Reading Music Writing in the Digital Age

Maura Johnston, at the NPR Music Blog, recently wondered about the future of music writing in the digital age, where traditional combinations of generalist coverage and more in-depth "think pieces" are being jettisoned for "legions of sites that dive down cultist rabbit-holes and other sites that attempt to predict what the masses will want to read and share on social media like Twitter and Facebook." Most interesting to me were her insights about the ways that digital audiences engage with writing itself:

The most crucial difference between print and online media consumption boils down to the click. When reading a print publication with multiple stories, your eye could flick over a headline or catchy paragraph and be drawn in; the process of choosing to read something is fluid. Compare leafing through a paper to scanning a stack of headlines, deciding which ones compel you from their brief description, clicking, reading, then clicking back and going through the whole rigmarole again. (There's also a question of scale; the cascade of headlines coming from, say, Twitter or Facebook is magnitudes bigger than that in a typical daily.) "Most Popular" lists on some publications' sidebars allow for a quick way to dive into content, but they often become self-reinforcing, or reward topics that have a predictable payoff.

I'm not convinced that this distinction, between an older "fluid" reading and newer fragmented "back-and-forth" reading, is as stark as Johnston portrays; readers have engaged with the written word in diverse ways, much of which ignored the intentions of authors, long before the advent of social media--just look at 19th century scrapbooking, for example. Her overall point is not really about whether readers are engaging differently with music writing, however; it is that professional journalists are no longer the arbiters of culture that they once were and might need to rethink their role:

...From streaming albums to artist tweets to comments in the iTunes Store and beyond — and music writers become just another voice, shouting above the fray to be heard. Turning that chaos into a conversation that spans fans of all genres and artists, and that connects people in surprising ways, should be a goal among writers and editors in 2013.

Again, I see the point but am not entirely sure I'm convinced. It is true that social media has expanded readers' access to writing, commentary, and publications in ways that were not possible in the print age, unless you were willing to hang out at a university library for days and weeks, scouring the periodical stacks. (And some of us did). But I wonder whether music writing has ever had the power for listeners that Johnston ascribes to it. Music fans, for instance, were writing to and for each other, outside of conventional media coverage, long before social media; professional music writers have always been "just another voice" for them. Perhaps the issue is not simply one of institutionalized music writing yielding to the clamor of the crowd but rather of the changing quality, size, and scope of clamor from one decade to the next.

All this reminds of a book I should read by Jennifer Lena, called Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music. Sudhir Venkatesh offers an interview with Lena at the Freakonomics blog, where Lena argues that categories of taste and genre are not merely aesthetic but deeply social and contextual and that we need to pay more attention not just to artists and their works but also to the social, political, and economic players--including audiences and music journalists!--that have always defined music. It sounds pretty ethnomusicological to me (I should write about the frustratingly parallel universes of ethnomusicology and cultural sociology another time), but I will withhold comment until I've actually read it.

Sitting or Standing

Patrick Jarenwattananon at NPR Jazz is wondering why people sit at jazz concerts. My own thoughts here.

My Music, Part Two

 

I am sometimes asked whether I will ever join my old colleagues, Charlie Keil and Sue Crafts, and create an updated version of My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life, which we published in 1993. But I have to say that it seems to me that Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton are doing just that lately over at All Songs Considered. They've now produced two great podcasts based on audience submissions and stories; one was on "Summer Music Memories" and the latest is about "Songs That Make You Weep." The show usually features Boilen and Hilton (and sometimes other critics, as well, including Stephen Thompson and Ann Powers) highlighting their favorite new releases or shows, but these episodes offer stories of ordinary people using music in the daily lives, often in their own voices.

So much has changed in the world of popular music, especially in terms of its technology, business model, and distribution. However, at the same time, Boilen and Hilton are pointing to many of the same meanings and actions that we discovered in the Music in Daily Life Project back in the late 1980s: the uses of music to shift or match mood, the deep connections between music and memory, and the transformative power of being moved by a song. This is a balance that really interests me: what has changed about the practice of audiencing, thanks to new technologies and social forces, and what remains the same, thanks to the constants of cultural and human behavior?

Watching Jazz

An NPR Radio piece yesterday featured a fascinating new project, by musicians Jason Moran and Me'Shell Ndegeocello, to revive the dance music of Fats Waller. Moran and Ndegeocello talk about the ways in which jazz has moved away from its party-oriented entertainment origins in Waller's day. Moran explained, ""You know, the '20s [and] '30s, people dancing to music wasn't seen as bizarre or crazy. Now, if I play some Fats Waller music in a gig and someone starts dancing, they're the freak." Ndegeocello went further and noted something in jazz that she calls the "fishbowl complex": "You know, 'I'm going to come watch you.' I don't know how it got to be that way. It just has a specific historical reference now. And people forget that it started in brothels."

While Ndegeocello was likely referring to "jazz" with her pronoun "it," I heard the sentence as: "And people forget that [watching] started in brothels." I have no idea whether that is even historically accurate (when was the first brothel?), but the extent to which music served as a means for 20th-century prostitutes to display themselves before clients made me follow that mis-hearing a bit further and consider the framework of, say, a turn-of-the-century New Orleans brothel for understanding modern audiencing. Certainly a major theme in the history of audiencing in the United States has to be the development of the "gaze," with all the sexual, racial, political, and behavioral complexities involved in that action. We have created elaborate rules, buildings, institutions, technologies, and markets which explicitly support practices of exhibition and spectatorship and which often reinforce ideologies of social difference.

On the other hand, I'm a little hesitant about a broadly-applied "gaze" thesis in this case, because I do not agree that dancing to music is inherently better than witnessing music. Moran and Ndegeocello go so far as to oppose dancing to watching, implying that the former is active and participatory and will break down social barriers, while the latter is passive and distant, locking people into structures of inequality. Instead, I think there is a strong case to be made that playing, singing, watching, and dancing are all part of performance and have taken on various meanings (good and bad) in different social and historical contexts. It may be useful to encourage people to dance at jazz shows and revive the days of Fats Waller, but it might also be useful to remember why people stopped dancing at jazz shows in the first place. Namely, in the 1940s, bebop sidemen, distancing themselves from what they saw as an exploitive entertainment market and seeking a different kind of recognition in segregated America, sought to develop jazz in new, modernist directions. Their audiences--beats, bohemians, hipsters, students, and intellectuals--were motivated to participate as listeners in this new subculture of virtuosity, recognizing its avant-garde irreverence as a powerful reflection of their own rebellion against "middlebrow" America. In other words, in 1950, it made sense to some people not to dance.

Perhaps the more pertinent question in all this is why has the fishbowl model of jazz performance remained with us for so long? Why are contemporary jazz audiences reverently listening rather than exuberantly dancing? Waller's legacy depends on the answer to that question as much as it does on the impressive efforts of Moran and Ndegeocello to recover the bodily joy of his performances.