music

Saying Goodbye to SXSW

Last year I attend­ed my first South by South­west Music Fes­ti­val. It was a big deal! It was on the com­pa­ny dime! I lead a team of four peo­ple on a musi­cal jour­ney that took us from Rachael Ray to 2 Live Crew. We met a ton of inter­est­ing artists and talked to as many as we could on cam­era for comcast.net. I was real­ly proud of what we accom­plished in our first time out. Before we left for Austin, I ful­ly expect­ed that SXSW would be an annu­al event on my edi­to­r­i­al calendar.

What a dif­fer­ence a year makes. Con­tin­ue read­ing →

A.C. Newman @ Johnny Brenda’s


A.C. New­man
Orig­i­nal­ly uploaded by J T. Ramsay

I went out to see A.C. New­man at John­ny Bren­da’s Tues­day night. I had a great time. I’m going to write about the man and his new album, Get Guilty, over at my work blog, Blind­ed by the Hype, today (hope­ful­ly.)

It was an amaz­ing show. Regard­less of how you feel about his most recent stuff with the New Pornog­ra­phers, or his solo work, he’s an unde­ni­able show­man who must be seen to be believed. I can think of few song­writ­ers whose body of work has been so con­sis­tent­ly strong since he came back on the scene with the New Pornog­ra­phers near­ly a decade ago.

If you’re not at SXSW and you’re look­ing to hear some great music, make sure you get your­self out to see A.C. New­man when he comes to town. You won’t be disappointed.

The Sky Is Falling!

Here’s my absurd, reduc­tion­ist view­point on why edi­to­r­i­al will sur­vive the demise of the music indus­try: just because big con­glom­er­ates won’t make mon­ey sell­ing music does­n’t mean peo­ple will stop mak­ing it. Artists will keep doing all sorts of beau­ti­ful, irra­tional things, often at con­sid­er­able per­son­al expense, even if there’s no one to buy it. Some­one still needs to dig around to find what’s great, right?

If we as crit­ics con­cen­trate sole­ly on solv­ing the music indus­try’s prob­lems, we won’t be able to ade­quate­ly address our own. Jason Gross and I have been going back and forth quite a bit about this on Twit­ter. He wrote, “Music biz = our bread/butter (& our love). As for sav­ing crit­i­cism, do you mean the whole scribe trade or our just our own turf?” Con­flat­ing the music busi­ness with music itself is sil­ly. (I’m sure Jason agrees, but his tweet is illus­tra­tive nonetheless.)

If crit­i­cism sur­vives it will be as a cul­tur­al fil­ter. It sounds imper­son­al, but it’s of cru­cial impor­tance to an audi­ence. We have to stop think­ing of our­selves as ser­vants of the music indus­try and con­cen­trate on being of val­ue to an audi­ence with pre­cious lit­tle time to spend think­ing about our pas­sion. Remem­ber, crit­ics have always been cul­tur­al cura­tors, so it’s not a rad­i­cal change in job descrip­tion. We just have to think of our role in broad­er terms.

Our love is writ­ing about music. Let’s not for­get that.

Pandora’s Box

Scott Ten­nent makes an emo­tion­al plea for music fans to ignore leaks over at  Pret­ty Goes with Pret­ty. We’ve all seen vari­a­tions of this argu­ment before. The MPAA even made spots that echoed this sen­ti­ment. It’s heart­felt, but hope­less. Count­less clich­es could be used to describe what’s hap­pened, but I’ll use this one: you can’t get the tooth­paste back into the tube.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

They’re Just Not That into You

I know insid­ers claim that peo­ple are lis­ten­ing to music now more than ever before, but what if peo­ple are just not as inter­est­ed in new music as they used to be? Has per­ceived demand for new prod­uct out­stripped con­sumer interest?

The answer is easy. Search your heart. Every­thing will be eas­i­er if you can just admit what you know to be true.

Con­tin­ue read­ing →