Personality Crisis

Personal context is, I think, a good thing. Attitude towards music is always colored by personal state. Either writers provide personal context or they provide a personally defined interperative framework. Absent these, we get universal proclimations which tend to be useless, uninteresting, and largely bunk. On the other hand, I don't find myself enamoured of largely personal writing with occasional musical asides, at least not as music criticism.

a. "Carcass are the greatest band on the planet: and I've heard ALL the others." b. "Carcass are the greatest band on the planet, and the only band I've ever heard."

You can't "just" talk about records: what you say about them is always SOME kind of a personal history, even if you're hiding things or lying or adopting some shared reviewing convention for fun or profit...

Does the personal history say something new/useful/entertaining/revealing/upsetting about the record, or indeed about reasons for (not?) listening to records?

Let's say it can be a good thing. Anything is better than the track- by-track rundown. I think it's one of the reasons Lester Bangs is so well loved even after all these years. But then he was a great writer, there's a beautiful sadness in the Astral Weeks/ White Light, White Heat piece and nasty humour in the way he tries to come to terms with Metal Machine Music. Of course it also can be done badly, I'm thinking of Everett True around his Me & Kurt & Courtney period.

I would like to see some more total personal essays or just a (short) fictional story that captures a record without mentioning any tracks. That's the thing I'm working towards. But again I must say it's difficult to do well, it can very easily slip into "I was a depressed teen sittin in my room and suddenly I heard Neil Young and man, it suddenly all made sense."

I believe personal matter is unavoidable in criticism - it's fallacious to think that it can be otherwise. So I prefer it when writers confront how their personal context informs their appreciation of the artifact, rather than those who ignore it and make pretenses to objectivity.

I wish that when people discussed my records they wouldn't keep dragging in serious personal problems that are really none of their business, such as my guitar playing.

Personal context is important, but in the wrong hands it can be taken too far. Bad writers can make personal details boring and irrelevant, or go into the "too much information" territory.

Of course, even that kind of music writing appeals to a certain audience.

It *should* be interesting, but of course depends on how good the writer is. the Lester Bangs piece on Astral Weeks is quite haunting. The average self-appointed internet "critic"'s personal reflections tend to be extremely painful. I know it sounds snobbish, but I think it's also fair.

*Everything* depends on how good the writer is. Impersonal objectivity from complete idiots is at least as obnoxious as rampant subjectivity.

My thread of the day should be something important like Senser:Classic Or Dud, so I thought I'd mention here that while writers are keen to put personal context into their reviewing, very few of them talk about sex - Meltzer does in a kind of bullish way I think, but any others? This would probably fall into what Nicole calls the "too much info" category, but as has been coyly suggested in the sex vs drugs vs music thread, sex and pop are tied up, possibly in the Elvis' hips way and certainly in the what-was-playing- when way, and this seems *important* and maybe something that SHOULD be written about.

But how to do it? And more especially how to do it without raising associations in readers' minds which will forever taint a track for them? (Or is raising associations which will forever taint a track EXACTLY what a critic is meant to do?)

Reasons for bringing sex in: a HUGE amount of discussion of music (and lots of other things) is really just evasion (conscious/ unconscious) of, um, aspects of attraction/repulsion.

Reasons for then being wary: public discussion of sex is FAR MORE prone to uncritical conformism than discussion of music. (Like: someone who says "I don't like and never have sex" is very likely hanging a sign round their neck saying "Ignore my ridiculous opinions.") It surely risks opening the hatch of the playpen-submarine — wherein antipathies and affinitites can be safely dealt with — to the inrushing cold implacable ocean, where the feelings (disgust, obsession, fear, loneliness, all the tricky stuff) are just too strong to be just PLAYED with, or at, or whatever.