Today's Personal Journal has a column by Jim Fusilli that is a great example of critical writing -- one of my favorite genres. This time, instead of illustrating his linguistic chops by writing about a band, he turns his attention to Blender magazine, and unloads. He starts off this way:
Blender magazine, which treats men like boys, women like chattel and rock music like a soundtrack for cretins, recently published its list of "The 50 Worst Songs Ever!" In its current issue, it follows with "The 40 Worst Lyricists Ever!" Surely the culture is better off for its musical anthropology.
Blender may be beyond caricature, but it isn't much worse than most rock magazines aimed at young men, or magazines for young men that occasionally feature rock music.
And then builds from there. It's entertaining reading, but like most good critics, he makes a larger point, but without beating his readers over the head with it: that just maybe, the decline in relevancy of the music industry overall is tied to the way irony and celebrity have come to be the primary way of communicating. As Fusilli notes:
The problem is, and I can't tell you how badly I hope I'm wrong here, some readers may think Blender is a music magazine and that what they do is actual music criticism; that putting down 30-year-old pop tunes and selectively panning gifted songwriters is a merely a dumbed-down form of qualitative analysis. It's not. Even Blender's CD reviews, some written by critics who know better, take a flip tone that suggests the subject is disposable and thoroughly banal.
Music IS important, and has been considered so probably since the first drummer started pounding on a rock. But today, it often feels like saying something is important, that something just might transcend the ordinary, or touch people in a way that pierces more than the skin is tantamount to heresy. Cool is being untouched, cool is being detached, cool is irony.
So riddle me this: is it possible that the decline of relevancy in the music world today is linked to the way that the straphangers to the industry, the blenders of the world, have been participating in the lingering death of the industry that pays their bills?
Sort of reminds me of one section of the blogosphere, relentlessly seeking to diminish the value and impact of the "mainstream media" while linking to and seeking validation from the same...