jared
11-10-2005, 03:08 PM
Jim DeRogatis is currently the pop-music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times. He’s also the author of “Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs. America’s Greatest Rock Critic,” “Milk It!: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the '90s” as well as two other titles. He has freelanced for Playboy, Spin, GuitarWorld, and for a short time he wrote for Rolling Stone. Derogatis also hosts “Sound Opinions” with fellow music critic Greg Kot. The radio talk show is heard every Tuesday from 10 to midnight on WXRT 93.1-FM in Chicago. He is universally considered one of the leading music critics in the United States.
Let’s begin by talking about your career. What made you decide to become a music journalist and critic?
Well, I was a fanatical music fan with fanatical opinions to inflict on people. [Laughs.] I bought records obsessively from the time I was 12 years old, and I listened to music all the time. When I was in high school I started writing about music, and all through college I did a college radio show. So I wrote about records, I bought records, and I played them on the radio. I also played in a band and went to a lot of live shows. For me it was all out of the same impulse: I’m a fan, I love this stuff, and I’m coming at it from all the angles. Now, I went to college for journalism and I wanted to be a journalist, but I never thought I’d actually be lucky enough to write about music. It seemed incredibly difficult to break into getting paid to write about music, even on the level of writing for something like the Village Voice. It was impossible for an 80’s indie-rock kid from Jersey to break into writing about these things, so I did what a lot of music fans did at the time, I started a fanzine. I did that for five years while being a regular journalist and covering a beat in New Jersey. On the beat I wrote about jail riots, fires, crooked politicians and other things. I’d do that all day and then I’d come home and write all night about music for free for my fanzine. So really I wrote about music for 10 years before I got paid to do it.
[B]Do you think that writing on a beat directly out of college made you a better writer?[/B]
Absolutely. The skills you pick up as a regular reporter, you know, knowing how to get your facts right, knowing how to work under pressure, knowing how to say things right – I mean, look, you can’t be a music writer if you’re not first and foremost a good writer, and serious about good writing.
[B]
Do you find that working for a large newspaper, which must follow strict print ethics, limiting in any way?[/B]
No not at all. Of course I have to have shorter paragraphs, I can’t have a 400-word paragraph, and I can’t say “fuck” in the paper. But I have more freedom as a writer at a “square newspaper” than I did when I wrote Rolling Stone, or when I freelance for a magazine like Spin. It’s ironic because these magazines have a vested interest in maintaining good relationships with record companies and artists. When Eminem is on the cover of Rolling Stone and his publicist and managers choose who gets to interview him, and they set the rules for the interview, and he refuses to speak about certain things, and he chooses his photographs, it’s basically a press-release. Whereas working at a daily newspaper they need me to cover news, and that can be Britney Spears, or it could be My Morning Jacket, but they don’t care what I say. They trust my instincts as a critic. I have more freedom to write what I want than I would if I was writing for Rolling Stone, that’s for sure.
[B]Let’s talk about Rolling Stone. In your book Milk It! you describe working at Rolling Stone as the worst eight months of working life. Could you elaborate on why it was so bad?[/B]
It’s basically like this: you have the keys to a Ferrari and you can only drive five miles-per-hour. I could send you, or the best writer of my generation, to Iceland to live with Bjork for two weeks to write the ultimate Bjork story, and send you with a photographer and a stylist for the best pictures. Instead, though, we were doing stories about Art Garfunkel’s third wedding because he plays racquetball with Jann Wenner.
[B]How did Jann Wenner treat his staff during your time there?[/B]
Like shit! He is a tyrannical tyrant. I think he would make Mussolini look like a benevolent person. He’s horrible. It’s political Machiavelli in place. It’s really not about the music journalism at all.
[B]What is your opinion about music magazines that put more celebrity figures on their covers as apposed to musicians and bands?[/B]
Well…whatever, if people want to read US Weekly, then that’s fine. But Rolling Stone is no better than US Weekly. In fact it’s worse because it has these pretensions that it’s something better. That magazine is bought and paid for by the industry, and in a lot of ways that’s sad.
[B]What sort of influence and/or power do you think music criticism has over the music industry, the artists and the fans?[/B]
I don’t think any. Through the punk movement in the early 70’s, which I write about in “Let it Blurt,” I think that the model for the relationship between critics and artists was a pyramid. At one tip you had the artist, at the other you had the fan, and at the third you had the critic, and ideas were flowing back and forth in all directions at all times. And somewhere in the mid 70’s, and punk was really the last gasp of the pyramid, it turned into a pipeline. At one end you had the artist, and by that I really mean you had the industry, at the other end you had the fan, and shit just flowed in one direction, and the message that critics conveyed was “buy this now!” Everything was basically smiley-happy-two-thumbs-up-blurbs. If we were to cut out six reviews of the Madonna album which comes out in a couple weeks, cut them out from USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone and Spin, put them all in the same typeface, and lay them down side by side, they would all read the same thing. There would be no real ideas, no real criticism, and they would all just boil down to “buy this product now.”
[B]
Well what’s real criticism to you?[/B]
I think real criticism is when the critic is sharing his or her honest ideas about something and they’re not bought and paid for by the industry. Those ideas can be right or wrong, or spot-on, or completely irrelevant, but it has to come from the point of view of a fan. If I buy a record and I feel like it’s the best record ever, like it changed my life, or if I feel like a record is a complete piece of crap and I want my $17 back, this minute, then it comes from somebody who is a fan and not from someone who’s part of the industry. Criticism is a part of industry, obviously, but that doesn’t mean you have to behave as-such.
[B]As an experienced journalist and critic, what do you find both missing and wrong in music journalism today?[/B]
I think that point of view of a fan. When Greg Kot and I go to the Metro and there’s 998 people who’ve paid to get in, some people will come up to me and say “I read that thing you wrote on Friday and it was a piece of shit,” or they’ll say “I read that thing and you were right on,” whereas in New York you can go to a show and 60% of the audience is there for free because they work at MTV, or a radio station, or for one of the magazines, and really they’re just writing for each other. I hate to say it but Dan Quayle was right, there is a media elite and they do write for one another, and it is bought and paid for. The fan element doesn’t even enter into it!
[B]
When listening to a record or seeing a band perform live, do you ever set aside the urge to be critical and just enjoy the music for what it is?[/B]
No, I think anybody who is a music lover is always critical. When you hear something that you love, you think “what is so special about this?” and when you hear something that disappoints you, like when you’re at a live show and 1,000 people are having fun and you’re not you think “why am I not having fun?” I think that people who are really engaged with music are always critical. I think lots of music fans are critics. They may not necessarily do it as their day job, but they’re always thinking about what they’re listening to.
[B]How has the Internet changed music journalism and music criticism? [/B]
There’s definitely a lot more opinion out there, and that’s a good thing. I think everybody should have their own blog to chronicle their discoveries or the things they’ve found that they feel let down by. But there’s also a lot of shit. A lot of bad criticism exists now in terms of people just getting their facts wrong or not having anything to say. The flip side of the blog universe is “I have a blog therefore I’m important, let me tell you about my belly-button ring.” But I’d rather have there be too much and a lot of it suck than not enough.
[B]Continuing with the Internet topic, how do you feel about peer-to-peer fire sharing? Who do you feel benefits from it? Would the industry be better off without it?[/B]
I don’t think there is any way to put that genie back in the bottle. I think it’s the future and the ability for me to zap over a record that I think you should hear right now is a great thing. Maybe you’ll love that record enough to go buy it, or maybe you won’t, or maybe you’ll go pay to see the show, or tell 10 people about it and they’ll buy the record. People who love music share music. It’s a good thing for the art. I don’t see [file sharing] as any different then a library. I’ve written books and I’ve gotten paid from them. But you know what? If the Chicago Public Library has “Let it Blurt” and 30 people check it out, and they read it and love it, I don’t look at it like “goddamn, that’s 29 lost sales.”
[B]I agree. I think that’s one element the RIAA and most record industry insiders miss. People will buy the product just not the album. Fans will see them live, buy a t-shirt, or a sticker.[/B]
Yeah, but it’s not putting money in their pockets so they’re saying it’s killing artists. I think that the artists who subscribe to that are idiots.
[B]
But take a rock band like Cold. They have to sell a certain amount of records to be on a major label. Essentially, they need those sales. [/B]
Well, look at Wilco. They gave away “Yankee Hotel Fox Drive” and they were rewarded with their first top-five Billboard chart debut. They sold half a million copies of that record. So you could argue that they would have sold 750,000 copies if they’d never put it on the Internet, or you could argue they sold half a million copies because they did. I don’t really know. But Wilco has a career. They all have houses, they all have health insurance and they’re all making a nice living. They know that they haven’t been taken advantage of by anybody but their record company.
[B]
What does the music fan benefit more from: an honest, thorough critique of an album, or an informative Rolling Stone type article?[/B]
I don’t see where there is a difference. An honest critique must have that information in there, and you have to put it in context and say where it’s coming from. I think that any journalism is better with a modicum. And, you know, this notion that you can be objective and completely unbiased is a lie. Look at the recent announcement of Alito for the Supreme Court. You have to point out that this guy is rabidly anti-abortion, an arch-conservative, and that he was hand-picked by a despicable element of our country to get this job. I don’t think that it’s biased of the liberal media to point that out. Those things are just facts.
[B]
Do you see the complete disappearance of print media, including the ‘zine, newspaper and magazine formats, with the emergence of the Internet and Digital Media?[/B]
No I think people will always want to have something in their hands so they can read it on the toilet.
[B]Something tangible.[/B]
Yeah, and I think that people enjoy magazines, and they enjoy having something they can read in bed. You can’t take a computer to the toilet. To what extent print is going to be the dominant force in journalism…I don’t know, I don’t think that’s been played out yet. It may be that only certain magazines and newspapers survive and those become a boutique, and the rest of media is just online – I’m not sure. But I think that good journalism is good journalism whether it’s on the radio, or television, or in a magazine, or on the internet, and the standards for good journalism and criticism have not changed. However the delivery form has.
[B]Do you view music as a true form of art, or do you view it as simply entertainment? [/B]
I think that it’s absolutely art. Music is one of the last forums for truth in our culture. But it can also be completely entertaining. I think that Smash Mouth is great rock ’n’ roll, and I think The Flaming Lips’ “The Soft Bulletin” is also. One of them is art and the other is probably just entertaining trash, but I don’t see that there has to be a distinction.
[B]What role do critics of media and entertainment play in American society, and how important is a critic’s opinion in our culture?[/B]
Today the role isn’t an important one at all. A lot of people don’t want to think about the entertainment that they’re consuming, and that’s pretty disappointing. But a lot of people don’t want to think about a lot of things, like politics. So I think a large disconnect exists from anything that challenges a person’s suppositions and preconceived notions, which is really a tragedy. Maybe that’s something that’s always been a part of culture since the Roman Empire. Nietzsche had this notion of the Talented Tenth, which was the idea that only one in ten people are actually intellectually engaged in the world, and alive and thinking. Obviously though that’s the road to fascism, which is why Nietzsche got misquoted so much by the Nazis. But there’s something to be said about that. A lot of people just eat at McDonalds. Why do they eat at McDonalds? They don’t even know. They’ve just been told to eat at McDonalds and McDonalds is on the corner and they don’t stop to think about it. But for those people who do care about art, whether its visual art, or film, or music, and they want something more, those are the people I’m writing for.
[B]
Who in your opinion have been the most influential music critics?[/B]
Well, obviously I wrote a book on Lester Bangs, and he’s the beginning and end of it. He really is the one who showed people how it should be done. There are other people I admire. I think Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer were both great and important writers. And I have no use whatsoever for Greil Marcus or Dave Marsh.
[B]
When you interviewed Bangs you asked him what he felt good rock music was. What do you think rock music is?[/B]
I don’t think I can do better then his definition: something that makes you feel alive and engaged with the world. That can be deep and profound, an album that makes you want to cry, like “The Soft Bulletin” or “Pet Sounds,” or it can be something stupid that makes you want to jump up and down and bang your head against the wall. It’s something that makes your life better, and maybe it’s something that just makes you feel profoundly sad, but it’s making you feel and that’s the whole point.
[B]If Bangs were alive today how do you think he’d view today’s music?[/B]
That’s a sucker’s question and I never answer it because he was such a perverse and contradicting son-of-a-bitch that you could see him saying just to be difficult that Nirvana – which is a band he should love, I mean he invented the word “grunge” – is bullshit and Puff Daddy is a genius. Or he could be out of writing about music completely. It’s really disrespecting him to suppose I would know what he would think. But here’s what I think: I think music in 2005 is every bit as great as music in 1965, or 1985, and at the end of the year I’m not going to have no problem coming up with 10 albums that I can’t live without. And I completely despise this notion, this nostalgic notion that nothing in my generation is ever going to be as great as the Beatles. That’s complete and utter bullshit. Nirvana was not the Beatles of my time. Nirvana was Nirvana, and the Beatles were the Beatles, and they were both fucking great, and you’re missing out if you missed out on either of them. You’re also missing out if you haven’t heard The Decemberists for that matter! [Laughs.]
[B]What would you say your biggest mistake as been as a writer?[/B]
I double-back on myself all the time and I don’t think you should trust a rock critic who doesn’t admit that he or she doesn’t. I think that your relationship with music changes over time, and you have to be willing to say “when this record came out, I really liked it, and I turned out to be completely wrong,” or vice-versa. I wouldn’t trust any writer who doesn’t say that they don’t do that. There have been a lot of records that I’ve been wrong about. I thought REM’s “Monster” was worth something when it came out, but it turned out to be a piece of crap, and really the beginning of the end for them. I was also very skeptical of the Smashing Pumpkins because of the lyrics being so stupid. But in retrospect, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” is a pretty amazing musical construction that just happened to have really stupid lyrics.
[B]How has music criticism evolved over the years, and where do you see it going in the future?[/B]
Well like I said, it’s gone from that pyramid model to a pipeline model, which is really sad. But I think things go in cycles. Look, you can go unto iTunes right now and buy any of the hundreds of albums that come out each week, and with all that flood of product, how does one discern what’s worth their time and what isn’t? Or even if you’re peer-to-peer file-sharing, just what’s worth your time? You can’t listen to a hundred albums. So I think criticism becomes more important because there’s all this information flowing at people at all times, and what is worth your attention? Eventually I think there will be a resurgence of the kind of early 70’s criticism, which I wrote about in “Let it Blurt,” which is criticism that just comes out of necessity, you know what I mean?
[B]
Are you comfortable with that role of being the middle-man or the filter to the general American public? [/B]
Yeah, but I think it’s more than just telling people what to buy. In the best rock criticism you’re also telling people what this says about the world, what this says about life and the human condition, and hopefully you do it with some style and humor so that it’s entertaining to read. I’ve read great reviews of horrible records, where a record isn’t worth two seconds of my time, but the review taught me something or amused me. I think criticism can be something significant on its own and not just a consumer guide.
[B]--Brent Steven White[/B]
Let’s begin by talking about your career. What made you decide to become a music journalist and critic?
Well, I was a fanatical music fan with fanatical opinions to inflict on people. [Laughs.] I bought records obsessively from the time I was 12 years old, and I listened to music all the time. When I was in high school I started writing about music, and all through college I did a college radio show. So I wrote about records, I bought records, and I played them on the radio. I also played in a band and went to a lot of live shows. For me it was all out of the same impulse: I’m a fan, I love this stuff, and I’m coming at it from all the angles. Now, I went to college for journalism and I wanted to be a journalist, but I never thought I’d actually be lucky enough to write about music. It seemed incredibly difficult to break into getting paid to write about music, even on the level of writing for something like the Village Voice. It was impossible for an 80’s indie-rock kid from Jersey to break into writing about these things, so I did what a lot of music fans did at the time, I started a fanzine. I did that for five years while being a regular journalist and covering a beat in New Jersey. On the beat I wrote about jail riots, fires, crooked politicians and other things. I’d do that all day and then I’d come home and write all night about music for free for my fanzine. So really I wrote about music for 10 years before I got paid to do it.
[B]Do you think that writing on a beat directly out of college made you a better writer?[/B]
Absolutely. The skills you pick up as a regular reporter, you know, knowing how to get your facts right, knowing how to work under pressure, knowing how to say things right – I mean, look, you can’t be a music writer if you’re not first and foremost a good writer, and serious about good writing.
[B]
Do you find that working for a large newspaper, which must follow strict print ethics, limiting in any way?[/B]
No not at all. Of course I have to have shorter paragraphs, I can’t have a 400-word paragraph, and I can’t say “fuck” in the paper. But I have more freedom as a writer at a “square newspaper” than I did when I wrote Rolling Stone, or when I freelance for a magazine like Spin. It’s ironic because these magazines have a vested interest in maintaining good relationships with record companies and artists. When Eminem is on the cover of Rolling Stone and his publicist and managers choose who gets to interview him, and they set the rules for the interview, and he refuses to speak about certain things, and he chooses his photographs, it’s basically a press-release. Whereas working at a daily newspaper they need me to cover news, and that can be Britney Spears, or it could be My Morning Jacket, but they don’t care what I say. They trust my instincts as a critic. I have more freedom to write what I want than I would if I was writing for Rolling Stone, that’s for sure.
[B]Let’s talk about Rolling Stone. In your book Milk It! you describe working at Rolling Stone as the worst eight months of working life. Could you elaborate on why it was so bad?[/B]
It’s basically like this: you have the keys to a Ferrari and you can only drive five miles-per-hour. I could send you, or the best writer of my generation, to Iceland to live with Bjork for two weeks to write the ultimate Bjork story, and send you with a photographer and a stylist for the best pictures. Instead, though, we were doing stories about Art Garfunkel’s third wedding because he plays racquetball with Jann Wenner.
[B]How did Jann Wenner treat his staff during your time there?[/B]
Like shit! He is a tyrannical tyrant. I think he would make Mussolini look like a benevolent person. He’s horrible. It’s political Machiavelli in place. It’s really not about the music journalism at all.
[B]What is your opinion about music magazines that put more celebrity figures on their covers as apposed to musicians and bands?[/B]
Well…whatever, if people want to read US Weekly, then that’s fine. But Rolling Stone is no better than US Weekly. In fact it’s worse because it has these pretensions that it’s something better. That magazine is bought and paid for by the industry, and in a lot of ways that’s sad.
[B]What sort of influence and/or power do you think music criticism has over the music industry, the artists and the fans?[/B]
I don’t think any. Through the punk movement in the early 70’s, which I write about in “Let it Blurt,” I think that the model for the relationship between critics and artists was a pyramid. At one tip you had the artist, at the other you had the fan, and at the third you had the critic, and ideas were flowing back and forth in all directions at all times. And somewhere in the mid 70’s, and punk was really the last gasp of the pyramid, it turned into a pipeline. At one end you had the artist, and by that I really mean you had the industry, at the other end you had the fan, and shit just flowed in one direction, and the message that critics conveyed was “buy this now!” Everything was basically smiley-happy-two-thumbs-up-blurbs. If we were to cut out six reviews of the Madonna album which comes out in a couple weeks, cut them out from USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone and Spin, put them all in the same typeface, and lay them down side by side, they would all read the same thing. There would be no real ideas, no real criticism, and they would all just boil down to “buy this product now.”
[B]
Well what’s real criticism to you?[/B]
I think real criticism is when the critic is sharing his or her honest ideas about something and they’re not bought and paid for by the industry. Those ideas can be right or wrong, or spot-on, or completely irrelevant, but it has to come from the point of view of a fan. If I buy a record and I feel like it’s the best record ever, like it changed my life, or if I feel like a record is a complete piece of crap and I want my $17 back, this minute, then it comes from somebody who is a fan and not from someone who’s part of the industry. Criticism is a part of industry, obviously, but that doesn’t mean you have to behave as-such.
[B]As an experienced journalist and critic, what do you find both missing and wrong in music journalism today?[/B]
I think that point of view of a fan. When Greg Kot and I go to the Metro and there’s 998 people who’ve paid to get in, some people will come up to me and say “I read that thing you wrote on Friday and it was a piece of shit,” or they’ll say “I read that thing and you were right on,” whereas in New York you can go to a show and 60% of the audience is there for free because they work at MTV, or a radio station, or for one of the magazines, and really they’re just writing for each other. I hate to say it but Dan Quayle was right, there is a media elite and they do write for one another, and it is bought and paid for. The fan element doesn’t even enter into it!
[B]
When listening to a record or seeing a band perform live, do you ever set aside the urge to be critical and just enjoy the music for what it is?[/B]
No, I think anybody who is a music lover is always critical. When you hear something that you love, you think “what is so special about this?” and when you hear something that disappoints you, like when you’re at a live show and 1,000 people are having fun and you’re not you think “why am I not having fun?” I think that people who are really engaged with music are always critical. I think lots of music fans are critics. They may not necessarily do it as their day job, but they’re always thinking about what they’re listening to.
[B]How has the Internet changed music journalism and music criticism? [/B]
There’s definitely a lot more opinion out there, and that’s a good thing. I think everybody should have their own blog to chronicle their discoveries or the things they’ve found that they feel let down by. But there’s also a lot of shit. A lot of bad criticism exists now in terms of people just getting their facts wrong or not having anything to say. The flip side of the blog universe is “I have a blog therefore I’m important, let me tell you about my belly-button ring.” But I’d rather have there be too much and a lot of it suck than not enough.
[B]Continuing with the Internet topic, how do you feel about peer-to-peer fire sharing? Who do you feel benefits from it? Would the industry be better off without it?[/B]
I don’t think there is any way to put that genie back in the bottle. I think it’s the future and the ability for me to zap over a record that I think you should hear right now is a great thing. Maybe you’ll love that record enough to go buy it, or maybe you won’t, or maybe you’ll go pay to see the show, or tell 10 people about it and they’ll buy the record. People who love music share music. It’s a good thing for the art. I don’t see [file sharing] as any different then a library. I’ve written books and I’ve gotten paid from them. But you know what? If the Chicago Public Library has “Let it Blurt” and 30 people check it out, and they read it and love it, I don’t look at it like “goddamn, that’s 29 lost sales.”
[B]I agree. I think that’s one element the RIAA and most record industry insiders miss. People will buy the product just not the album. Fans will see them live, buy a t-shirt, or a sticker.[/B]
Yeah, but it’s not putting money in their pockets so they’re saying it’s killing artists. I think that the artists who subscribe to that are idiots.
[B]
But take a rock band like Cold. They have to sell a certain amount of records to be on a major label. Essentially, they need those sales. [/B]
Well, look at Wilco. They gave away “Yankee Hotel Fox Drive” and they were rewarded with their first top-five Billboard chart debut. They sold half a million copies of that record. So you could argue that they would have sold 750,000 copies if they’d never put it on the Internet, or you could argue they sold half a million copies because they did. I don’t really know. But Wilco has a career. They all have houses, they all have health insurance and they’re all making a nice living. They know that they haven’t been taken advantage of by anybody but their record company.
[B]
What does the music fan benefit more from: an honest, thorough critique of an album, or an informative Rolling Stone type article?[/B]
I don’t see where there is a difference. An honest critique must have that information in there, and you have to put it in context and say where it’s coming from. I think that any journalism is better with a modicum. And, you know, this notion that you can be objective and completely unbiased is a lie. Look at the recent announcement of Alito for the Supreme Court. You have to point out that this guy is rabidly anti-abortion, an arch-conservative, and that he was hand-picked by a despicable element of our country to get this job. I don’t think that it’s biased of the liberal media to point that out. Those things are just facts.
[B]
Do you see the complete disappearance of print media, including the ‘zine, newspaper and magazine formats, with the emergence of the Internet and Digital Media?[/B]
No I think people will always want to have something in their hands so they can read it on the toilet.
[B]Something tangible.[/B]
Yeah, and I think that people enjoy magazines, and they enjoy having something they can read in bed. You can’t take a computer to the toilet. To what extent print is going to be the dominant force in journalism…I don’t know, I don’t think that’s been played out yet. It may be that only certain magazines and newspapers survive and those become a boutique, and the rest of media is just online – I’m not sure. But I think that good journalism is good journalism whether it’s on the radio, or television, or in a magazine, or on the internet, and the standards for good journalism and criticism have not changed. However the delivery form has.
[B]Do you view music as a true form of art, or do you view it as simply entertainment? [/B]
I think that it’s absolutely art. Music is one of the last forums for truth in our culture. But it can also be completely entertaining. I think that Smash Mouth is great rock ’n’ roll, and I think The Flaming Lips’ “The Soft Bulletin” is also. One of them is art and the other is probably just entertaining trash, but I don’t see that there has to be a distinction.
[B]What role do critics of media and entertainment play in American society, and how important is a critic’s opinion in our culture?[/B]
Today the role isn’t an important one at all. A lot of people don’t want to think about the entertainment that they’re consuming, and that’s pretty disappointing. But a lot of people don’t want to think about a lot of things, like politics. So I think a large disconnect exists from anything that challenges a person’s suppositions and preconceived notions, which is really a tragedy. Maybe that’s something that’s always been a part of culture since the Roman Empire. Nietzsche had this notion of the Talented Tenth, which was the idea that only one in ten people are actually intellectually engaged in the world, and alive and thinking. Obviously though that’s the road to fascism, which is why Nietzsche got misquoted so much by the Nazis. But there’s something to be said about that. A lot of people just eat at McDonalds. Why do they eat at McDonalds? They don’t even know. They’ve just been told to eat at McDonalds and McDonalds is on the corner and they don’t stop to think about it. But for those people who do care about art, whether its visual art, or film, or music, and they want something more, those are the people I’m writing for.
[B]
Who in your opinion have been the most influential music critics?[/B]
Well, obviously I wrote a book on Lester Bangs, and he’s the beginning and end of it. He really is the one who showed people how it should be done. There are other people I admire. I think Nick Tosches and Richard Meltzer were both great and important writers. And I have no use whatsoever for Greil Marcus or Dave Marsh.
[B]
When you interviewed Bangs you asked him what he felt good rock music was. What do you think rock music is?[/B]
I don’t think I can do better then his definition: something that makes you feel alive and engaged with the world. That can be deep and profound, an album that makes you want to cry, like “The Soft Bulletin” or “Pet Sounds,” or it can be something stupid that makes you want to jump up and down and bang your head against the wall. It’s something that makes your life better, and maybe it’s something that just makes you feel profoundly sad, but it’s making you feel and that’s the whole point.
[B]If Bangs were alive today how do you think he’d view today’s music?[/B]
That’s a sucker’s question and I never answer it because he was such a perverse and contradicting son-of-a-bitch that you could see him saying just to be difficult that Nirvana – which is a band he should love, I mean he invented the word “grunge” – is bullshit and Puff Daddy is a genius. Or he could be out of writing about music completely. It’s really disrespecting him to suppose I would know what he would think. But here’s what I think: I think music in 2005 is every bit as great as music in 1965, or 1985, and at the end of the year I’m not going to have no problem coming up with 10 albums that I can’t live without. And I completely despise this notion, this nostalgic notion that nothing in my generation is ever going to be as great as the Beatles. That’s complete and utter bullshit. Nirvana was not the Beatles of my time. Nirvana was Nirvana, and the Beatles were the Beatles, and they were both fucking great, and you’re missing out if you missed out on either of them. You’re also missing out if you haven’t heard The Decemberists for that matter! [Laughs.]
[B]What would you say your biggest mistake as been as a writer?[/B]
I double-back on myself all the time and I don’t think you should trust a rock critic who doesn’t admit that he or she doesn’t. I think that your relationship with music changes over time, and you have to be willing to say “when this record came out, I really liked it, and I turned out to be completely wrong,” or vice-versa. I wouldn’t trust any writer who doesn’t say that they don’t do that. There have been a lot of records that I’ve been wrong about. I thought REM’s “Monster” was worth something when it came out, but it turned out to be a piece of crap, and really the beginning of the end for them. I was also very skeptical of the Smashing Pumpkins because of the lyrics being so stupid. But in retrospect, “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” is a pretty amazing musical construction that just happened to have really stupid lyrics.
[B]How has music criticism evolved over the years, and where do you see it going in the future?[/B]
Well like I said, it’s gone from that pyramid model to a pipeline model, which is really sad. But I think things go in cycles. Look, you can go unto iTunes right now and buy any of the hundreds of albums that come out each week, and with all that flood of product, how does one discern what’s worth their time and what isn’t? Or even if you’re peer-to-peer file-sharing, just what’s worth your time? You can’t listen to a hundred albums. So I think criticism becomes more important because there’s all this information flowing at people at all times, and what is worth your attention? Eventually I think there will be a resurgence of the kind of early 70’s criticism, which I wrote about in “Let it Blurt,” which is criticism that just comes out of necessity, you know what I mean?
[B]
Are you comfortable with that role of being the middle-man or the filter to the general American public? [/B]
Yeah, but I think it’s more than just telling people what to buy. In the best rock criticism you’re also telling people what this says about the world, what this says about life and the human condition, and hopefully you do it with some style and humor so that it’s entertaining to read. I’ve read great reviews of horrible records, where a record isn’t worth two seconds of my time, but the review taught me something or amused me. I think criticism can be something significant on its own and not just a consumer guide.
[B]--Brent Steven White[/B]