The One Who Shopped You

Victims of editorial indifference (or assassination) love to assert that music journalists are frustrated musicians: parasitic, reactionary wallflowers driven by their jealousy and/or impotence. This year, critics have finally responded with their debut album. It is called Merriweather Post Pavilion.

The impeccable reputation of Animal Collective is a fiction created by writers, who, as ever, need to believe they have some stake in the game, but are tired of getting the cold shoulder when everyone pairs off at the after-party. This band will never leave an interviewer holding the door as they hop into a limo with satchels of nose candy and a buxom tart on each arm (metaphorically or actually). Which is to say that the possibility of Animal Collective "selling out"—and thereby torching a supportive publication's transitive cachet—is so inconceivable that critics can safely back them until the end of time (as can the anoraks who worry about that sort of thing). In a medium where motives are so easily obscured or misread, that kind of certainty is exceedingly rare, and, when your greatest fear is backing a gauche horse, priceless. A recently re-armed Nick Sylvester pointed me to a blog I had yet to see called Hipster Runoff, which in a dissatisfying, open-ended and rhetorical way, tried to make the previous point.

"Carles", Hipster Runoff's author, is waylaid by an empirical notion: that the internet is somehow a phenomenological bootstrap for Animal Collective's success. This is an easy mistake, because the band has thrived along- and inside the internet. The reality is that the members of this band can better afford to embody the independence critics and suspicious listeners so often equate with authenticity. And the longer an act is able to sustain said independence, the more credit and credibility they are extended. This was true in the print era, and it's true today, but it is a more difficult trick, because there is almost no money generated by the cycle of performing, recording and releasing music. With a somehow ever-expanding discography reinforcing their status as a Real Band, and a subtly commercial musical evolution growing their audience with each release, Animal Collective's brilliant career is a masterstroke in long-tail marketing: the only example yet of a band buying out the venue in the digital age.

In 1990, as hair metal drew to its exhausting close, marginal one-and-a-half-hit wonders Slaughter sold 2 million copies of Stick it To Ya. Two years earlier, Def Leppard's Hysteria moved an incomprehensible (and highly suspect) 17 million units. Coming from this experience of the Billboard charts—of an era when music was all-but inextricably tied to physical media—the idea that a band can sell 25,000 copies of an album in 2009 and clip the Billboard Top 10 is very difficult for me to swallow. Animal Collective's appearance at #13 is not a victory for anyone: it is confirmation of how far pop music has fallen, commercially speaking. For purposes of comparison, the British band House of Love—largely unknown outside the UK—signed to Fontana for $680,000 in 1988, on the back of three truly mediocre (even by post-C86 standards) Creation singles. In today's money that would be $1.17 million in pound-adjusted USD. By the end of 2009, Animal Collective will likely surpass the House of Love's lifetime album sales, with strong chart appearances in both the US and UK. And they will have very little to show for it, financially speaking, because they stayed on an independent label and are dealing with the slow drip of points on albums sold. Creation founder Alan McGee has tactfully avoided embarrassing anyone with that line of thought.

But Animal Collective have no alternative: the profit margins in pop music are gone, for both the label and the artist. Which means the only people who can afford to make music, or take on the risk of making music full-time, are either broke or loaded (usually the latter). Record companies can't help make anyone's lives easier—can't make the dream real—because they can't make any money, even if they guess right. When you could count on a 1:15 or 1:20 ratio in terms of hits earning back your flops, you had a vibrant, course-correcting industry. An industry that is responsible for Phil Collins' version of "Tomorrow Never Knows"^[1], but an Industry nonetheless. As I've said before, you had the choice to finger-point and accuse that industry of laziness, self-absorption and corruption, bathing yourself in the credibility of renunciation, and getting laid for those reasons rather than your first-cousin being the guitar tech for Mr. Big, who "are really great guys, really down to Earth."

In 2009, the chart space previously occupied by pop, crossover R&B and straight-up rock n' roll has been supplanted by music that is consumed explicitly for the sense of aesthetic refinement it affords the buyer. Being a band—drummer, bassist, lead singer, guitarist with mystique—and writing pop songs simply isn't enough these days, because nobody's buying pop songs. They're buying a representation of consenus in a certain sphere—an accessory that broadcasts "I get this." That much, I think, most of us understand. And Animal Collective will be this year's beneficiaries of suburban-refinement couture.

Last year's I've Got a B.A. and I Don't Know How to Use It weapon of choice came from Vampire Weekend, whose new single "Brunei Hilton" (note: this hasn't been mastered and may not be the final mix) is, despite the suspect and tedious ethnic title, reassuringly not influenced by Malaysian roots music. It's a tasteful if predictable crossover, which...more power to them—you walk and talk like the Jonas Brothers, you might as well sell like them. Say what you want, the breakdown at 1:51 is fantastic.

M.I.A.'s forthcoming digital-only EP is called Terrorism (It's Bad). I swear to God, I'm gonna put her in the back seat, and drive her to Tennessee. Put it this way: if New Edition came out tomorrow, every single article about them would drip of ethnocentric condescension, and worse, they would respond in kind, detailing their tragic, impoverished upbringing. In films we have torture porn; in the media, we have tortured porn. Every celebrity—musician or otherwise—has to have some desperate malady (like, being fat), or a soul-fortifying rags-to-riches anecdote in their bio. New Edition came from one of the most horrifying, trashed and totally neglected places in America, and sang "Cool it Now" and "Candy Girl", among the helium-lightest bubblegum A-sides of their era. I doubt if M.I.A.—graduate of St. Martins, free market capitalist on hers and her parents' ethnicity since 2000—would last a night in Roxbury's Orchard Park circa 1984. But THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A CENSORD VERSION of "Paper Planes". IF U SEE IT PLEASE REMOVE! SHE WILL NEVER CENSOR THIS SONG.

In recent years, musicians like M.I.A. are creating themselves better than PR agents did in the old days. Everyone has some ridiculous angle. Bon Iver: I sat in a log cabin for three months crying about my ex-girlfriend. Right here, bro; *pats chest*. Amy Winehouse's career trajectory paces her proximity to death. Sid Vicious, a comparably famous pin cushion, is a t-shirt; Amy Winehouse made the mass media millions of dollars by accenting her avowedly fantastic music with piteous catatonia, domestic violence and footage of her smoking crack. Her career-defining single is about refusing to go to rehab. Does anyone else find this mildly troubling?^[2]

What's happening is that pop music is locking into the same structure of patronage the art world swelled with in the 1980s. Keith Haring, Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Chuck Connelly—endless acclaim, affirmation, drugs and access flowed, seeded by writers who needed an angle to get read, then conferred by educated yuppies looking to acquire relevance and present-tense good taste. In the past there was no need to muddy music's sheen with troubling biographies and sociopolitical depth. You would never look to pop music for social currency of that kind with Boy George on the radio. I mean you get near to addressing real issues in your music, you're Midnight Oil, and you're boring the ass off everyone.

Pop music has always been driven by emotion, but it was generally celebratory of a state of mind, whether happy, sad, bemused, indignant, etc. Whatever consensus its fans submitted to was rarely questioned, because the music did what it was supposed to do, when it was supposed to do it (in the car, in the rain, at the dance, in the coliseum, on MTV). In cases of niche music like punk and hip-hop, consensus was critical in a different way, as both a formative boundary and for their sustenance—these were self-policing movements, stylistically and behaviorally. The kinds of questions those fans asked each other were beside the point when confronted with the face-on sexuality of INXS's "Need You Tonight", or the countless and not entirely disposable reveries to abandon offered by Def Leppard et al.

What used to be that upper tier of "rock" and pop music—arenas of escapism, contexts in which we let our guard down—is now a disconnected succession of sonic tidal waves, the Sound of Sound.^[3] So much of the music we're charged with absorbing is arrogantly self-reflexive and dragged down by either cynicism or a lack of devotion to the end result. "Indie" right now means "half-assed, too long". Animal Collective are princes of this realm, wherein the act of constructing an actual song is an achievement. The band's image, and the emotional character of their music, is a this-is-what-you-want, this-is-what-you-get response to the easily-divined desires of their audience, who spend a shocking amount of time broadcasting their demographic identity online, crying out for representation. Would that critics were touting the band's deft recognition of this culture shift, and their ability to swim in such untested waters—rather than annotating the "appropriateness" of their influences—I could probably get on board with the whole thing.

Pop music consumers, for temporal reasons as well as laziness, will always need critics as a filter. If enough blogs make enough noise about a particular artist, Pitchfork will weigh in; if Pitchfork gives their record an 8+, the mainstream mags will run watered-down restatements of Pitchfork's position (always with a tweak of indefensible reserve, given that most of them haven't led an editorial charge since the mid-'80s, if ever). Owing to the internet, the writers staffing these publications are in constant contact. The problem then is the lack of consumer feedback in this rapidly contracting loop, because only their money talks, and nobody is buying records, or participating in a financially meaningful way. The same people attend most of the club-level concerts in a given city, rather than individual bands bringing a distinct subset to bear, and there is no form of promotion as immediate or powerfully unified as FM radio and MTV once were. In their stead, consensus-elected websites dictate the progress of pop music, through a more distributed and therefore less tangible—but assuredly no more diverse—clique of chancers.

Online reputations are wholly derived from popularity, which suggests a populist triumph, but, appealing design schemes, ease of use, and most importantly, the quantity and frequency of a site's free content are composite if not dominant factors in status conferral. The quality and intellectual honesty of that content is a secondary concern debated, if at all, in the very online communities these publications are clocking for the next act that might generate traffic (increasing their statistical footprint, and therefore their advertising revenue). A snake too short to eat its own tail.

Hipster Runoff's outburst addresses the extroversion of modern music fans from the wrong side of the fence, blaming the medium—the Internet's dizzy, inherent immediacy—and "street level" fans, who are participating the only way you can these days: by joining in the chant. You can't maintain any self-evaluated, self-directed identity in the underground now, because the depth of immersion and filtration required to keep up overruns even the keenest observer. Not very long ago, you could poach or reject proposals put forward by theorists and critics^[4] at your own pace. You could check in once in a while, wear the shoes for a few weeks, and see if they fit. Today, you step off the conveyor belt to tie your laces, and whole genres will pass you by. This is not the audience's fault or doing, it is simply the reality they're confronted with.

Rabid music fans have embraced acquisition, accumulation, and knowledge expansion in lieu of devotion to bands that excite and speak to them. Unable to submit to music openly—due in equal part to the demystification of music, the self-absorption of musicians, and the unpopularity of popularity—the die-hards who once put up posters of their idols, traded tapes of their in-studio banter, and traveled to see these heroes in person, are finding their fix proselytizing for their own impeccable taste. The proliferation, debate and evolution of pop music as a form is now a team sport, but who is enjoying this game? Who is enjoying music?

^[1] Turns out Alan McGee is a big fan.

^[2] I wish I could say "Well, you have to market the artist over the music, because the music is shit," but that was only true of the dire synth-pop days and maybe late-90s hip-hop. Amy Winehouse is one of the most important singers of the last twenty years. Imagine her doing doo-wop versions of Gits songs. We simply have not had a talent like this, and her fame is based on her self-destructive impulses. Way to go, everybody.

^[3] Mainstream anthems are comparably frigid and rote, but at least you'll get a chorus out of Coldplay. Know this: the difference you perceive between their latest and Merriweather Post Pavilion is a measure of your complicity in the devaluation of the underground.

^[4] The topper: I overhear that Michaelangelo Matos has started a blog declaring what he's calling a "Slow Listening Movement" in response to the sort of detachment and ennui that follows from the state of affairs I just described. Listening habits, as a phenomenological Statement. Mike, can't you just...listen to less music? Why does it have to be some kind of treatise? Why do so many online extroverts have to quantify and shape their behavior, then sell it as some kind of conceptual exercise—a "meme", or worse (and most reprehensibly obvious), a book pitch. 2009: very educated people are responding to the placement of an artificial constraint on consumption as if it is a Movement. Guys, you are fucking bricked.