foto: POD

O grande Simon Reynolds, um dos mais respeitados jornalistas de música, falou em um dos seus zilhões de blogues (que poderiam ser sessões de um único saite) sobre o estágio atual do ofício, analisando as mudanças impostas na última década pela a explosão das ferramentas online.

Parece uma auto-entrevista apressada, a pontuação está caótica. Mesmo que não seja, os pontos levantados valem a leitura:

12) Where do you see the music press going in the future?

deprofessionalised in large part, more and more fragmented,fractious…. it will follow the way music is going

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it would be good to steer away as much as possible from the whole steady deprofessionalisation of music journalism/”what happened to it as a livelihood/career?!?!/”doomed, doomed, we’re doooomed” issue, otherwise it’ll just turn into a grim handwringing session. It’s bound to come up anyway, especially during the question time. It would be more interesting to talk about why music criticism might be worth doing even if it’s not a good career option — all the stuff about what’s it for, how does it make a contribution to music culture, how to do it well, how approaches have changed in the last decade, what motivates us, what inspires us etc etc.

As the one on the panel who’s been around since the dawn of time I’ve noticed differences from when I started, or from the first half of my career, to do with the disappearance of the magazine as a social nexus, a milieu. When I started out, email didn’t exist, fax machines were scarce and bloody expensive, so you brought your copy in personally, by hand; that meant you hung out at the magazine, so you got to know all the writers, there was a lot of socializing, drunken discussions, arguments. A thing I’ve noticed on the very rare occasions that I go to a magazine office is that they are like ghost ships. There’s hardly anybody there, absolutely no vibe. Cos everyone sends in copy by email, editors I think would actually discourage anyone from coming in person, cos theyr’e so overworked it’s a distraction. So one thing I sense is that the music writer lifestyle has become more solitary and that it is harder for a magazine to have “vibe” in the classic sense of Creem/NME/etc. Obviously writers do find each other and socialize, hang out, etc. But that’s not quite the same thing as when a magazine functions as a kind of social milieu, because you would also rub up against writers/people you don’t like and disagree with as well. Friction creates sparks. Of course there are online surrogates for writerly community like ILM etc but they have their own problems.

Another is the rise of musician-critic. Obviously there have always been super-smart, articulate, hyper-aware musicians (Eno, Green, Lunch, Malkmus, et al) but… there seems to be more of them now. I’m thinking Dirty Projectors dude, Vampire Weekend (who worship Momus who is an extreme example of musician/critic), Daniel Lopatin , Ghost Box dudes, Drew Daniels, John Darnielle, etc etc. and even in dance music you have super-eloquent types like Burial or Villalobos. I kinda half-feel like they’re encroaching on our territory! There’s a little bit of hmm what’s my role now, cos they know they’re trying to do/what they’ve achieved. At the same time these musicians have grown up reading music criticism and so you could say that it shows that what we do actually has some kind of effect. Anyway I wondered if you agreed that there’s more of these hyper-conscious musicians around now, and also if this is a development that’s been accelerated by blog culture. At times it can be a little suffocating almost, the musician presents a very well-laid out map of what their music is about.

the topic of tl; dr will have to come up at some point i expect!

speed-reading seems to be imposed by the nature of the web and data/culture overload

it is interesting how these changes in structure and reception affect the mode of writing, at one point some years ago before the web really took off it seemed like music writing in print magazines was getting more congested because word-counts were being reduced, so it was like people were trying to cram 800 words of data/argument/reference into 400 words.

on the web there’s no limit to space but there’s the different pressure of competing with all the other text and media out there, everyone being in a hurry, so maybe there is a pressure towards brevity/impact

i seem to be unconsciously resisting it by generating ever-vaster pieces

Dica do Julin.

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