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2. NY Times
Snarkiness Preferable to Sincerity
By Kelefah Sanneh
6/23/05
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/arts/music/23sann.html?

One of the funniest and meanest music-criticism blogs publishes no original music criticism at all. It's called The Shins Will Change Your Life, online at indierock4eva.blogspot.com, and it compiles excerpts from breathless or fawning articles about indie-rock albums and musicians.

One writer in the site's crosshairs promises that after hearing the new album by the singer-songwriter Maria Taylor, "you'll soon be wondering how you've lived so long without having these songs in your life." Another declares that the new Art Brut album is "as clear as crystal a piece of untainted genius." And a third notes that "No Wow," by the Kills, is "a brutal record that changes you the same way prison changes a man." No extra commentary is provided, and none is necessary; the site's scathing sarcasm goes entirely unstated.

The Shins Will Change Your Life reads like a delayed reaction to the great snark debate of 2003, begun in the pages of the literary magazine The Believer and continued, for a few months, in the Snarkwatch section of the magazine's Web site, believermag.com. Heidi Julavits, an editor of The Believer, used the term snark to refer to the "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt" that she often noticed in book reviews, including some that have been published in The New York Times Book Review. (The essay is online at believermag.com/issues/march_2003/julavits.php.) And the Snarkwatch site did the opposite of what the Shins site does now: instead of snarkily mocking music critics for their overwritten encomiums, it took book critics to task for "needlessly unpleasant" or unfair reviews.

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