A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: An Open Letter to YouTube's Two College Students

 

I found your different reaction to this somewhat funky Grand Funk Railroad rocker "We're an American Band", which you liked, compared to the more traditional bluesy Grand Funk song "Inside Looking Out", which you were lukewarm about, interesting, fascinating, and quite revealing. It was almost as though you were talking about a different band in these two "reaction" videos made, no doubt, for money and profit. Commodify everything seems to be the mantra of the brave new digital age.

I have a lot of problems with your "approach' to popular music, one grounded, I think, ultimately in fetishisation and one which recapitulates traditional ahistorical fetishisations. I suspect I have particular problems with your reactions given, first that you are clearly bright, if a bit too pissed sometimes, and secondly because you claim to be college students though I really don't see what relevance that phrase has to do with any of your musical "criticism" on YouTube. Valid criticism, it seems to me, must do several things and, by and large, yours only kind of and fitfully does this. First, it must be grounded in empirical exegesis, in an analysis of text as it is and its contexts. Second, it can, if it must, be interpretive. One can interpret a book, film, television show, or a piece of music either more or less historically, socially, culturally, and reflexively. Finally, it can, if it wants to be, homiletic, it can preach about the merits or demerits of the music and the musicians who make a song. My problem with your approach is that the last, the homiletical level, seems to determine the hermeneutic and empirical levels, a kind of anti-science approach.

Exegetically, of course, one has to admit that, in this instance, GFR is, instrumentally, more than competent as were most rock bands of the era. Pop performers were and are a different beast. Secondly, interpretively one has to delineate the genre of music you are listening to, which you kind of did, if somewhat ahistorically. Speaking of history, one has to, of course, put music in historical context. If you want to, for example, compare GFR to Rush the only way you can do this validly (scholarly and intellectually speaking) is to compare this GFR song from the early 70s to a song from Rush's first album, which is late 70s, if memory serves. Comparing 70s GFR to 80s and 90s Rush is a problem that should be obvious to college students (or perhaps not) not only musically but in terms of technology, though ultimately that doesn't matter since one either likes (jouissance) a ditty and a band or not. By the way, you also have to compare this GFR song to others to get a sense of the bad and the genres they mine.

What one values and likes, of course, as empirical evidence makes clear, is, ultimately, in the socialised eyes of the beholder. If forced to choose this GFR song or a Zeppelin song, I would, at present go for the GFR "Inside Looking Out", with the understanding that I (subjective) find the blues way too repetitive and prefer the repetitiveness of pop to the formulaic simplicty of the blues. I find the blues in general, akin, in other words, to one of those Hollywood film ultra fantasy based bullshite blockbusters that dominate the corporate and propagandistic film world today today even though I appreciate what ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughn (fellow Texans) did when they transformed and broadened the blues. Personally, I prefer, and I still do, the baroqueness of psychedelia and prog far to the blues of Led Zep, though I do like a few songs of theirs, those that are, not surprisingly, more proggy and folky (bog bless Sandy Denny). I find both of these musical forms much more interesting than the much less complex blues. But then I was more a Beatles guy, who were less bluesy than their contemporaries such as the Stones and the Animals and later proggy and folky Tull compared to their early bluesy stuff. A little bit of reflexivity is always worth thinking about when one is peddling one's critical wares.

It is clear to me that much of what passes for "criticism", a term I use loosely since your prefered form of criticism is inherently problematic and  way to ahistorical, theoretically simplistic, and methodologically problematic. It is essentially just about feelings and nothing more than feelings. Why, of course, one should give a fuck about what Lester Bangs or Robert Cristgau says about music--I never did--is a question worth asking and pondering given that such "criticism" is little more than ain't I cool pr bullshite. Film criticism of the era--I am thinking of Pauline Kael--is a similar form of "criticism", a "criticism" that is ultimately homiletical, that is ultimately of the I like it so it must be good because I am so fucking cool type of "criticism", a type of "criticism", of course, founded on mass fetishisation or the I am a god impulse so common among humans particularly in the Western world. I have always liked what I like and I have never given a fuck about what other or don't like because ultimately beauty is, as I recognised years ago, ultimately in the eye of the beholder and I have never given in to that corrosion of conformity, peer pressure. Hopefully, I am also reflexive enough to think about why I like what I like and the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces that have helped construct why I like what I like.