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February 26, 2008
* Does anyone remember Music JOURNALISM?
You might think this post would be another installment about our announcement of last week. But it's not.
In-print music magazines are dying, sure. We've become yet another example of that. Today, however, I'm writing about the practice of journalism in music coverage -- or, more specifically, the utter lack of it.
Two primary examples to which I can point. One was in the print medium, the other online.
You may have read something within the past couple of days about a "review" of the Black Crowes' new record which appeared in Maxim magazine. The writer had a largely negative opinion of it, which is fine, of course. Except that the band's record label had not yet sent out advance discs, nor had it been provided in any other form to anyone in the press yet. Oooops.
Maxim at first tried to explain the review as an "educated guess" but eventually issued a full apology. None of which excuses such a thing from ever being allowed to happen in the first place.
It is theoretically possible that this is primarily on the writer, David Peisner (thanks for the name, Maura) who obviously knew what he (or she? The name of the writer oddly appears to have been shielded from the news reports about the incident, and I've not actually seen a print copy of the magazine yet) was doing. Publications generally trust freelance writers to procure advance music from publicists on their own, rather than trying to babysit or mediate that process.
It's worth noting that a few weeks ago I tentatively assigned a review of the Black Crowes album to one of our freelancers, Bob Townsend, for our March-April issue of ND. Bob wrote back a couple weeks later to say he still hadn't gotten an advance. No problem, I said; if they're not going to send an advance out, we'll just hold off till the following issue.
It's certainly possible, though, that a writer could lie -- "Yeah, I got the advance today, will have the review for you by the end of the week" -- and as such, I can foresee a scenario in which Maxim was not in fact aware of the writer's fabrication. Not that it would let them off the hook -- and it's also possible the editors could have been complicit in the duplicity, of course -- but first and foremost, it's the writer who's at fault here.
It's most certainly the editors who are at fault in my second example, though, and this one at least tangentially affected No Depression. Sometime in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, an anonymous poster circulated a phony "press release" on a couple of message-boards suggesting that the Austin nightclub Pangaea planned to circumvent South By Southwest policy by enforcing a strict dress-code and giving priority admission to those who ordered "bottle service". As it happens, No Depression's showcase is Wednesday (March 12) at Pangaea; the phony missive also listed our lineup, as if to associate us with the false claims.
This smelled like a rat from the git-go, in large part because SXSW controls the door at its venues; it's part of the conditions of their agreements with the establishments who host the conference's showcases.
Yet by late Tuesday morning or early Tuesday afternoon, several music-news websites -- including The Daily Swarm, Idolator, and Stereogum, many of them highly-trafficked and supposedly respectable -- had cut-and-pasted the post's contents onto their site and fashioned news reports out of it.
None of them so much as bothered to question the veracity of the information, or to call Pangaea to see if they would confirm having sent this "press release" out, or to call SXSW to see whether they would allow this at one of their venues, or to call No Depression to see if they would present a showcase at a venue under such conditions.
In fairness, some of the sites subsequently either removed or revised their news items after it became clear -- only through SXSW contacting the venue and passing word along to me, which I then posted as comments below the sites' news items -- that they'd been had.
The point, however, is that they never should have been had in the first place. There are major -- MAJOR -- steps missing in the fundamental news-gathering processes of a great many music-related websites. Basic editing principles and common-sense fact-checking are becoming a lost art.
We all know that there are hundreds of sites out there who are ultimately doing little more than cut-and-paste recycling of stuff they've found elsewhere around the web. But can't anyone bring anything REAL to the table? Real content? Real research? Real writing? Real JOURNALISM?
I'll tell you one thing. If nobody else can do it, we sure as hell can.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
February 24, 2008
* "words fall through me...."
Well, how 'bout that.
Congratulations, Glen & Marketa.
And kudos to the Oscar voters, who proved once again to be wiser than Grammy voters.
If you ain't seen Once, git thee to the video store, or your Netflix queue, or wherever you get your movies these days. The movie's as good as the song.
Just on the off-chance you don't know what I'm babbling about, Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova just won the Oscar for Best Song for "Falling Slowly", from the Irish indie film Once. See a handful of previous blog-entries in this space over the past year for more on that film:
http://www.nodepression.net/blogs/peter/2008/01/_raise_your_hopeful_voice_you.html
http://www.nodepression.net/blogs/peter/2007/05/take_this_sinking_boat_and_poi.html
http://www.nodepression.net/blogs/peter/2007/06/_followup_thoughts_on_once.html
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 7:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
February 20, 2008
* "don't it always seem to go...." (you know the rest of that lyric)
Just a brief note here, to all who have responded to our news of Tuesday morning, whether in comments to the home-page announcement, or on various message-boards and blogs around the web, or in e-mails sent to us:
The cavalcade of empathy has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly gratifying. Coming to terms with this new reality hasn't been easy for us, but it sure helps to know how many of you share what we've valued about ND all these years.
Sometimes you go about what you're doing every day and week and month and year for such a long time that you maybe don't realize just how many people are aware of, and caring about, what you do. Not that doing No Depression has ever felt like a "normal" job -- but I think its purpose has become clearer simply by dealing with the looming prospect of its absence. And y'all are helping me to understand that. So thanks, very sincerely.
In the meantime, we've still got one more issue to assemble, and we're very much looking forward to that. Beyond the likely print finale, there is the matter of just how we might fit what we do into the ever-shifting sands of the web. Hopefully we can contribute, and not just by being there, but by being GOOD, which seems to me to be the real challenge to internet media today. In a sense, it's the same battle that print always was -- striving to be successful with something of quality amid the flotsam and jetsam of the journalistic barrage. (It's just that the grammar and spelling is a whole lot worse on the net.)
More to come once I've had a chance to address the many dozens of e-mails still awaiting a response. And hopefully at some point soon here, we can stop talking about our own predicament and start just talking about the music again....
adios,
peter
P.S. -- It looks like Grant and I will be interviewed for a piece on All Things Considered running this (Thursday) afternoon/evening, and Kyla will be interviewed for a Weekend Edition piece running on Saturday. Thanks to the good folks at NPR for caring about what we do....
Posted by Peter at 9:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 14, 2008
* "don't be sad, i know you will...."
Just a brief note here for anyone who might be looking for post-show comments about the Reivers reunion in Austin this past weekend -- I'm refraining from that for the moment on account of having been assigned to write something about it for a Texas publication (I'll post an update once it's wrapped up and in print). Suffice to say the shows were quite a hit -- two sold-out nights of terrific performances (24 songs each night, with two songs different in the set list between Saturday and Sunday).
One song they didn't play was Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You", which appears as a bonus track on the Dualtone Records reissue of Saturday. Last night, I went to see a young and very talented singer-songwriter from Canada named Basia Bulat at the Triple Door in Seattle, and, lo and behold, she played "True Love Will Find You", to close out her set. (Another odd coincidence is that Bulat's voice is rather reminiscent of that of K. McCarty, the most accomplished interpreter of Daniel Johnston's work -- see her mid-'90s disc of all Johnston tunes, Dead Dog's Eyeball.)
On this Valentine's Day, it's worth revisiting Daniel's words of inspiration: "True love is searching too..."
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 12, 2008
* "someone's praying, my lord, kumbayah...."
A few weeks ago I happened to stumble upon a rather intriguing and intelligent blog-entry that dealt with our recent cover story on Shelby Lynne, written by a fellow named John Marks on a site called purplestateofmind.com. Interested in his writing but not having a clue as to what "Purple State Of Mind" might be, I poked around a little further and found that it's the title of a documentary film which is just now beginning to hit some festivals and select screenings. Though its promotional budgets are modest and its national profile is (so far) relatively low, Purple State Of Mind strikes me as a film that the majority of Americans need to see.
The summary description is hardly sexy: Basically this is 80 minutes of two middle-aged white guys sittin' around talkin' to each other. The catch is that the two guys -- Marks and his longtime friend and former college roommate Craig Detweiler -- are tremendously articulate and intellectually challenging, and their central subject matter delves deep into the heart of the modern American experience. Essentially they're addressing the great Red State/Blue State divide between believers and nonbelievers of Christianity, and the extent to which this divides us as a nation in a way that is ultimately both unnatural and unhealthy.
By openly and honestly confronting each other about how they came to believe (or not believe) what they do today, Marks (raised Christian but no longer a believer) and Detweiler (not raised religious but born again in his college years) take their own steps together toward bridging the supposed chasm between the religious right and what might be termed the agnostic left. More significantly, they go a long way toward breaking down those stereotypes altogether, eventually revealing within themselves elements of each other's beliefs and values.
Their conversations and arguments are heated, humorous, vehement, compassionate, and most of all relentless. In the end, as Detweiler repeatedly stresses, it's not about convincing the other person, or about winning or losing. Rather, it's about understanding and respecting one another's views.
Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the two deeply personal revelations which more or less bookend the film, in which Detweiler and Marks recount specific trigger-points that had a lot to do with their respective affirmation and rejection of faith. Essentially the two men faced very similar darkest-moments-of-the-soul experiences; their responses may seem on the surface to have been entirely opposite, but I'd argue that on some level, they were affected in precisely the same way. Both of them stared directly into the heart of darkness; each of them dealt with it by reaching for the only reckoning that could help them find their way back to the light.
Detweiler and Marks are screening Purple State Of Mind in several cities over the next few weeks. For a taste, here's the film's trailer:
Many of the upcoming screenings are cross-promotional events for Marks' new Harper/Collins book Reasons To Believe, which came out this week. For those willing to dig deeper, the book goes another 360-odd pages into the subject; in fact, the film was actually an outgrowth of the book, having sprung from Marks' decision that his first interview subject for the book should be Detweiler. Because Detweiler's career involves teaching and training students in filmmaking, he suggested they have their conversations on-camera, and a documentary project was born.
If you're looking for an Americana-related musical tie-in (other than Marks being an avid reader of No Depression), check out the film's music, which includes excerpts from Neko Case's cover of "Wayfaring Stranger" as well as Wilco's "Theologians". In my estimation, however, the crowning musical choice is the revival of Guadalcanal Diary's transcendent 1985 cover of the old campfire sing-along "Kumbayah". The movie's spirit strikes at the very core of that band's apocalyptic reading of the song; it's almost as if Guadalcanal Diary recorded it precisely for the purpose of connecting with Purple State Of Mind twenty-odd years later.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
February 4, 2008
* an Obama addendum....
....that is, an addendum to my co-editor's blog-entry of this morning. I'll add simply that I've been leaning Obama from the beginning. I remember talking at length about the prospects and possibilities of Obama as presidential hopeful with my old friend John Krajicek at last year's SXSW (in March), so it's basically been a year or so now, waiting and watching to see if this train could pick up steam.
To that end, the video Grant linked to in his blog seems, to me, like the locomotive finally charging full speed ahead. It wasn't created by the Obama campaign; at least its creators, will.i.am of the Blackeyed Peas and filmmaker Jesse Dylan (yes, another Bob kid) claim that it wasn't. Regardless, it strikes me as a flash point, as one of the finest creative political endorsments ever made, and one that may very well completely mobilize and motivate the strong youth base to which Obama has been appealing from the start.
My friend Farnum Brown sent me a link to the video yesterday. I checked it out and noted that although it had just been posted on Saturday, by Sunday afternoon it had already accumulated 152,000 views (and that's not counting the views in a swarm of "clones" of the same video that had sprouted up concurrently on YouTube). By this morning when I checked in a few moments ago, it was up to nearly 698,000.
And not surprisingly. Because this thing is GOOD.
Which I guess amounts to an endorsement of the video, humorously. Fortunately the video happens to support the candidate I was already endorsing to begin with.
Anyway, here it is:
the direct youtube link, if you want to see the lyrics, viewers' comments, and view-totals, is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY
So, can we, really?
I don't know, ultimately. But I do know that it's about time we gave it a shot.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)