At the time of starting this post, it’s Friday, March 3rd, 2023. In a moment of vulnerability, I would like to tell you that I am Doing Bad. Whoever prayed on my downfall: you got it. I’ve been sick with something since I got back from LA, my mental health is in the gutter, and in adjusting my medication for depression, I’m sleeping weird hours and generally restless. I’m not hungry but I must eat. I find myself either nauseated in bed or in search of an errand that cannot be completed. I walked around Williamsburg for two hours the other day, just to end up spending three hours standing in line for a Deftones show that I didn’t have tickets to.
I promise that I wasn’t crazy for doing that. I went and saw Wolf Eyes on Tuesday, Feb 28th, 2023, and allegedly needed tickets to that, but before I could even show the door guy a ticket, he put a wristband on me and let me in. I figured that the same thing might be able to happen at the Deftones show presented by Marc Jacobs’ Heaven and Stray Rats for a collab featuring the Heaven and Stray Rats and Deftones brands where Deftones’ iconography was emblazoned on (maybe) high quality wool and polyester goods in order to sell expensive clothing to Gen-Zers who weren’t either weren’t aware or weren’t alive when White Pony released, let alone Adrenaline or Around The Fur. Anyway I had no such luck, and was informed that my Waiting List spot would not materialize into a ticket, and that I needed to go home. It wasn’t all for naught. I got an oldhead in line to buy an Unwound ticket off of me for one of their shows that I cannot attend next week.
In the wake of Deftones announcing their capsule with Marc Jacobs’ Heaven and Stray Rats, I saw quite a bit of hemming and hawing from people in their 30s about it. This isn’t about the authenticity of the collab. Deftones has endured because they’re the least embarrassing nu-metal band. They’ve always been tasteful, even at the band’s lowest point, adding drunken joke voicemail messages about Hot Carling (“I turned that into a verb, did you appreciate that?”). The collab product itself is a little confusing to me as it traverses between several of the band’s eras while not landing anywhere except for Hot Girls Like Deftones. Which is true. It’s an undeniable fact that the hottest woman you know loves Deftones. Liking Deftones alone will not make you hot, but you cannot be hot without liking Deftones. Marc Jacobs understands this, or at least someone at Marc Jacobs does, and will sell it to you starting at $95 for a shirt or $55 for earrings that say “Shove it.”
The pastiche of it all is a little cheesy to me as someone who was at least kinda There for Deftones’ rise/peak, but whatever. As an adult who has loved music since I was a toddler, I am used to the consistent churning of the world to take something I love and try to sell it back to me now that I’m old enough to be discerning with my money. Hell, I guess Maverick Records did this with “Back To School (Mini Maggit)” before I even knew they were doing it (“Pink Maggit'' remains my favorite Deftones song to this day). I talked about it briefly in a groupchat full of hot people who like Deftones, where my friend said something along the lines of “I hope you get in, but I think this collaboration sucks.” At first, I bristled and thought “Man who cares? It’s not for me or you.” But I realize that I care.
I spent a lot of time reading this week and stewing over the idea of what it means to be A Critic. What it means to have a relationship and a responsibility to the art that I consume and promote to any platform. Is my responsibility as a writer to show you the morally pure and the uncomplicated? Is it my responsibility to weigh in on discourse from afar as if to say that I certainly wouldn’t have done things the way that other critics have done? Am I responsible for guiding the poor, huddled masses yearning to have good taste into the light that is my cult of personality?
No. My responsibility is to talk about shit that rocks and why it matters. My responsibility is to care. You, as a consumer, can take it any way that you want. If you think that the opinion is worth spreading, I hope you smash the RT or forward it to your weird friend who has too many records. My responsibility is to give context and tell you why I think something sucks or why I think something is important. The bigger picture is that the Listen Up, Nerds Newsletter is a no-nonsense look at art in the attention economy. I care about what gets on the screen that you stare at for hours every day.
On what is now last Friday, March 3, 2023, there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the music journalism sphere where a columnist made a comment about an artist’s work that wound up with a bit of a back-and-forth on twitter. Most of the discussion has been deleted by both parties, and I don’t feel like it’s right for me to talk about two people who wouldn’t know me from Adam, but I’ll give you a quick rundown of the issue.
Artist releases new project.
Writer covers art in a column, but mentions that nothing that the artist does will match the feeling that journalist gets from a record the artist released almost 13 years ago.
Artist feels slighted by that statement and posts about it.
This got quite a few eyes on it because people think that artists and critics are supposed to be adversaries. The man unable to form an opinion of his own thinks there must be a winner and loser. He thinks one side has to prove its might because he sees every discussion as a zero-sum game. There was a discussion but it certainly wasn’t a debate. I’m not here to slam either side in the argument for feeling a way, but the attention economy forces writers into carrying water and doing press rather than lending a critical eye.
Did you also read that last part and say “Who cares?” Maybe! And if so, then maybe criticism is not your bag, man. You likely like what you like and that is unlikely to change. How it reads to me is that when music journalists are boxed into doing PR work, they’re more likely to have what my elementary school teachers would regard as “A disruptive outburst.” There’s this burning feeling inside to actually have an opinion or tell a personal story, and as soon as it pops out, it causes a problem. The writer ostensibly critiqued it and felt the work shined enough to be included in a “Best Genre Releases of Last Month” listicle, but the inclusion of a line about past work is a little undercooked and likely should’ve been clipped by an editor. I’m not sure it does much to bolster the work in its current form. Regardless, I’m not editing this dude and I’m also not here to say anyone was wrong, but what counts for criticism these days?
In an earlier newsletter, I spoke about how the curve that Pitchfork grades on seems irreparably skewed and how putting a little bit of effort and nuance into work can get you a 7.0, but what does that 7.0 mean to a consumer? Should I now not pay attention to art that gets *less* than a 7.0 and only *consider* music above it? Well, no. I should make up my own mind. But should I spend any amount of time covering something that sucks? Sure. Because I care about popular new releases, I can say a couple of things.
I listened to two dreadful records that were received well last week. I listened to the new Model/Actriz album, which received an 8.2 Best New Music on Pitchfork and I listened to the new single from The Dare, which went in one ear and out the other in less than 3 minutes. With his first hit, “Girls,” I can at least tell you about that song. The new song, I can’t even remember the name. I feel like it’s “Good Time” but it might not be. The Model/Actriz record was more offensive, sounding like a PG-13 version of the Nine Inch Nails albums that I grew up listening to. As Gavin Rossdale put it in “Everything Zen,” “There’s no sex in your violence.” Maybe I would’ve liked it more if I hadn’t spent most of the week listening to The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste by Ministry all week, purely by happenstance. The reviews called M/A “sexy” and “charismatic,” but if this is the type of thing that people are referencing to sell sex, then I get why Gen-Z is portrayed as so sex-negative. Both of these releases lack any sort of real, tangible stance other than “Sex,” and not even in a fun way. It felt like the creeping unsexy feeling I got from the Deftones x Marc Jacobs collab. Sex in these worlds doesn’t feel like an experience, it feels like a product. It looks like an acquisition rather than a trait. Worst of all, their sex sounds like a dull way to spend three minutes.
I guess that this is where, if I care so much about what you listen to, I propose a solution. My solution is really to listen to Nine Inch Nails and HEALTH and other moderately sexy industrial-by-way-of-goth music. Listen to some sort of “Electronic Body Music” like Boy Harsher or Front 242. Go listen to music that sounds like you’re getting sweaty on the factory floor instead of wearing a suit to your marketing job in the factory’s offices.
Eli Enis' Whirr Blog is required reading for the next few paragraphs of this post
On the subject of proposing solutions, Eli Enis wrote a big article about his exclusion of Whirr mentions in his New Wave of American Shoegaze article from the end of last year. It was something I tweeted about at the time but didn’t feel like going long on for the newsletter because it’s kind of an uninteresting gripe. The gripe in question was that the article focused on maybe 20 people in total between seven bands, and how big bands from California, a scene overflowing with talent, were excluded. Now it sounds like they were excluded because of their mentions of an influential band who was canceled in 2015. I get why this is a tricky thing to broach. How do you even talk about the Whirr thing? The art itself isn’t dangerous, but to pretend nothing happened is also foolish. It’s not the same, but it does remind me of how we talk about Burzum.
Enis correctly goes into some of the big problems with not only how we handled the Whirr posts as a scene, but also in how it’s impossible to learn about what happened because of the internet. He made a great point about posts getting completely culled after venture capitalist after venture capitalist churn through the music sites of yore, deleting old journalism to free up server space and cut costs.
Make no mistake about what was said in 2015, it was reprehensible and stupid. At worst, it was outright hateful and wack, but it was also depressing when it happened. Not because it seemed out of the realm of possibility, but it was almost entirely posted because GLOSS was gaining much more recognition than any other band at the time. The posts felt... jealous. And for a band who spent so much time positioning themselves to be detached and above it all, what could be less cool than actually caring about recognition? Instead of positioning them as this forbidden fruit, a great band that you have to listen to with the door locked and on your headphones, what if we were real about it and told the truth: It was palpably lame. The cool guy image was over in a flash. Whoever posted that was a dork who cared about Top 10 lists. It’s like when Varg started posting way too much online and proved himself to not be some mysterious shadow entity of cool riffs and forbidden knowledge, but rather a loser who created a racist version of D&D.
Caring is positioned as the anti-cool, and has been for a long time. I’m not going into a big screed about how being earnest is actually cool, because it’s not. Sometimes it feels more overwrought than coolness. Earnestness can be used to guilt someone into caring about something that doesn’t matter. Not caring can be used to guilt someone into remaining ignorant of the facts for whatever reason, or to make them sound like they’ve lost the battle because they care. So when something like the Deftones x Marc Jacobs thing comes out, I’m going to care enough to have serious opinions on something that you haven’t even thought about in the 72 hours since it was released. I’m going to give a shit about how new music that wouldn’t sell 10 copies in Walmart in 2003 is getting BNM’d on what seems to be the biggest music website. I’m going to care about having to hear about why I should care about The Dare when nothing he does will match the juice that “Girls” had last year. I’m going to care that cool bands got excluded from a big article about shoegaze based on one specific influence. I’m going to care that the influence in question never really repented for what was posted on their social media pages.
The fact of the matter is that I am always going to care because my feelings are something I cherish. I simply love feeling a way! So many of the things I have always cared about have been overlooked or represented poorly in the past, and now that I have a platform of some degree, I’m going to share my thoughts. I’m going to care about music criticism, I’m going to care about music, and I’m going to care about what you should care about, because that’s how we move forward. At the end of the day, criticism and art are in a discussion about progress. When we share our priorities and determine how progress sounds, we move the needle. And if we’re not progressing, then what are we doing?
Tomorrow, I’m giving you an extra post going into ranking the Self Defense Family Discography because I liked Miranda Reinert’s post on the same thing and because I want to champion some of the music that made me who I am, for better or worse! Then I’m off to cover Soupfest in Columbus, OH and Unwound back in NYC on Sunday. Subscribe if you’re up for that.