The part of this I take issue with is the part about complaining about SEO/trollgaze/clickbait/etc. Most of the people making these accusations are people in the online publishing field — people who know exactly what they’re talking about and how prevalent it is. I mean, “trollgaze” was coined by Maura, and I’m fairly sure she knows standards and practices for music blogging.
And yes, it’s usually valid. Recent example: Chris Brown at the Grammys. Any guesses how many media outlets went easy on him out of “objectivity” or “measuredness,” in part or in whole a proxy for not pissing off the Chris Brown stan constituency? It’s not just about tone, either; it’s about what gets written about and how much, which often looks more like a cost-benefit analysis than what people connect with. Yes, that’s how business works. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions. It’s still a valid observation.
This is a misunderstanding of my actual point, which has nothing to do with the realities of SEO optimization as a glorified spam-content creation process (which I will absolutely acknowledge as real and pervasive). But I'm not talking about some vaguely-defined, if probably real, "them." To the extent that SEO leads venues to publish stuff that barely passes the test as "writing," which in my understanding is most of it (see: photo slideshows, listicles, etc.), I don't really care about it much. I can ignore it.
But writers at Village Voice and Popdust and other places sometimes throw the concept of "SEO" around in bad faith of what I see to be things (like songs and artists) far less directly related to literal SEO strategies. This is the problem with the "trollgaze" index -- it basically assumes that every decision in a given song or from a given artist is made with the same cynical eye toward gaming the system that high-functioning spambots (and the people who function as high-functioning spambots) use. Part of my point is that we shouldn't believe that to be true as our default position. And another, probably more important part is that even if that's true it doesn't necessarily tell us much about the thing in question. By assuming "trolling" and calling it a day, the intentions of the creators, however valid, have completely superseded any attempt at meaningful analysis of what's actually going on. It's not that it would be impossible to write something valuable doing that, but that it's a difficult prospect, especially when it's a standard way of writing about certain kinds of music. This was the crux of the "Lana Wars" from my perspective -- very few people, myself included, were actually listening to the music very carefully; rather, they plugged whatever they happened to hear into the framework they'd established before they listened. That this approach usually, but not always, makes for shoddy music criticism isn't too surprising to me. I also happen to think that it makes for shoddy social analysis, shoddy image analysis, shoddy everything -- not on principle, just in practice.
So yes, SEO is a "thing," and it leads to a lot of problematic content online. I'm just saying it's not an excuse for why our writing and ideas are so bad, if and when they're bad. "SEO" isn't in itself the problem -- a more basic and more pervasive problem is that too many writers are creating far more content than they have ideas. This is how I ended up feeling at Tumblr -- I was producing stuff that might as well have been "data" -- I was my own SEO machine, except I wasn't really "optimizing" anything for anyone in particular.
(One specific Tumblr format issue is that, rather than directly respond to someone as in a comment thread, I would often take what they said and republish it for a slightly different but overlapping audience. That allowed me not to engage with specific claims and ideas, but rather take everything as a jumping off point for whatever it is that I wanted to say. And again, this is as much a "me" problem as it is an "environment" problem.)
At least here, or in a comments thread, I can have some semblance of a back and forth in which there's something at stake -- two people either enter and then leave with a new understanding, or at the end at least there can be some understanding of how (if not why) something went wrong. This is exactly what happened during the Rebecca Black comment back-and-forth between Katherine and myself at the Jukebox, which I want to bring up again not to open any old wounds, but as a reminder that this was a genuine conversation, but was never finished.
What's interesting in the context of this post is that what (to me) was the most important divergence point of that back and forth was a point from Katherine that brings me back to the cynicism problem:
It’s my problem with people going and auditioning shittily on purpose just to get them some of that potential finale-show exposure and gag CDs. It’s my problem with producers setting up people who aren’t conventionally attractive, or who aren’t all there, etc., and using them as fodder to mock — and some of them are in on this, some aren’t, but it sucks either way.
My argument, at the time, was that this in no way fairly represented the tactics of Ark Music Factory (from what we can know of their process, which is limited), even if other producers do it (in American Idol auditions, although there we also know that the process of getting an audition is far more understood to be fodder for mockery, which was obviously not true of the extremely-obscure Ark Music Factory prior to "Friday" virality).
And this assumption that AMF must be in any way in conversation with contributing to mockery -- that is, immediately blaming the producers instead of the ones doing the mocking -- is exactly what I'm referring to when I say "operating in bad faith" -- taking the perceived and sometimes real (though not always) immoral behavior of a select group of individuals and assuming comparable behavior from others. That's an incredibly cynical way to view the music world, but in practice such cynicism only holds in specific instances -- that is, it's not a blanket cynicism that would hold for anyone creating music. I don't know how cynical Ark Music Factory may be, but what I can react to is the nasty and seemingly unverifiable claim that a producing duo was knowingly exploiting young women on the off chance that they might be mocked by a mass audience.
That is the attitude I'm referring to, an attitude that, I think, ultimately poisons the well. (At least, that's the poison I'm waving toward in the previous post, re: SEO-blaming.) It exists in the SEO world, sure (if Rebecca Black is being 90% mocked, the spambot assumes it should probably write a mocking post -- why not), but SEO is not responsible for it. It's our fault, us being the ones literally in conversation with one another.
Wow, great article, I really appreciate your thought process and having it explained properly, thank you!
ReplyDelete"And another, probably more important part is that even if that's true it doesn't necessarily tell us much about the thing in question."
ReplyDeleteThere's your point in a sentence. Your complaint is that people are assigning a motive to how something was created, and using that as their excuse to ignore the content of the thing that's created. You could add that to do this is fundamentally anti-intellectual and destructive. (And no, this doesn't mean that motive should be taken off the table. It means that motive doesn't explain the content or value or meaning of something. It's only part of the story.)
See, you're still fundamentally mistaken. It was not a genuine conversation. It was my telling you that I'd said all I wanted to say, and you flagrantly and proudly ignoring it. That is a "genuine conversation" in the sense that a man yelling at you on the subway after you've told him to stop is a "genuine conversation." I'm actually quite offended that you seriously still think it's valid.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's very funny that you talk about misinterpreting arguments, considering how many of mine you've misinterpreted:
ReplyDelete- I never claimed that Ark was exploiting people in hopes that they'd be mocked. At all. Ever. Please point to one place where I ever argued that. What I argued was that they were a vanity publishing outfit, a lot like, say, poetry.com (citation: http://www.absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/poetry_scams.htm), that sold people dubious promises of legitimate fame/industry experience/whatever. It's always going to be "unverifiable" because nobody would ever own up to that, but the outward signs match almost exactly. The fact that you are continuing to compel me to talk about this, instead of letting it die already, despite my being as clear as I could possibly be that I don't want to talk about it anymore is not lost on me.
- Nor was I talking about "photo galleries and listicles," which strikes me as an extreme oversimplification. I thought my original post made this rather clear: I'm talking about the economics of what topics, and artists, are deemed worthy of discussion, which has everything to do in online publishing -- any online site, not just ours, with the possible exception of some wildly funded unicorn longform site that doesn't exist. Yes, print made and makes essentially the same calls; it just has less reliable metrics. How much and which artists get discussed has a large, demonstrable influence on what music gets made more often and what gets made less. So yes, I think this is a completely fair topic for music criticism, particularly the sort of music criticism that aims to influence things (ha ha ha ha idealism.)
Katherine, just because you say something is "fundamentally mistaken" doesn't make it true. I very carefully laid out a counter-argument -- namely that there is absolutely no evidence to support the theory that Ark Music Factory was in any way creating music with the INTENTION of it being mocked, hence had nothing to do with "American Idol audition culture." Then you accused me of trolling and ended the conversation.
ReplyDeleteMy point here is that it was at least the two of us in the room together trying to figure something out, hence was a genuine conversation, if not necessarily a good one. That we failed to figure anything out is unfortunate, but I'm still here willing to try to understand exactly what your point was. Here's my understanding, and please tell me if I misunderstand you completely, which is possible: you seem to think that "Friday" was CREATED to be mocked, rather than created to be a good pop song that audiences happened to mock anyway (a fault that says a lot about audiences, but says little about the song in question). You seem to conflate the viral popularity of "Friday" -- an audience phenomenon -- with something you call in your blurb the "Friday machine." But the "machine" -- that is, the system through which "Friday" was popularized -- is us, and I don't think it's fair to consider that to be "Friday"'s fault.
I accused you of trolling because I specifically said, multiple times, as clearly as I could without attaching audio and HTML marquee tags, that I did not want to continue the argument. You ignored that, which at best shows a complete lack of respect for me and at worst is deliberate trolling.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, you misunderstand me completely, both there and in this post, but again, I do not wish to continue this argument.
Except you are continuing the argument, by claiming that what I'm saying completely misunderstand what you wrote. My question would be, "how did I misunderstand?" I'm not trolling you -- this is the opposite of trolling. I'm not trying to provoke a reaction in you, I'm trying to provoke a response to my (valid) questions about what your point is. If it's "obvious" how I'm misinterpreting what you've said about any of this, then it isn't obvious to me.
ReplyDeleteI think this particular argument happens to have resonance in more general conversations about music, perhaps especially in an age of SEO. See Frank's summation above: "people are assigning a motive to how something
was created [or, I would add, to how it is widely received], and using that as their excuse to ignore the content of the
thing that's created."
That's why I'm continuing to push it. It's not just "Friday" -- that, as I see it, is the problem with not only SEO content publishers (like the writers "neutrally" reporting on Chris Brown to appease fans or reporting snarkily on Rebecca Black to appease haters) but with the critics of SEO practices, too.
In your blurb, you blame "Friday" for the world in which "Friday" exists. In the comment thread, you do directly implicate the creation of "Friday" in the process of "producers setting up people who aren’t conventionally attractive, or who
aren’t all there, etc., and using them as fodder to mock." I just don't understand how what I'm pointing out is misunderstanding you completely, and I'm asking you to explain what you meant.
That does clarify things, and perhaps I was confused by your comment, in which you compared "Friday" to William Hung.
ReplyDeleteI think that exposing vanity publishers who are legitimately preying on the weak is something worth doing, but I also think that usually when people and writers talk about these things, they're bringing a lot of assumptions about the product to the table. That was why I brought up Girls Rock Philly in the conversation -- we could think of it as a "vanity project," but there are many other ways of considering it too. I think it's interesting that Rebecca Black specifically is an exception to what seems to be the general business model of Ark Music Factory (offering a kind of "fantasy" pop star experience), because Rebecca Black's mother, who was 100% in control of making the experience possible, has said explicitly that it was intended as a kind of media literacy experience.
But there's a trick here, which is that in exposing bankrupt and morally dubious business practices, we can't just throw the baby (songs, movies, entertainment objects) out with the bathwater. If I had to "rate" a film by the labor standards by which it was created, I would have to give a film like "Titanic" zero stars. But it would be strange for me to do that -- unless I admitted that my judgment of it as a piece of art has little to do with my judgment of it as a piece of exploitative labor. There are ways of acknowledging both, and I think that my larger point is that it bothers me the way that acknowledging even the possibility of exploitation or exploitative practices, even when don't have the evidence to prove it (and sometimes when we have evidence to disprove it), seems to obliterate any possibility of consideration of the work on its terms.
The "work's terms" don't happen in a vacuum, of course. There are just subtleties in the conversation that go bulldozed. (Not responding to your final point about the realities of SEO, as I have to go, but it's worth thinking about and returning to in a bit.)
I would also add that people posting poetry at Poetry.com ARE actual poets, and teen models ARE actual models. The question isn't whether or not they "are" this thing or that thing, but whether what they're doing is any good, or has any value. And of many vanity projects, there is little value to the rest of the world. But that isn't true because they're vanity projects, it's true because they're bad, or useless, or whatever.
ReplyDelete