18 July 2006
LIVE REVIEWS KINDA SUCK DON'T THEY
Very Generally Speaking, No Names Taken
Download: Charalambides's "Dormant Love"
This came up yesterday, typically, over shredded pork and general tso. I've written plenty live reviews, most times because Riff Raff ruffed daily and I was getting tired of the old spiders-in-buckethats routine. Also concerts make pretty good dates: They're free, and if your date's pretty awesome you can make little jokes about stuff in between songs and she totally will buy the next round of drinks. The flip, if your date sorta sucks, you can just ask her to bend over a little and use her back to take copious notes. If she's the taller type, you just have to be patient. But then again, maybe she doesn't even mind that--so now you have a decision to make.
I can't tell you the last time I listened to a record with more than one other person, and I know a lot of people, so I'm willing to guess that most people interact with their musics alone--just the lonely people and the musics. So the whole communion of live music, concert as ceremony myths remain more intact than ever, at least for people who don't go body and blood to shows every night. As for live reviews, it makes sense to meet music on different terms, in different scenarios, not just in your room with your pants off and maybe a towel draped over your legs so the laptop doesn't burn your junk.
So most live reviews service the rockcrit machine--they're album or best-of reviews in a readymade context, these are the songs Madonna sang, the crowd was "age/race/sex demographic XYZ" and they were pretty into the "Material Girl" who by the way still looks great after all these years, Madonna "overcame" technical difficulties or whatever, and here's an ironic thing Madonna said to the crowd which will make for my fantastic conclusion. And you know, whatever. I'm fine with these reviews. K. does them all the time, even gets a few cross-genre puns and parenthetical jokes in, and I don't think you can ask for more from America's sharpest, handsomest pop critic.
Maybe you want to know exactly what you missed at that sweet Grandaddy acoustic show last night, but for the rest of us that fly-on-the-wall, Horace-in-his-cabin shit reads pretty colorless--pretty commonplace, utterly un-eventful. Maybe you have the time to read a few different show reviews in different cities--so now you know Missy Elliott's live show is fairly consistent, good for you, good for her. It's merely a report, the writing never justifying the impetus to write, and I have severe problems with people who interact with music like that. A concert's not a fucking crime scene.
That said all the ultra-definitive, "this show was about...staying young forever" zeitgeist type concert reviews read so forced to me--so naive too. Fact is, the more concerts you see, the less taken you are by a concert's general circumstances. There's always somebody in front of you, and he's always saying something stupid. There's always a guy complaining about how nobody dances at shows anymore, how the scene is fucked, whatever. There are always two kids next to you smoking reefer--I know these two kids and they just really like the stuff, get over it. Maybe these details merit inclusion in your conclusion that the Wolfmother show was this rock-as-democracy, everybody loves some Zeppelin return to roots--maybe. But there's too much cause and effect--sorry, a really packed show at the Merc is not a "real intimate experience," and actually you're the only one who isn't on the list with a plus one. A bunch of people are cramped into a room, drinking expensive drinks, being hipsters, watching someone perform the same jokes and same setlist and same snafus he'll do in the next fifteen cities he's in, somebody will have sex with another someone, and if it's a Deerhoof show, I'll have my shirt off.
Shows make for bad writing, that seems to be the reason a lot of people just stay away from reviewing. But people still like free tickets, and press people need press, so here we are now with a million "photo review" blogs with the same exact pictures of Eddie Argos jumping sweaty around the Bowery Ballroom--a real rock and roll moment right. Maybe you get a judgement--"Art Brut were pretty good last night, not as good as that other time I saw them (you may remember the sweet pictures I took)"--but as someone who's taken photos as shows before, I know how tough it is to pay attention to the moment when you're trying to get the good shot on stage. To say nothing of the fact that you can't drink brews with your bros, you don't get the best mix because you're right in the front, and again, the whole brews with your bros thing. Beyond that, some people do the live photo blog thing really really well--I just don't know why people think they can do better than, say, this guy.
To an extent I guess live reviews could tell you whether you should see the band in your town, but I don't think anybody really reads the reviews like that do they? I had heard Unicorns had a terrible live show, but I still wanted to see them as Islands (until they preemptively banned me). Just saying that it's never Should I Stay or Should I Go--concertgoers tend to have a wide latitude when it comes to who they'll see or how much they'll tolerate, especially at indie rock shows. Plus I've rarely read any truly negative reviews of live shows anyway--it's as if the reviewer doesn't want anybody to know he wasted his time seeing, I dunno, Bloc Party at Webster or Keren Ann at Tonic or whoever.
Quickly: Apparently some people read reviews to see if pranks they pulled there are noted for posterity.
Let me backtrack as I enter rant length and territory. Live reviews are too dry or too breathless, too respectful or too reverential, overly matter-of-fact or overly abstracted--at all times "cracked" and figured out and processed and hot damn it's onto the next concert. All the "every concert means something" talk is merely a writing exercise, a chance to work in a reference to Stanley Cavell or Dennis Cooper or Dr. Seuss or whatever lit dude you're jocking that week. Maybe people read them to see what they missed, or because they care about an artist's live show, or since they went to the show and want to see whether their opinions mesh well with the author's, but most people don't read them (for my own, I cite Riff Raff pageviews) because they don't care or know the writing's formulaic or just plain awful. Yet there's still a market for them--and still plenty of people who will write them in exchange for free concert tickets.
I wish I knew exactly what I liked in good live reviews but I don't. Dave Hickey did one in the Voice a while ago, he brought an imaginary young kid to an Aerosmith show and the review was a hilarious and obviously insightful dialogue between Hickey and this kid. Pretty great stuff, if any publication had the balls anymore to run something like that. I appreciate people who appreciate the who what where when why and how of the concert experience exactly how the artist intended it, what he wanted us to take from it--but I want an alternative narrative too. I don't want the concert reported, I want it read, and I want to read you reading. But who reads anymore?
// posted by NBS @ 11:00 AM 
Comments:
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You make some very interesting and spot on points. As someone who likes to post reviews of the shows I attend, I can relate to the annoyances you point out and have been guilty of them at times.
My reason for posting a review is to capture the essence of what made the show interesting and noteworthy for me. If no one else cares, then that's fine. Perhaps the review is just my way of memorializing an event I participated in?
Also, while I can't speak for everyone, I don't write reviews to appease the press people who gave me free tickets. In most cases, I've paid my own way to get in. Maybe that's unusual for bloggers.
It's a little unfair to state that people write reviews in exchange for free entry. Some people just like to write about their experiences. That's called blogging. If you don't like to read reviews, don't.
My reason for posting a review is to capture the essence of what made the show interesting and noteworthy for me. If no one else cares, then that's fine. Perhaps the review is just my way of memorializing an event I participated in?
Also, while I can't speak for everyone, I don't write reviews to appease the press people who gave me free tickets. In most cases, I've paid my own way to get in. Maybe that's unusual for bloggers.
It's a little unfair to state that people write reviews in exchange for free entry. Some people just like to write about their experiences. That's called blogging. If you don't like to read reviews, don't.
It's really hard to figure out how to write a live review you could actually see yourself reading. In the absence of any production-related insanity worth reporting (like, for instance, the crystal-studded sneakers with wheels in the heels that Usher wore at the New Orleans Arena Summer 2004) I agree that your best bet is to take the K. route, although I disagree with you on what exactly the K. route is - at its best, it's to basically ignore the show and treat the review like an essay on the performer in question, to refer back to the show only insofar as it contributes to a deeper understanding of who the performer is, much the same way scenes function in an artist profile feature.
This has its analogue, of course, in CD reviews. There's a use value to them, but it's patently uninteresting to read a review that gets bogged down in/stops at the level of "good-or-bad." You're a critic, not a thumb pointed up or down. And you don't want a review with its nose pressed to the CD, over-concerned with sonic description (read: adjective dogpiles) for its own sake. Unless you're a really good writer (Sasha used to describe sounds very elegantly at Slate). And, certainly, you don't want a review (Pitchfork can be cartoonishly guilty of this) that starts in on the CD only after 300 words have been spent relating it to whatever your professor assigned that week. I am not remotely on some anti-intellectual shit, but that just never works.
I've often wondered why there isn't a Pazz 'n' Jop in which critics rank critics. Yes, that's really lame, but it's not like we aren't narcissistic enough for it, and I know we all have our top 5s or 10s, and would love to see where we each fall. Should we make this happen?
This has its analogue, of course, in CD reviews. There's a use value to them, but it's patently uninteresting to read a review that gets bogged down in/stops at the level of "good-or-bad." You're a critic, not a thumb pointed up or down. And you don't want a review with its nose pressed to the CD, over-concerned with sonic description (read: adjective dogpiles) for its own sake. Unless you're a really good writer (Sasha used to describe sounds very elegantly at Slate). And, certainly, you don't want a review (Pitchfork can be cartoonishly guilty of this) that starts in on the CD only after 300 words have been spent relating it to whatever your professor assigned that week. I am not remotely on some anti-intellectual shit, but that just never works.
I've often wondered why there isn't a Pazz 'n' Jop in which critics rank critics. Yes, that's really lame, but it's not like we aren't narcissistic enough for it, and I know we all have our top 5s or 10s, and would love to see where we each fall. Should we make this happen?
You def. poke at this, but I think the emphasis on live reviews right now has a lot to do with the "I WAS THERE"-ism of the blogs, everybody rushing to "discover" the next Clap Your Tapes Say Art Brut, the photoblog being a referential mark of proximity as much as the retelling of an experience. The line between fanboy, publicist, and member of the press is pretty blurry right now, and it seems to be taking a lot of the fun out of actual fanboydom.
I have to agree with g.h.e.h. up there--any dude with an EZ Archive account can post an mp3 he found that might be Radiohead, but only dudes within a certain radius of the actual event itself can have the exclusive access (Internet-wide exclusivity) of seeing that one show that's time-coded with a date and place and won't happen again. The ones who post fifteen pictures of the same thing from the same audience position, too. Yeah, they need to stop doing that.
Oh man going to the McCarren Pool Deerhoof show with you with our shirts off is gonna be so great. Make sure to keep some kind of mesh tank top on hand though, because the dodgeball can be really slippery if you've been standing around sweating for a long time.
(Also, keep your eyes out for a forthcoming live show review from me that will just barely qualify as "reporting.")
(Also, keep your eyes out for a forthcoming live show review from me that will just barely qualify as "reporting.")
yo these comments is busted i posted this yesterday AMZ!
Sammiches/Sammiches has the rub, that and your crime scene tag. Fan/promo blogs and live reviews say one thing: Dig(g) My Life, Here is My Proof. It's looking in the mirror every ten minutes, it's laughing at your own jokes. It's "Oh you haven't heard of them" x1000, this sense of turning yourself into some kind of portal/Oracle for others, when you're chasing the same information everyone else has.
What you get is the most insecure, desperate, deluded flakes, who need this sense of dispensation and an audience, and they draw the biggest audience because their many sad flaws result in an OCD check to the Statcounter every five seconds, the motivation to POST MORE CONTENT. The audience - both the lazy and the ones who don't care - are only too willing to take advantage, to trade in the easy currency of the day's music/news as filtered by the designated gatekeepers (again, all Quixotic forehead-banging neurotics). Most people are fine with - and not particularly worried about the source of - common dialog, water cooler whatever, oh that band yeah I'll check them out but not really because who gives a shit. Bloggers are the people who have to pretend they're in on something, who have to give a shit because without the shit (bands, movies, other blog posts), they're only - GASP - themselves.
Possible positives: hipster blogs as scene TiVo - I Was Totally Going to Go See Band X But I Lazed Shit Oh Great Brooklyn Vegan Was There Let's See What I Missed Oh Nothing David Byrne Was There How Typical.
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Sammiches/Sammiches has the rub, that and your crime scene tag. Fan/promo blogs and live reviews say one thing: Dig(g) My Life, Here is My Proof. It's looking in the mirror every ten minutes, it's laughing at your own jokes. It's "Oh you haven't heard of them" x1000, this sense of turning yourself into some kind of portal/Oracle for others, when you're chasing the same information everyone else has.
What you get is the most insecure, desperate, deluded flakes, who need this sense of dispensation and an audience, and they draw the biggest audience because their many sad flaws result in an OCD check to the Statcounter every five seconds, the motivation to POST MORE CONTENT. The audience - both the lazy and the ones who don't care - are only too willing to take advantage, to trade in the easy currency of the day's music/news as filtered by the designated gatekeepers (again, all Quixotic forehead-banging neurotics). Most people are fine with - and not particularly worried about the source of - common dialog, water cooler whatever, oh that band yeah I'll check them out but not really because who gives a shit. Bloggers are the people who have to pretend they're in on something, who have to give a shit because without the shit (bands, movies, other blog posts), they're only - GASP - themselves.
Possible positives: hipster blogs as scene TiVo - I Was Totally Going to Go See Band X But I Lazed Shit Oh Great Brooklyn Vegan Was There Let's See What I Missed Oh Nothing David Byrne Was There How Typical.
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