Chris Ott is doing a series of interesting posts related to Retromania over at Shallow Rewards

here's the first

and here's the second


from the latter, Ott asks:

"What is the modern response for subjugated fans now that music distribution and recommendation platforms are profiting from their attention, regardless of the nature of that attention. You might be listening to something and just retching over how bad it is; you would never pay money for it, but because you landed on it, someone’s using you as proof of their popular (read: advertising) footprint. How can anyone delude themselves a referendum based on this kind of binary tallying is valid? This system cedes the same corrupt control over music promotion the industry had in the physical media era to digital publishers and the PR firms they’re coziest with."

Yeah, often thought that as a measure of popular taste and popular desire, a system based around buying records is much more revealing, I think.  For most people, the expense of buying a solid-form music commodity is significant, so it represents either A/ real desire or B/ real curiosity (which could be susceptible to hype, but hype so powerful that it might be considered a form of social reality in itself, indicating serious commitment on the part of the operators of the hype machinery).

The casual, aimlessly drifting, itchy-click-trigger nature of net browsing means that all kinds of very weakly or barely at all cathected attention accrues to things.

In response to this other part of post #2:

"At fourteen, I paid $28 for a copy of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s The Impossible Dream because Robert Smith said he loved Alex Harvey. Not only was I stuck with an expensive and impenetrable piece of glam-era lunacy, I had to confront that my biggest idol had really questionable taste. Granted, I’ve come to appreciate SAHB in my golden years—particularly "Anthem"—but I endured repeated listens of a record I could not understand or stand because I had nothing else to do but work out why it mattered to someone I worshiped and not to me. That will never happen again, not the way we’re set up. You will click away the second a song loses you, and you’ll never learn anything about yourself. I mean it: you will never unlock or awaken new neural paths in your brain if you continue to gravitate toward music that satisfies your expectations. That is Easy Listening"

... Tom Ewing speculates intriguingly:

"My suspicion is that listening (and watching, etc.) is ultimately going to enter the grey realm of willpower: people will have attention regimes, in the way they follow dietary regimes and exercise regimes*, and will have them in public: a proclamation of one’s listening regime will become a kind of social marker. Demonstrating you can pay attention in a world of instant clicks will be a mark of presumed character (and bragging rights) in the same way demonstrating you keep fit in a world of chairs and screens is among white-collar workers now.

"Exactly what form these attention regimes will take I’m not sure. They won’t be quite the same as having rigid or even ‘refined’ tastes. But we’re seeing signs of their rise now - the vogue for #longform posting (mostly regardless of density of ideas or quality) for instance. They will go some way towards solving the problem Chris Ott outlines, assuming you feel it’s a problem. They will also introduce their own neuroses and snobberies, which might be even worse."

Related to the cult of the long-form post, it's interesting that a couple of high profile web-only magazines (in one of the cases, very high profile: indeed synonomous with the internet and making a success in that medium )  (I'm not naming them because I'm suddenly not sure it's been publicly announced yet) are in the process of putting out print-only versions of themselves on a quarterly basis. Presumably a really challenging undertaking, going from digital to analogue -- learning from scratch everything from production to distribution.


It is possible of course to flick desultorily through a printed magazine in the same way one drifts shiftlessly across the infosphere, but something about the bounded, enclosed nature of the magazine seems to encourage getting pulled into a story... and staying with it until the end. And I do mystically believe that printed words somehow imprint themselves better on the brain than electronic type.

follow up to the Interpol 10th Anniversary commemoration post, here's Chris Ott having a "Rational Conversation" with Daily Swarm's Eric Ducker about that absurdly premature reissue.

Also discussed is the fact that Saddle Creek recently reissued Danse Macabre, the 2001 album by The Faint. Which tops the Interpol reish for absurdity and then some. Did anyone even remember that record by the end of the year it came out?

Ott, he don't pull no punches, even though he liked the Faint a bit at the time:

"The situation with Danse Macabre is that No Doubt took them on tour as an opener to buy their “cred”, as it were, in 2002. And so, as far as The Faint goes, that was the biggest thing that ever happened to them, in their entire career. But I suspect those audiences don’t remember it that way, and that they didn’t make a lot of fans off that decision. When Saddle Creek and The Faint look back on ten years ago, perhaps they remember that tour and maybe almost getting mainstream attention. But The Faint weren’t My Chemical Romance, and it was never going to happen. There’s a very distorted memory there, in trying to celebrate Danse Macabre and that moment, which I experienced as a complete failure. "

Of course the real point is that both bands were unoriginal, derivative of an earlier age of music, and of specific bands to boot. And just as you can't have a revival of a revival (well, No Doubt as participants in a late 90s ska-revival revival maybe disproves that, but it's the exception that proves the rule), so too an Anniversary Reissue of a piece of music that wasn't in its own time a Broader Sociocultural Event  (e.g. The Slider 40th Anniversary mega-box) NOR has it subsequently become  Iconic through Steadily Accruing Cult Love, Ahead of Its Time Stature and Influentialness (as with the Velvet Underground and Nico's 45th Anniversary mega-expanded box), it just don't make no sense! It's just a record that came out, to modest impact, that has since never been out of print and is still readily available with unsold copies lingering all over the place, and, as Ott notes, is on iTunes and Spotify and the rest.

So why then? It's just a marketing ploy, says Ott:

"I look at the reissue thing as a way for the classic, outmoded music industry to toot its own horn and say, “We might have a way here to force the gatekeeper websites to promote our catalog.” Advertising is everything; so, in a way, the reissue is a very powerful advertisement for catalog sales. Catalog sales dwarf new music sales in terms of physical media: they overtook them this year, statistically, along every measurable line. But it was already the case for ages: that’s why Billboard had the “Heatseeker” bullshit inside the chart, so your new hip-hop protégé doesn’t notice his record is two positions lower than an old Michael Bolton album."