Let’s say I write a favorable review of Iris DeMent, A rave, if you like. I post it to her facebook Wall and twitter account. One of her management repost it. Her fan base repost it. Lots of people come to rock nyc, and my base readership increases.
Now let’s say I do what I did in the case of Iris, let’s say I write a closely detailed rave which includes a pan of sorts for the new album: “it is strange to hear such sad strange and strong words in a musical setting, and it doesn’t entirely work on the album. The actual songs are missing Iris’ usual tunefulness, not always but often enough for the songs to miss your memory box, they sound wonderful and they sound real but they don’t sound like great songs .”
So what happens then? An Ok nothing special review like the No Depression one gets embraced, the artless Boston Globe interview gets embraced, but rock nyc’s sincere attempt to get to the root of the album is completely ignored.
Why bother working for hours and hours on the damn thing when I know no one will read it? Nothing would’ve been easier than to remove my caveats from the story and leave it as unstilted praise but then why bother working so hard in the first place, right?
That is the problem precisely: with me it is such a small scale my feeling is one of fuck em, but the truth is nobody anywhere is helped through lying. The only thing that matters is the truth, that’s all you’ve got and there is nothing else but truth. Critics like me are (for the most part) forgotten before they’re even read so all is left is to say, those other guys are lazy and don’t know what they are talking and this is the absolute truth.
But then even less than no one reads you.
Here ends my whining wretch impression