Notes on a bubble (Subprime Indie For Dummies)
The deregulation of rock writing in the early 00s allowed cheap critical credit to flood the sub-prime, or ”indie”, market, allowing bands to obtain careers despite not remotely having the talent to sustain them past the initial repayments. Rockonomists such as Harvell who issued warnings to this effect were labelled Jeremiahs by Blog St.
Some outlets, such as Stylus Magazine, used this boom to create sprawling bodies of work, mistakenly believing that thoughtful, passionate commentary would ensure a strong market share. Often, they would run several essays a week, sometimes being so opulent as to allot hundreds of words to a single great moment in a single song, effectiveley overleveraging the attention span of anyone who would rather just watch cute boys pretend to be in a Jodorowsky movie. This is what led to their collapse in Fall of 2007.*
Larger outlets, Pitchfork in particular, realized that they could now present opinions on 20+ records each week, thus framing themselves as somewhat authoritative while still maintaining a “fun” element by alternating between scatalogical gimmick reviews and portentiously meandering Grad School analysis. They were sometimes wrong, divesting themselves from great records during the fourth quarter and putting their cultural capital into shaky bets, driven by the blog markets (more on those later). Often they were right, effusiveley praising moving works that deserved to be remembered. By the middle of the decade, this tension had conferred upon them the status of being both a tastemaker and publicy loathed by anyone who aspired to be a person of taste. This level of demand meant that, regardless of cultural currency, enough people were looking at their American Apparel ads that they were able to leverage themselve from a journalistic entity into a lifestyle brand, thus achieving a level of verticle integration seldom seen in a market where everyone else’s revenues were down.
Meanwhile, bloggers realized that if everyone tacitly agreed to slightly overrate songs that were mereley above average, it would create the illusion of a glut of great bands instead of an endless sprawl of groups that were only really creative enough to devise a good name, steal a vocal hook from 90s radio, and execute as many as 4 or 5 rudimentary postpunk riffs in succession while simultaneously exploiting an overinflated Nostalgia Value of Amateurism Index (The NVA index, as it was called, had been boosted in the US because of war and economic uncertainty) and ignoring the importance of anything beyond hiring a good publicist and striking the right balance of quirky and serious in their press photo. Since many of these blogs were written by writers who could only really handle hyperbole and restating press releases, discussing everything as if it was good or great allowed them to inflate their own credibility on both writing and tastemaking fronts by elevating the one good song that many high-NVA bands had to offer. So, by creating a cultural expectation of greatness (and always bringing up The Strokes as a comparison), the blogosphere often managed to force traditional reviewers into wasting 1/4 of their word count contending with “hype” before even approaching the music contained on the albums in question. This erected a further shield against a public understanding of these High-NVA, Low CMO (Craftsmanship, Musicianship, and Originality) bands.
At this point, we should look at how these High NVA, Low CMO albums were structured. By being mostly rock albums, it was assumed that even the most openly superflous were inherently ”authentic”, solid pieces of cultural currency that were designed to function as some sort of enduring, pureley artistic statement. Often, they could be readily pre-ordered and would be packaged with trinkets that helped facilitate the adoption of the record into the buyers’ personal brand. Fortunateley for consumers, the buying of records had pretty much been called off with the advent of broadband. However, everyone still liked the idea that music might be worth paying for so these high NVA, low CMO records were often well reviewed, only to be aggressiveley hated 3 or 4 months later, sometimes by that same minority of consumers that had actually once felt passionateley enough about them to spend money.
All of this came to a head on “Black Tuesday.” Named for high NVA, low CMO band Black Kids who had ridden 2/3 of a decent song to good reviews of their debut EP. Expectations were high for the band, who were signed to a major label despite widely disseminated reports that they could bareley play their own songs live. On this day, the Hated Tastemakers served them with a 3.3 out of 10 possible points. Instead of an analysis, only a picture of two pugs was posted, superimposed with the word “Sorry.” Some theories state that this score was amended up from a 0.0, on the off chance that the band might succeed despite being a shitty, overvalued commodity. It’s still unclear to this day who the “Sorry” is even directed at.
In the wake of Black Tuesday, debate raged over Pitchfork’s alleged arrogance/incompetence, the band’s validity, and whether or not similiarly high NVA, low CMO bands such as Times New Viking or MGMT might be the next to be slammed. Meanwhile, in order to avoid the appearance of being overvalued, bands such as Deerhunter and Los Campesinos scramble to put out new records every 3 quarters, hoping to outpace the now merciless hype/backlash cycle by at least a few weeks on either side in order to live up to their current valuations before a more detailed auditing threatens to break them.
*Actually, it was a smart descision made by a very burned out editor who decided to kill the thing instead of watching the beast grind itself into a tragic nub. It looks funnier with the mortgage meltdown this way though. Also, wtf?, the old site is gone. Where is this shit archived?
Apologies if this is kind of a hijack of Tom’s earlier joke, but I figured I’d run with it since it kept amusing me and I’m committed to not working today.
