So there was a big kinda summit/roundtable thing last night at Columbia Journalism School on the topic of Pop Music Criticism and Cred in the Internet Age. Event was chaired by the Enviable Wizard/Purple-Hatted One Himself, Sasha Frere-Jones (alright, it’s kind of ironic that this computer isn’t allowing me all blog-worthy techno-luxuries at the moment, but www.sashafrerejones.com, the New Yorker). Panel: an eloquent but admittedly out of place Tunde Adibempe (from TV on the Radio), a nervous/earnest Amy Phillips (freelancer on web/print and a blogger), Michael Azerrad (emusic.com, author of Our Band Could Be Your Life), a probably too cool Knox Robinson (editor-in-chief of the Fader), Brandon Wall (editor-in-chief of Prefix mag online), and Anthony DeCurtis (Rolling Stone, editor/founder of Tracks Magazine) playing the Really Likeable Old Guard.

So anyway, the talk could’ve been huge, right? Well, it touched on some really important topics, and some really well-articulated insights came out, but ultimately it was too shallow and derailed too often to get really focused. Admittedly, it seemed impossible that it would’ve gone otherwise, what with about 75 minutes to talk about a lot of Important Stuff. Azerrad seemed weirdly (but importantly) preoccupied with the idea of blogs as a way to create social networks in a networking sense (i.e. some well-meaning brown nosing), which hadn’t really occurred to me (for which I subsequently and privately acknowledged a little shame for not bothing to keep my own blog). SFJ at one point talked about how the music criticism/journalism thing runs on a bunch of clocks now (with the immediacy of blogs and online ‘publishing’), whereas in the past, the idea of primacy or discovery didn’t have quite the same pants-splitting hysteria surrounding it. Also confirmed: good writing is good writing; a well-written piece on Houston hip-hop one year after everyone got off on the stuff on ILM is still worthwhile. So obvious- but for me, this was the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT point he could’ve made, and again, I felt a little weak for occasionally subscribing to this whole “we ought to cover this before (the dreaded and obscure) they do.”

Some really good questions, and some incredibly dumb ones; thank you very much to the young man that decided this was the appropriate forum to bring up a) the utter “awesomeness” of SFJ’s Bright Eyes/Dylan comparison and b) Eminem’s political incorrectness and the reprehensible journalistic pussyfooting by the Rolling Stone writer who didn’t take a stand against it in the interview. There was some pretty off-putting bandying of really important topics and some good, old-fashioned bitterness between panelists. Some people just don’t see eye to eye, but some people both can neither see eye to eye nor get over it for the sake of having a productive discussion, go figure. In all, nothing resolved, some things illuminated, and a pretty good plate of General Tso’s at the place across the street afterwards.