aspect of graduate school, and academic life for many, that people outside of it don’t know, or forget about.  You teach undergraduate classes, and that’s what pays your tuition and gives you a modest stipend (when you’re a professor at a research university, your teaching pays your salary, and subsidizes your research and writing).  I should save this for another post, but man: teaching is pretty fucking awesome, and I’m honored and privileged to be able to do it (And not all grad students get the luxury of A.I. appointments, so that’s something to be thankful for as well).  I’m not sure what this blogger would think about the general worth of undergraduate education–probably some one-liners about never being able to get a job with a Creative Writing degree, if this post is a predictor of his “Evening at the Improv” comedic approach–but I and my colleagues here take our teaching responsibilities incredibly seriously, and the students we teach frequently amaze me with their unique ways of reasoning and writing.  And I do feel like I’m making a tiny iota of difference in their educational careers by giving them the tools to critically assess the culture around them.  So there.  Yeah, you can tell that I get emotional thinking about teaching.  It can get weird sometimes, especially when talking to other teachers.  Before this gets sappy, though, on to the next minor quibble.

Our blogger friend mentioned “field” in his comments, and that’s worth of a brief explanation.  In academia, one might say, there are fields, and there are disciplines.  Disciplines often end in -ology, and they are separate from fields because they typically have methodologies (method + theory) attached to them.  Anthropology, ethnomusicology: these are the two disciplines my work comes closest to.  More ethno than anthro (same ancestors), but they share methodologies–data collection through fieldwork, which implies “ethnographic” research, in other words lengthy participant observation, interviews, fieldnotes, transcriptions, recordings, and so on.  In terms of “fields,” my research overlaps most with what’s often called “new media studies”–which has no particular methods but a common “thing”–as well as the hazy thing called Cultural Studies, as well as the loose conglomerates called fan studies, science and technology studies, and a few others.  So that’s what that is.

Third, I’d like to offer this extended quote, because it’s something I don’t run into that often.  He answers his own question, “who the hell else is going study your research once it’s published?”, with:

The god damned MUSIC INDUSTRY. Yep, I mean that art-crushing boogeyman so often referenced. With every piece of dense, plastic text, you could be gifting useful data to R&D departments of the very companies you think construct Lady Gaga out of legos. That’s either really funny or it murders my soul in this hard decade ahead. Or it could be complete bullshit. Hell, I’m just making it up.

To this I say, using the same typographic latitude he gives himself: I FUCKING HOPE THE MUSIC INDUSTRIES* WOULD PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT I HAVE TO SAY.  Again, I understand where he’s coming from here.  After all, he uses the Sex Pistols as an example, so he’s clearly working with a cartoonish “us against the world” idea of what academia is all about.  But in reality, it couldn’t be further from the truth. I really, really hope that my work is good and thorough enough that my “contribution to society,” or if I’m lucky, one of my contributions to society, is that people who work in the recording industry read my stuff and then maybe pay a bit more attention to how music fans engage with and re-circulate music, create new meanings for the things they love outside of officially-sanctioned commercial culture, and so forth.  And maybe realize that fans (of stuff on major labels, mainly) aren’t their enemies, they’re just waiting for these lumbering corporations to catch up with them, to start speaking their language.  And maybe other stuff!  I haven’t even been approved by the Institutional Review Board yet!  But not only do I not think that “R&D departments…construct Lady Gaga out of legos” (I don’t know what this means), but I think that the particular research I’m going to do could very well help them a lot, and this can’t be underlined heavily enough–I HOPE IT DOES.  Kansas professor and author Nancy Baym, among many others, is totally speaking truth to power, for example.

So there’s my response.  It’s long, probably too long.  Sorry for the no-doubt many grammatical errorages.  But it allowed me to get a lot of stuff off my chest.  Granted, stuff that this guy probably doesn’t care at all about.  But stuff nonetheless.  Doesn’t make for a good party conversation.  But if that blogger (or anyone else without academic access) wants recommendations (or even pdfs maybe) of good articles or academic books that address issues I mentioned above (or others that don’t do it well enough that you should say away from), hit me up!  There’s lots of great stuff out there.

*Nitpicky, but no one should use the phrase “music industry.”  There are many “industries” that work to sell music, and putting them all under one umbrella does a disservice to how they operate.  For instance, it’s the “recording industry” that suffers from downloading, not the touring, merchandising, or technology components of the music industries.  Lazy grammar like this, especially when it appears in newspaper stories, only serves to help the RIAA (the real evil, yo) manufacture fake numbers about the decline of this chimerical institution thanks to downloading culture  Here’s Williamson and Cloonan (pdf) with a much lengthier explanation.  Ahem.

Filed under: academia  Pitchfork