China and Facebook and Criticism, oh my!

Despite my growing disenchantment with NPR's music website, it's still a great way to kill time. I just read a story that was interesting, but reveals why my disenchantment has grown. The article is about the growing punk scene in China, and there are some nice quotes (including one that reveals a bit of how Chinese popular musicians consume American popular music, from Bob Dylan and Woody Gutherie (!) to the Ramones), but the article does not consider what seems to me the obvious ramification of the article: China has a growing punk scene?!? Does the author understand the political and social ramifications of this? The Chinese government clearly does not, else they would have nipped this in the bud. The article also does a terrible job of contextualizing the scene, saying China has "the fastest growing" everything else, making it seem that punk music is the predominant style and that those darn Chinese beat us to the punch yet again. However, by their own admission, the musicians realize they are 20-30 years out of date. Can you really have "the fastest growing" scene of a trend that stopped dominating 20-30 years ago?

I also wanted to talk a bit about facebook. I've joined the dreaded menace, as that's how the Music and the Written Word Conference is organizing travel and lodging arrangments, which makes a good deal of sense. I want to comment on two things. The first is what facebook is doing to the concept of friendship. I have about 25 facebook friends, which is roughly the number I would consider to be my friends in the "real world." Yet, I see these people who have 400 or 700 or 1000+ "friends," and know by their own admission they don't even KNOW some of those people, much less have a "friendship" in the traditional sense of the word with them. Maybe its symptomatic of our growing isolationism (ironically* because of a technology designed to keep us closer together), an issue others smarter than I have touched on and that I won't rehash. But, those who use facebook would do well to consider its effects on their perceptions and labels of "friends."

Labels are my second point of criticism. I spent a lot of time procrastinating reading peoples' "info" yesterday. It was telling, as with facebook, we can label ourselves, in effect construct our identities, as we WANT to be seen and percieved. Granted, that tells one almost as much as the actual "info" itself, and is a suprisingly revelatory feature. However, I think this too is symptomatic of our technological age, as we spend time carefully constructing these somewhat virtual identities for ourselves, yet sparse time realizing them in a non-virtual world. Just some things to think about.






* This is not *actually* ironic.

Pre-Concert Conversation

Bored? Lonely? Miss me? Don't have plans for Halloween? Genuinely interested in Shostakovich's visit to Louisville 50 years ago? Then do I have a link for you! WUOL, our friendly neighborhood NPR station (well, one of them) has provided for download the pre-concert conversation I took part in a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

NPR and Criticism

Not long ago, I read an article criticizing NPR's "Top Songs of the Year (So Far) list for being too "white." The author contends that "it's not that NPR doesn't like black music. It merely maintains a strict preference for black music that few actual living African-Americans listen to." Maybe so, maybe not. In my opinion, anyone who genuinely wants to keep a pulse on "black" music (more or less defined by the article in terms of what it's not: white, indie, guitar-driven, college educated, alive, young, local, and hip/fresh/non-retro) doesn't use NPR. Listening to NPR for current trends in rap/ hip-hop makes less sense than buying The New Yorker strictly for the cartoons. And I can see some merits in the author's point that "In matters of musical taste, everyone has a God-given right to provincialism and conservatism, even those NPR listeners who consider themselves cosmopolitan and liberal," although I think forcing yourself to consume music you do not like simply to be "cosmopolitan and liberal" is asinine. 


And I was doing well even through the comparison of the NPR "Best Music..." list with the fact that "...in 2009, the No. 1 song on the Billboard charts has been by a black or female artist—or by groups featuring both blacks and whites or men and women—a total of 41 out of 42 weeks." What got my dander up was the article's snippy "Who are the progressives again—the public radio crowd or the Top 40 great unwashed?" So, "progressive" equals "listening to music that prominently features black or female artists?" And the "great unwashed," because of their support of this music (isn't that what the chart statistics are proving, support?), are more progressive? Breaking "progressive" into such simplistic (and borderline racist) terms does no one any good. More over, it trivializes the complexities of production and consumption of race in music into antagonistic binaries. I'm not going to defend NPR and what they chose to conceive of "black" music, but in their exposure of non- mainstream "black" artists, they inform their listeners about the entire spectrum of "black" music, a spectrum that takes far more into account that Top 40 hits.


However, I will criticize NPR for its endorsement of Bernstein's recording of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony. And, for its sales pitch: "In the remarkable finale, Shostakovich achieves one of the greatest coups of his symphonic career: a "victorious" closer that drives home the expected message and at the same time makes an entirely different point — the real one." This whole trope of Shostakovich study was begun with the fraudulent memoir "Testimony," and was continued through a slew of noxious, pseudo-musicological "interpretations" that I won't even mention by name on my blog. This trope persists, in program and liner notes and pre-concert lectures (last weekend I saw a legitimate conductor spew some of this same nonsense before Shostakovich's 10th Symphony), and most frustratingly, in legitimate scholarly publications by scholars who did not critically analyze their sources. It's a serious historiographic problem, and one that I will return to soon.




"..An entirely different point- the real one." Please. Aside of being elitist and overly dramatic, and ignoring for sake of time the hermeneutic implications of such statements, sticking to such an interpretation with Bernstein's recording, BERNSTEIN'S!, the fastest one I have ever heard **, is mindless. The tempo at the end is so fast, so stereotypically reliant on traditional symphonic gestures of closure that the possibility for other interpretations doesn't even exist... and that does a huge disservice to Shostakovich and intelligent consumers of art music.



** Compare Bernstein's (8:53) with Rostropovich's (12:04)