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Paying for Reviews....is that fair?

Fox said:
Not at all an insult, it rather proves my point about the futility of trying to write technically for a non technical audience. i sat in bed and blathered and didn't have a house style. On an iPad. I just don't think writing (let alone reading) music reviews to people whom have no real investment in understanding music is a useful utilisation of time. The relationship is the wrong way round. Readers should understand music before reading music reviews, that means some investment from them in learning about music, doing it the other way around dooms any writer of any calibre to dumbing down a subject to the point where it says nothing and if it says nothing there is no point saying it.
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Depends on your intended audience. A piece for the Grove encyclopaedia should be very different to a piece for the Sunday Times, because while there may be an overlap of readership, the audience is actually entirely different.

Fox' remarks read to me as insufferably elitist. HiFi+ is a high-end magazine, but not an elitist one. I want a music review to pique my interest in an album I might not be aware of, or inform me of the merits of a new work by an artist or composer I'm familiar with, but whose latest I haven't heard.

To suggest that a listener doesn't appreciate a piece of music in the way the composer intended is to circumscribe the context in which a given piece of music may be experienced or understood. I don't think that is right, at all.
 
There is a point where the simplification and onomatopoeia of pop writing fails the reader, the writer and the subject matter. I spend a lot of time drilling into why people like a piece of music and eventually all it boils down to is "because I like it" a circularity based on simple emotional attachment. When asked if that emotional attachment is intended or correct, most people shrug and don't care.... As if their feelings are more important than the intention of the work.

It is seen as elitist because it challenges the requirement to dumb down to maximise sales. The toe curling equivalent of any popular journalism drilling into a specialist subject, its usually "so wrong it's not even right" when it deals with the technicalities, if it makes a reviewer feel pleasant then that is all that needs to be said but misusing specific fundamental terms so they are flat out plain wrong, specialist words that have specific meaning: (I can cite many howlers from the times, the guardian and so-called professional critics) are being used to remove meaning from statements whilst giving the appearance of knowing what they are talking about.

This is new-speak.

Please see it as elitist if you like, I am calling bullshit on most of what it's written in popular media, perpetuated by lazy editing, uneducated writers with no musical background and who will be reviewing computer games later that afternoon, and readers who would rather be entertained by a pleasant sounding synthesis, a contextual meaninglessness. Like beat poetry or primal writing...

One can only travel with "emotional attachment"'and "I do not want to think, thinking spoils my pleasure" for so far before you hit a wall, you can choose to go through that wall -- but that takes knowledge. The problem is until you cross that divide you do not know what misinformed tripe you are reading with popular music journalism. One's lack of knowledge stops you from knowing any better and seeing how much more you have to learn.

Ignorance is not bliss, it is deliberately disabling yourself.
 
paskinn said:
I have just realised that 'Six Moons' now has an official policy of demanding that any manufacturer who wants a review has to buy advertising space....In advance. The stated reason is that Six Moons wants the money. It expects to be paid for what it does.
Is that pretty blatant? Or a simple admission that such a policy is the only viable course for a web-based 'magazine' ?
Could you trust reviews known to have been (in effect) 'bought'?
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Most good reviews have been bought in one way or another, Corruption rules
 
Fox, I suspect there's a lot to do with priorities at play here. Most people don't have the time or especially the inclination to delve deeply. It's not great but there it is. Many would say something along the lines wanting a life. A parallel might be.....it's possible to think of love in terms of chemical reactions but most just follow their emotions.
 
Half of my degree is in music, I can play 3 instruments (one fairly well, the others not) so I am well versed in musical terms and music writing, and I've done a fair bit in my time.

I do not want to read a review of a piece of music, or a recording, written in those terms.

I like some music on an intellectual level, some on an emotional or visceral level, and some on both. My enjoyment may be enhanced if I understand the piece, but that doesn't stop me listening purely for pleasure. I don't need to follow a score, or deconstruct a piece in order to enjoy it, though I wouldn't claim to understand it without some sort of formal analysis.

But I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Musical analysis is a tool, it is the servant not the master. It is a way to describe and understand the process of making music; it is not the music. But we make music because of the way it makes us feel. To review it without making that connection is a sterile and purely intellectual exercise, and music written in that way is also sterile. Look at Serialism.

I suspect if you wrote a musicological analysis/review of an album for HiFi+, few would read such a thing, fewer still would understand it, and even those who did would, I suspect, wonder why you'd done such a thing in a publication intended for a popular audience.
 
Fox, have you ever watched the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory? It's mostly about socially dysfunctional scientists trying to cope with relationships and how the scientists analyse everything.
 
It's not difficult, but it is elitist (I was going to say 'insufferably elitist' but on reflection, won't).

Where I differ is in taking a position on the purpose of music. Whereas mathematics is a tool, and its most esoteric levels probably have a beauty only appreciated by the fortunate few who understand it, most people can do simple arithmetic. That doesn't invalidate the arithmetic. Music, on the other hand, is an atavistic force, we are somehow driven from deep within to produce and appreciate music. We may be inherently mathematical, but in a different way.

By all means, let Babbitt and the others push the boundaries, though I don't see much evidence of his boundary-pushing translating into a genuine progress for more mainstream composition (I may be wrong, haven't looked). But while I haven't read Babbit's article (I've read the Wiki piece you link to) it is still true to say that he doesn't get performed, recorded or talked about outside some pretty specialist circles. If nobody hears it, can it really be music?
 
Fox said:
There is a point .............
Ignorance is not bliss, it is deliberately disabling yourself.
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Fox I was mindful to welcome you back and did not relish your enforced absence. But it seems you have chosen to live in and promote you POV to the point of alienating I can only wish you best of luck. Don't you dare ever IMHO.
 
I'm kind of half with Fox, half not. I do feel most reviews on pretty much anything are dumb to the point of irrelevance. This is especially true of audio components etc. As for music there is obviously scope for any kind of review one wants to read or write and a marketplace ranging from the casual listener through to highly-trained and experienced musicians (all of which are certainly present here on pfm). I would never look down on someone for 'simply liking something', but neither would I look down on them for attempting to understand / dissect / intellectualise it either. I guess I sit somewhere in the middle.

I come to music from a rather odd perspective as I started out in the new-wave / DIY days of the late '70s-early '80s where the driving attitude was to simply pick up an instrument and 'do it' and I've never really wanted to grow up since. As such I can "play" bass, keyboards and guitar with varying degrees of limited ability though don't even think of it in terms of 'notes', 'chords' or other such convention / terminology. I just slide down until I'm in tune and find my way around from there and just remembered shapes / movements etc. All very organic, but obviously very limited too. By saying I've never had the slightest interest in playing anyone else's music so have never needed to adopt or adapt. I'm only interested in jamming around / creating etc. I learnt about sound largely via owning many analogue synths etc, I bought my first one (a Korg MS10) as a teenager. That's where I discovered envelopes, wave-shapes, filters, modulation etc. I know rather more about recording studios etc as I used to part-own a little one and that did require some reading as anyone who has ever had to fight a MIDI to SMPTE clock sync box for an ADAT will tell you...
 
I think there is a danger for people to assume that this is "looking down on", it is simply seeing where we end as intellectual and phenomenological beings, it is just accepting we are where we are and where do we want to go? We can get only so far with understanding what our reactions to music are with the cognitive tools we develop in life, sometimes we work it out ourselves (as I did with jazz simply reading the sleeve notes and pretty much reverse engineering a language of "framework music" that led me to people like Zorn and Anthony Braxton and so on), but I wanted to go further and my first music teacher told me it is easier and more efficient to learn standardised cognitive tools on top of specialist tools rather than make all those tools from scratch -- a little knowledge will help us get to where we want to go faster with no need to reverse engineer a thing.

Music does not need an audience, music is happening all the time all around us and it is everywhere both music with and without agency -- and much of that is never heard by the majority of people. Its very fragile, ephemeral specialness is important and as humans we try and capture it, all of it -- now Cage's response is "recordings are harmful to his music" and he has a point: but I view recordings as both helpful and harmful to music and that music as recorded is not the same artwork as music as played, it is not the same sound or even artwork when it transitions from media to media and as it moves from space to space and system to system. That 75th anniversary blue note LP is not even the same music as the original press -- we all agree its will qualitatively sound different and even if it were identical, it would not be the same music because it is removed in time and space, even if we were able to recreate the original sound (if we can agree on that) it can never be the same piece of music because of the listener and so on.

This is basic Deleuzeian phenomenology, the experience is as much a part of the entity and is inseperable.

Recorded music is helpful for a lot of reasons, We have have a better idea of an event because of a recordings but the recording is not the music, and most people forget this.... we discuss music as if recordings are music and they may or may not be but cage said it is harmful for a lot of reasons because music is the aggregate of the sound production and the space in which it is played, a recording is a reproduction of the aggregate of the sound production and the space it was recorded played in a different space and context. Note no listener, actually no performer is implicit.

This fascinates me. I lack the tools to know how it fascinates me and success or failure to explain it will rely not on pretending and synthesis of knowledge but looking at what came before, what is happening and where it is going Using the tools that the former use, I may develop tools to assist me, but their validity will be test in the viva.

Anyway, 6moons. Poetical nonsensical writing for people into audio porn. If someone pays for it, then someone gets to eat. Eating keeps a person alive.

This is good.
 
"This is basic Deleuzeian phenomenology, the experience is as much a part of the entity and is inseperable."

ayayayay
Let me try again

This is basic Deleuzeian phenomenology, the integration of the experience is as much a part of the entity and is inseperable.

Sloppy sloppy sloppy ... that would have been picked up by someone.
 
Fox said:
There is a point where the simplification and onomatopoeia of pop writing fails the reader, the writer and the subject matter. I spend a lot of time drilling into why people like a piece of music and eventually all it boils down to is "because I like it" a circularity based on simple emotional attachment. When asked if that emotional attachment is intended or correct, most people shrug and don't care.... As if their feelings are more important than the intention of the work.

It is seen as elitist because it challenges the requirement to dumb down to maximise sales. The toe curling equivalent of any popular journalism drilling into a specialist subject, its usually "so wrong it's not even right" when it deals with the technicalities, if it makes a reviewer feel pleasant then that is all that needs to be said but misusing specific fundamental terms so they are flat out plain wrong, specialist words that have specific meaning: (I can cite many howlers from the times, the guardian and so-called professional critics) are being used to remove meaning from statements whilst giving the appearance of knowing what they are talking about.

This is new-speak.

Please see it as elitist if you like, I am calling bullshit on most of what it's written in popular media, perpetuated by lazy editing, uneducated writers with no musical background and who will be reviewing computer games later that afternoon, and readers who would rather be entertained by a pleasant sounding synthesis, a contextual meaninglessness. Like beat poetry or primal writing...

One can only travel with "emotional attachment"'and "I do not want to think, thinking spoils my pleasure" for so far before you hit a wall, you can choose to go through that wall -- but that takes knowledge. The problem is until you cross that divide you do not know what misinformed tripe you are reading with popular music journalism. One's lack of knowledge stops you from knowing any better and seeing how much more you have to learn.

Ignorance is not bliss, it is deliberately disabling yourself.
Click to expand...

It is not 'lazy' editing. It is editing to a target audience.

Moreover, I find your dismissal of writers as 'uneducated' elitist and wilfully ignorant. I have already exhibited by the editing of your own work here that the writer's understanding of the subject matter is overpowered by the requirements of the readership. If you can extract from my reworking of your review where your superior intellect resides next to any other review in the same context, I'd be exceptionally surprised. And we perform a relatively light touch on rewriting.

Most publications profile their target audience down to exceptionally precise levels, as they learn more from Amazon's buyer profiling. Ours is slightly more free-form, because most audio publications are sufficiently self-selecting not to need a tighter profile. This reader profiling results in extremely tight targeting of editorial material, providing what might be considered Reithian goals, but within precisely defined limits.

A camera magazine is a perfect example of this; the readers want to know what camera, lens, filter, and tripod to buy to take landscape photos. Their readers want to know the best places and the best times of day and year to go out and take landscape images, and they want to know basic information about exposure, and composition to help them make a better landscape photo. While they might want to know the basic differences between a conventional Beyer, a Foveon and an X-Trans array (in terms of pixel layout) they generally don't want to know the intricacies of the Beyer sensor array and how it works. While they want a good lens, and want to understand what words like 'apochromatic' mean, they are typically uninterested in understanding modulation transfer function above a simple 'good, better, best' reading of the graph. And, while they want to know about composition in an 'use the rule of thirds here', few go to art classes and even fewer read Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, or Susan Sontag.

Those who do write the magazines generally do have an understanding of this, but cannot impart it to an audience who actively do not want to read 'any of that stuff'. So magazines generally don't delve into these deeper waters, because they fear Mr. Profile Reader (Andy, the 48 year old middle manager with an HND who lives and works in the Black Country with his 45 year old wife with a not as high as it used to be disposable income because his son is back from university and both of them are saving for his deposit on a flat), will stop reading a magazine that has become too 'preachy'. And those magazines that can afford to do it, have sub-editors with that profile on their desk and re-work everyone's writing to suit that target reader. That's how tight the profiling gets.

If you were writing professionally, you would either knuckle under and write for the demands of the readership of that title, or be fired and try to find another more suitable readership.

Ultimately, the most self-righteous jazz expert in the dole queue is still in the dole queue.
 
Fox derives intellectual satisfaction from understanding & rigorously analyzing the structure & architecture of the music he listens to.

And that's just fine.

I mostly react to music at a more visceral level. And that's just fine too.

Chris
 
Chaps

Music and writing about music is no different from anything else, unless people use it, it is pointless.

The Beatles wrote music that appealed to the masses, it made them popular and millionaires.

You can write about their music in any style you want, if you write in a style that most people understand, you will be on to a winner. If you write too simplistically or too hi brow, then no one will bother to read it.

What style you choose to write in is entirely up to you.

It is no different than roasting coffee beans and then writing about it. You are the slave of your target audience.

Regards

Mick
 
Perhaps it's unfair, but it always seemed to me that the more hifalutin critics write not to educate the public but to impress other critics with their erudition. Reminds me of a joke:

At the National Art Gallery in Dublin, a husband and wife were staring at a portrait that had them completely confused.

The painting depicted three black men totally naked sitting on a park bench. Two of the figures had black willies, but the one in the middle had a pink willie.

The curator of the gallery realized that they were having trouble interpreting the painting and offered his assessment.

He went on for over half an hour explaining how it depicted the sexual emasculation of black men in a predominately white, patriarchal society. 'In fact,' he pointed out, 'some serious critics believe that the pink willie also reflects the cultural and sociological oppression experienced by gay men in contemporary society.'

After the curator left, an Irishman, approached the couple and said, 'Would you like to know what the painting is really about?'

'Now why would you claim to be more of an expert than the curator of the gallery?' asked the couple.

'Because I'm the guy who painted it,' he replied.

'In fact, there are no black men depicted at all! They're just three Irish coal miners. The guy in the middle went home for lunch.'
 
It has just dawned on me I seldom read a review of HiFi kit, that is something that sets out to evaluate and compare.

I do see a lot of opinions posted on forums which can read like a review but are more often one persons preference within their wee world. It took me a long time to broadly ignore such opinions which rarely are experienced when I tried those items. Popular consensus can mislead too - MDACs cannot please everyone.

How to get a handle on worthwhile things to try.
 
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