Sunday, January 29, 2006

The downside of blogging

This note came via e-mail from my son, Spencer, a music aficionado/musican who follows the goings on in the hip hop world via various newsgroups and bulletin boards.

Interesting story. (Humboldt Blogs) Some discussion of the negative aspects would have been nice, like the whole aspect of "blogging something into existence" that we talked about briefly. Entire new sub-genres of rap have been labeled and categorized thanks to blogging music journalists (whose authority, thanks to the universal access of blogging, is undoubtedly questionable).
Take for example the new rap sub genre of "snap music"/"intimate club", whose roots and specific origins are being discussed on the blogosphere this very moment. "Snap music" does not exist as a genre to rap consumers who aren't in the blog-reading set, let alone the artists that are actually making it.
It’s bad enough that second-rate journalism majors at shoddy internet music publications like Pitchfork Media are able to conjure up nonsensical categories like "freak-folk" and have the record buying public adhere to them (much to the chagrin of the actual artists involved), but now anyone with a DSL connection and Soulseek has this power in some sense. Everyone can think they are a music critic, and this is very very bad. The gap between the reviewer and the artist is distanced even further as actual interaction with music scenes is even further obscured, which can be both a good and bad thing.

Enough for now...

oh, check this
out

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