Owlspotting

About a month ago, an editor turned down a story pitch I made. I believed (and continue to believe) that the story was indicative of today’s media landscape and the information consumption patterns of an Internet-addicted generation. Pitching the “Internet video” story to the editor (for the third time) I said:

I’m going to try and convince you once more. The phenomenon is huge. The one-year-old YouTube has 20,000 video uploaded each day and more than 25 million clips are watched daily. Two other giants are iFilm and Google video. This has exploded because of the expansion of broadband and the price drops for digital equipment. Some these videos are clips from TV, ads or movie trailers, but the most (and the most successful) are amateur videos showing people dancing, spoofing pop culture phenomena, singing, and doing other asorted weird stuff. What has made the popularity of Internet video soar even more are video blogs or vblogs. Some of these are actually daily shows of a few minutes with specific topics. For example, I am a huge fan of www.rocketboom.com, a daily video blog that “presents video oddities and animations, report on robotics and other technologies.” Despite being funny and well produced, another reason for the popularity of Internet videos is the Video Ipod which can play all these!

After the story was turned down once more, I decided to stop pushing for it. Wallowing in misery, I wondered whether I should post these ideas on the blog and chronicle their life as they are executed by other publications. I have had dozens of story ideas shoot down in the past couple of years because any number of editors didn’t see anything new or newsworthy in them. Sometimes they were right, sometimes I made an awful pitch, and sometimes they were wrong. I did have some victories). Just last week, Rocketboom was featured in Business Week, Wired and Rolling Stone. Give it a couple of months and it’ll be in the features section of every major metro paper in the United States.

I was right on that one.

And I was right on another story — my personal favorite for more than a year — one I pitched a few times (yes, it got shot down) and one I wrote about a few times when this blog was born. This story was about indie-snobs, the phony elitism of indie rock music and the phenomenon of loving a band not for its music, but for the hipness associated with being one of the lucky few to have heard of it.

In June 2005 I directed my rants at what I saw was the driving engine in this re-organization of the music validation paradigm: Pitchfork. At that time, I had recently seen a Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah show. The band was still unknown and I happen to stumble upon it purely by accident. The next day I was reading some music blogs and realized I had seen the new “IT” band (the new Arcade Fire in the context of the time):

Let me return to my comments about musical condescension and musicitas. A friend who read my post directed me to Pitchfork’s official review of Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah. It was a predictable read that says less about the music than about the indie-rock climate the record is being reviewed in.

“There’s something really refreshing about stumbling across a great band that’s trembling on the cusp without any sort of press campaign or other built-in mythology– you actually get to hear the music with your own ears,” the review says.

So it’s not about the band’s music as much as it is about the band’s status. They are still relatively new, they are not that easy to come by and they haven’t signed with Sub Pop Records (The Shins, Postal Service and now Sleater-Kinney) yet. Yes, Clap Your Hands might make good music, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The review goes on:

“While a lot of bands view the promotional apparatus as a necessary evil, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah prove that it’s still possible for a band to get heard, given enough talent and perseverance, without a PR agency or a label. Indie rock has received a much-needed kick in the pants, and we have the rare chance to decide what a band sounds like of our own accord before any agency cooks up and disseminates an opinion for us. Damn, maybe this is how it’s supposed to work!”

That being said, Pitchfork takes it upon themselves to slap a 9.0/10 on the record and automatically become the PR agency that validates the band. But they won’t assume responsibility for pushing the band, because that would also imply assuming responsibility for reviewing the band’s second record (which will most likely see a larger release) by listening to the music first.

I’m not saying Pitchfork is the hypocritical deux-machina of the indie-rock game, but it’s another blade of grass in a field populated with music snobs, who would take status over music any time.

By then Pitchfork had become a player in deciding what makes it big and what fails in modern music. It was subtle, because it was hard to believe music consumers streamed to the site en-masse. Then, as I began discovering the ever-growing field of MP3 blogs, I understood how the Pitchfork verdict spread so fast and so far.

I attempted to do a story on the phenomenon and actually pitched it as one of 10 story ideas to an editor last fall. Here is what I wrote — something I elaborated on in subsequent conversations:

There is hardly a musical genre out there today that exudes the snobbishness and initiates-only feel of indie-rock. A genre dominated by mellow riffs and heart-on-your-sleeve lyrics offers the most brutal rises and falls in music. Most bands are a one record wonder because of fans who abandon them after a CD gains critical acclaim. For indie-snobs it’s not about the music, but rather about the state of being cool and supporting an unknown project. Once that band gains wide recognition, they are suddenly passé. Not because they sound different (most don’t), but because their initial fans don’t want to share them with the masses.

It didn’t work.

Then a couple months ago I felt slightly vindicated when Bill Wasik, the inventor of the flash mob, wrote about his experiment in a fantastic Harper’s article. Wasik’s experiment with the flash mob was based on his experiences with the hipster world, which provited the ripe climate for Pitchfork’s growth and the formation of the indie rock hierarchy.

The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned–whether Friendster.com, Franz Ferdinand, or Jonathan Safran Foer–it inevitably will be. Once abandoned, it is never taken up again.

This is the phenomenon I wanted to write about and although it’s present throughout the culture, I wanted to keep the spotlight on music. After the Harper’s article I made another attempt to push my story, articulating my position more clearly and probably using more examples than I did the first time around. It didn’t work–and just like the Internet video story, I knew someone would come in and do it.

And someone finally did.

Journalistically, one might say I buried the lead. This post was inspired by an article in today’s Washington Post by J. Freedom du Lac headlined “Giving Indie Acts a Plug, or Pulling It.” A better description of the article is given in the headline on the jump page: “Pitchfork, Making Hay as an Indie Arbiter.” Du Lac has written the story I wanted to do for a year (it’s even illustrated with a photo of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) and he has done it well.

Now that the story has made the front of WP’s Arts section, it will trickle down to the more conservative press outlets (a group that includes most of mainstream media), which was probably waiting for an endorsement by the top dogs to tackle the subject. (As you can probably tell, a version of hipsterdom is alive and kicking in the journalism world.)

Here are a couple samples from du Lac offering a good summary of what the Pitchfork phenomenon has done to the music world: “(…) Pitchfork, the hilariously snarky, oft-elitist, sometimes imprenetrable but entertaining and occasionally even enlightening Internet music magazine, which may or may not be the new (…) Rolling Stone.” And: “Pitchfork has achieved a sort of mythical status, like an indie-rock yogi: Readers climb the digital mountaintop to see what wisdom (and written weirdness) its team of freelance wroters might dispense…”

So, I have lost another story today… I can’t wait to see what story I will lose next.