It is a strong belief of mine that music is a product of culture. Music is a derivative of an artist’s inspiration, and that inspiration is a function of culture. While inspiration is not completely dependant on culture, I believe it has a large affect on some artist’s work. Culture is shaped by large historical events, as well as economic and social change. It is the combination of these factors at the right time that yields a place with great music. Right now that place is here, in the United States.
I’ve been astounded by the amount of effect the independent music scene here in the United States has influenced other musicians and people across the globe, I’ve personally met people that I can say are more knowledgeable about the scene here than I, and I live here.
The Internet has proven to be a great tool to find and navigate through new and upcoming bands, where a band on the Internet can generate enough “buzz” can land a record deal. The emergence of the cassette tape made it easier for bands to send their music out to labels-and now with the emergence of blogs and their DIY labels, such as Ian Nelson’s Triple You Tapes and Michael McGregor’s Curatorial Club. They’ve made it easier to support a band they like while marketing it to the readers they already have. These micro-labels have created a nice base for an up-and-coming artist to spring off of, allowing the artist to gain enough exposure that will someday hopefully lead to a proper record deal.
The act of blogging, as well as the term “blog band”, has been discussed in interviews with bands such as Girls and Tamaryn, and not with acclaim. To be honest, I can’t say I blame them. A music blog can be started by anyone. In general, the intent was never to be read, just a place to share some music with your friends, among other reasons. Most bloggers are not writers, and tend to gain readers by the songs and videos they post, not what they write about an artist. When a band such as Tamaryn or Girls read something on an arbitrary blog and see that what is written sounds similar to what they just read on another blog, or be compared to a band that sounds nothing like them, I can only imagine the frustration felt.
In a recent interview with the Line Of Best Fit, Tamaryn states:
You get a lot of reviews of our record that will say this sounds like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mazzy Star and that it also sounds like My Bloody Valentine. If you think about it, all those bands are completely different from each other and that’s where we’re coming from. What we do is an amalgamation of all my favourite things processed through me and made real. There’s a lot of soul to it. I’m not trying to be an imitation of anything. I don’t agree with reviewers 99% of the time about anything. But thank God they’re not comparing me to some terrible blog band. The bands they’re comparing me to are the greatest bands of all time.
What exactly identifies you as a blog band? Is it the fact that your music is highly promoted across the Internet? Tamaryn’s music is highly promoted across the internet-does that necessarily mean Tamaryn is a blog band? Not necessarily.
What differentiates a blog band from any other band, to me, is that blog bands are equated with internet-born hype. Blog bands that are promoted by blogs primarily help build hype for their music, and can conversely cause the band to “die out” quickly, once blogs stop posting about them. Tamaryn’s promotion is not entirely based off of music blog praise. Blog bands have essentially become the “top 40” pop music of the internet, they have become paralleled with those catchy radio songs that sound great at first but fail to have a lasting effect on the listener.
Christopher Owens of Girls said in a recent interview with Pedestrian.tv:
There’s a thing that’s happening now with new music, where it’s fucking funneled by these blogs, they’re all the same, all the blogs are fucking the same. If one of them likes you they all like you, I am convinced that all of them are run by one person anyway. If you go blog search our new song “Heartbreaker” hardly any of them even express an opinion about the song. It’s just all the same fucking shit. It’s just a little bit frustrating. Like, people that run blogs – and no offence if you do – but they should inject some fucking personality into what they do like… I don’t know, Lester Bangs. All these people who have produced good music journalism, there is such a great outlet for it but you never see it anymore. With our new song I went online and everybody had the same exact thing to say. I got really confused. I thought ‘does our record label run these blogs?’. It’s basically all pop up ads. Two or three out of the ten I read had expressed any sort of opinion about the music at all.
I agree with Christopher, and being a blogger myself, take no offense to what he said at all. Since blogs can be created by anyone, it is no surprise to me that a Google search will yield a large magnitude of blog posts about Girls, and many of them will sound the same. That is a fact. Reiterating what I stated before, most bloggers are not writers, and the failure to accurately communicate their thoughts about music is probable.
A blog post can be made quickly and with ease, and at the same time hold so much power when it comes to creating hype for a band. If your blog is well known, a domino effect is created, dispersing music across smaller blogs around the Internet. Somewhere along the line those misconstrued comparisons are made and an ill-informed write-up is composed. Thus, the dilemma between musicians and blogs are created.
While loose interpretations of an artist’s music may be widespread across the Internet, they still offer some sort of synopsis of the music-to give a general idea of what the track being blogged about will sound like. Also, blogs are maintained partly because they are fun to have-a bulletin board of whatever you want, as well as a way to exert creativity by means of the Internet.
Technology has opened many doors for music as far as marketing and promoting it. The invention of the cassette tape allowed musicians to send their music out to labels, and the Internet is allowing a massive amount of people to find music before it even gets to that point. It seems we’ve reached the absolute closest point to listening to an artist’s music anywhere a computer and Internet are available. Perhaps the next step is a more organized system of music promotion and criticism.
Written by Louis Kishfy of Salad Fork.
