If, as pre­dicted, the Com­pact Disc, dies soon, this essay might be ren­dered meaningless.

Until then, though, here is a belated response to an arti­cle I read in the January/February 2011 edi­tion of B.C. Musician.

B.C. Musi­cian is based in the Okana­gan and has been pub­lish­ing about eight years. Most of the con­trib­u­tors are musi­cians, who share their expe­ri­ences and pass on advice. Fre­quently, each new issue is based on a theme, such as the list­ing of sum­mer out­door fes­ti­vals. As the Okana­gan Val­ley isn’t a hive of music indus­try  and B.C.based music pub­li­ca­tions sel­dom last more than two years, the mag deserves credit just for sur­viv­ing. With all the chal­lenges from the Inter­net fac­ing any pub­li­ca­tion, this must be tough.

The arti­cle in ques­tion was “Cri­tiquing The Hype Machine”  by Bar­bara Brued­er­lin,  which exam­ines reviews and review­ers. It seemed naive, made a few faulty assump­tions, and some of the opin­ions she solicited from var­i­ous musi­cians indi­cated she/they didn’t know any­thing about the media. Not that Brued­er­lin et al can be blamed. The media has wrapped itself in a mys­tique and uses it as protection.

When I was through the arti­cle, my first ques­tion was, Why not ask a reviewer?  Nowhere is any­body who reviews records asked about the records they review or what con­sid­er­a­tions go into choos­ing what records will get reviewed. I review records and am puz­zled myself.

Reviews don’t sell records, at least not directly. Any­body can hear any record and make up their mind them­selves. What a review serves to do now, though, is to cre­ate an aware­ness that the record exists. So much music is released in a year that even a brief recog­ni­tion of the record’s exis­tence is impor­tant. A well-written review, no mat­ter how short, can pique curios­ity, and, if the con­tent is accu­rate, help both the buyer and the maker.

The Province prints hard copy reviews on Tues­day under the name Ultra­sound. When Ultra­sound started, it was a full page and included one main review, six mid-sized reviews (called midis) and six brief reviews (minis). Now it’s a half page of six midis, about 150 words in length each. That’s not a lot. With some records, putting an album in con­text can be 150 words. With oth­ers, the record might be so ordi­nary that 150 words is a stretch.

In the past cou­ple of years, reviews have gone online. That’s offered some relief as in the­ory all reviews are printed, not just six, and they can be more than 150 words. The lat­est wrin­kle is that the records cho­sen for the hard copy have tended to have been plucked from the wire ser­vice, not writ­ten by Stu, John nor I. I’m spec­u­lat­ing that these reviews are more timely. Tues­day is the offi­cial release day of most records released by the major labels, Uni­ver­sal, Warn­ers, Capitol/EMI and Sony/RCA.

So, records arrive the week­end before release, are reviewed imme­di­ately and The Province runs them Tues­day. There is some­thing wrong with this. In the inter­est of being timely, for what is a news­pa­per if not timely, major releases might be reviewed based on a first impres­sion.  First impres­sions can be wrong, and often a record reveals itself over a period of time. What sounded great doesn’t hold up on repeated lis­ten­ing. Con­versely,  what at first seemed unre­mark­able, shows more sub­tle strength. Unfor­tu­nately, even a record that was released the week before is regarded as old news. The clas­sic exam­ple is The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street. It was regarded as a sprawl­ing, sloppy, badly pro­duced record when released forty years ago, now it’s fre­quently cited as The Stones’ mas­ter­piece. News­pa­pers don’t have forty years to delib­er­ate. The empha­sis is on the now.  It might be fun to revisit such albums to see how they’ve weath­ered, though.

Another ques­tion is, what records to review?  The pri­or­ity is usu­ally given to major new releases. Thus, if Madonna has a new record, it’ll be reviewed and prob­a­bly be hard copy. Madonna doesn’t need another review as she prob­a­bly has three thou­sand of them already and her fans are going to buy her new record any­way,  but The Province has to pub­lish a review. It wouldn’t be doing its job, oth­er­wise. Madonna, then, has one of the six midis avail­able. That leaves five spaces and these might go to Kanye West or Tay­lor Swift or Lady Gaga  or any other famil­iar name. There might be one space left for a locally made inde­pen­dent album, but which one? I usu­ally review local indies and get approx­i­mately 250–300 a year, which is a small frac­tion of what’s out there. I might lis­ten to all of them, but there is no way to print a review of every record and some of them are a strug­gle to review. It’s not that these are badly made records, as every­one seems to know what a record  should sound like, but a lot of them go nowhere and are unremarkable.

Hav­ing decided what records to review, there are a few other con­sid­er­a­tions. Some time ago, I con­cluded that neg­a­tive reviews serve no pur­pose. They’re fun to write. They’re an oppor­tu­nity to show some teeth, flash the claws and pos­si­bly invest a lit­tle snide wit.  I’ve even writ­ten one word reviews, funny, I hope, but nasty. How­ever, if you’ve only got six spaces per week, it’s more pro­duc­tive to tell read­ers about  good records that they should hear. A neg­a­tive review means one less slot for records that are com­mend­able. Besides, one word reviews leave a huge hole that looks bad on a news­pa­per page.

Review­ing a local indie requires fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion. If Madonna’s newie isn’t good, and the review says as much, there is an ele­ment of anonymity. The three thou­sandth review prob­a­bly means noth­ing to her and won’t deter the fans. The local indie record review is more per­sonal.  I strive to find some­thing pos­i­tive to say and hope the crit­i­cism is con­struc­tive. The act actu­ally can get some­thing out of this that it can use, pos­si­bly when it comes to mak­ing the next record. The local is like a neigh­bour and pos­si­bly a pos­i­tive review is the start of a blos­som­ing rela­tion­ship. The local has to live with a review, good or bad, because friends will com­ment on it and word of mouth will get around. Good words, rather than bad.