Nightlife / The Dream of Your Own Paparazzi
PGWP’s tumblr post brought my attention to some commentary about Brooklyn Vegan that I found amusing.
Take the recap of June 20’s Gogol Bordello show, the photos of which include several crowd members having a nice rest — they just so happen to have a little crack showing. But it was yesterday’s recap of Feist’s Prospect Park show that really started to edge into creepiness, with a few long-range shots of random women just hanging out.
One of the BV posts in question here.
I am always really happy when other people are frank about how useless a lot of the so-called ‘important’ music bloggers are, and PGWP is consistently on-point in this department. Brooklyn Vegan, though almost universally accepted as an indie-rock household name, is little more than a counter-culture tv guide for hipsters, and sometimes a gossip rag. Tour dates, photos from whatever happened the previous night, and one-sheet recitations are par for the course. Now, as nymag.com points out, it’s borderline voyeuristic ploy aimed at attracting the self-obsessed.
Personally, I’m not sure I have a problem with seeing a girl’s ass crack as part of a festival’s photo “coverage”. Sure, it’s invasive and creepy, but it’s not the worst offense. What really troubles me is how easily people (both deeply immersed and only tangentially concerned) in the music community get swept up in the exact sort of shallow and meaningless sidebars that we laugh at others for looking at. It’s alright to look at “nightlife photography”, bizarro scenesters posing with a can of Sparks and ironic sunglasses, but if our mother picks up an Enquirer, we very quickly look down our nose. Personally, I don’t really see a difference.
It’s disheartening, but not really surprising. Especially considering how most so-called music blogs are barely coherent attempts at regurgitating an email from a press agency or MySpace bulletin. Hardly anyone is taking the time to actually critique or discuss new music, even fewer are doing so in any sort of open forum that enables a community’s involvement in their own culture. If the web truly is the new frontier of the ’scene’, it must strive to be more than this, a collection of URLs vomiting the same useless information, the same shitty cameraphone iterations, the exact vapid utterances that drove us all away from mainstream music in the first place. I gave up on music blogs a long time ago, but there is little more gratifying on the web than the occasional thoughtful listener who still discusses what they hear, has albums not mp3s, and goes to shows because they still have some interest in supporting a community, not being immortalized (by their own design or someone else’s) as “here” — when they are clearly so detached from it, we have a hard time identifying what “here” even means to them (this link to a lengthy piece by Eric Harvey is well worth your time, and discusses this last point of mine much better than I do in this moment).
So no, I don’t feel sorry for ass crack girl on Brooklyn Vegan. If I knew her and she felt imposed upon, I’d sympathize, but the real aberration here is the implication of something more sinister, more disappointing. It’s not Brooklyn Vegan’s fault, though. This is, apparently, the kind of thing thousands of people want to read and look at each day. The faux ironic indie dance club crowd has already cornered the market of nobody celebrity (for more on this with a firmly planted tongue in cheek, I recommend Hipster Runoff), and Pitchfork was posting photos of unknown attendees last year as well (scroll down for random “hottie” indie chicks captured forever in the annals of good taste), so BV is hardly revolutionizing anything in the community, they’re just cementing their uselessness.
I certainly understand that BV’s issue does veer a little left of center in terms of normal “here’s some folks in the crowd enjoying the show” type concert photography, of which there is plenty, and plenty that’s good. I get it: someone is covering an event and uses the zoom to hone in on some cute girls. It’s a smidge creepy, sure, but mostly it’s just obnoxious. After all — what the fuck do they have to do with anything, anyway? Who gives a fuck? People were there, big whoop. If I’m the kind of person who really gets some sort of valuable experience looking at concert photography, I’m hugely pissed that my second hand experience is slighted because we have to “capture a mood” or “set the scene” with “real” confirmations of “good looking” people who actually attended something.
I’ve rambled about this aimlessly for much longer than I thought I would, but I suppose it touches on a couple things that really irk me in general, whether or not this particular instance existed. Again, I’m glad I know where to look for some more thoughtful discussion.
And yeah I know. Relax, what’s the big deal, who cares, it’s just the internet.
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