I'd like to begin today by quoting a couple of somewhat polarized excerpts from the comments-section of a post my co-editor recently made on his blog:
But if you're content sitting on your porch, shotgun in hand and yelling at the kids to get off the lawn, I'll leave you to it. (from someone named Donnie)
and:
Should I apologize for preferring the actual object to its electronic doppleganger? (from my co-editor, in partial response)
What follows is a manifesto of sorts that was received entirely apart from that exchange, but which speaks largely to the same root issues. It's from my longtime friend Kurt Heggland, who for many years in Durham, North Carolina, co-hosted (along with Steve Gardner) what was almost surely the best Americana-themed house-concert series in the country at a place he called Pine Hill Farm. (Among the artists who played there over the years were quite a few who have appeared on the cover of No Depression, including Alejandro Escovedo, the Drive-By Truckers, Robbie Fulks, and Blue Mountain -- playing unamplified in Kurt's living room to about 70 very fortunate paying customers.)
Kurt's hardly a technophobe; he works for Dell, previously worked for Sony Ericsson, and designs technological gadgets for a living. But he also knows good art, and understands the artistic experience. I think what he has written below is one of the finest expressions I've yet come across about the contemporary disconnect between technology and art -- and about what our overseas colleague Ed Ward has come to refer to as "neophilia" (for much more on that, read this: http://berlinbites.blogspot.com/2008/03/neophila-and-its-discontents.html).
So. Should you choose to view Kurt as another shotgun-toting porch-sitter howling at the kids, that's your prerogative, of course. And I'm not really suggesting you'd be wrong, or that Kurt is right. What I am saying is that it's very clear to me he's thought about this a lot. As has Ed Ward. And as have quite a few folks who, as a matter of fact, embrace technology to a pretty significant extent -- if that weren't the case, there's no way you'd be reading these words in this space right now -- but who also believe it's essential to think these things all the way through.
With that, I present to you the e-mail Kurt sent to me last night, after he heard about the imminent shuttering of the print edition of No Depression:
Not to sound like a luddite, but this news makes me think about why I hate the way the music industry is going.
Artists:
It used to be hard to break into the music business. Now it's still difficult, but you have even more crap obscuring your path so that it's probably a lot harder to get noticed. It's like bands used to be trees in a forest, now they're leaves in a forest, if that makes any sense. The path to get in line to get discovered is probably easier, but there's a corresponding increase in the difficulty for those trying to discern the true talent. I can't tell you how many times I've gone on iTunes myself to investigate some band that is all the rage, only to find they are just another insipid group of wanks who overestimated their talent but were somehow able to get their music past the sleeping sentries of the digital music biz. It's just as rare as it used to be for a band to have any real meaning, but now I have to wade through so much detritus that I don't get that excited about the search anymore.
The Experience:
I know the new music biz model is quite lucrative for many new-media companies and even for many bands, but it has taken away our artifacts, and that is the thing I most resent.
No one gets together and shares their 'records' anymore. Talking about the art on the cover or arguing what the best tracks/sides are used to be valid social interactions. People used to know the titles and order of the songs on their favorite records (some of us still do). We just download piecemeal snippets of agreeable audio, and often don't even know the name of the track or who the artist is. Many times even musically fervent friends of mine have not been able to name the artist for the track that is playing when I ask them, without consulting the LCD on the iPod or car stereo. They just downloaded something that was linked from a link that they found when they linked to an artist they actually could name.
The experience that sharing music gave us was half the thrill of the music itself (even listening to Journey from a boombox on the hood of a Monte Carlo sitting in a clearing in the woods around a bonfire had great meaning -- oops, a little too autobiographical). We developed relationships with artists through their records being played in their entirety...repeatedly. The 'shuffle' setting has certainly diluted this by eliminating continuity. Now everyone has white earbuds in their ears and couldn't share what they were listening to if they wanted to.
I'm perhaps being a bit over-dramatic and cynical here. I know people still share music, but now it has to be part of your personality to want to actively share. It's not a naturally occurring thing so much anymore in my opinion. It's in many ways harder to share, too, due to where the music resides (counterintuitive to the whole-collection-in-your-pocket, I know), and our mosquito-like attention spans. Like most adventures in the virtual world, finding music online is such a lonely activity that perhaps it's influencing the social aspect of our music. Why thumb through a friend's collection of CDs with a beer in my hand when I can scroll through millions of songs in the comforting glow of my own LCD at home?
The Future:
And on top of that, without the artifacts, where will our personal collections be in 15 or even 10 years? No one will be pawing through a St. Vinnie DePaul thrift store and find a sweet gem of an MP3 to be really excited about. It will just be gone into the ether more than likely. My digital collection will probably not even be accessible for my son to explore when he's in his teens. Assuming our current catalogs of music migrate to whatever the new technology/encoding arises, it may be easy for him to explore the genres/artists of the past, but I wonder if it will have as much meaning as the first-run Johnny Cash record that I got from my dad, or the untitled and impossible to find first Jayhawks record that my brother gave me. How can there be real gems anymore when a keystroke can multiply its existence by exponential numbers? I can download the same song that 500,000 other people download in 10 seconds from iTunes or Limewire -- where's the quest in that? I still buy everything on CD unless it's something that is only available digitally, which by the way doesn't necessarily make it special in the least.
ND is what Rolling Stone used to be, and Spin never was. Today's Rolling Stone is doing its part to reduce the already transitory attention spans of music fans. Steve Jobs just said recently "no one reads anymore". That's not true, they just can't read more than one paragraph at a time about any one subject. ND was dedicated to introducing people to artists, encouraging them to start a personal relationship with them, and maybe that's just not what the masses want anymore. They want: 1) to know who are they dating 2) do they have tattoos 3) how did rehab go and 4) boxers or briefs. That's not to say that there aren't important things being said in the digital media about music, but again -- leaves in a forest.
And even if I find something important, I don't get the artifact. I have most of the NDs that were published, and I'll be keeping them forever. Perhaps that's how my son will learn about awesome music from my era. (I plan to keep my CDs/vinyl too, so there's that.) When I get a new computer, all the links to cool things written about music on my computer will be probably be lost. And they will probably be taken down from the servers anyway to make room for more recent content even if I did somehow retain the link. Heck, I may lose my entire digital collection someday through a glitch or obsolescence or carelessness.
Maybe ND's future is more of a hybrid with a net-based core. Look at Pitchfork. They're going gangbusters. They sponsor a huge music fest every year now. They're starting a 'TV' station online soon. Clearly they're doing well. I don't see a counterpart to them in the roots/alt-whatever/Americana category, though they cover a small bit of it. Another blog I like, catbirdseat.org, has evolved from a blog to also encompass a record label. Maybe ND can be all these things. Heck, put out an annual digest of the best written work with a CD like Oxford American does. I'm sure you're exploring all the options and I'm sure ND will do great in it's next incarnation. I just regret not being able to have the artifact anymore.
Raise your hand if you're familiar with the songs of Stan Rogers.
If your hand is up, there's probably about a 95% chance you're Canadian.
Either that, or Rogers was simply an artist whose name and work somehow managed to escape me all these years. But whatever the case, I got to know his music rather well this past weekend during a visit to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Looking for some evening entertainment on our fourth/first anniversary (that's what happens when you get married on Leap Day), my wife and I stumbled upon Stan Rogers: A Matter Of Heart, a play currently being presented by Eastern Front Theatre at Alderney Landing in Dartmouth (across the bay by ferry from Halifax). A quick web-search indicated that Rogers, who died in an airplane fire on a runway in Cincinnati in 1983, was a man of significant respect and renown in his homeland; a recommendation from our longtime Canadian contributing editor Paul Cantin sealed our decision to attend the play.
Given the way Rogers died, it struck me as a bit eerie that his songs (as performed by singers Terry Hatty, Aaron Kyte, Julain Molnar and Cliff Le Jeune, with a three-piece backing band) almost posited him as a Canadian Jim Croce, in the way he deftly contrasts gritty character sketches against contemplative ballads. Croce's penchant for swaying from the likes of "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" and "Rapid Roy (That Stock Car Boy)" into "Lover's Cross" and "New York's Not My Home" somewhat mirrored Rogers' ranging from "Night Guard" and "The Idiot" to "Forty-Five Years" and "Song Of The Candle".
Croce comparisons don't tell the whole story with Rogers, though; rather, it's just a starting-point to help convey his appeal, and to understand the high regard with which he's held in his home turf. Certainly he also brings to mind his countryman Gordon Lightfoot (and not just because both had signature songs about shipwrecks), but in the end Rogers stands distinct among Canadian songwriters, largely because of how deeply he drew upon the traditional aspects of daily living in the Great White North, especially along the eastern seaboard. From tales of maritime disasters to laments of fishing-trade changes to saluting the Northwest Passage to the obligatory hockey song, Rogers' oeuvre essentially serves as a classic blueprint for what might be termed "Canadiana."
And, as it turns out, there's a fairly direct connection between Rogers' legacy and the modern string-band scene that is the cover-subject of our March-April issue. Leonard Podolak, leader of Winnipeg band the Duhks, is the son of Mitch Podolak, founder of the long-running Winnipeg Folk Festival -- where, every year, the event is concluded with a rendition of Rogers' fictional anthem "The Mary Ellen Carter". Its uplifting chorus -- "Rise again, rise again" -- is adapted ingeniously as a thread running throughout A Matter Of Heart, a softly reassuring refrain revisited several times before the full song is belted out in a rousing finale.
You may well have to go to Canada to see it. And if you go -- while you're there, see what you can find out about Stompin' Tom Connors....
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.
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:
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....
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..."
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.
