Caveat: this is basically a trend piece about trend pieces. Then, briefly, a think piece about think pieces.
Fairly recently, Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward’s band She & Him, released an album on cassette. So did MGMT. And British Sea Power, who I had to look up.
Remember cassettes? Those deck-of-cards-sized plastic rectangles filled with magnetic tape that made the music recorded to it sound worse every time you heard it? Remember how the ribbon used to get all frigged up and back out of the cartridge itself and you’d have to roll it back in with the tip of a pencil? You probably feel all warm-fuzzy just thinking about it. Or slightly annoyed.
Cassettes were terrible. They were convenient, sure. They were smaller than LPs and didn’t make that weird clunk sound like 8-tracks. And – like VHS – cassettes were maybe even instrumental for a minute in their dissemination of music in certain subcultures, via tape trading, mixtapes, etc. But for the most part, tapes were a weigh station en route to CDs, an evolutionary stopgap. I tried to listen to a Master Of Reality cassette the other day and it took like nine minutes to find the song I wanted to hear. I had to flip the thing over and then imagine the inverse of the album’s music in my mind and sort of haphazardly fast-forward and rewind until I go to more-or-less the right place. Useless.
That bands are issuing music on tape seems like a half-funny/half-sad joke. Now that iTunes has killed the cassette, the CD and the long-player record – despite a wash of other Record Store Day-adjacent pieces suggesting that vinyl is “back in the groove” because of a modest increase in sales – putting music on tapes seems like a paean for the whole culture of artifacts. Like, “Here’s a tape! Use it to hold down some loose papers, then use the accompanying download code to get MP3s of the music, that you may actually listen to it.” Like a compressed RAR folder or a USB key, it’s still essentially an MP3 delivery device.
None of this dissuaded The Independent from proclaiming, in typical boil-in-bag think piece fashion, that “Cassettes are back!” This article was published last Friday, April 26. Of the year 2013. The recent issuing of several pieces of music on cassette – as well as a subculture, not at all new, that releases experimental and indie music on tape – led the paper’s Elisa Bray to declare the medium revived, just like vinyl before it.
Short of a “cassettes are dead, long live cassettes” lead, the piece indulged the idlest form of contemporary critical writing: locate two or three things that are ostensibly the same, imaginarily project the exponential growth of that sameness, call that made-up growth of that presumed sameness a “trend,” interview 1.5 people and, bingo-bango, trend piece.
It’s pretty easy to get looped into this kind of writing. Just this weekend, after realizing that Rob Zombie and Kevin Smith are both developing hockey movies and that Mike Dowse’s Goon was also a hockey movie and, hey, that’s like three hockey movies, I batted around the idea of developing a trend piece-style article on the return of the hockey movie, like a bored kitten swatting at a loose knot of grey matter yarn.
But instead of hunkering into the intellectual rigour of “Why all the hockey movies?” and “Why all the seemingly violent hockey movies?” and “Our culture sure is violent, eh?” I did the more appropriate and responsible thing and ate a whole sleeve of off-brand Fig Newtons and fell asleep on the couch. The world doesn’t need another half-thinky trend piece, easy as they are to purvey.
And seriously, it’s really, really easy.
Anyone lamenting the thinning job market for humanities B.A.s should look at the uptick in published pseudo-criticism, which rolls along the loose intellectual contours of undergrad-level academic essay writing without being beholden to stuff like thorough citation or originality, if they want to see where all the accumulated capital of English and Philosophy and Cultural and Film Studies and Sociology majors is being reinvested. Writers like Bray – and myself, who once sold an essay about baldness in Breaking Bad, mostly reverse-engineered from an idea for a headline – have made stuff like this something of a stock-and-trade precisely because it doesn’t actually require that much work.
Imagine Garfield lazing on a countertop, eyes half-closed, visualizing a dish of lasagna in a thought bubble and you’re pretty much imagining how hard it is for anyone whose ever written a trend piece to imagine writing a trend piece. Throw in some jargon from the post-Freudian/Frankfurt/whatever school of thought, trickling down from the margins of a B-grade term paper, and you’ve got the trend piece’s slightly more sophisticated cousin: the think piece. (So, imagine Garfield imagining the idea of a dish of lasagna.)
This isn’t to say that trend pieces or think pieces are wrongheaded or shouldn’t be done. Not necessarily, anyway.
Sometimes they’re really clever. And other times they’re just fun to read, especially when their own intellectual curves swing and jut and curlicue in compelling ways which, while maybe not Important, are still satisfying as hermetic intellectual exercises in opinion formation – the distracting journalistic equivalent of Sudoku or Luminosity. Other times, this whole trend yields seemingly nothing but virtual reams of useless half-thought essays on What It Is That Don Draper Means, Really.
As a default journalistic mode, this sort of writing amounts to a shortcut to criticism. Reportage becomes trend-spotting. Actually thinking becomes reviewing a cable TV episode in a thousand words and passing off over-exaggerated chin stroking as consideration.
Maybe in a hundred years, with some diligence and a little luck, all this stuff will have long evaporated from public memory, broad sections of Thought Catalog salted so that no naval-gazing non-crit can ever find purchase again, the whole undercooked trend piece/think piece thing as disco-dead as goddamn cassette tapes.
