Upon closer examination

I just want to pull some of these quotes out from the article to which I linked yesterday....

"a sleek round of commerce for the taste-making class"
"not an audience that wears T-shirts of its favorite band or beer"
"the audience is still largely mid-20's, white, upper middle class, educated: prize ponies for advertisers"
"leisure mavens used to exercising choice, and they favor small designers"
"informed and fairly dispassionate consumers sampling a band, checking it off a list, moving on"
"sense of informed caution was everywhere but onstage"

Whew. I'm picturing Ben Ratliff leaving his desk in New York, heading out among the stinking SoCal masses, getting deflated by the wilting desert sun, retreating to his hotel, and getting a little fired up. Wonder if he brought enough water. Wonder if he read the flash mob piece.

Seems like an interesting cat though. More interesting than the other one.

"As an adolescent, reading Rolling Stone and the Voice's music section, I thought that the whole point of being a music critic was that you could live in a cultural cocoon and foist your hipness on the world. It seemed like subsidized record-fetishizing. And I think that for some people, it is precisely that.

But the real challenge of the job--and particularly in writing for a daily--is to keep in motion, always putting more distance between you and what you thought was cool when you were in your early 20s. (You can always admire the old favorites again, but carefully: you must meet them on new ground, as a more developed person.) You have to keep going against assumptions, especially your own. Hipness is a disease, it really is. It freezes thought."