Would you rather be told "you're a great writer but you like crap music" or a "you're a crap writer but you like great music"

i've recently decided to start reading/posting to ILM more often and this is how i start. with a typo. great. BOO-YA! BRING IT!

You go work at SPIN.

you see, a very good friend of mine just wrote a lovely article (under "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken") about lloyd cole and i'll regret this later (sorry mike!) but i have to big it up somewhere. (the name may be the same but this is a different person than the regular ILX poster BTW). anyway, i'm kinda jealous because he's a great writer AND into good music and sometimes i think the two are mutually exclusive, ya know?

Thomas Pynchon is a great writer, yet apparently he's a big fan of the heroically yawn-tacular band, Lotion. Just an example.

True, but you can't be good at writing about music without being a good writer.

I would actually rather have it that way around, though. I'd rather excel at something active, like writing, rather than something passive, like having good taste.

[/deliberately inflammatory statement]

Anyway, in one sense it's moot because it's impossible to concretely define music or writing as crap or not-crap objectively. But leaving that aside, I realise that a lot of music writers are good at it, and in most cases, by the very nature of their profession/passion, they appreciate a lot of "good" music by anyone's definition.

Jesus I'm confusing myself now... My true point, though, was simple: if you had to choose between one sentiment or the other, where do you stand?

I'm so insecure and constantly in need of ego-stroking. And in no way am I a professional writer.

"You can't really write, can you? And you're musical tastes seem a little at odf. I like your shoes"

or maybe, just maybe, he listens to the archies because he likes the archies, and he likes the archies because they're actually a pretty good band. "bang shang a lang" people!

Aaagh! No point in being a great musician if you're gonna play crap (unless you're doing sessions.) Being a crap musician playing great music on the other hand....

Most of the music writers I rate as writers have tastes I don't agree with, anyway. (sometimes I rate them more as writers than critics, but that's... a slightly different disctinction.)

-- Don A (dmxz...), October 8th, 2004.

Ohmigod Don! Dissing the Godz...

i think the problem is that the bigger a writer you get the more you have to deal with word limits. The big mags bitch-slap lifers while indie fucks are told to Run Free.

Yeah, that seems to be the assumption that a lot of people here are making but it's not how I read the original question. You can say to yourself "It's all subjective, if someone tells me I have bad taste they're just an idiot because I KNOW I have great taste." Yet let's say all of your colleagues consistently disagree with your tastes and agree with each other. All of the writers and editors you know tell you that you have bad taste and your publication gets more angry letters about your opinions than those of any other writer. Would you still be justified in your arrogant self-confidence? At some point being a music writer goes beyond subjective personal taste. The flip side would be a writer who champions music that nobody else is talking about but that later proves to be highly popular or influential. Couldn't that person be said to have some degree of objectively good taste?

I think the Lester Bangs mention is a bit problematic because by many standards he could probably be considered a "crap writer." His importance and appeal comes down to the music he chose to champion just as much as his writing style.

To a large degree being a critic of any sort is about being a tastemaker (or canon builder). How can you perform that function if you have no taste? The original question is a bit like asking a fashion designer if they would prefer to be known for having a great sense of style or being a great seamstress.

I'm curious how it is that you think this is so. I think that though he could be considered in some sense a gonzo writer or whatever (and obviously some of his pieces are more free-form and wacked out than othes), he had a great sense of structure, a great command of language, etc.

OTM, and largely forgotten in much latter-day appreciation of Bangs. Also why Lester pre-1976 >> Lester post 1976.

I also think that file sharing and muzik-on-the-net in general (including ILM) are radically changing the role of critic/music writer as gatekeeper/tastemaker/canon-builder. Perhaps that's a new thread.

I don't think that was the argument at all but you probably could make that case to some limited degree. Take the Wire for example. Imagine a magazine that covered only the top 10% of music that the Wire covers in a given year but with a writing style in more of an amateur, breathless-fan-zine vein. It would definitely be less intellectually stimulating but could arguably function much more effectively as a filter for music fans. Of course here I start to veer into the whole debate over music-writing-as-consumer's-guide.

I can't think of an album I've enjoyed that didn't either get critical raves or go gold so I never feel alone

Well, fine then. You have great taste. The original question was a hypothetical as in: imagine that the stuff you like doesn't get rave reviews and you do feel all alone.

Yeah, I think that equation is way too simplistic. I think he was a lot better with shorter album review form later on.

(x-post)

God, I don't think that's necessarily true at all.

OK my Bangs equation was too reductive, the guy wrote boatloads of stuff (as evidenced by the incredible year-to-year bibiliography in the otherwise unread-by-me bio). But man, some of the uncollected reviews he wrote in Rolling Stone, back when he was a nobody freelancer with a funny name, would just take your breath away compared to the jaded bitter reveries of his final years.

Having never studied writing seriously I can't make a very informed argument on the topic of language or structure. Personally I think Bangs was an absolutely brilliant writer but the obvious criticisms would be the highly personal approach, the long sidetracks, bizarre obsessions, etc. Basically all of the things that make him great could be seen as negatives depending on your point of view and that p.o.v. is informed by the actual music being discussed. On the one hand I could see how you could be somewhat entertained by his writing even if you hated the music under discussion but I can't imagine enduring it for too long if you really had no common point of reference.

Now I'm just waiting for someone to cite all of Bangs' numerous missteps and lapses in taste!

Anthony, this is totally OTM. Ironically, I think the situation is particularly problematic on the indie fucks' end because the general trend in their long-form writing is a bore you to death, taking-my-job-of-dissecting-the-fourteenth-Significant-Indie-Album-of-the-Week-seriously one.

As for the writers for big mags, if the writers are going to write about a lot of the usual crap that those mags generally cover, I'm more likely to read a four paragraph review than a nine paragraph review.