Wading in the Velvet Sea

I used to write a lot more about music than I do now, as two of you may have noticed. I used to posit myself something of a scholar, a critic, someone with something intelligent to say about the art that you as a reader owe it to yourself to read, contemplate, and ultimately regard my genius as Gospel. Well, feel free to continue to do that, but it just isn’t the case.

It’s taken the writing of music to see just how, well, easy it is to write about something you really like and sound fairly authoritative on it. All it takes is a decent knowledge of the genre, an opinion, and away you go. The proliferation of weblogs has both increased and watered down music journalism, so near as I can tell. On the pro side, it’s great that the hegemony of Rolling Stone, Spin, Village Voice, etc, is largely broken down by the democracy of weblogs and personal websites. Power to the People, yo.

On the flip side, there are so many websites as to make the whole genre of music criticism either impossible to wade through or simply white noise---how many opinions about the White Stripes can you really read at the end of the day? Even worse, poorly written music criticism makes my eyes bleed. As a client once commented in the margins of a book we were writing for them, ‘That is poorly wrote.’

Note that I’m talking about writing style, not opinion. As Rob says in ‘High Fidelity’, ‘How can it be bullshit to state a preference?’ It’s not. But the democracy of the internet means it’s basically a community college, not an Ivy League institution, for whatever type of criticism you may be looking for.

Now, I’m a music fan, not a critic. Yes, I criticize music (I’m looking at you, J. Lo and Ms. Love Hewitt) but I am not a ‘critic’. ‘Critic’ as a title bugs me, not only for the connotation that some people have a better opinion than others on music. It also implies a unidirectional attitude and approach to the discussion of music. The term ‘critic’ is usually applied to someone who works for a ‘reputable’ magazine, TV station, or whatever medium you can think of. Look, I’m quotation happy. There is a legitimacy given by this title, at least an implied one. These people, know what they are talking about. We should value their opinion.

I would argue we should value their opinion in as much as you the reader deem it valuable. Given how many 15-million selling CDs are completely destroyed by critics should prove how worthless they can be. And this is where Justin, I think, actually makes a good point. Fundamentally, it’s pretty simple. You like a song because, well, you like a song. In the world of ‘critics’, stuff like teen pop has no place, because they are too busy wishing Elvis Costello was still with The Attractions, or subscribe to the theory that good popular music (as opposed to pop music) died along with Lennon. There’s something fundamentally unhip and anti-populist about a lot of music criticism that just irks me. So, with that in mind, I reiterate---I am a music fan.

This is my web-site. I’m a 27-year old guy in Cambridge, MA. I own about 700 CDs and have 1,000 MP3s on my computer. I cannot sing three notes consecutively in key. I can find a C on a piano but that’s the extent of my musical ability. I never heard the Clash on the radio, I wasn’t alive when some of my favorite albums were produced, and I really can’t understand in my bones why Elvis Presley represented a revolution in American culture.

I am telling you all of this because I want to be clear where I am coming from when I talk about music. I like a particular band, or song, on a fundamental level because, well, I do. It’s as simple as that. I can given specifics when pressed, why I love the lyricism of Norah Jones, the improvisational genius of Phish, or the sheer sonic inventiveness of Missy Elliot. But it all boils down to: ‘I like it.’ Period.

There’s nothing wrong with simply liking something because you do, if you’re a music fan. If you’re a critic, though, this is a severe no-no. It’s understandable, no one wants to read 1,000 words with a variant on ‘I think this album is really cool. Yea, man. Cool.’ Not only is it uninteresting to read, but also would break down the notion that these critics are not terribly smarter or more informed than the general public when it comes to music. And then why would we buy these publications? So the facade of critical superiority is created. I am not arguing that all people have the same knowledge---there’s a reason I have someone change my oil in my car. But at a certain level, there are a myriad of music fans on the Internet who equal or surpass critics.

People like Justin exist almost entirely outside of the critical spectrum, but fall full into the fan base. A 2 star review of ‘Celebrity’ in Rolling stone or Entertainment Weekly isn’t going to shift the overall sales of the album by more than 50,000 copies, say. Now, for an up and coming band, 50,000 copies is a lot, but for N Sync, who sold 2.4 MILLION copies of ‘No Strings Attached’ in a WEEK, 50,000 copies ain’t a big deal. People heard ‘Bye, Bye. Bye’ or saw the video, went completely apeshit, and bought the record. Didn’t matter that Napster leaked every track months earlier, it went through the roof. People simply liked it that much. Completely critic-proof. The fans had spoken.

Which is what I do hear. I speak, you listen. When I read other sites, the role is reversed. It’s a dialogue, not a pedagogy. I can dress up all the music I like is fancy language, but really, all reviews and discourses fall into a variant of ‘I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’. Pretty simple, really. It’s the same I think on a ‘critical’ level but they simply have a larger cultural vocabulary to draw from than I do.

Take my brother. (Please! He’s single and now employed!) Anyways. He graduated from Ithaca this Spring in film studies. He has both a technical and cultural vocabulary that I simply don’t have. We still can both appreciate movies, but at a certain point his train keeps going and mine stops. He sees it in terms of camera angles, lighting, composition, and 343 things I can’t even begin to look for. With me, due to my ligh design background, I am usually focused on the lighting of a concert of a play more than the event itself. We’re so in tune with the mechanics that we sometimes forget to enjoy the thing we are most proficient in. Maybe music critics are too, in some level. They would argue that if I’ve never listened to bands like X and the Sex Pistols, I can’t like The Strokes and The Hives. Well, maybe I don’t like them in the same way as these critics, but I still like these bands, darn it. And, to paraphrase High Fidelity again, how can my own opinion be bullshit? There is indeed a need for some sort of critical skills needed to appreciate the art form, of course. But it shouldn’t be the sole key to being able to appreciate a work of art (even if that work of art is a John Mayer record). At some point, it all boils down to personal taste.

My girlfriend has a relationship to art that I have to music. Neither are experts in the traditional sense of the word, but we both have a decent amount of critical appreciation derived from a bit of academic study and a lot of personal love towards the respective art form. We have a hard time critically appreciating he other’s love on the same level, but we can both appreciate on a fundamental level the other’s love. I look at a painting the way she listens to a song---we’re not completely ignorant of what we are experiencing, but it mostly boils down to ‘I like this’ or ‘Eh, not so much’. She informs me about brushstroke, color choice, medium; I tell her what little I know about chord progression, tension/release, but ultimately it’s all window dressing to our respective initial impressions.

These impressions, I would argue, are the most important ultimately. If I listen to a record, and I don’t like it, pretty much that’s it. Sometimes albums or songs will creep up on me, but to me a record isn’t something you should WORK at. You can find new levels to it for the rest of your life (ie, Beck’s ‘Sea Change’ is a record I love listening to on headphones due to the layers of sonic wonderment I keep finding with each listen). But if I don’t like a record, no review in the world is gonna change my mind. Which is find, because really, what is a review in a magazine anyways BUT that person’s opinion as well?