[event] Loops, Brighton 16th May

[tamaranth]

ladymoonray has written this up more thoroughly here: this is a quick transcription of my notes:
Loops -- Brighton 'Great Escape' festival
(which felt so much like an SF convention!)

Paul Morley: music writing, 'like everything else', has been democratised: the element of writing is less important than it used to be, though love of music still essential.

Colin Greenwood: everyone can be a DJ with music freely available via internet. Decline of the traditional model where music journalists get review copies in advance and pass on their views.

PM: ideally, reader is going through the imagination of the reviewer to get to the music.

Simon Armitage: 'the fragmentisation of everything'. Major album releases should be, but no longer are, treated as important cultural events.
Countercultural music world pinned down by older generation: how do kids engage with it? "There could be something important and radical going on out there and people our age would never know about it -- I find that very comforting."

The internet contains "a lot of opinion and no judgement".

PM: trying to redefine his skillset, which has been displaced by a combination of technology (internet) and fandom. What's on the web is an inheritance from the way things were: there's no bold new creativity to match technological advances.

CG: internet = lots of content, bloggers don't edit / thin down enough

PM: we weren't writing consumer guides

CG: when people go out and buy music because you say it's good, you're lost.


Executive summary:
- blogging means a plethora of opinion but not much judgement
- the great days of music journalism (Lester Bangs etc) are over but the skillset can be repurposed.
- the music world has conventions that feel just like SF cons! (I checked, it's about £40 for the three days, which gives a heck of a lot of free music tho' attendees had to pay separately for Kasabian.)

Comments

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Randomly: Every time the idea of writing about music floats across my consciousness, I think again that it's something I can't wrap my head around. I can listen to people talking about books or read people writing about films and relate that to my own responses and my desire to read a particular book or watch a particular film. I'll buy a book on the strength of a recommendation, but with music, I only ever seem to be responding to hearing the product itself.

If I see/hear someone compare band A with band B or declare band A's music to belong to genre X, then that will attract my attention, but the first thing I do is go and find a sample/download to find out what I think. Maybe it's because I didn't pay any attention to music writing when I was growing up and completely lack the vocabulary?