pinna storm

Let’s go back to my 13th birthday, for that is the day my preteen dreams became obsolete.

Like every other middle schooler in Vans, I wanted to work for Rolling Stone. But not in the Cameron Crowe way, or even the Hunter S. Thompson way. I didn’t daydream about taking acid trips through California or New Hampshire and reporting on rock gods and monsters. I mostly just wanted to write the starred reviews found at the back of the book.

Yeah, lame ambitions, I know.

Back then, those reviews were the first thing I turned to when that magazine or CMJ or Spin came in the mail. How else would I know whether to drop $17 — a night of babysitting, or a week’s allowance and change — on the new Morcheeba CD? Outside of staying up for 120 Minutes on a school night, there was no other way! Napster didn’t exist yet, and it’d be another year before I would become aware of pitchforkmedia.com.

The dudes writing these 300-word quality assessments had almost total control over the way I spent my highly disposable adolescent income at the long-gone Rice Village Sam Goody. And that power as a tastemaker, as an arbiter of cool seemed neat to me. Plus, let’s be real: The idea of getting paid to just sit around and listen to albums and compare them to other albums is still pretty sweet. So that’s what I wanted to do when I grew up.

OK, getting to my pool party. It was a blast; we ate stuffed crust pizza; and I wish you had been invited. I’m pretty sure all my gifts were great, but the best one was definitely the teal 32MB Rio PMP300 that my parents gave me. It had come out four days earlier. It was way smaller than a Discman. I was the only one in my grade who had one. I loved it.

Because it could only hold about a dozen songs, I treated it like an insta-mixtape: Tripping Daisy’s “I Got a Girl,” Cibo Matto’s “Sci-Fi Wasabi,” and Harvey Danger’s “Old Hat” all made the cut at various points.

As the years went on and the iPod replaced the Rio, the premium I put on listening to albums continually declined. Meanwhile, my ability to get new tracks instantly and for free increased. Hooray Internet! And as this happened, everyone went all Andy Rooney about the death of the record, the record store, the music magazine. Shit, magazines period. But weirdly, no one’s stressing about the record review, and there’s still some cachet to them. Generally talented people continue to write them, even if I don’t really know anybody who reads them. It was a big deal when the former rock director at my college radio station started contributing to Pitchfork, despite telling us when we were freshmen that its offices should be ethered. Another fellow WHRB member — a great friend whose weekly annotated mixtapes are vital — writes album reviews for Dusted. I’m sure at least a few reviews will appear on this site.

Even I got in on the game for the hottest of milliseconds this year, thinking that it might provide a little yin to the yang that is web-editing at a political magazine. Another friend who worked a block away at another magazine that has nothing to do with music was starting up a music review website called The Blood Beat and wanted to know if I would be interested in contributing. I said sure, it might be fun doing a type of writing I hadn’t done since college. After typing out my first review and then two-thirds of my never-finished second, I realized there was a reason for this.

The record review is usually boring and now fundamentally useless, and that’s actually a good thing. Almost all of them can be assigned to one of three categories. For bad stuff, there is the complete and total evisceration. I wrote this type of review for my treatment of Freelance Whales’ Weathervanes, wherein I was an asshole and called the record the musical equivalent of a Jersey Turnpike Ikea. I also hurled as many unflattering comparisons to Death Cab and Dave Matthews as possible. The goal here is an easy one: clever humiliation.

The second type is the rave, which seems mostly reserved for Radiohead and Animal Collective records. With this, you are basically jerking off a band with as many 50-cent words as possible.

And the third type is the creative exercise, where you are basically jerking yourself off with as many 50-cent words as possible. This review is for albums that fall somewhere in the middle. On the inoffensive end of this spectrum, you have the travel diary entries that try to describe an album’s intangible atmosphere and get into how the record makes the reviewer feel. It’s a kind of old school review that might prompt a tl;dr, even if it’s not bad writing. And on the other side … well, there are the multiple-choice quizzes, the imagined dialogues, what have you. It was while trying to write one of these for Let’s Wrestle’s In the Court of the Wrestling Let’s — which, for the record, is a charming if somewhat overlong album that is worth a listen — that I realized that I was wasting my time and that of any unlucky reader. Honestly, Amazon’s product page would be more useful to an interested buyer: There are audio samples there, and at least customer reviews will warn you if the packaging of that limited edition gatefold LP is actually weak and not worth the money.

I really did intend to do more reviews for them even through June, but that feeling of futility combined with the distraction of a cross-country move to Alaska meant that I just never got around to it. Embarrassingly, my name still shows up on The Blood Beat’s homepage as a contributor. I’m glad people are still keeping the site going if it brings them some satisfaction. That’s a good enough reason for most things. I’m also glad that they don’t seem to think that they’re meeting some unfulfilled need for smart music criticism in the form of an album review, because that need’s just not there.

Though I used to obsessively read record reviews, the last one I really remember checking out was Pitchfork’s brutal review of Travis Morrison’s Travistan back in 2004. This stuck out because the Dismemberment Plan was a really good band whose former singer should have put out at least a decent release, and more importantly because reviewer Chris Dahlen gave it a 0.0 out of 10, which had never been done before and was shocking at the time. It was the atom bomb of music criticism, and it meant that the album was anathema to college radio stations. Nobody bought the record, but everybody talked about the review.

Today, no one really talks about Pitchfork much at all except for in the context of its summer music festival — and I guess me, right now. Its historical traffic rates aren’t publicly available, but based on numbers from a 2006 Slate article explaining why everyone hates Pitchfork and the site’s 2009 and 2010 media kits, its traffic has only grown from 1.5 million unique visitors to 2 million over the course of four years. Nick Denton would fire every last P4Ker for these numbers. Moreover, a lot of that traffic is coming in for the video content, the news blog, and the ever-baity top [whatever multiple of five] of [whatever unit of music] of [whatever period of time] lists. I wouldn’t be shocked if just a small fraction of the traffic to America’s premier music review website came from the reviews themselves.

And I don’t think I’m the only one who’s given up on reading reviews. No Twitter link has ever led me to one. In July, out of a couple thousand items shared by my Google Reader family, no actual reviews came up and the one thing that touched upon their very existence was an interview with the Fiery Furnaces’ Matthew Friedberger, which discussed how arbitrary the whole review process is and how Internet buzz around a band can be affected by a random number assigned by whatever guy was on the hook for an item that week.

All this, of course, doesn’t mean that music isn’t being written about in other interesting ways and that music writing isn’t being discussed. To get a little baity, here are six very different things that I do remember being passed along and picked over at length in the past year or so:

• Lynn Hirschberg’s annihilation-by-truffle-fry profile of M.I.A. in the New York Times
• Vigilant Citizen’s Dan Brown treatment of Lady Gaga (I still love this)
• David Cho’s explication of “Empire State of Mind” for people who do not really listen to rap, follow basketball, or deal drugs
• The Washington Post’s write-up of the Courtney Love performance art concert disaster of 2010
• The Village Voice’s mostly accurate but incomplete worst songs of the decade list
• Hipster Runoff’s study of the meme economy, replete with diagrams

In all seriousness, that last item does an especially good job of showing why the album review is mostly unnecessary now — and explaining why it still maintains some vestigial relevance. An easily processed number from a critical institution named after a farming tool will help amp up a band’s hype, but so do plenty of other things now.

Are there and will there still be important cultural authorities? Yeah, almost certainly, but they’ll act more like conduits instead of top-down judges of what’s interesting nationally. NPR Music is a solid example. This online division of National Public radio has existed for less than three years (though All Songs Considered has been around for a decade), and it’s on the verge of surpassing Pitchfork traffic-wise. The site features plenty of critical content, but most of it is more contextual than anything else. NPR Music is successful for a number of reasons beyond that: It gets exclusive permission to stream albums pre-release date, its Tiny Desk concerts are often ultra precious, it regularly solicits recommendations from listeners, and it pays attention to music blogs major and minor. (Also, the tag team of Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and affable white dude Bob Boilen could not appeal more to two significant segments of the population who still buy music: aging hipsters and aged hipsters.)

So, going all the way back to September 19, 1998 and knowing what I know now about music and media and all that jazz, would I still want that teal Rio? Even if getting it meant the crushing of my seventh grade dreams? Sweet heavens hell yes. That thing was the jam.