is music criticism a kind of fascism?

i think it can be.

and like most systems (viewed in the sense of constructs, that's what it is), the bigger it gets, the more easily corruptible it becomes. a tangled mass of expectations imposed by reader and writer and advertisers and a perception of the world at large create the tone, which takes on the function of a master volume knob; a swirl of images and icons, sometimes conflated, sometimes subverted, but almost always whose meaning becomes this entrenched, static thing; the filtering process -- what gets covered and what doesn't?.

what this all amounts to is a framework, a rosetta stone by which a user interprets content. think about what it would be like to read a pitchfork review in rolling stone, and vice versa.

and yet, even on a smaller scale, almost all these things still hold true, right down to a solitary music blogger such as myself.

i took several journalism classes in college that grappled with objectivity, both as a concept and as something that could potentially be measured in practice (at least, in that latter regard, as something that could be judged in so far as it was blatantly violated).

ultimately, the conclusions we arrived at were pretty clearly visible from the outset: objectivity is a practical impossibilty.

the best we can do in the pursuit of perfection is exactly that: the best we can do. with that in mind, i'll do my best to establish context wherever i think it's helpful or illuminating to what i have to say here, all while doing my best to abstain from a cute or indulgent take on gonzo journalism.

i encourage discussion and disagreement here, because in the end, one person's opinion is one person's love, and this project would be best restricted to a diary if that's all that came through.

most of all, i hope that you find this as worthwhile as i think it will prove to be for me.