Crawdaddy! bills itself as the premier magazine for rock music criticism. Makes sense, given that Rolling Stone is more preoccupied with taking photos of a womanizing Kid Rock than it is with talking about, say, the political ramifications (or, sadly, the lack thereof) of Neil Young's Living With War record.
What's more, Rolling Stone essentially sleeps with the enemy, where "the enemy" translates roughly to "the recording industry". Crawdaddy! does nothing of the sort, and leading the pack is the brilliant Max Mobley and his biweekly column called "Riot Gear!". You might have seen on Facebook that I posted a link to one of his articles, this one (profanity warning!) on the drawbacks to MP3s and even CDs in comparison to analogue media like vinyl, and called "There Once Was A Note":
So then you take this cold and perfect [digital recording], and you strip away things that were there in the performance and the production so you can make it smaller—because if you make it smaller you can carry more of them with you. [...] It’s the sonic equivalent to pizza rolls. It tastes a bit like a real pie and has some of the same ingredients, but nobody’s fooled—unless pizza rolls are all you know, ya poor bastard. And so I pity the mp3 generation every bit as much as I envy them. Working in music production and pro audio, I will probably grow angry with them, too. Because what am I going to do with this expensive gear designed to provide subtle nuances that first will be captured coldly, then stripped out entirely so the listener can hear the tune on a bus?
Good stuff. But there's too much else here to leave unmentioned, like his post from Oct. 24th about the struggle of buying CDs under the noses of the record company "weasels":
I stopped downloading when my favorite sites went away or started charging actual money. And downloading never stopped me from buying CDs. In fact, I bought more because I got to test drive the band. I certainly can’t leave the decision of who to buy up to the weasels. They like crap! [...] But like my contemporaries, and many consumers, I dig the packaging. I want to hold the disc and read the booklet, check out the album, not just a file of a single. I still believe an album has a beginning, middle, and an end.
And an article about the history of making music more portable, and the sacrifices necessary:
Cassettes also gave birth to the mix tape. Take your favorite vinyl, your brand new cassette deck, a blank tape, a sixer of beer, and a broken heart, and you could create an epic sonic drama that defined who you were and why your ex-girlfriend should come back. In the ‘70s, mix tapes probably saved more relationships than Dr. Joyce Brothers, Pauline Reage, and Phil Donahue combined. Now it’s as though the music market is one big mix tape. Hello MP3, goodbye album. Hello quantization errors, goodbye rumble, wow and flutter. Hello digital, goodbye vinyl, goodbye tape, goodbye rock star. At least vinyl lives on as a bastardized musical instrument, which I find very rock ‘n’ roll since rock music is art’s most infamous bastard child.
Anyways. All his stuff rocks. If you, like me, won't settle for the current state of music -- where the artistic experience equates all too often to listening to an iTunes track at 128Mbps, without any sense of individuality -- then you should check out his stuff. The music industry is in turmoil, and neither side seems to be pursuing an environment that allows creativity to flourish. Thus, the music industry needs more people like Max Mobley.
