Choosing Consideration, Not Consumption

Pitchfork goes down. Some books and writers who embody what it means to consider, rather than just consume art and media.

(As usual, this newsletter may be too long for email. Click through to see it on the web.)

It was announced this week that music criticism and reporting website Pitchfork was being folded entirely under the GQ banner, with a significant proportion of existing employees exiting the company.

Anna Wintour who heads up all content for Condé Nast, the entity under which GQ and Pitchfork sit, said, “blah blah blah, blah blah.” Actually she said this, which is the same thing:

Music fans, specifically fans of music criticism have been understandably upset at the news. Even those who have bristled against some of Pitchfork’s occasional, and famous antagonism recognize that a vital part of the music community is being lost.

There’s a lot of different issues that this kind of move invokes and I think it would be a mistake to put one’s finger on any single one as dispositive. The moment Pitchfork lost its independence and was acquired by Condé Nast, its demise became inevitable as the demands of performing like an asset with ever-increasing value is not the same thing as running a sustainable publication.

At a bigger level, another thing that seems clear to me is that arts criticism in general is less important as a service in our day-to-day lives. As discussed in last week’s newsletter ruminating on Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flatten Culture, we have much less need for critics to steer us toward art and media we might be interested in. Algorithms have stepped in to do the ranking and sorting for us, e.g., no need for Siskel & Ebert when we have Rotten Tomatoes. As Chayka argues in his book (which I’ve now read; it’s terrific), this has deleterious effects on our culture broadly and us as individuals, but it’s impossible to deny how things work.

Outside of algorithms, individuals are now more likely to be seen as influencers rather than critics and the individuals who come to our attention do so via algorithms. We are in an era of consumption over consideration, and an influencer is more useful than a critic when it comes to fueling consumption.¹

This is particularly true for music where streaming has dropped the cost of checking out unfamiliar artists to near zero. When I was a kid, figuring out which album/cassette/CD you were going to spend your hard-earned money on was fraught. Taking a flier on an artist you were unfamiliar with because you liked one song might result in a waste of $10-15.

That opportunity cost was significant. Now, off a flat rate streaming subscription I can give a listen to just about any music I wish and decide what I like. Who needs a critic to do that?

But of course, criticism has a role beyond telling us what we should or shouldn’t buy. While algorithms undoubtedly have the kind of flattening effect Chayka writes about, they’re at least okay at helping us make those judgments. But true criticism is the opposite of algorithmic averaging moulded into a consensus. It is the product of a unique intelligence reacting to the object of scrutiny as only that unique intelligence can. The criticism generated by this process becomes its own thing, independent of the original object of scrutiny. When done well, it is awesome, necessary even.

Thinking about the near-demise of Pitchfork put me in mind of a particular book that was almost like scripture in my household when I was in my late grade school/early middle school years and just starting to form my taste in music, Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the ‘70s.

Robert Christgau was music critic at The Village Voice from 1969 to 2006, and the (above) edition of the book we owned compiled his “Consumer Guide” capsule reviews from the paper - short, funny, penetrating, sometimes caustic, always opinionated takes on the records of the day.

Each album got a letter grade, and Christgau’s description of what each grade means gives great insight into the approach and attitudes he brings to his work:

An A+ record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut.

An A is a great record both of whose sides offer enduring pleasure and surprise. You should own it.

An A- is a very good record. If one of its sides doesn't provide intense and consistent satisfaction, then both include several cuts that do.

A B+ is a good record, at least one of whose sides can be played with lasting interest and the other of which includes at least one enjoyable cut.

A B is an admirable effort that aficionados of the style or artist will probably find quite listenable.

A B- is a competent or mildly interesting record that will usually feature at least three worthwhile cuts.

A C+ is a not disreputable performance, most likely a failed experiment or a pleasant piece of hackwork.

A C is a record of clear professionalism or barely discernible inspiration, but not both.

A C- is a regrettably successful exploitation or a basically honest but quite incompetent stab at something more.

A D+ is an appalling piece of pimpwork or a thoroughly botched token of sincerity.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would buy a D record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would release a D- record.

It is impossible to understand why anyone would cut an E+ record.

E records are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.

An E- record is an organically conceived masterpiece that repays repeated listening with a sense of horror in the face of the void. It is unlikely to be marred by one listenable cut.

I read every entry in Christgau’s guide multiple times, despite the fact that I had not listened to the overwhelming majority of the music he discussed. For example, it would be almost a decade before I first heard MC5, but I knew they were one of Robert Christgau’s favorite bands, and the first time I listened to them, I had at least some sense of what I was experiencing.

One awesome thing in the world is that in 2001, Christgau moved all of his writing to a dynamically updating website, which has not changed its aesthetic since 2001, but which is filled with treasures. It’s taking me forever to write this newsletter because I keep dropping down the rabbit holes of Christgau’s website.

You can almost search randomly and find a gem. This review of Van Halen’s first album cracks me up. It also happens to be dead accurate, IMO:

Van Halen [Warner Bros., 1978]
For some reason Warners wants us to know that this is the biggest bar band in the San Fernando Valley. This doesn't mean much--all new bands are bar bands, unless they're Boston. The term becomes honorific when the music belongs in a bar. This music belongs on an aircraft carrier. C

As a kid, it was fun to trace Christgau’s specific taste as I paged through the book. Steely Dan was a favorite, including earning an A+ for Pretzel Logic. I think my own Steely Dan fandom, which at one point went against prevailing winds of what’s considered cool, is at least somewhat informed by my early exposure to Christgau’s writing.

The range of what he’d review was nearly infinite. Under “D” you can read about Kiki Dee, Miles Davis, and Deep Purple. Christgau is always opinionated , but you never get the sense he’s unfair or too invested in prejudging a group or artist. Prog Rock was never a favorite, but he’s always willing to see the virtue in whatever he’s listening to, like in this review of Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway [Atco, 1974]
I wanted to call this the most readable album since Quadrophenia, but it's only the wordiest--two inner sleeves covered with lyrics and a double-fold that's all small-type libretto. The apparent subject is the symbolic quest of a Puerto Rican hood/street kid/graffiti artist named Rael, but the songs neither shine by themselves nor suggest any thematic insight I'm eager to pursue. For art-rock, though, it's listenable, from Eno treatments to a hook that goes (I'm humming) "on Braw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw-dway." B-

I want to move on to other critics in books and film whose work has been important to me, but first let me drop another great bit of news that was news to me,

Robert Christgau

is still busy at work writing a newsletter of his own, And It Don’t Stop, and it is fantastic.

In 1986 James Mustich started A Common Reader, a book catalog containing his personal reflections on whatever caught his fancy at the time. That work ultimately gave birth to his book 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, which is very similar to Christgau’s record guide in that it consists of deeply personal takes on works of significant interest to the critic.

Mustich is not as sharp-toned as Christgau, but that doesn’t mean he lacks opinions. 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die reads like a very personal encyclopedia. Some of the entries are for books that you would expect to be in a collection under this title (e.g. The Diary of Anne Frank and Beloved), while others are entirely idiosyncratic. I remember being pleased that Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love merited an entry, a book that held up against the pantheon might be viewed as minor, but which had a profound effect on me, as it did Mustich.

One of my favorite things about this kind of writing and these kinds of books is that they allow you to see another mind at work. I’ll never meet Robert Christgau or James Mustich, but in a way, I feel like I know them. That this can happen entirely through reading someone’s writing will never cease to be kind of amazing to me.

I’m not a cinephile. Sure, I’ve watched lots of movies, including many foreign films and “classics” released before I was born, but music and especially books are a much bigger presence in my life. Still, the same pleasure I get from Robert Christgau and James Mustich is present in the work of David Thomson’s The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

That’s the cover for the 5th edition above, which is the one I own, but it’s since received another update into a 6th edition.² While framed as a dictionary, similar to Christgau and Mustich, every entry is deeply personal, rendered from Thomson’s unique point of view.

I’ve never seen Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, but thanks to Thomson, I have some appreciation for what makes it such an important landmark in film. I can’t claim to truly understand the import of the French New Wave and its major figures like Godard, Truffaut, Bazin, and Rohmer, but thanks to Thomson I have at least one perspective on the topic that I can take with on my ongoing journey of watching movies.

I now know enough that when I read another great book about film, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood³ by Mark Harris, which describes how 1967 became the year American cinema changed forever and was driven by the influence of the French New Wave, I can appreciate what’s being argued.

In many ways, these books are an antithesis of consumption. If something is consumed, it is used up entirely. Rather than consume, these books consider the subjects at hand and leave substantive material behind for the reader to make something for themselves.

I try not to get too panicky about things, and I’m not one to embrace the past simply out of a sense of nostalgia, but I can’t help but believe that some vital stuff is being lost, not necessarily (or just) Pitchfork itself, but an entire way of looking at the world that builds a sense of communal around something other than just what we buy/stream/promote. Yes, Pitchfork could be very irritating, but that’s fine! They didn’t get to decide what I liked. They were a voice I could compare my voice to.

Mustich sent The Common Reader to subscribers in the mail. Christgau had a sustainable gig at The Village Voice. Thomson has published numerous books and innumerable works of criticism. We had an infrastructure that allowed people to produce stuff of value without having to spend the bulk of their time drumming up audience and attention.

What has to happen to make space for this kind of work in today’s world?

—

Some hope that platforms like Substack are the future model that makes this work - the same work I’m trying to do - possible. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie issued another triumphalist Substack note in the wake of the news about Pitchfork, along with news of impending layoffs at the LA Times, and the total implosion of Sports Illustrated.

For sure, Substack has provided a landing spot for some folks who worked in traditional media and saw their publications ruined by the forces of financialization. I started this newsletter specifically because I thought it was only a matter of time before my line item at the Chicago Tribune was cut. Hasn’t happened yet, which is probably mostly a testament to how low cost I am.

But the picture is not entirely rosy. The Free Press, which reportedly has millions of dollars in revenue is also not running profitably, and recently announced a move to try to secure outside funding.

Another not profitable entity is…Substack itself, which had difficulty raising additional outside funding last time they tried. I assume that there’s some number of Pitchfork writers with sufficient name recognition to launch successful newsletters here, but there isn’t enough space for everyone, and the existing audience isn’t going to pay $5 (or more) dollars a month to 10 (or 20 or 30) different writers.

More importantly, where is the next generation of writers going to come from? The most important variable for success on Substack is having had success off of Substack. Robert Christgau looks like he’s doing well here, but also, this guy is a freaking legend! He spent over 25 years at The Village Voice! The Village Voice stopped publishing in 2017.

A bunch of individual newsletters on a publishing/social media platform is not an infrastructure that supports sustainable work and makes space for writers to get started and develop and accrue audience.

The only way to win in Chayka’s “Filterworld” is to grab the attention of the algorithm, an act which has nothing to do with being interesting, unique, or adding something of substance to the world for others to make new things for themselves.

Is that the future we want to live in?

Links

At the Chicago Tribune this week I took up the baton from

Lincoln Michel

who argued in favor of the “weird little freaks” of the world as narrators, and discussed five of my own favorite weirdos in fiction. Also from me this week, at Inside Higher Ed, I argue that anyone who thinks we should keep the SAT around should take the actual test and then explain how it represents anything students should know and tests them in a way consistent with how we think about learning.

In her debut column at LitHub,

Maris Kreizman

looks at the coming flood of books in March and asks if it’s one of the best months in years for books.

At the New York Times, Olivia Waite has four romance novels of note.

In his weekly list of things worth paying attention to,

Austin Kleon

has lists of books related to two of my recent favorite books, Filterworld and Jesse David Fox’s Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture and the Magic that Makes It. Kleon is demonstrating the art and practice of “consideration” over consumption.

Parents should have special appreciation for this week’s highlight from McSweeney’s: “Sorry, Percy Jackson, Camp Half-Blood Registration Closed Before I Could Sign You Up” by Marisa LaScala

Recommendations

1. This is Happiness by Niall Williams
2. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
3. Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl
4. Those We Thought We Knew by David Joy
5. Summer Lightning by PG Wodehouse

Peter G. - Cape Town, South Africa

Interesting list. I’m going with a series that was very hot for a while, but you don’t hear invoked as much anymore. They’re a bit gritty and harsh, though also caustic and funny. I’m talking about Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, the first of which is Never Mind.

1. The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton
2. David Lynch:  A Retrospective by Ian Nathan
3. The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer
4. White Holes by Carlo Rovelli
5. Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

Diane P. - Plano, TX

Another very interesting list. I want to go with fiction that also has the feel of philosophy. The pick is When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut.

1. Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
2. The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow
3. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow
4. Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Cory Doctorow & Rebecca Giblin 
5. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton

Howard C. - Waynesville, NC

I’m going to take advantage of Howard’s openness to graphic novels and suggest a real heartbreaker, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso.

Recommendation requests have been really pouring in, which is great! But it also potentially means delays on people getting those recommendations. I’m going to try to keep doing Wednesday posts of recommendations (as I started last week), but if the backlog becomes too great I’ll either start giving people recommendations directly through email, or potentially prioritizing requests from paid subscribers.

Meanwhile, let’s keep the momentum going through the link below.⁴

Right now, the best and only way to support writers and writing you want to exist in the world is directly by engaging with their work and, where possible, contributing financially to their enterprises. I strongly encourage you to check out

Robert Christgau

’s newsletter (click on his name back there) and you can sign up for James Mustich’s newsletter from his website for free.

My plea for subscriptions is right below:

I know that much of the country has been in a deep deep freeze, but I’m going to have to drip my faucets tonight, which is truly rare in these parts, so spare a thought for me and mine if you will.

Thanks for reading, and look for more recommendations on Wednesday.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. I wrote a column years ago at the Chicago Tribune where I mused about the denotations and connotations of the word(s) consume/consumption and how there was a definite strain of destruction tied in to the words. When a fire “consumes” a building it leaves only ashes behind. “Consumption” was another word for any wasting disease (most commonly tuberculosis). Too closely identifying our selves with what we consume doesn’t go anywhere good, IMO.

2. Neither edition appears to be available on Bookshop, which is a real shame.

3. The book is a deep dive into the movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, and Dr. Doolittle represent the transformation of film from studio products to ones primarily driven by creative professionals. We’ve since evolved back to the pre 1967 days.

4. All books linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and an additional reading/writing/literacy nonprofit to be determined. Affiliate income reset to zero for the year, for some reason. Hopefully it’s just a glitch. I’m investigating.