Internet killed the radio star Voxtrot, which recently released a new album, and the bloggers who used to rave about it are no longer clicking
By Stephen Kiehl
Sun reporter
July 17, 2007
A funny thing happened to Voxtrot on the way to pop music stardom: The Internet moved on.
A year ago, the rock group from Austin, Texas, was the darling of music bloggers everywhere. One site described its music as verging "on the Platonic ideal of indie pop." Another praised its "distinctive, muscular sound," and comparisons to great rockers (Elvis Costello, the Smiths) ensued.
But the experience of Voxtrot this year has proven that what the Internet gives, the Internet can take away. Internet love is fleeting and fickle. Fans must be nurtured and cared for. Or else they can turn on you with all the viciousness of a cliched pop song heartbreaker.
The same bloggers who fawned over Voxtrot last year are no longer so hot to, um, trot. The band's new album, released in May, was met with yawns at best.
MerrySwankster.com dismissed one of the new songs as "safe but completely forgettable" and said, "The quality of Voxtrot's output has been steadily decreasing as well, and at an alarming rate." And the pre-eminent music review site, Pitchfork Media, called the album "awkward" and "frustrating," and rated it a middling 5.9 out of 10.
Call it a mutual breakup. A few months ago, on his own blog, Voxtrot lead singer Ramesh Srivastava let loose a tirade against music bloggers, saying they destroyed artists without thought and blamed the Internet for creating a disposable culture in which art is not valued.
"The internet is a very dark place to be," he wrote. Addressing bloggers, he said, "You may think that you deserve to download an album at no cost, store it in your iPod, pass your particular judgement, and then immediately dispose of it or hype it at will, but you actually don't deserve that."
But Srivastava says the album is not one that you get immediately, and he has urged listeners to spend some time with the music, to get to know it before writing it off. It's unlike Voxtrot's earlier music, released on three short EPs and rich with hooks, melodies and sharp lyrics - in other words, perfect for immediate gratification.
As the band moves in a new direction, Srivastava hopes his young fans will be patient. He's not optimistic. He says when he was a teenager, he would buy albums at a record store and really labor over them because he had spent his money. Nowadays, he says, teenagers have no such investment.
"People in the 18 to 19 range don't understand why you would ever pay for music," Srivastava said in a phone interview with The Sun. "The younger generation has never lived in that world. It's not like they're doing something intentional to degrade music. ... But everybody wants to download and everybody wants to be a music critic."
The Voxtrot singer may be the world's oldest 23-year-old rocker. He rails against online banking, online grocery shopping and Netflix, all of which he believes isolates people. "When you do something really basic like go to the grocery store, you have to have human interaction," he says. "If you live in a world of instant gratification, it's easy to forget the stuff that's really important."
To Srivastava's rant against the Internet, bloggers reply that the Web has led to a great democratization of music, and especially music criticism. It used to be that Rolling Stone's five-star rating system offered the definitive word on an album. No longer does anyone speak with such authority. Instead, thousands of smaller voices can be heard, and music fans reach consensus on their own.
"You don't have to depend on your local record store to promote some obscure band from across the country," said Keith O'Brien, co-editor of Merry Swankster. "The nature of the environment today is that people are finding out about music all the time."
He says people have always been fickle about music; the only difference is that now those opinions are preserved online. His site, which was created in late 2004 and streams whole songs, gets about 8,000 hits a week. It also includes this disclaimer: "Buy the music if you like it. Buy from local music stores, if you can."
An early backer of Voxtrot was Charles Olney, the debate coach at Dartmouth College who writes the blog Heartache with Hard Work in his spare time. "For a month or two last summer," Olney says of Voxtrot, "everyone everywhere was talking about them."
He said the band's new album hasn't generated much excitement because it's not that good. But Olney, 25, also admits to being guilty of one of Srivastava's charges: He doesn't spend as much time with a single album as he used to.
"Now there's so much out there that I feel silly listening to the same thing repeatedly," he said. "There's only a certain amount of time I can listen to music in a day."
Even Srivastava acknowledges that the quick-hit Internet culture he rails against has infected him as well. "I often find that, when presented with so much music," he says, "I tend to have a very disposable attitude towards anything that doesn't set me on fire in the first five seconds, as it is instantly forgotten."
He just hopes people don't treat his music that way. After Voxtrot's initial EPs generated such buzz last year, the band signed a recording contract with Beggars Group USA, which is trying to get the band beyond the blog world.
"I'm completely thankful for every listener we've gained through the Internet, and those are some the best people I've ever met," Srivastava said. "But I would like us to develop the band to where that's not the thing we depend on."
stephen.kiehl@baltsun.com
