August 2, 2006

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No Fear And Loathing in Contemporary Crit

This column is like a disappointed State of the Union for pop-culture criticism. It bemoans the lack of strong voices (like, it says, Lester Bangs and Hunter S. Thompson) in cultural journalism, and explains it with our society's inability to assimilate technology. Instead, new tech is still seen as a "Gee whiz" thing that we play with, instead of as a part of our culture that really affects who we are and how we think.

"[W]e play video games and they play us: The console and the gamer affect each other in hundreds of ways, stimulating our sight and blurring our hearing, and teasing us with the illusion of control and then yanking it away."

We lack the makers of taste who tell us with authority about the things going on in the culture that we shouldn't be missing, and who do so with the audacity to imprint that opinion on everyone who reads it.

"[N]o great critics have emerged, and by that he means he's never been at a big lit/journo cocktail party and heard anybody say, "You've gotta read THIS WRITER. I could give a damn about gaming, but whoa, s/he writes about games like a house on fire!" Nobody has shown up with that bowl-you-over voice that takes a seemingly alien and marginal activity-- an activity that, like drugs, many in the audience will never even try-- and turns it into a must-read experience."

And in the background, there's this whole technology thing. We keep saying, "This is so cool, it's going to change everything." But we never get around to assimilating that change and writing about the world as if that tech wasn't some novel and fleeting diversion that needs to be explained, and analyzed for whether our grandmothers will be able to figure it out.

Instead, tech magazines are digging deeper ruts in fallow soil. Wired's devolving into Cosmo for geeks: It hypes and glosses over tech the way Cosmo turns the most spectacular human experience, the orgasm, into bulletpoints. And who else is out there in the popular press? We know that our readers probably play an Internet-enabled XBox 360 that can pipe movie trailers while they're listening to an iPod and instant messaging their friends on a laptop. But what's the real story-- that we're entertained?

The column is on Pitchfork, but I got it via Slashdot. And when Slashdot picks up a Pitchfork story, you know it's probably pretty interesting.

Also,

• I bought tickets for The National on Thursday, October 26. I keep accidentally writing "The Nationals" tickets and people keep thinking I'm talking about the baseball team. If you haven't listened to Alligator yet, do so.
  The National - Secret Meeting.mp3
  The National - Karen.mp3
  The National - City Middle.mp3
  
• The new TV On The Radio album Return To Cookie Mountain is awesome. Their old stuff was sometimes very cool, sometimes really boring. The new album is all great.
  TV On The Radio - Playhouses.mp3
  TV On The Radio - I Was A Lover.mp3
  
• Listen to Beirut's album Gulag Orkestar. Very weird, like old-world sounding sort-of-rock with polka influences and it's just great.
  Beirut - Brandenburg.mp3
  Beirut - Postcards From Italy.mp3
  

Posted at August 2, 2006 5:40 PM | Comments (3)

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