Cross-Media Rockcrit?

Hmmm Having checked out the column I think you were a little hard on the pitchforkers, Tom. Firstly, Radiohead kind of ask for it, with their Pynchon and Chomsky references, though admittedly the sheer number of namedrops falling on ones head can grow a little tiresome, and, yes, pretentious. Secondly, and more importantly, I think once a record enters someones life it can make all kinds of connections  biographical, artistic, historical  and to legislate as to which of these are legitimate seems a little churlish. Ive read too many reviews of Kid A than is good for me, and most of them have been rather turgid attempts to render musical texture and tonality into pedestrian prose. I guess Im also kind of impatient with the Uncut- Mojo-Q orthodoxy, that has no higher ambition than to file away a record into some Olympian Encyclopaedia of Rock, all those capsule if you like this, youll also like these summaries. An interesting book, or film, or record (which, let me say, I doubt Kid A is) can create any number of contexts for itself, and I prefer a kind of criticism that messes categories up imaginatively rather than politely pigeonholes. Greil Marcus (oh I wish I didnt have to bring him into it) talks somewhere about how the very act of criticism is putting artefact X up against assumption Y and seeing what sparks fly. So, maybe the combination of Radiohead and Finnegans Wake is a dud, but what about Robert Johnson and Herman Melville, or Stuart Murdoch and Hal Hartley or Stephin Merritt and Andy Warhol. It neednt be kow-towing to high culture for some imaginary legitimacy, but rather a democratizing action: a potentially fruitful way of thinking about culture and how it makes uncommon sense.

My position on this is a definite maybe. On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be any intrinsic reason why it shouldn't be a reasonable thing to do. Themes criss-cross media naturally, so why shouldn't criticisms of works in one medium relate those works to works in other media?

However, with regards to pop music I have two reservations. One, such explicit relating rarely works, and two, when it does it tends to result in writers focussing on certain parts of the music to the exclusion of all others. In particular, some critics' heavy analysis of lyrics at the expense of other elements in a song often seems rooted in these critics' need to ground their `lightweight' pop criticism in a more `heavyweight' literary culture. This isn't that surprising, it being much easier to write intelligently about words than breakbeats, but it doesn't make it excusable. The resulting inability of these critics to write about lyricless or non-literate pop all too often leads to their damning of entire genres as worthless just because they can't analyse them comfortably.

Since pop music criticism is designed primarily to attach a life-style and other external values to the music being sold, it seems inevitable that the critic (or indeed the marketing guy, or the 'artist') will pull in external comparison points to help define the cultural value the consumer is accumulating with each listen or purchase. Which makes the use of such references neither good or bad, but inevitable.

Since sound is having to be translated into words in the first place (and hence the lyric-heavy approach of much rock crit.) why not understand other art-forms *as* music criticism. What else is the Milleniumn Dome if not an immensely subtle essay on OK Computer? Or going even further, isn't Tony Blair a living performance art response to the music of Massive Attack?

Heavens!

It's not every day that I come across quotations from Finnegans Wake while browsing these, um, pages. It's not every day I read something by the boy Troussi, either. I feel compelled to say something.

First, as a really ignorant soul in so many ways, I ask to be forgiven for commenting: Finnegans Wake doesn't have an apostrophe in it. Myles na gCopaleen used to say that the mistaken insertion of that apostrophe hastened Joyce's demise.

I'll try and take things one at a time.

1. The Radiohead review I found silly. It was OK-ishly written, but overcooked - incredibly hyperbolic in tone - in fact, it could easily have been a parody. I come close to refusing to believe that the following three moments were not parodies:

a) 'the fiercely literate lyrics... "Cattle prods / IMF / Riot shields / blah blah"'.

b) The claim that Ulysses and OK Computer both displayed an 'insurgency' that 'shattered the rules' of their genres. That'll do fine as a description of Ulysses (other descriptions will do fine too - there's no need to argue about it now). But it is ludicrous as a description of OKC. OKC was, I think (and again, other descriptions might be permissible, but this one seems uncontroversial) a sluggishly-paced, intelligently-made, mournful late-90s rock record. I can see no way in which it shattered any rule, or displayed any insurgency. That doesn't make it bad or valueless, of course; but the overblown claims here make for a veritable category mistake.

c) the comparison of the gestation of FW and that of Kid A. For heaven's sake, Kid A has been released 3andabit years after OKC, plus some touring etc. FW was finally published *17* years after Ulysses. That mathematical disparity alone makes the comparison seem silly. But I think it's silly anyway. In sum, I think that what we have on that Radiohead-review site is some character who can write but gets rather overexcited when he (?) writes (and there are worse things than getting excited, it must be admitted); who knows his Joyce reasonably well, as far as one can tell; but who is (from my POV) way OTT in his estimation of Radiohead. The overall effect is silly. But perhaps I should beware criticizing people for their enthusiasm. Possibly enthusiasm is a good thing. I don't want to start telling people not to be enthusiastic about pop music.

2. Tom E's response seemed unimpressed, as I was, by the review. But maybe I wouldn't have put my disdain in quite the same terms. Obviously, I'd have put it as I just have.

Is 'progressive rock' relevant? Maybe. One thing that I find remarkable is that first people sneered at Rhead as 'prog rock', but now it's become *OK* (!) to say that they're like various prog-rockers. Some axiological scales have been tipped somewhere.

Tom E said:

>>> less commented on was the effort that rock writing went to in order to reflect the magnified status of its host artform.

It's a nice-sounding point, but I'm not *quite* sure if prog-rock is the key area here - unless we are counting Dylan / Beatles as prog for these purposes. I would have thought that 'rock writing' in general had an overblown phase. Mind you, I suppose that much of it is still overblown, just in a different (and even less impressive?) way.

>>> The problem for most rock hacks was that the musical advances being made by bands like King Crimson were well beyond their analytic powers.

I could not quite tell whether this was a joke or not.

>>> They turned in general towards literary criticism - or rather, towards a frothy imitation of Leavisite literary criticism: lots of lyrical analysis

It seems plausible, but I'd like to see the evidence. I'm not sure that FRL was a great 'close reader' anyway (as is often claimed) - in New Bearings, maybe, but not in the Lawrence book, which tends just to quote chunks of text and approve them.

As Stevie T would probably be quick to point out (and as I think TE implicitly acknowledges), there are many kinds of lit.crit. - and maybe he would also seek to persuade us (were it necessary) that the Barthesian mode of criticism was taken up into the pop and sonic field by Simon Reynolds?

>>> It made for gruesome reading, this attempt at a rock High Criticism. And it remained a powerful trend in music writing until quite recently, when an unholy combination of commercial crassness, punky fanzine styles, and a 'serious' criticism which didn't rely on literary leg-ups for legitimacy wiped it out.

Well, again, OK - but I would like a bit more demonstration of this. Are you saying that (for instance) MM1988 (oh, no, not that again...) was an instance of this 'gruesome' mode? And if 'punkiness' is relevant, then what about the long history of fanzine culture going back to punk itself - why didn't that already represent a challenge in the 1970s and early 1980s?

>>> The problem here is that it doesn't work as criticism. Brent Sirota's essay treats Radiohead as if they exist in a vacuum, as if no other music is being made today. But Kid A exists in direct relation to a lot of other music - to write an essay this long and inflated about it without even suggesting its current musical context is simply bad criticism.

This seems a fair point. Then again, I dare say that there is room in even this small world for any number of things to be said about any number of things. If I wanted the authoritative and last word on Ulysses and I didn't mention Flaubert, The Waste Land, Imagism, the Odyssey and whatever else, then I might be up a gum tree. But still it might be possible to say *something* halfway interesting about the novel while mentioning none of those things, only the history of pantomime in Dublin. In other words, there are (perhaps) in principle as many contexts for an object as you care to give it. The problem only arises if you claim to be giving (and aren't giving) 'the' context - and I suppose I agree that the Rhead geezer was, yes, implicitly making such a claim.

Much more general issue: should pop only be discussed in relation to pop, or to other things too?

Tom E seemed to say the former - but I don't think he really means it. He was (I think) just provoked by someone else's silliness into attacking a bogeyman of 'literary rock criticism' that may deserve attack (at least when done as poorly as this - and it should perhaps gall me a tad to say that, for I see precious little reference to Joyce in these waters). I suspect that Tom E might not ultimately dissent from what Stevie said.

Which was:

3. >>> Having checked out the column I think you were a little hard on the pitchforkers, Tom.

Well, I disagree with him there, as explained already.

>>> Secondly, and more importantly, I think once a record enters someones life it can make all kinds of connections  biographical, artistic, historical  and to legislate as to which of these are legitimate seems a little churlish.

This is much more like it. Does anyone disagree?

>>> Ive read too many reviews of Kid A than is good for me

Why? Where? I wish I got to read all the Radiohead reviews that you folks do. No, I don't.

>>> I prefer a kind of criticism that messes categories up imaginatively

OK, it's hard to disagree - but pigeonholing has a place too. It's hard not to want to do it, however much we might knock the activity or desire.

>>> the very act of criticism is putting artefact X up against assumption Y and seeing what sparks fly.

I buy this. It may be roughly similar to (though more engagingly put than) what I said re. the potentially infinite number of contexts, some of which may be interesting to someone or other. One reader's sparks may be another's squibs, of course.

>>> It neednt be kow-towing to high culture for some imaginary legitimacy, but rather a democratizing action: a potentially fruitful way of thinking about culture and how it makes uncommon sense.

The 'democratizing' bit is a bit overdone, a bit too populist-polemical. But otherwise I think the point is, again, sound. The point is (I take it) that pop is a bit of culture like many things are, and we can make our lives more interesting sometimes by comparing all kinds of such bits to all kinds of other such bits. If I believe that - and I think I do - then funnily enough I think that Stevie T was one of those who taught me it, though he probably never intended to.

Thanks for your precious time.

I think it's a perfectly good idea to relate music to other artforms and to its context, other cultural products surrounding it, etc., and I've done plenty of this in my time (my turns of phrase - "low-rent futurism", "the apocalypse of the guitar", etc., are usually arrived at by a combination of the music itself and what it sets itself up to be, the sound and its background narrative). My account of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's history relates the cheap and ease of off-the- shelf synthesisers in their later years to the decline in the exoticism of space travel, for instance. I've built my style around these analogies, and while they can become stultifying and too much of a formula (my Britpop piece, for instance) there are many worse ways to write.

The problem, though, is when high-cultural references get thrown around ostentatiously and pompously by people who really don't seem to be very clever, an idiot's guide to "intellectual life", purely for the sake of it, as in the Pitchfork reviews of Radiohead - the idea that aspiring towards high culture is enough *in itself*. Radiohead's most malign influence in the long term may not be their music; it may be their encouragement of such overwritten, lavishly meaningless journalism, reinvoking the literary equivalent of prog rock, just as some have said they've reinvoked it musically.

What I'm curious about is, does this sort of heady crit. help you to enjoy music more? Do y'all think about such things when listening to records, like how the music fits into cultural/historical contexts, how it relates to other art forms, etc? Or is it all kind of "after the fact" analysis, to be pursued for its own sake? Personally, I'm not really sure what purpose this kind of analysis serves. Maybe these are all questions for another topic...

All of the above, yo. Today I was listening to a Kraftwerk record, first time through, and doing both the broader musing (wondering about its place as "future music" compared to other kinds of music, which it still seems to hold despite being more than 20 years old or so), and the on-the-spot reacting and appreciating (finding the beginning uncomfortable, and constantly comparing it to the Senor Coconut versions, but then eventually sliding into the typical raw reactions I experience with any other music). I don't see why listening can't, or shouldn't, accomodate both.

Spot on, Josh. Most of my music listening (and hence my writing about it) inspires a reaction both to the context, and to the base sound of the music itself.