Bklyn Sounds 8/8/2023 - 8/14/2023 + The Crisis in (Local) Music Media

With lay-offs and discontinued arts sections comes more culture-gutting + Shows: RP Boo / "Public Service" / Arthur Verocai / Wendy Eisenberg & gabby fluke-mogul + Asher White / Prince of Queens +

The conversation around the “state of music journalism” is sad enough that I try to stay away from the social media scraps, lest they further trigger my professional despondence. And the nature of local New York music coverage is such that I literally started writing “Bklyn Sounds” as a response. Yet even by these standards, last week’s events seemed like a critical climax of a sort. 

On the same day that multiple writers for The New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” section — the front-of-magazine pages listing upcoming arts events — confirmed thru social media that their services were being discontinued and the section was getting drastically reduced, also came news that veteran musicker Steve Smith was let-go by WNYC-Gothamist as its arts and culture editor. (Full disclosure: I have been freelance writing/radio-producing stories for WNYC since Steve’s arrival there.) Smith was responsible for, among other things, the weekly events listings. 

Of course, the continued decimation of such “starter” coverage — the place where new, undiscovered and growing artists, or community events, could grab a toe-hold in a mainstream publication — was simply more of the same from local New York media institutions. Many of them are based in the city, but either have their eye on a national and global audiences, or serve a populace devoted to a moneyed arts culture, which is driven by the intersection of corporate interests and establishment spaces.   

The fact that these cuts were made the same week many were falling all over themselves for new angles to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop — the definition of a local New York culture ignored or dismissed at its birth by all but the most intrepid community arts writers-reporters-participants-musickers — made the comedy pointedly darker. If there is a new cultural movement brewing, it seems a local arts journalist won’t learn about it unless it percolates from within their TikTok algorithm.

Which is hardly outside of the realm of possibility. This is not a hate-mail to technology or new modes of information streams. But it does lead me to ask, “What was the last purely social-/streaming-service, app-based experience — one with no human amendment — which positively affected the evolution of the arts?” Not their distribution and consumption, but what the “next” is? And I will 100% grant you choreography and dance — though who these great new dances are profiting is also up for some debate, because most often it’s not the kids inventing them.

Historically, this “next” is a product of communities, not big companies and platforms. And while many such platforms are undoubtedly creating versions of “community” online — both good and bad — it is the act of getting dirty and into the trenches together, and acting on your shared intuition for an extended period of time, that formulates the big ideas which withstand the critical kicking of the creative tires.  

By minimizing coverage of what’s happening outside arts-and-culture’s top 5% — and making the 95% compete for an infinitesimal amount of space — magazines, newspapers and media platforms with historically local associations, are simply practicing a variation of class warfare that New York real estate has been involved in for over a generation. Often the real estate deals and the moneyed cultural institutions are one and the same, whether that be a fancy arts center on the West Side of Manhattan, or a new club in Bushwick. Both are highly performative in the creation of community culture, while continuing to divide capital’s “winners” from “losers.”

It is a redefinition of who this city is by and who it’s for. Not because the city hasn’t always been driven by money (it has), but because the relationship between money, media and the arts has been changed — by data, by the aggrandizing attraction of global reach, and of course by their older sibling, the fiscal bottom line. That relationship was once a measured dance, which involved critics and reporters discovering new artists, works and ideas, audiences, then following their climb or documenting their fall. This would be accompanied by bigger bookings, or support from arts-institutions with an ear to the streets, and result in both a fuller story of culture’s evolution, and an ecosystemic support of culture as a whole. (This is where I have to #RIPVillageVoice, and arts-weeklies so so hard, as they were culture’s media foot-soldiers and talent developers.) Nowadays entire music-cultural swings can take place in the city, and the biggest piece of press that will come out of one will be in the form of an obituary. This is not how culture dies — culture never really dies — but this is how its reach and influence gets artificially curtailed.

It would be foolish to claim that The New Yorker or WNYC-Gothamist or The New York Times or New York Magazine-Vulture will never again recognize the city’s cultural movement in real time. New York’s culture is just too strong — and the arts-institutional braintrust will be given more and more opportunities to catch the zeitgeist produced here in Gotham all-too regularly. And as another “music magazines suck” conversation that took place last week pointed out, “when’s the last time you found out about your new fav DJ via reading a magazine ?” But their absconding requires more reaction than just scraps amongst us musicking peasants. Supporting a few more lightly influential independent publications and Substacks is great, but it has to be only a start. Because this is not simply about musicians/artists and writers/producers getting abandoned for data-justifying business reasons, it’s about the desertion of cultural potentialities. And there’s no rehiring those.

This Week’s Shows: