25 shameless examples of click-bait trolling from Village Voice Media’s music sections

September 17, 2012 By

I have come here not to praise the Village Voice, but to bury it.

One of the sadder things to watch in recent years is the deterioration of the Village Voice. The celebrated alt-weekly has a legendary history, since its Norman Mailer co-founded the paper in 1955. It has published some of the best cultural criticism since then.

Sadly, those days are long, long gone. The paper was acquired by New Times in 2005, and since then, there seems to have been one high profile layoff after another. As former VV writer Rosie Gray wrote in BuzzFeed last month, “We didn’t think they cared one bit about what happened at their flagship paper, and we had a sinking feeling that they’d be willing to hurt the Voice instead of shuttering or selling other papers in the chain.”

Last Friday, the Voice laid off Maura Johnston, the music editor (and my very favorite music writer these days). As David Carr of the New York Times wrote, “[S]he also embodied The Voice’s tradition of thoughtful cultural criticism, and resisted the kinds of light, easily consumable items, like Top 10 lists and photo compilations, that tend to draw the most traffic online.”

That’s the direction, sadly, the Village Voice and other papers owned by Village Voice Media are choosing to go. On Johnston’s last day, Friday, the Voice posted on their music blog a racist (and sexist: Tina Turner is called “Ike’s ex”) listicle from the Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely that was a week old. Sadly, you’re more likely to see easily-digestible lists, factually inaccurate information that could be corrected with minimal research (like the “Cop Killer” post below, which remains uncorrected) and obvious trolling from VVM newspapers than intelligent coverage. For example, I doubt you could find people on the payroll of Starbucks who will tell you with a straight face that they believe it is the finest record store in Seattle, yet here we are. I even clicked on a collection of press photos from Sub Pop more than twenty-five times, just to see if Sleater-Kinney was included in a “25 Great Bands on Sub Pop” photo collection (they weren’t, but Hot Hot Heat was).

I have compiled a list of 25 posts that are so transparently obvious that they are designed only to generate page views, angry comments and nothing more. You won’t find any thoughtful analysis below. This is also only a representative sample, though I’ve tried to include most of the obvious examples (the instrumental hip hop one, the hipster band one, the Ryan Adams “review,” etc…). I even managed to link to each post (or the full text when the piece that never should have been published was taken down), because, really, that’s all they want.*

Someone who works for Seattle Weekly might tell you that they review every local album every month in their Reverb magazine, and that they have posted thoughtful articles, for example, on DJ Marco Collins and a detailed piece on why radio playlists are becoming less fluid, and that’s true. The Seattle Weekly’s music section isn’t completely useless (and I still read it daily to see what other blogs are commenting on, and Eric Grandy is easily one of the best music critics in this city), but to pretend that VVM newspapers are continuing to publish excellent cultural criticism without succumbing to pageview trolling is an exercise in denial.

* VVM newspapers changed to a new commenting system on July 19, and comments before that were lost. That is why some posts above say “comments unknown.” I know how to check comment counts.

Chris (941 Posts)

Chris Burlingame is the editor of Another Rainy Saturday.


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Comments

  1. josh says:
    September 17, 2012 at 11:50 am

    meaningful commentary on the sad state of music editing or stealthiest clickbait traffic-generating ploy of all time?