(Untitled)

[alexmacpherson]

OK, so, Animal fucking Collective. I might hate Tumblr more than them, what a mess of a platform that is - how the hell you all keep track of what anyone's saying I've no idea. Hence, posting this here

Comments

[koganbot]

Well, I'll react to the "your tiny indie hole is not the center of the musical or critical universe" charge. I'd say that by and large, indie kids are the rank and file audience for music criticism, the ones who most care about criticism as a way of communicating about music and discovering music. Obviously they're not the total audience for criticism, or else the alternative press would be even more indiecentric, but they're fundamentally the most committed to the reading and the writing about music. I'd say that indie is a genuine folk movement, not that they represent The People - most people aren't fans of indie, and no music gets to be the people's music and no people get to be The People, but nonetheless they're a popular movement, a strong constituency that's not going away and that cares about music with a religious devotion that equals mine or yours, and they support their music. --But then "indie" doesn't mean the same thing to everybody, and I felt a lot of affinity with what Chris Weingarten was trying to do at Paper Thin Walls, which was to at least try to look out at the world of music, even if most of the music we covered ended up mediocre. And my basic criticism of the ethos of indie - that it fetishizes mediocrity - still seems potent, but doesn't apply to Chris.

[alexmacpherson]

Yeah, I basically agree. I don't think this is a good status quo! So either the indie-centrists who dominate criticism need to open up to other genres - and NOT in that infuriating "we like X when it's not really like X" tokenistic way - or non-indie-centric voices need to pitch in.

I mean, there are plenty of non-indie-centric voices out there; it's not like R&B, hip-hop, soul, any genre you care to mention - they have their own media and their own writers. But because none of those writers make any claims to be the centre, and tend not to care what the indie-centric mainstream thinks, they don't get involved in conversations like this. Which probably means they win.

[koganbot]

Indie-centrists don't dominate criticism, even if they're an overstrong presence. What they dominate is the audience for criticism, which makes for an interesting tension.