A Moment Of Noise

John Nova Lomax has written a long and interesting feature about the decline of CD sales and the general devaluation of music for The Houston Press. In it, he muses about the role that blogs play these days in hyping/deflating bands at record pace:

Some blogger with some juice among the others of his ilk is having a great day — his rattletrap vintage Volvo passed inspection, and that foxy barista he’s been chatting up at Starbucks every morning for three months has finally cracked and surrendered her digits. So the blogger drifts home in a pink cloud of joy and writes up a glowing review of the first slightly-better-than-competent Williamsburg hipster clone band CD in the stack of 15 on his desk. Some guy at Pitchfork reads it and wants to stay cutting edge, so he piles on, awarding the CD something above an 8.0 on their ten-point scale. And it’s Katy-bar-the-door after that; dozens of bloggers will sing hosannahs about this unoriginal hipster band’s unlimited potential and reinvention of rock and roll for the new millennium, all before any of these commentators have seen them live or even have listened to their record more than three times. The band will announce a spate of gigs opening for The Hold Steady, but already a hater parade backlash will have set in, one that is no more informed than the initial wave of hype. And then the band hits the road, where they are exposed for what they really are — a competent indie rock band, no better or worse than the five or ten bands like that in every major American city. That’s when the gust from the haters reaches hurricane force, and the band is never heard from again.

[ via Obscure Store ]

This entry was posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 9:34 am and is filed under Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.