(Occasional Coolfer contributor Alec Hanley Bemis started writing about the Village Voice's firing of music editor Chuck Eddy on an email list. Coolfer offers an expanded version.)

By all reports Chuck Eddy was an extremely responsive, communicative editor in an era of hands-off, light-touch, blog-style rubber stamping. Eddy is also a great writer and rock intellectual. If you doubt that I'll refer you to his piece on Detroit's recent triumphs on America's album charts. (Makes a nice twofer with Robert Christgau's essay on why Eminem is one for the ages.) Some fancy glossy should sign him up to a lucrative writing contract. Now that even uptown mags like Vanity Fair are putting Paris Hilton on their covers, it's time that they get someone like Chuck to do some real analysis.

That said it's hard not to acknowledge Chuck's departure from the Voice doesn't come out of left field. For anyone making a career as a pop writer, it's clearly a bummer on a personal level. (I believe he's a single father with kids.) His departure is also cause for alarm if you believe in the lasting import of public intellectuals. Eddy is original. Where most music critics are sheep, he has a POV as bold as that of Richard Meltzer. The style he encouraged and the range of coverage he allowed into the paper was unique.

However, the capitalist/market-satisfying individual in me says it was inevitable that he got axed. He edited the section for himself and people like him. Rock critics, geeks. An audience that gave a shit that he was a contrarian, or even understood the dominant stream of thought & taste he was revolting against. The problem: A paper like the Voice needs to be read and understood by regular people. That's how newspapers survive, folks. The Village Voice's music section has long been the premiere venue for music crit, yet it long ago turned up its nose at a general audience. Furthermore, it intentionally nipple tweaked its natural readership of hipsters and fuzzy, culture loving liberals.

Here's an anecdote that might provide some insight. A few years ago I taught a NYU graduate j-school class about youth culture. About 1/4 of the students were aspiring music/culture writers. The other 3/4 couldn't give a shit about any musician not in the top 40. I had them read some Voice stuff and could tell from their reactions that the section was in trouble. The aspiring music/culture writers hated it because it covered Toby Keith and random boogie rock, while ignoring or underplaying lots of cult, music faves. The other 3/4 of the class were mainstream "non-music" people. Normally they might be interested in a story about artists who shifted units (a mainstream country or rap musician, John
Meyer). Unfortunately, the section was equally inaccessible to them because of its dense thickets of self-referential prose.

Two leds from recent articles picked at random from the Voice's website. First a review of west coast rappers Keak the Sneak and E-40 -- an example of how the paper covered "popular" hip-hop.

The prodigal coast has returned. Banished from rap since Tupac's shooting, the Pacific sensibility -- ranging from the barbecued grooves of G-funk to Mobb music's electro picaresques -- has hemorrhaged cred since the mid '90s, while surrendering Billboard real estate to young blood in the Bible Belt. New scenes have been flashing in the pan at strobe pace, with a spate of geo-genres springing up along the nation's rim: crunk, screw, trap, and snap. Add hyphy to the list—maybe. It promises to finally restore balance to hip-hop's lopsided map. Kindled by native wordsmiths, a Bay Area renaissance has been simmering, simmering, simmering. E-40 might finally bring it to a boil.

Questions for those Coolfer readers who spend less than two hours a day websurfing AllMusic.com: What "Mobb" are they referring to? What the hell is "hyphy"? Did you understand the writer is saying California hip-hop is back after a period of Southern rap dominating the charts and the popular imagination? Well, no, because it doesn't come out and say any of these things in plain English.

Continue reading "Guest Blogger: One View on the Chuck Eddy/Village Voice Situation" »

Posted by Glenn at 3:49 PM | Link
|Guest Blogger||Music Criticism/Writing|

(Damian Kulash of the band OK Go has been guest blogging at Coolfer while the band finishes up its tour. If you'd like to send Damian a question or comment, you can email him at his temporary guest blogger email address, damian@coolfer.com.)

I always do this. I get on a plane with a fully charged battery, duly caffeinated and all geared up to get some work done. There are t-shirt designs to finish, or backed up emails to answer, or a song idea to get sketched out in a synthesis program. I turn down the complementary headphones, settle in, drink a bloody mary mix or a ginger ale, and then I am sabotaged. They put on the in-flight movie and it’s over. I sit, like a zombie, and watch the entire thing, without sound. It’s ridiculous; I can’t pry myself away -- TVs completely shut me down. I can’t even eat at restaurants that show sports games because I’ll ignore whoever I’m eating with, no matter how boring the sport is. So this post represents a huge triumph of determination for me. Every word I write here is a victory over the silent Billy Bob Thorton and his Bad News Bears.

The last post got me thinking about the message of a band -- what a band means, what place it carves out in the world. Obviously, the public image of a band is generated by hundreds or thousands of impressions. It’s a picture composed not only by songs and the band’s press photos, but also by countless interviews, appearances, rumors, snapshots, and stories. No one could find, much less digest, all of the material spun off by a band (my mom is nonetheless making a noble attempt), but the public generally comes to a rough consensus about a band.

Sometimes the message is pre-formulated and planned out. This can seem concise and intense, or just contrived. From the Beatles to the Hives, there’s a long history of great bands who carefully, even anally, crafted a tightly-knit aesthetic message that we hungrily lap up. On the other hand, we can all think of an equally robust list of bands whose transparent attempts to generate an image seem fraudulent or facile.

Other bands seem to whip up a message effortlessly, or even accidentally. Could anyone claim that Elliott Smith seemed manufactured? Or that Fugazi’s politics were a prefab imaging device? Here again, though, it’s easy to generate a long list of musicians whose I-just-rolled-out-of-bed-this-way schtick is boring or pathetic.

With regard to my own band, I’m not really sure which camp we fall in. It’s no secret that we make an effort. We have a distinct look, we plot our course fairly carefully, and we don’t try to hide the fact that we are deliberate. By the same token, though, we are uncommonly accessible to our fans, generally straightforward in interviews, and pretty candid and earnest overall.

Sometimes I question the wisdom of our approach. Of course, we have to stay our course: it’s who we are, and we’re too established to suddenly be transform into something else anyhow. But for all of the effort we expend on blogs and articles written for magazines, on intelligently speaking our minds, on aggressively making ourselves available to fans at our shows, it’s hard to tell how much is really gained.

By way of example: The Vines. We were friends with The Vines before they were signed in America. They’re great guys. We spent a couple months in adjacent recording studios and we hung out all the time. Craig was terrified of my dog, and my dog made it worse by shitting in the middle of their control room after they left one night. We toured with them for their first tour of America (their first tour anywhere, in fact), and I remember thinking that the poor guy was completely screwing everything up. Every interviewer I talked to had been abused or offended by him, and I watched him, helpless and inebriated, work his way around the country, pissing off his fans, his band, and his crew alike. I was sure he’d trashed any chance they had at success.

A couple months later, there was a full page in Rolling Stone celebrating what a total fuckup Craig had become. In the same issue we got a tiny congratulatory blurb about something forgettable. By the end of the year, they’d sold around four times as many records as we did.

It doesn’t really pay to be the nice guy, but we are who we are, and we’re loving it. I suspect there will always be a more caricatured character ahead of us on the charts, and the relative safety of our smart-guy thing will probably keep us from igniting a sudden international phenomenon. But we hope that our approach will last, at least; we’d rather be cruising at this altitude for 20 years than rocket up and plummet immediately. And as we head home, today, I couldn’t be happier. The last nine weeks of shows have been spectacular; I’m proud of our record and the world seems to be liking it, too; after living at dangerously close quarters with these guys for years now, we’re still best friends; and I spend my life doing things I care about. What more could you ask for?

By the way, Billy Bob and crew are celebrating wildly. They must have won the big game.

Thanks for reading. I may stop by and write something here in the future, but for now I’m going to take some time off for Thanksgiving and try to write some new music. If you want to read more things I’ve written, there should be a brand new page of my ranting up on our website, www.okgo.net.

Posted by Damian at 10:46 AM | Link | Comment (23)
|Guest Blogger||OK Go|

(Damian Kulash of the band OK Go continues his guest blogging today. If you'd like to send Damian a question or comment, you can email him at his temporary guest blogger email address, damian@coolfer.com.)

Thanks, everyone, for all of comments and emails. I’ve been trying to keep up with replies, but we’re in the middle of the most hectic part of the tour. Tonight we’re in the city where we formed, Chicago. Yesterday was a mad 7:30am dash from Minneapolis to Madison. I look forward to the day cell service is trustworthy enough that one can do interviews from the middle of nowhere, but for now it’s the daily rush from city to city so that I can then sit in the car and tell someone, again, how we came to be called OK Go, and that I haven’t picked a favorite superhero or shape of pasta. Then after the show we drove to Chicago and caught 45 minutes of sleep before we left for a radio show at 6:30am. It was followed by a few interviews, soundcheck, an in-store performance at a Tower. I’m bleary and shakey from caffeine, but looking forward to the show. We go on in about 45 minutes.

I’ll respond to a pair of your comments that I found amusing. One was from a guy in Boston who was shocked and upset, last year, when I published a political screed titled “How Your Band Can Fire Bush” before the election. His feelings: “Rock bands should be seen and not heard. Well, heard in their music, not their opinions.” I’ll let you try to figure out how I am meant to respond to his comment without revealing any opinion. The other was from a woman in St. Louis who loved that same political piece and now wonders if my relative silence on politics since the election represents a strategic move back to the safety of not standing for anything.

The quick response to both is that I don’t have the time on tour to follow politics with the gusto I’d like, but I stay moderately well in touch nonetheless. I haven’t been as publicly political of late because the issues of the day don’t lend themselves easily to my particular soapboxes, which are currently limited to this blog and a few 30-second bursts of sarcasm between our songs every night. With a national election looming last year, it’s wasn’t hard to interest people in voting, and there were more than enough amusing, relevant 30-second quips to go around. I also happened to have some time at home, where I could focus on research and writing. Now, I am thrilled as I hear each detail of the Administration’s nose-dive (not a moment too soon), but despite my glee that the Appropriations Bill was voted down, for instance, the subject isn’t really the type that lights up an audience. “Let’s here it for the FAILURE OF THE ADMINISTRATION’S APPROPRIATIONS BILL!” Tumbleweeds would blow past me on stage. Tonight I’ll probably just insult someone in crowd instead. They love that.

Posted by Damian at 5:23 PM | Link | Comment (18)
|Guest Blogger||OK Go|

(Damian Kulash of the band OK Go continues his guest blogging today. If you'd like to send Damian a question or comment, you can email him at his temporary guest blogger email address, damian@coolfer.com.)

DRM just flat out sucks.

Its most obvious problem is that it doesn't work. No matter how sophisticated the particular software, it only takes one person to break it, once, and the music that was "protected" by the DRM is free to roam the vast expanses of the P2P networks. It’s the most ridiculous house-of-cards model imaginable: one single breech and the whole system implodes. As if to underscore the superlative absurdity of their goal, the lightbulb-heads also managed to cook up software that is comically easy to break. Way to go, guys.

Beyond the guaranteed functional failure, DRM is bad for everyone involved. Tech savvy fans are given more of an incentive to download illegal copies of songs off of file-sharing P2P networks. Why go to the trouble of buying the cumbersome strings-attached version of a record when you can get a better version for free? Less net-knowledgeable fans (those who don’t know how to get around DRM or don’t use P2P networks) are punished by discs that they can’t load onto their computers or iPods. They might as well have bought cassette tapes. The particularly conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it’s the right thing to do, they just get insulted. They’ve made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them inferior versions of records, hampered by software that’s at best a pain in the ass and at worst a real threat to people’s security.

As for musicians, we get to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren’t such a hassle to listen to, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn’t sabotaged our releases. It’s pretty basic: the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. Not just in our own megalomaniacal minds, but in real numbers – the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to get stuck in someone’s head or catch the ear of somebody new. It’s basic marketing. Music advertises itself, so we want our music played as much as possible.

We don’t want people to buy our records and promptly shelve them, we want people to fall in love with them and listen to them over and over and spread our music out into the world. Any obstacle that makes a record harder to listen to is bad news for the artist that made it. A record that you can’t transfer to your iPod is a record you’re less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with, less likely to tell your friends about, and less likely to blast out of your car window as you roll down main street. Musicians (and their labels) should be making it as easy as possible for the world to listen to the records they make.

(More Damian after the jump. Please keep reading.)

Continue reading "Guest Blogging: The DRM Hullabaloo" »

Posted by Damian at 9:25 AM | Link | Comment (44)
|Guest Blogger||OK Go|