Ben Davis on the fallout from his critical review of Devon Rodriguez's "Underground," and what it says about "parasocial aesthetics."

An issue common to all of our LPET posters is that they think criticism means forbidding people from enjoying media in general. First of all, people are just as allowed to *dislike* things as they are permitted to enjoy them—you can’t trick them into changing their minds with your authoritarian meme posting. Second, I introduce this radical idea: you can still enjoy things while being critical of them—it can even lead to a greater appreciation of societal and historical context, and it can make you usefully wary of the role the shit forces of the world play in the media we consume. It can also help us maintain our political and social integrity while watching or reading or listening to whatever is offered to us. For example, my peacenik, anticapitalist proclivities may make me critical of many mainstream blockbusters, but they also afford me a greater appreciation of movies like ‘Office Space’ and Dolly Parton’s classic ‘9 to 5.’ Finally, though our LPET posters think otherwise, it is indeed possible to *like some things about a piece of media and dislike things about that same piece of media all at once*.

Fantano is not unaware of his detractors, who range from viewers who think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about to fellow critics who think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The things that make him a successful vlogger—his speed, his unpretentious humor, his willingness to review everything regardless of his genre fluency, his refusal to assume a deep understanding of an artist’s politics or feelings—are at odds with traditional print and online criticism. He brought up an interaction with a Pitchfork writer who eagerly introduced himself at South by Southwest. The writer told Fantano he was only joking when he previously wrote on Twitter, “Anthony Fantano makes me want to quit my job.” Every music writer we spoke to is at least aware of Fantano’s work—some of them find it dumb, and at any rate, don’t want to talk about it on the record. It doesn’t bother Fantano too much, but it does bother him. “It obviously took time and took a lot of effort,” he says of his work. “I would at least like to be treated with the same amount of legitimacy. That’s all.”

What I’m talking about here is how addictive the righteousness that comes from that condemnation is, and how we will apparently turn to any source we can find for it — even when that source is not evil or harmful or part of any world we exist in or understand.

Hackathons can spur creativity, can inspire a concerted amount of development effort on a focused project for a short period of time, and can increase attention to a critical issue. For people who feel disaffected and hopeless, a hackathon can rekindle a sense of creativity and possibility. But the tangible products of a hackathon (hardware, software) are rarely of adequate quality for real-world use.

In 2012, attempts to stay ahead of readers' innate desires resulted in a collective throwing up of hands. Think pieces and reviews still existed, but they were accompanied by other attempts to lure readers: Trifles like album titles and track listings treated as news items worthy of their own "stories" (to maximize the possibility of people tripping over their fingers and into a unique view); artists out of the public spotlight for more than six months unearthed as if they were creatures from another dimension; Tweets and other public statements by artists taken out of context and drained of their tone so as to stoke "WTF" headlines; superlative-laden lists not even aimed at expressing an opinion in count-downable form; posts with factual errors seen as hits to institutional credibility and opportunities to wring double the traffic out of one story.

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

“What do you recommend is the best process for getting my music reviewed on Pitchfork? “The easiest way to contact us to email and mail something to me directly, not just to the office. I would also read some reviews, find out which writers might like what you’re doing, and try to contact them directly. Targeting people who seem open to your music is an easy way to help it along. If you do send CDs, I would expect that a one-sheet, while it could be read, is more likely going to be discarded, so if you send a promo CD you should make sure any information that anyone might want– your website, short bio if needed, contact info for booking or PR if you have it, is on the back of the CD case itself.”

Thoughts on the tendency of the internet to empower and break down niches. “You can be a niche, but you’re a public niche, so you can’t expect to be left alone about it, or understood on your own terms. The internet makes niches possible, but it’s also a massive space in which loads of different people communicate — and spaces like that tend to pull everyone toward the middle, developing conventions and enforcing a cultural center. So far, this hasn’t stopped plenty of corners of the internet from getting extremely insular and specialized, but it’s still a form of cultural policing on this front.”