EDITORIAL
From Acoustic Guitar, December 1997

BETWEEN THE LINES

So what are all those articles about instead? In the wake of all the (in the words of Andy Warhol) deeply superficial coverage of last summer’s all-female Lilith Fair tour, I put together these nominations for the most annoying themes and habits of that thing called music journalism.

Who is this article about, anyway? You know the type, the article that says, beneath all the flashy surface details: "Here I am in a room with Keith Richards. And you, poor reader, are not, and you never will be. Keith even calls me by name! He likes me!"

Hip-sounding, meaningless juxtapositions. Particularly loved by rock critics, these little bits of wordplay go something like this: "If Sun Ra and Henry Rollins collaborated on a post-industrial avant-folk reggae album, it would sound something like T-Bone Axgrinder’s latest." Or the ever-popular drug imagery: "Axgrinder plays like Ottmar Liebert on steroids and crystal meth."

Women as a genre. Jill Sobule once remarked that the media talked about her career as if she were in a pro wrestling match with Sheryl Crow, as if there’s only room for one woman in pop music at a time. In creating Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan said she hoped to challenge the refusal of the media to treat women artists as individuals, but the tour mostly had the opposite effect, inspiring countless insipid articles on "chicks and music" that tried mightily to squash artists like Cassandra Wilson, Fiona Apple, and Mary Chapin Carpenter into the same box.

The tag that won’t die. Richard Thompson has quipped that he’s mainly famous for not being famous--every critics’ favorite observation about this "cult" artist. Scores of other artists suffer from the same mindless repetition of the same tag--whether it’s that they’re a political singer, that they’re past their commercial peak, that they are a new age hot-tub act. . . .

Worshipping unit sales. I can accept that record companies tend to look at musicians as movers of product--it is, after all, the music business--but why do so many journalists buy into this thinking too, labeling any under-100,000-selling artist a failure? In one amazing article earlier this year in Newsweek, a critic was supposedly writing about Shawn Colvin (she’s so good, why she doesn’t sell more records?) but spent the entire time berating Jewel (she’s so bad, why does she sell so many records?). Nowhere in all this was any inkling of what he likes about Colvin. And what were these two very different artists doing in the same article, anyway? (Oh, right, they’re women.)

Survival of the hippest. An awful lot of music writing is essentially about how well the artist in question is riding the winds of fashion. This is most obvious when the wind shifts, as with the Grateful Dead, who through the ’80s were ignored or scorned by the rock media, then in the ’90s were suddenly raised again to hip status and lavishly praised, only to be elevated to sainthood with the passing of Jerry Garcia. All the while, of course, the band was playing the same music.

The name game. An incredible amount of energy is expended by the media, record labels, and, in the end, artists themselves, in labeling music that by its nature has very little respect for borders. A certain amount of this categorizing is unavoidable as a shorthand for consumers, but often in music journalism it becomes the main point: so much time is spent in putting the music in a box that no one ever gets to see inside the box.

Thanks for listening. I’m feeling much better now. And if you ever catch me committing any of the above . . . fire away.