One-blog wonder
How the internet has redefined the musical playing field
BY Chandler Levack
Cultural critic Chuck Klosterman once wrote that the internet is a very Marxist plane. By which he meant it’s an unlimited, equal playing field, as the little cultural worker competes against big cultural capital.
For musician Colin Munroe, this is very good news. The 26- year-old Torontonian, who got his start producing hip hop from an ad in the back of a newspaper, rode an updraft of internet hype when his indie-rock take on rapper Kanye West’s single “I Want Those Flashing Lights” was featured on the rapper’s popular blog. In a matter of hours, Munroe’s cachet skyrocketed as his MySpace friends list grew from hundreds to thousands.
“At the time, it was more effective than getting a bulletin board in Times Square,” says Munroe. “Especially because I never expected it. The internet has become Times Square now, a place to yell and get attention, and try to cut through.” It’s no secret that traditional record labels are in decline. In 2007, Billboard reported that as overall album sales fell 14.9 percent, to 500 million, individual track sales increased 45 percent, from 588 million to a whopping 844 million.
The culprit? Enter the “blog band”—a musical group that becomes famous through a bevy of websites devoted to the philosophy that if you throw enough against a wall, something’s gotta stick. Ever heard of Vampire Weekend, Black Kids or Bon Iver? It doesn’t matter if you haven’t—chances are, by the time you read this, these names will be met with eyerolls as trendchasers find a new band du jour. As bloggers set their sights on newer, hotter bands from the deepest pockets of suburban Toronto (Tokyo Police Club) or Williamsburg (Yeasayer), they perpetuate a never-ending cycle of must-have debut EPs that feature only four songs.
“It’s been this way for a few years now,” says Toronto-based music critic Carl Wilson, an editor at the Globe and Mail and author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. He’s a prolific blogger himself, at zoilus.com.
“Essentially, major labels don’t do any of this anymore,” Wilson says. “Artist development is almost an extinct art, so you have to have people doing it for themselves. Instead of record labels promoting a band, MySpace and music blogs fill in for that function.” But, he says, blog-style music criticism has cultivated a way of talking about music without thoughtful, considered attention. It’s hurting the music business, and maybe rock music itself.
Take a look at some of the prominent fixtures of the industry, such as BrooklynVegan.com and Stereogum.com, and one thing is clear: criticism is not a priority. Peppered with gratingly enthusiastic prose that spends as much time dissecting the musicians’ haircuts as it does their artistry, the writing style—all pithy, hyperventilating prose—only gives scant consideration to what the music means, and whether it’s any good. Instead, contributors are preoccupied with who’s in and who’s out, the next big thing and what’s already over. On these blogs, the role of “music critic” has dissolved into “unpaid publicist,” manufacturers of aesthetic credibility. Only HypeMachine remains honest about its intentions: it’s a data sorter that ranks bands based on the number of blog posts about them. The site’s recommendations read like an iPod playlist for the ultra-hip consumer.
Wilson relates the jangly, multivalent aesthetics of blog bands to the technology they’re produced by: computer speakers. The quintessential sound is, he says, “a group of kids banging on things and yelling.” (He’s not playing the curmudgeonly rock critic here: this description is pretty accurate if you’ve ever listened to the herky-jerky spasms of the Born Ruffians, the under-the-sea murk of Arcade Fire and the frenzied video-game noise of Crystal Castles.)
“Traditionally, record labels would make sure the band would get out and tour.” says Wilson. Now, bands explode prematurely online and many quickly flame out.
Colin Munroe understands that a flash-in-the-pan video is just the beginning of a rigorous touring and promotional schedule that doesn’t begin and end on MySpace. But he takes a certain pride in his video’s popularity.
“At its height,” he says, “it was the most-viewed viral video across all of the internet.” Well, not quite: in a perfect metaphor for the web aesthetic, it was actually second—to the classic YouTube clip “Bird Poops in Mouth.”
