Free Pony Theory ~ Note: Music Criticism

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

And here's the big secret of music criticism, the irreducible mystery that we'll never solve until (or unless) we solve what might as well be called the human condition: People just like what they like. It's not consistent or predictable, it's not rational, and any reason they give to you is almost always one that comes after that central, visceral, pre-intellectual reaction. And it's this, I think, which has spurred the anti-rockist backlash, the kind of perspectivist shift that attempts to let us all let us like what we like without some tin-pot aesthetic despot trying to tell us we can't. Rock criticism, out of which almost all current music criticism flows, was partially an attempt to legitimize and defend a genre of music against its opponents. That sort of advocacy was a reaction to a view of the aesthetic world that tried to impose a kind of objectivity onto people's reactions, but by now we've come to a place where some of us are trying to move beyond these sorts of reformations and counter-reformations, these constant additions to the canon, and move on to more productive grounds. Liking or disliking art doesn't make you a good or bad person, so why do we get so invested in other people's taste? (I have my own opinions on that, but this essay is going to be long enough as it is, so let's leave that question as rhetorical for now)

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/art...op_playground/music-criticism.htm

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

http://www.cokemachineglow.com/feature/article/amir_review.html

Common sense, right? It’s amazing how often a very basic precept of evaluation --- “back up what you say” --- gets lost online in the practice of evaluating music. Most often, reviewers spend their time supposedly reviewing music by talking about history. Reviews from even reputable online publications often spend in excess of 60% of the review detailing years of history before even beginning to get to evaluation. But history, context, origins --- these should inform an evaluation of the music itself, not constitute it. Sure, history can be important, and all music follows in certain traditions, newer or older --- but we do a disservice to the artists we review when we substitute obsession with music history for a fair look at what they’ve produced, regardless what tradition it falls into. Most often, endless history-obsession serves as a sly substitute for analytical capacity in the reviewer; he or she may not even know what a time-signature is, or what chords they’re hearing, or what composition is, but if they can distract you with enough tangential information, they can skirt those issues.

Perhaps even worse are those instances when reviewers spend paragraphs detailing how the music “feels,” offering little to no justification for these perceptions. That kind of reviewing does serious damage to the credibility of online music criticism precisely by trading in terms grounded in almost pure subjectivity. They make the job of evaluation inane and inconsequential. You ask them, is this album good, and they say “Well, I feel like it’s good, but really, who’s to say?” Which begs the question: “Why are you reviewing music, then?”

Fundamentally, there is an objective fact in music criticism: that all of us are dealing with the same music. It follows the same chord patterns, time-signatures, contains the same lyrics, comes out of the speakers the exact same way, regardless of who’s listening to it (I’m ignoring details like the volume of the music or anomalies in hearing, of course). Whether or not those objective aspects result in any particular subjective emotional experience is something different altogether --- but then the reviewer would have to say “it’s structurally good, but it just doesn’t resonate with me, because [whatever reason].” Music criticism ought to be first concerned with the objective fact, the music itself, and secondly whether or not its relation to other things (history, tradition, cliché, etc.) makes it better or worse. But above both of these things, reviewers must account for why they are passing a certain judgment. Otherwise, in the words of one aesthetician, “we merely gibber.”

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

Of the 10 records Rolling Stone ranks as 2001's best, exactly zero were released and distributed by independent labels. Instead, their list includes Radiohead's Amnesiac -- which isn't even the best Radiohead album of the year -- and a Mick Jagger solo album that's bad even by the comically low standard by which Jagger albums are measured.

Rolling Stone is an easy target, but its competitors don't fare much better. Blender's top 10 also put up a goose egg on the indie front, while Spin found room for just three indies in their top 20 of 2001.

I mention all this not to re-open that increasingly dull "indies vs. majors" can of worms. The point is not whether indie records are better, but rather that most people will never know about most great records because music magazines aren't writing about them. Year-end lists illustrate the point, but the problem exists year-round.

Why? The easy answer might be that music critics have become lazy and complacent followers, lacking the strength of their convictions. Used to be the best of the lot were snobby contrarians, championing records no one's heard and assuming any artist the record company pushes as the "next big thing" probably sucks. It was an imperfect system, but it helped give artists without much promotional muscle a chance at cracking into public consciousness. Maybe critics couldn't stop the New Kids on the Block from selling millions of records, but if nothing else, they could try shaming those record buyers into recognizing the error of their ways.

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A7733

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

By the '80s, writers weaned on rock criticism began asserting their voices at such nascent magazines as Spin, Option, and The Source. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of traditional publications began hiring pop critics. The new generation was influenced by the flippant rebellion of punk and the heady street culture of hip-hop. "The first thing that made me want to write was music journalism," says Nick Hornby. The British author of "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy" was inspired by the New Musical Express generation of the late '70s, namely writers Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons. "They were doing something different. Everything went up a gear with them. They were incredibly rude when they wanted to be, and they knew about other things besides music. You couldn't predict the way they'd think."

DeRogatis dates the last great era of pop writing to the early '90s, when books like Gina Arnold's "Route 666: On the Road to Nirvana," Rachel Felder's "Manic Pop Thrill," and Simon Reynolds's "Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock" were published. "There were books about genre history and ideas," says the author of "Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs." "Then it petered off."
Some writers blame the decline in trenchant, in-the-trenches criticism on media's increasing starry-eyed obsession with celebrities. Superstars' images are carefully controlled by their handlers. Gone is the era when a journalist could spend days on the road with the Rolling Stones. "It's a seller's market. You have to fight to maintain any sense of integrity," says Smith. "Somebody's got to break this cabal going on with publicists and artists.""Bands are so buffered," says Hoskins. "If everything is so carefully controlled, it explains why the magic and mystique have gone out of the thing."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/...ave_worn_out_their_voices/?page=2

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

This idea of economics inhibiting real investigations (?real? as opposed to the reviews being just glorified advertisements) is, I believe, a very foundational one though. The more I look at how the - well, let me begin with my original train of thought, and then hopefully it will be easy to see where I ended up. When I first thought of this topic, I had immediately rejected a few answers out of hand, not even bothering to write about them then - like music being aural and literature and art being visual, so how can one write, a visual medium!, effectively about sounds?, which I still think isn?t a serious enough objection to warrant anything more than a passing snort of derision, but one rejected answer to my query looks somewhat promising the more I looked at it: that interesting music hasn?t been around as long as interesting literature, therefore literature had a heads up in the criticism department. One moment of thought though will raise a few supercilious brows. Ives and Schoenberg were contemporaries of Joyce, so this can?t be, and of course that is rightly so, and really, one doesn?t need music to be interesting (?interesting? in the extremely elitist way I too often use it) to analyze it, it just makes it easier if it?s more complex or different.

However, one thing literature has had for far longer than music was a viable delivery system to the masses. Since roughly the 1400s, The West has had the means to disseminate its ideas, relatively cheaply and efficiently, while music had to wait for fin de siecle technology to allow it the same means of transmission. Even then, records don?t become big business for more than a score of years with Tin Pan Alley?s focus moving from sheet music to records to the eventual shifting of record producing to what becomes the record industry. So, where people could discuss written works in a public forum for hundreds of years, music?s only had eighty years for it to be the focus of public consideration.

http://www.fakejazz.com/articles/critics2.shtml

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

Most music criticism just makes me angry? says America's cult-popular critic and online blogger Glenn McDonald. ?I like to feel that an artist is trying to understand something, and maybe even trying to represent some sort of approach to understanding, not just selling units of entertainment. Magazines too often try to homogenize their writers, either by restrictions and editing or just by rolling so many of them together that it's nearly impossible to make sense of individual personalities. I'd rather read about music on mailing lists and discussion boards and random web sites, where people aren't afraid to care about what they're saying, and have the luxury of being themselves.?

The real quality of a music critic is perhaps the ability to describe their own ideas about and emotional reactions to music, writing that makes one buy a CD. Several generations of US music lovers have grown up listening on instruction from the Village Voice's Robert Christgau, attuned to his inimitable blend of judgment, passion and wit. Christgau's reviews always carry hints and warnings, classic caveat emptors. ?His writings constitute a virtual encyclopaedia of popular music over the past fifty years. Whether honouring the originators of rock and roll, celebrating established artists or tipping newer ones... Christgau uniquely applies the language and ideas of academic critical theory to popular music, minus the anal-dry language used by academics scared or incapable of originality never mind irreverence? arts critic Laura Jamison wrote recently in the New York Times. ?Christgau?s forte is his ability to write on a phalanx of vastly different artists with equal erudition, examining the artists and their music as both cultural products and influences... No pop act is too weird, arty, commercial or schlocky for Christgau's contemplation.?

http://www.cluas.com/Music/features/rock_criticism.htm

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

http://www.cluas.com/Music/features/rock_criticism.htm

Music-reviewing is essentially a ?service industry? at times hijacked by egos and self-indulgence emphasises Glenn McDonald. But a revolution in technology and easy digital access to music threatens to render many critics' work obsolete. ?We ought, I think, to have been trying to help readers find music they might enjoy, and to do that we needed to find a way to tell them enough about a record, in terms they could understand and use, that they could make an informed guess about whether buying it was a good risk. We often failed, of course, because reactions to music are intensely subjective and it's impossible to anticipate when, for example, some particular twitch in a singer's voice is going to completely alienate a listener who would otherwise seem to be the band's ideal audience... The thing that threatens to render the whole field of endeavour obsolete, however, is that if you're on the Net you now don't really need to have music described for you. At that point, detailed written descriptions of music are superfluous and anachronistic. A couple of 'if you like Oasis, you might like Travis' links and some clips, and the listener can just make up their own mind.?

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

So Davies. There's this part where the guy who forged "Harrowing of Hell" gives this whiny but basically hardhitting semi-extended monologue that calls, basically, for absolute criticism, criticism without heed to context--and from there, calling for absolute art, art that needs no context to be understood. Again, it's all impossible, but what my good friend The Internet has done is afford more opportunities for contextless artmaking and appraisal, which brings up the usual questions: Why do genres die? Was it who, or what, that killed disco? I mean to an extent I wonder how much of it is supply/demand, and from there how much of it is merely supply, access, presence. I'm sure one of those new books about disco has an answer too. But how much of this is a function of industry machinery? Out with the old, in with the new, etc.?

In other words, if we pretend criticism can help or hinder the newness of new music (it can't; for another time), the reason it's OK to reward semi-fascist throwbacks critically is because positive appraisals doesn't impede new music from coming along. I can see how it would have gotten pretty annoying if everybody kept drawing the same fucking Nativity scene over and over again, and there's limited space in museums and art galleries and so on, and the voraciousness of music consumers and art buyers in general all but demands the new, but all's to say I'm relieved not to be such a crank about this stuff all the time now.

http://riffmarket.blogspot.com/20...ting-music-criticism-in-2007.html

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2822/is_1_23/ai_59450313

Nonetheless, the relationship between popular music criticism, popular music fanship, and cultural politics is a vital one, especially if music criticism is creating an interpretive frame for fanship relatively void of politics. As a result, I would suggest that the question of the relationship between criticism and "postmodernity" as an aesthetic be investigated on the level of individual case studies. Rather than attempt to provide an exploration of youth culture, authenticity, and the question of "postmodernity" in total, then, I will investigate a specific case involving relationships between popular criticism, fanship, and postmodern aesthetics.(5) Through a reading of mass-mediated criticism (and coverage in general) of rock bands Kiss and the Sex Pistols during the late 1970s and during their reunion tours in the late 1990s, I will suggest that, in these cases at least, "post" themes have indeed become a common (and troubling) element of popular criticism. After noting the different notions of authenticity and the different criteria of judgment employed in music criticism at each end of this two-decade gap, I will discuss the problematic implications of contemporary criticism and our (i.e., academic critics) role within it.
In short, the emergence of "post" theses in popular criticism is important if Simon Frith is correct in noting that, in the end, rock criticism isn't concerned with representing music to the public but with "creating a knowing community" (67). That is, like all public discourse, rock criticism rhetorically constitutes an audience that agrees to its meanings. Rock criticism that posits "post" assumptions about music and music fanship helps create audiences who can consume with those assumptions as their interpretive frame. Hence, rather than arguing over whether contemporary popular music is modern or postmodern or whether mass culture in general has developed a general postmodern aesthetic, I want to use these cases as suggestions of the problematic ways popular music criticism encourages an aesthetic that is celebratory toward cynical self-reflectiveness and musical commodification.(6)

Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 1088

http://redelephant.wordpress.com/...iticism-lester-bangs-edward-said/

While not every Bangs review is astonishing or insightful, I do find that he occasionally delves into the social and aural context behind the musical work with a deal of passion and personal integrity. So much so that he really reminds me of Nietzsche fantastic review of Wagner’s symphonies: No limp referencing or namedropping, no one-minute commercial sound bite. Pure ferocity and crazy infatuation.

Perhaps as an antidote to the dwindling state of music criticism, writers should not be inducted into assembly-line mechanics, reviewing album after album after album of free PR-pushed music on a daily basis. But instead, follow the route of literary criticism and write only about tunes they feel very strongly for, be it intense dislike or worship. This would undoubtedly offer some very readable and fascinating accounts of music. Yes, more women writing critically about music would also be terribly exciting. But alas, we hardly live in a world free of commercial/consumer/ideological interest, do we?