correlation versus causation
And re the original post that spawned this: come the fuck on. Creed’s selling 42 million albums in four years was driven by a host of sociological factors. People don’t consume Creed albums in a vacuum. I’m sure tons of people are legitimately bananas over Creed and I’m sure there’s a billion others who want to have Chad Kroeger’s baby, and I personally think that’s largely innocuous, but music critics and Grizzly Bear fans aren’t orchestrating cultural hegemony, they’re reacting to it. I mean, seriously.That said, that the music said music critics and Grizzly Bear fans actually like and recommend (ie instead of Creed) is predominantly for and by upper-middle class white people is, yes, waaaaay problematic. But thinking Clay Aiken is a shit singer and, say, listening to hip-hop aren’t exactly mutually exclusive.
First, let’s not conflate “music critics” and “Grizzly Bear fans,” whoever did that. Second, music critics recommend lots of things aside from music by and for upper-middle class white people. (See year-end lists from Maura and Sasha Frere-Jones for but two examples.) It’s just that the readership is primarily middle-class (why does it have to be upper?), and so by definition, taking them only as an aggregate, they tend to respond most uniformly to music that falls into that category. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that people liking the kind of music people like them like is not really a bad thing (do we roll our eyes at bodega owners in Washington Heights playing nothing but salsa nueva, thinking “Oh that’s so Dominican“—well, we probably do if we’re Dominican music snobs, which certainly suggests something!), even though “we” (“we”!) tend to think it is. But this is just because of a very particular set of values that priviledge individualism and uniqueness, ones that are almost impossible to live up to without engaging in a healthy amount of self-deception. Once a stereotype has been identified, especially an accurate stereotype, if we fit the mold of that stereotype we try to figure out ways to differentiate ourselves from the specifics of that (“Well I may like the Arcade Fire but at least I don’t like Grizzly Bear”) or abandon the identity entirely, epecially if the people associated with the stereotype are not the kind of people we think of ourselves as. For music, everyone likes to think they have particular and unique tastes so the identification with anyone who falls into a stereotype is a non-starter simply because anyone who falls into a stereotype must have unoriginal taste. We like being part of communities of listeners that can have slightly different opinions on the objects we’ve collectively decided are part of the conversation, but this requires actual interpresonal or parasocial contact through message boards or reading something like criticism. If our exposure to a taste-group is through a stereotype, however, we put the cart before the horse and assume the conscious adoption of a style comes before the slow building of a particular taste and express our disgust. It’s destructive and constructive at the same time, but mostly constructive, because by being the kind of people who dislike hipsters, we both strengthen our identity and strengthen the identity of the other taste group as people who are not-us. As long as you stay within your own bubble and have crossover interactions only within certain agreed-upon forms, this works. Whether it’s healthy or not is another matter.
As for the Creed/Nickelback stuff, I’ve just been flummoxed by people expressing their differential distaste about the latter being named Billboard’s band of the decade, in part because Bilboard is by definition something that just measures stuff and in part because Nickelback selling a shit ton of albums should not be news to anyone who’s been paying attention to music, but mainly because I though we had this debate already with the whole “flyover rock” thing. Here’s Ann Powers’ original article, and here…uh, here would be Marc Hogan’s excellent response, if it was still where I thought it was. Hmm. Well then, self-indulgently, here’s my post about it from the horrifyingly redesigned Idolator.
2 days ago
