Maybe the Reverend is just getting old and cranky, but I find myself agreeing with music biz gadfly Bob Lefsetz more and more frequently. In this modern Internet world, Lefsetz has become better known for his blog “The Lefsetz Letter” than he is for his work as an entertainment attorney and recording industry consultant. Although Lefsetz has been known to fly off on an illogical tangent every now and then (then again, who am I to be throwing stones, eh?), he nevertheless brings an educated perspective to his analysis and, unlike many industry insiders of a certain vintage, Lefsetz isn’t scared to death by new ideas (or technology).

In a recent blog entry titled “The Death Of Cool?” Lefsetz uses a recent performance by music blog darlings du jour Vampire Weekend on The David Letterman Show to tackle the long-simmering question of the “tastemaker.” Hidden within his blog entry is this gem of a paragraph:

“Used to be it took years for a band to reach public consciousness. Now it might take a month. From insiders to the casual listener, within that period of time, we can all know. Because of modern communication methods. Furthermore, there’s no screening process, no winnowing of the wheat from the chaff. Everything can be served up right now. It doesn’t have to break through because of its essence, the hype can deliver a ray of light to almost anything. And when you take a look at this something…too often you’re disappointed.”

A couple of years ago, when I had a lot more discretionary income than I do now, I fell into the trap of trying to “keep up” with what was hot, new and fresh in music. I invested a small fortune in buying new CDs, both indie and major label, from momentary “buzz bands.” As Lefsetz points out, “too often you’re disappointed.” Out of dozens of discs that I bought that year, I probably still have only around ten percent of them (or less) in my collection. More often than not, un-wowed by what I heard in the grooves, I’d trot these “hot” CDs back down to Grimey’s to swap ‘em for ‘60s-and-70s-era reissue discs while their current trade-in value was still high.

These days, the Reverend is much less concerned about what’s hot and what’s not. Call it following the beat of an indifferent drummer, if you will, but the opinions of today’s tastemakers leave me unimpressed. It’s telling, perhaps, that many of the bands whose CDs I bought during the binge year of 2005/06 never got to record a second effort and most have since fallen out of sight and out of favor, or broken up. Whether it’s a “hip” indie label trying to push their latest signing, a major label trying to market something “different,” or webzines and blogs like Pitchfork championing unknown freak-folk artists, it all falls upon deaf ears as far as I’m concerned. The only truth, still, is in the music. I don’t care if I discover something I like today or next year…hell, I’m a half-a-century old, who am I trying to impress?

Album reviews are an important art form and sometimes unwilling arbiter of what is “cool” and what is “fool.” Of course, the Reverend is an old-school rockcrit who teethed on scribes like Dave Marsh, Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs and followed critics like Rick Johnson, J. Kordosh, and even The Mad Peck religiously. Unfortunately, much of today’s rock criticism is uneducated and ill-informed, obsessively concerned with discovery and coronation rather than more ephemeral intangibles such as quality, artistic growth, songwriting or instrumentation. Any monkey with a computer and a blog fashions themselves a rockcrit these days, and the form is that much worse for this democratization of music criticism.

I would not be such a Luddite as to suggest that the rise of the amateur in music journalism afforded by the Internet is necessarily a bad thing. I personally like reading about music, and the online tastemakers sometimes turn up a gem…I really like last year’s Band Of Horses’ sophomore CD, even if online tastes have already begun to turn against the band. Vampire Weekend, once the recipient of almost-universal music blog praise, are already beginning to suffer the backlash of over-familiarity. Webzines and music blogs do a great job of letting readers know about new music, even if their over-effusive approach lends itself to inevitable backlash once people look beyond the hype.

And that, maybe, is the main problem with today’s tastemakers…they have no taste, only opinions. Marsh, Bangs, Johnson and the other critics that I enjoyed reading as a youngster were, to a man (and woman), unafraid to go out on a limb now and then and criticize something previously adjudged “cool” or to praise something reviled as “uncool” (like Marsh’s long-standing defense of Donna Summer…now, decades later and upon a second and third look, we find that the disco diva could actually sing pretty well).

These days, a band like Vampire Weekend can rise and fall so fast that there is no real analysis of the band, just meaningless hype/hate. A more expansive knowledge of music history, what has come before, would help modern tastemakers put new releases into proper context. This is an attribute shared by rock critics from the first days of Crawdaddy up through scribes like Jim DeRogatis, but has been largely forgotten in the Internet age. Truth is, only time will tell whether today’s much-loved gem is tomorrow’s dusty dollar-store purchase.

With the Internet and iTunes and databases and rar blogs opening music up like never before, as Lefsetz says, the public awareness that once took years for a band to achieve can flash by in weeks, if not days. But what these technological advances have also accomplished is in opening the eyes and ears of music lovers to a world of possibility. No longer constrained by either the dictates of the print media or the marketing efforts of indie-and-major-labels, consumers are compiling their own imaginative mix tapes of ‘60s soul, ‘70s funk, ‘80s heavy metal and ‘90s grunge, with a dash of vintage psychedelica, reggae and power-pop thrown in for flavor. With a hundred years of recorded music at their fingertips, people have discovered that their tastes in music are much more diverse and entertaining than they’d been told.

The reports of the death of cool may be exaggerated, but these days, “cool” is whatever the hell you want to listen to…ragtime, Delta blues, bluegrass, death metal, power-pop, Northern soul…don’t let anybody tell you any different. Whether you’re listening to Tommy Johnson, Sun Ra, Ricky Nelson, Husker Du or Nickelback, the important thing is that you’re listening…and that, friends, is COOL!

"The Death Of Cool?" at The Lefsetz Letter blog

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