{"id":1500,"date":"2014-04-06T15:14:28","date_gmt":"2014-04-06T22:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=1500"},"modified":"2014-04-06T15:14:28","modified_gmt":"2014-04-06T22:14:28","slug":"all-rock-music-edition-dean-wareham-and-the-poptimists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2014\/04\/all-rock-music-edition-dean-wareham-and-the-poptimists.html","title":{"rendered":"All Rock-Music Edition: Dean Wareham, and the Poptimists"},"content":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”dTd8KUgvezSMCnL3vPx3MNcoWYDv5jqq”]<\/p>\n

OVER the last few years I\u2019ve been corresponding with a number of rock musicians about how their world has changed in the post-label, post-recordings world we seem to be moving into. One of the most observant of them is Dean Wareham, former leader of indie-rock bands Galaxie 500 and Luna. Dean has a new solo album \u2013 his first \u2013 and is currently on a national tour.\"home_DB14_cov\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I spoke to him for Salon; here<\/a>\u2019s my interview. And here\u2019s part of his response when I asked him about the current situation for musicians:<\/p>\n

Everyone\u2019s in this boat right now. Everyone\u2019s saying, \u201cGood lord, it\u2019s easy to get attention.\u201d Or maybe not easy, but you can<\/i> get attention. You can get on the Internet, you can be all over the place, and connecting with people. It\u2019s hard to sell music, sell any physical product. Now it\u2019s getting harder to sell downloads as well. And it\u2019s not just me saying this. Apple and iTunes will admit as much also. I don\u2019t mind smaller budgets for recording. I don\u2019t know. I think you can make a great-sounding record for, I don\u2019t know, $20- or $30,000, you can do it. But, whatever, for some people it\u2019s hard to come up with that money too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also talks about his new record, his acting career, and the late Lou Reed.<\/p>\n

ALSO: One of the ways the music ecology has changed is a shift in the criticism and journalism that brings it to the audience\u2019s attention. Over the last decade or so, a movement called Poptimism has developed; Poptimism prides itself on concentrating on popular work and superstars. And it often goes beyond what it denounces as the \u201crockist\u201d canon that is sees as obsessed with white guys with guitars.<\/p>\n

A New York Times magazine story<\/a> taking aim at the Poptimists. Here\u2019s Saul Austerlitz:<\/p>\n

The issue is not attention \u2014 any critic who ignored mass taste entirely would be doing his or her readers a disservice \u2014 so much as it is proportion. Music critics are as snobbish as any other variety of critic, but lately, their snobbishness has been devoted to demonstrating just how unsnobbish they are. Given Katy Perry\u2019s string of No. 1 hits, a well-honed argument about her appeal is a welcome addition to the musical conversation. But should gainfully employed adults whose job is to listen to music thoughtfully really agree so regularly with the taste of 13-year-olds?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The causes of this, as well as the stakes, it seems to me, go beyond rock or pop criticism. Austerlitz wonders about other genres following this model:<\/p>\n

A significant subset of book reviewers would turn up their noses at every mention of Jhumpa Lahiri and James Salter as representatives of snobbish, boring novels for the elite and argue that to be a worthy critic, engaged with mass culture, you would have to direct the bulk of your critical attention to the likes of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer. Movie critics would be enjoined from devoting too much of their time to \u201c12 Years a Slave\u201d (box-office take: $56 million) or \u201cThe Great Beauty\u201d ($2.7 million), lest they fail to adequately analyze the majesty that is \u201cThor: The Dark World\u201d ($206.2 million). What if New York food critics insisted on banging on about the virtues of Wendy\u2019s Spicy Chipotle Jr. Cheeseburger? No matter the field, a critic\u2019s job is to argue and plead for the underappreciated, not just to cheer on the winners.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I get into some of this stuff in my book, but for now, I wonder how my readers see this issue. What should music journalism concentrate on, and what’s the right tone?<\/p>\n

FINALLY: One of the very finest of the earlier model of music criticism us Peter Guralnick, known for his two-volume Elvis bio as well as genre studies such as Sweet Soul Music<\/i>, which helped turn me on to 60s soul figures like Sam Cooke and Solomon Burke.(He also writes wonderfully about country and rockabilly.)<\/p>\n

He\u2019s anything but trendy or gimmicky, so it\u2019s striking to see that Guralnick will be reissuing his books with various enhancements: \u201cNow Mr. Guralnick, 70, is extending his franchise,\u201d a new story<\/a> says. \u201cSeven of his books, beginning with Feel Like Going Home<\/i> and Lost Highway<\/i>, his two earliest, but also including the Presley and Cooke biographies, are being reissued this year and next in \u2018enhanced e-book\u2019 editions that include video and audio material and, in some cases, new chapters on figures like Jerry Lee Lewis and Delbert McClinton.\u201d<\/p>\n

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[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”dTd8KUgvezSMCnL3vPx3MNcoWYDv5jqq”] OVER the last few years I\u2019ve been corresponding with a number of rock musicians about how their world has changed in the post-label, post-recordings world we seem to be moving into. One of the most observant of them is Dean Wareham, former leader of indie-rock bands Galaxie 500 and Luna. Dean has a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,39,586,40,27,38],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1500","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-arts-journalism","7":"category-creative-class","8":"category-dean-wareham","9":"category-indie","10":"category-journalism","11":"category-rock-music","12":"entry","13":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}