"some people are too smart to review music"

I think my generally inane point was "Genius adheres to no rules".

xpost

xpost

-- m. (mitchnet7...) (webmail), June 4th, 2004 2:00 PM. (mitchlnw) (later) (link)
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i dunno, ask chuck about it.

Nick Southall, yesterday:

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/1903402905.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

- mark s.

i mean, i could find a specific example, but i've made specific criticisms of plenty of essays that have been posted for discussion on ilm.

do you not agree with me strongo? i though you were kind of jaundiced against a lot of rock criticism too.

a short version:

it's not necessarily that i find stuff in the village voice (etc) *terrible*, it's just that i feel like rock criticism has taken one path since its inception, and people have gotten really sophisticated at that one kind of criticism. (almost like interpretive criticism w/r/t film studies.) and i should acknowledge that at its best, that sort of criticism can be enlightening and useful. but i think people have sort of taken that kind of criticism as far as it's going to go, and now the vast majority of critics (even many of the good ones) are sort of wandering in circles, sometimes moving on to new generic domains rather than rethinking their critical approach. i really think the time is ripe for a different kind of criticism.

again, one day when i'm feeling notably clearheaded i can be much more specific and less accusatory.

i dunno, maybe i 'forgive' that tendency because there's a kind of hopeful popularism (i hope i'm using that word right this time) about chuck's "rock", like if we all make good music we can participate in this big, abstract, innately desirable thing (i know i'm going to get in trouble with this, chuck's explained again and again how he likes lots of things that don't rock, dislikes plenty that do). truthfully though, i don't share your frustration because i don't think there's really that much "it rocks" stonewalling coming from chuck - look at the "big & rich" thread going on right now, there's plenty of talk about how and why and in what interesting ways big & rich 'rock' (i'm not sure the 'r' word is even used actually)

(this sounds bitchy when read but the tone is sincere)

Too much music criticism is still incapable of talking about the precise thing it is supposedly about, i.e. music. Much easier to treat music like literature and look for meaning, narrative, cultural relevance etc. This is, I think, the sort of crit that amateur!st is describing as played.

But criticism and review aren't necessarily the same thing and don't necessarily share the same goals. Is it right to - I can't think of a fair or dignified way of putting this - talk down to your readers because you're trying to cater for the needs of the broadest possible audience? In other words, a lot of peeps read reviews simply to be told whether something sucks or rocks. Do you do readers a disservice by not adhering to this demand?

Not enough crit talks about music as music (Band A sounds like Bands B, C and D is not enough). Everything that doesn't is interesting, but kinda inadequate somehow.

the kind of "criticism" of film i like most is done--not always, but often--in the academy, where the structure allows for lots of time spent poring over the same film or body of films. writing daily/weekly criticism doesn't allow for that level of close analysis, though i think some impromtu--and specific-- formal observations are always possible.

i forget sometimesthat criticism of any art form is functionally (necessarily??)...bifurcated (is that the right word?) into quotidian criticism and scholarship. the problem--possibly--is that there IS no academic pop studies to speak of (the closest thing would be jazz studies, and even that is fairly new) and so there's no formalist tendency in pop music writing that daily criticism could really borrow from productively (even if facile-ly).

i guess matos, is that no matter how descriptive your average rock critic gets, typically the description falls under the category of...how do i put this (i really struggle to explain this so that i don't sound silly or accusatory)...the impressionistic. sometimes an individual impressionistic description ("guitars like nail guns" or something) can be really vivid, but writing like that ultimately inhibits one's ability to be more in-depth descriptive, to do the kind of taking apart of a song that would constitute a sophisticated formalist poetics.

Inhibits? You're assuming the people who resort to the impressionistic are even capable of "sophisticated formalist poetics." Uh, actually...scratch that. I never studied any kind of criticism in college (and yes, that's something of a lame excuse) so I'm not even sure what "formalist poetics" refers to.

F.R. Leavis and Moral Seriousness in the work of Mobb Deep

*shudder*

xpost

i'm too brain-dead right now to explain it well, though i'll try some time soon, but for now:

http://www.geocities.com/david_bordwell/historicalpoet.htm

again, this essay was written in a film studies context, but i don't think it'd be too hard--well, possibly hard, but at least interesting--to transpose many of its central ideas to music, pop music specifically.

x-post. not getting into another xgau debate, fer sure.

i hope "poetics" doesn't sound pretentious. it's a concept rooted in aristotle, basically, although i can't claim that all of its tenets and implications were anticipated by aristotle or anything.

There's about five x-posts here, also I am wankered.

A good question, since I don't think the academic film criticism he's referring to has a popular outlet, either. (At best one can say Borders seems to carry magazines with that kind of writing. But that's it.)

Aesthetics is always best tackled with a skinful, innit?

Noodle - I am just about to drain the dregs of my second bottle of Spanish red today = I should probably go to bed.

the city of new york for starters.

this is true, but one can hope (er, I can hope) that even the quotidian criticism can be informed--and potentially enriched--by, such a criticism. even ebert evidences this, sometimes. (see his review of "the passion of joan of arc" for a really obvious example.)

x-post

scott: you raise an interesting question. i wasn't a music major and don't know anyone who studies music theory, so i'm totally out of the loop w/r/t academic music study. i do read stuff occasionally, but usually w/r/t classical music and occasionally ethnic musics--which is to say, ethnomusicology.

but i'd really like to pointed in a direction that would take me to examples of such formal-minded criticism of popular music, if they exist. i'd kill to know someone who could point me in such a direction!

scott--we're trying not to.

(xpost, that harvard book sounds interesting)

michael: that's why i brought up aristotle, b/c the notion of "poetics" employed here goes back to his notes under that name, not the contemporary genre of Poetry.

i think, btw, that "poetry" is one of the things that's most plausibly uncovered--and revealed, in the most exciting and life-affirming way--by such a criticism.

that book looks interesting, matos. i'll have to think about your "reviewing" question, because i have divided thoughts on that issue.

"Musicians all over the earth are amazingly adept at finding a personal, intriguing sound and making something new out of it. So if you're out looking for that thing, you'll find Jamaican music- it's been long based on a peculiar hybrid of all sorts of other musics from Europe, Africa, South America and the U.S. And yet, something very distinctive emerged out of it. Jamaican music wouldn't have been possible without all those other things and on the other hand, there's nothing else like it in the world. I feel that this will go on happening as long as you have musicians going on, trying to make a living."

One of the most asinine, borderline racist things I've ever read in reference to pop music.

to clarify, possibly: my argument isn't primarily for an academic study of pop music, but a *certain kind of criticism*, that perhaps might flourish more if pop music were truly entrenched in the academy. (and, furthermore, if it came out of music departments and not sociology or english departments, or worse, "media studies" departments. note that one big reason for the suckitude of lots of postwar film criticism is that film studies departments usually came out of literature departments, where interpretive methods--many of them dubious-- had already taken hold.)

i haven't read the gracyk, what's it about/like?

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mr. ott, i completely fail to see how frith's paragraph is "racist," but i don't really want to argue with you about it.

x-x-post YIKES!

TV Quick

i meant to write:

"test-run of a historical poetics..."

(sorry)

the idea of jamaica's unique economic/political/geographical position, and the shifting, specific, local implications of that position (changes in the economics of pressing records, or recording records, of import policies, of social gatherings, etc.) helping to provide clues as to why producers/musicians made the particular musical choices they did.... this is the kind of stuff that's all over, for example, liner notes on blood & fire cds. all it would take is someone to tie all these things together into a coherent historical argument, with a good deal of close formal analysis (i've even thought of devising some kind of system of notation for dub, for example) and--voila! a historical poetics of jamaican popular music!!

Gracyk isn't really a sociolgical dude like Frith is. The book is subtitled "An Aesthetics of Rock," and as such he shuttles between considerations about how rock is created, how it's understood by its creators and listeners, and how rock works. (What he says about rhythm made it horrifyingly clear to me that most rock critics [myself included] have only the most tenuous grasp about how rhythm does its dirty work in rock.) There are also very entertaining examinations about what Adorno, Paglia, and Allen Bloom have said about popular music which actually succeed in making me feel embarrassed for the latter two. Gracyk is sometimes fenced in by his frame of reference, which is more-or-less Rolling Stone-crit-friendly rock, but this doesn't translate into prejudice against stuff that falls outside of it.

There's a also more recent book by Gracyk about rock identity that I haven't picked up. When I was in Barnes & Noble today I noticed he also blurbed a book about "trash" in rock and even though he said something irksome along the lines about how "rock's disposibility reconciles us to the disposibility of life today" I'm willing to bet it's actually quite a thoughtful read.

my hand is snaking toward the revolver, but whatever.

I'm probably garbling the gist of the blurb, fwiw.

who's smart?

The Voice comes out of, was indeed the first, of the alternative weekly papers that dot the U.S.'s larger cities that came out of (or in VV's case, antecedented) the '60s underground press--in England, Oz is an example. In the U.S., a lot of these papers mutated into alt-weeklies, where there was a major emphasis on arts coverage; in England, they fed into the weeklies, NME and Melody Maker. American music magazines did and do get their share of writers from alt-weeklies, but the difference is, from what I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong), there aren't any comparable papers to the Voice or Seattle Weekly or City Pages or whatever in England--the closest thing there is Time Out, which is editorially closer in line to glossy monthly mags. (Though Time Out New York has run some pretty terrific work.)

The Voice is different because under Christgau's music-editorship (he was a columnist there from 1967-72 and became music editor in 1974, and was full-time at that through the mid-'80s) he emphasized a pretty rigorous critical approach in his section--unlike a lot of music sections, including my own, there are no features (i.e. quote-driven profiles), though there are some about music in the front of the paper. The arts sections are almost wholly given over to criticism.

I demand you name names, Traitor Hand!

do you mean that the voice concentrates on criticism over profile pieces and such? or that the criticism is itself rigorous?

michael, the essay doesn't depend on familiarity with the typical postwar theory gods at all--to the contrary. in fact as noted it harks back more to prewar theorists, and aristotle. although in that essay as in others there is a critique (sometimes implicit, more often explicit) of the direction taken by film studies in emulation of its postwar lit-crit models.

what was your question that was answered, tracer hand?

here is a conversation we just had:
yixfdb (10:40:44 PM): ever heard of Thin Lizzie?
orion0014 (10:40:50 PM): yep.
yixfdb (10:41:05 PM): Cowboy Sorg?
orion0014 (10:41:06 PM): i like their song "little girl in bloom"
yixfdb (10:41:11 PM): Song, even
orion0014 (10:41:14 PM): i don't know any of their other stuff by name.
orion0014 (10:41:17 PM): but i can download an MP3.
yixfdb (10:41:26 PM): http://lazarus.lazysod.nu:999/05_Cowboy_Song.mp3
orion0014 (10:41:49 PM): it'll take a while. but here we go.
yixfdb (10:46:45 PM): I'm not sure I get the purpose of the Ramones thing
orion0014 (10:46:55 PM): oh, there's no purpose.
orion0014 (10:46:59 PM): but i think it's funny.
yixfdb (10:47:03 PM): oh, good
orion0014 (10:47:17 PM): its purpose is humor.
yixfdb (10:48:58 PM): http://www.ringtones-database.com/artists/thin-lizzie-ringtones.php
orion0014 (10:49:09 PM): haha. i can't download ringtones for my phone.
orion0014 (10:49:13 PM): my phone is very old and outdated.
yixfdb (10:49:23 PM): would you want to?
orion0014 (10:49:36 PM): i don't know.
orion0014 (10:49:37 PM): perhaps.
orion0014 (10:49:41 PM): if they were good ring tones.

HE LIKES PEARLS BEFORE SWINE & OPERA & TOM WAITS.

I'm always learning,
getting better, maybe not.
Still: I get free discs.

I recognized that, and even felt some sympathy towards his argument, which I take is something like SLABsters proceed by examining how texts fit within doctrines treated as givens and as such is actually insufficiently theoretical -- but since I don't have a grounding in Saussure, Lacan et al. I don't feel certain that his is a fair assessment, and I fear I'll treat it as an excuse to say "oh goodie, I don't have to take that crap seriously now, la la la la."

this thread puts me in find of some sam fulleresque film about a music desk at a busy daily, where a cigar-chomping editor storms into the newsroom and bellows at his staff, "what, you too smart to review music?!"

I nearly bought that yesterday! I did get This is Pop which is enjoyable but from what I've read so far it's not really telling me anything I haven't come across before. Except perhaps Douglas Wolk's essay which so far is one of my favorite pieces is in the book.

When's the last time you wept over a piece of music? The exact circumstances, if you would be so kind.

Ever seen The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Mistuh A? Don't bother, your "Final Thoughts" are more predictable than Jerry Springer's. This crush I have on you is driving me mad.

With word and tint I did not stint.
I gave her reams of poems to say

goodnight, my love

The major problem with this kind of approach, however, is that even the smallest hints at music theory or technique ("an open E chord"; "the dotted eighth-sixteenth rhythm") have a way of alienating the non-music-literate readers. This problem seems unique to music, and I'm assuming it's because its vocabulary is much less intuitive than visual art, film, and especially literature (which is, after all, is required education throughout one's schooling and not just an optional arts credit here and there).

PS. Totally hungover and not thinking straight, so maybe forgetting somethign somewhere.

Quick test, give a brief answer to these three easy questions that everone should know:

1) What is a melody?

2) What's the difference between 4:4 and 'four to the floor'?

3) What is 'noise'?

(These terms come up very often on ilm!)

2) Several pints and half a dozen gins.

3) It's the thing on the front of yr faice.

Wrong. You can be too smart for your audience.

marcello can be pretty good sometimes, and sometimes not.

Most of the time I think the latter is when I am missing how Marcello jumps from artist A to artist C. Is it because we don't hear the connection or he hear too much?

I dunno whether "hiding" is the correct term here - I think that, with much modern music criticism, it's almost implied that these things won't be discussed, there's this bond between the critic (who doesn't actually know much about theory) and the audience (who also don't, and would be bewildered/bored if the critic went into it.) I suppose that it *is* hiding, in a way, because this bond is unspoken, but most readers/writers know about it (is it a good thing? Probably not; not entirely worthless though, either; I suspect that the best critics might be those who know and are very good at the type of criticism amateur!st would like to see more of, but manage to coat this knowedlege in the techniques used by the critics you describe...)

(I've tried learning an instrument a few times; I never got very far. I still want to, though!)

I'm not sure that it's only in order to hide a lack of knowledge of technical terms that music writers use simile, metaphor, comparisons etc, though. I tend to find that, even though I've got a fairly solid music theory background, a simile or a metaphor can tell me more about what a band sounds like, feels like, than a dry representation of the basic physical facts of the music. I'd rather be told that a band sounds like an angry cat being held upside down at the bottom of a well than that the guitarist is using x pedal to create x effect.

Occasionally, I try to write music criticism-type-stuff, and I can easily be hamstrung by things that I know, because it's tempting to just fill space with "triplets clashing over the quavers of a four-four beat / use of the yearning aeolian mode / ps here we have a folk harp with classical string-tension which is a rare thing o yes / based around the three-two clave, timbales with marginally less complex rhythm than is usual, conga part mainly flat-hand rather than cupped": but then you could end up with a technical drawing where you're supposed to have an oil painting. And start running into things you don't have information on ('and then the... uh... synthesiser comes in. it does not sound like any given instrument, and I don't have the details on how exactly they created this tone. but it is pretty').

I think, ideally, the balance of music theory&c should be like that of lyrics in a review: you don't want a reviewer to give you lyrics verbatim, but a few choice lines here and there where they stand out can be pretty useful. It is good for a music critic to have some background in the theory - preferably enough that they don't get all excited about knowing! stuff! and start blinding people with pseudoscience - but for me to like them they'd have to be tactful enough to use it only where appropriate.

This is all knowledge rather than smartness, though. I don't think you can be too smart to review music (someone who was really that smart would have learned how to present knowledge in a non-threatening, non-exclusive way before now. I'd like to think.)

I think this totally depends on the instance. I mean, I might want to know that Jimi Hendrix was using a Univibe or something if someone was making a point about his tone and how that tone was one of the great things about the song!

Amst: both.

I think it's interesting that music journalists tend to brag about all that free music. HA! As if free music is tough to be had these days!

Mr Matos I'm sure you're right as far as Professionals are concerned.

But there's a world of spotty mirror-lovers out there whose raisin detra is to accumulate terrible promos and brag about such to their mates.

Well I can mostly thank ILM for a fast growing list I've made of what must be 300 bands/songs I need to check out. Let's just say I do feel a bit overwhelmed.