Reading through the posts here, I admit I struggle. It’s not a struggle with this particular blog, or these bands, or these recommendations, all of which are excellent. Categorically, honestly. The struggle is this: I find music reviews on the whole to have pretty much nothing to do with my affective experience of listening to music.
This is due, in most part, to the polarization of reviews along a single line of consideration. Music reviews are obsessed with the single question of whether the music is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ By that the reviewer means something that be glossed as 'did I enjoy it?' Sometimes there is a sense of subtlety to the review – this album is average (and by that the reviewer usually means ‘bad’), or half of the album is good, and the other half is bad. The reviews at Dylaraddict are great – subtle and thoughtful. But no matter how well-considered or well-written, the vast majority of music reviews flatten towards a single good-vs-bad critical axis. But is that how we experience music? Is that the emotional response that we have? Again and again I find that an appraisal of whether a piece of music is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is one of the least interesting things one could say about it.
Maybe I just want too much from music reviews. Maybe it’s a form that promises ultimately one thing: to tell me whether something is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Maybe what I'm saying is I want is a way of talking about music that’s supplemental to a review, something more descriptive and less evaluative.
In general, art gets the benefit of the doubt from me. By ‘art’ I mean a wide range of cultural ‘stuff’ both high and low – movies, art exhibits, indie rock albums, tv shows, novels, etc. There is good art and bad art, but the best art provokes not just a single static reaction, but a complex and dynamic variety of reactions. The best art challenges us and challenges our assumptions, attitudes, and approaches to the world. And one of the strategies art has available to it is to defy us: to deliberately annoy, irritate, bore, confuse, confound, and displease. This last bit seems key to me: art shouldn’t strive to merely give pleasure, but to also provide alternatives to pleasure.
Different artforms are more or less suited to this type of work, but all artforms have the power to productively displease, including (especially) pop music. My favorite example of the affective range of pop music is the conclusion of Wilco’s A Ghost is Born: the two song sequence of Less Than You Think and The Late Greats. Ignore whether we think these tracks are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ How do we experience the sequence of these songs?
In any view it’s a strange sequence. Less Than You Think is a down-tempo piano ballad followed by 8.5 minutes of static and feedback. The Late Greats is an upbeat, hooky, catchy pop song. They are utterly bizarre songs to sequence next to each other, let alone to conclude an album with. Each seems to confound the other. Jeff Tweedy has said that that the squall at the end of LTYT is the aural equivalent of a migraine, a debilitating sound flooding of the sound spectrum. Listening to it is a singularly unpleasant experience, frustrating, boring, and all the more so because we know that on the other side of the experience the gleeful pop rush of The Late Greats is waiting for us. LTYT’s outro seems to unbalance and sabotage the entire album.
And yet I think the opposite is true: LTYT’s climax is the ugly heart of the whole album, because it forces us to feel, and feel strongly. If we simply skip past it, in annoyance or irritation, the track is forcing us to action, not just passive reception. This in turn draws attention to the difference between our song-centric present (CDs and MP3 players make it so easy to skip tracks, to re-edit albums) and an album-centric past (it’s much harder to just skip tracks on an LP or, egads, a cassette). That is it’s own set of problems and meanings, especially as Tweedy is such a vocal proponent of ‘the album’ as a unified aesthetic unit.
But our affective reaction is even more significant, because it folds back into the themes of the album itself. Like the most difficult moments of any relationship, Less Than You Think dares us to give up, walk out. It’s like being trapped in an aural purgatory. Then, without warning, we are sent to our reward, paid off, flooded with the dopamine of ‘Late Greats.’ The music tests, punishes, and compensates. Whatever our affective response to this sequence, it’s central to the meaning of, and circumscribed by, the music. And to skip it because we don’t ‘enjoy’ it is to opt out of some of the album’s most complicated emotional effects. It’s a refusal to engage on the artist’s terms. It makes the art beholden to us, and not the other way around.
We may find it a song bad, a melody boring, a lyric embarrassing, an arrangement overwrought, a vocal timbre not to our liking, an album too long, a career trajectory unfortunate. That is all part of our experience of the art, and as such, should be part of the discussion. But the discussion shouldn’t stop with such things. Art and artists should test us, and displease us, and disappoint. It should push us past good and bad, even render such categories irrelevant. That seems a far more productive outcome than art merely saying things we want said, and in ways we approve of.
6 comments:
Here comes a long response:
The central idea that reviews are useless when they become too subjective is one that I whole-heartedly concur with, and in constructing a reviewing template, I tried my best to come up with as many descriptive categories as I could, because when I read other people's reviews, I'm much more interested in getting a sense of what a record sounds like than whether some person I don't know and whose predilictions aren't well known to me likes the album or not. One of the people whose musical taste I most admire, in turning me down to write on this site, said that he had no interest in participating in the taste-making process, and I think that skepticism is really right on. You shouldn't write a review because you want to influence the way that other people hear something, you should write it to give exposure to something that you like, that most people haven't heard of. I think it's important to realize that in the context of a positive review, any negativity serves to ground things, to make your overtures more believable in representing the piece warts-and-all.
In light of that, while I'm all for being an advocate for art (in principle, that's what this blog is all about), to never say anything critical paints a false picture, and repeatedly doing so basically makes your writing pointless. The only reason to continue reading a reviewer is if the time you put into tracking down something that they've suggested pays off when that album is what they claimed it was. Anyone who's spent any time reading the consumer reviews on a large website like Amazon knows the pitfalls of cheerleading (!!!!!1!!!1!11). While I agree that just saying "this is good" or "this is bad" is uninteresting, The qualities that make a record good or bad are infinite and to my mind utterly remarkable. Our jobs as reviews is rather to say "this record is good/bad because a, b, c, d, etc. etc." and the longer and more robust that list is, the better we've done our jobs.
With regards to the particular example of the Wilco songs:
It seems to me that there must be some sort of middle ground between an artist and a consumer. I agree that our collective lack of attention span and inability to spend time digesting things that aren't immediately satisfying is a problem. At the same time, there are a lot of crappy artists out there who don't deserve the sort of reverence you're talking about just for participating in an act of creation. There's a pretty fine line separating productive displeasure and self indulgence (or even schadenfreude, as it seems is sometimes at the heart of avant garde knob-noodling). To expect your audience to participate for 7 or 8 minutes in your aural migraine smacks of self-indulgence to me. In the age of the iPod, why should they? Is the tension and eventual tonal shift really worth the slog? For me the answer is no.
And speaking of form, every artist should be aware of the medium they're working within if not beholden to it. Knowing that most of their audience would be listening to the album on CD or MP3 player, to make the claim that skipping to the next song requires an active response is technically truly but completely over-blown. You "interact" with the album for the half-second that it takes to hit the skip button (an actuality that should have been well-understood by the band), and by this measure, we are interacting with our music more than ever before, which seems to be what you're arguing against.
It may at times be frustrating, but none-the-less true, that art is almost always born of something functional, and more often than not, that function is entertainment. TV, Movies, Music, Books, Paintings, whatever medium you want to pick, people started creating within it to entertain others, and it's that basic contract between producer and consumer that almost any piece of art hangs off of and is informed by. I agree with your claim that we should be willing to be manipulated by an artist, so long as the eventual payoff is adequate, but trying to act as though the payoff isn't the point of the whole endeavor seems wrong to me, and that these kind of purist notions underpin some of the most pretentious and unfulfilling art that gets made shouldn't be a surprise.
For my part, I'll advocate for the middle ground I was talking about earlier. That we as consumers should operate within the artist's parameters until they do something that violates the trust that goes into the contract, after which all bets are off. Whenever I download an album by an artist I like, I listen to it the entire way through in order a number of times until I feel I have a good sense of its shape and basic operating principles, after which I feel more comfortable dissecting, reconstructing or reviewing it. I don't think that I shoudl feel like I'm cheating Neko Case if I want to listen to the bulk of Middle Cyclone but not sit around for half an hour listening to ambient noise. When I want half an hour of ambient noise, I'll buy a Buddha Machine.
Thanks for the response. I guess, if there is any takeaway from what I wrote, I hope that it is simply to suggest an additional critical consideration to how we listen to music, one that is as critical of the listener’s response to the music as it is to the music itself. I don’t even necessarily think this should be the dominant consideration; pop music, as you point out, is ‘born of something functional’, i.e. entertainment, and needs to be addressed as such. And as you say, simply participating in the act of artistic creation doesn’t earn you my time and money; the law of the bell curve says there are always way more mediocre artists out there than great ones. But I do think the great ones have the right to expect something more from us, and something more serious: more serious attention, more patience, more thought and consideration. This kind of canon-making is going to be contentious, of course, and may in fact be the heart of my argument as a whole (and maybe that’s the meta-project of this type of site). Anyway, for me, Wilco is one of these ‘canon’ artists, and as such deserves that kind of seriousness from its listeners: the quality of Wilco’s work obligates us to do more work than we need to do for a lesser artist. The conclusions of that work may be positive or negative, and we shouldn’t deny ourselves the shallower pleasures of that artist, but we should acknowledge that there are depths present in which dive deeply.
I think just about everything you say here is right, and I agree especially that artists should be aware of the medium they are working in, even as they try to transcend that medium. Certainly Jeff Tweedy is/does. I take the conclusion of ‘A Ghost is Born’ to be a commentary on that exact point, that we are interacting with our music more than ever before, that we ‘"interact" with the album for the half-second that it takes to hit the skip button.’ It takes no energy at all for an audience to toss aside an artists’ work, work that they have perhaps spent hundreds of hours creating, with no guarantee that it will ever be fully explored, fully appreciated, fully understood. The terms of the artistic interaction are favor completely the audience. What does that mean for the artistic relationship – the balance of power - between artist and audience? Or quote a phrase: Enter Okkervil River…
I guess I don’t understand, to get right at your lede, why you think reviews should have anything to do with your affective experience of listening to music. It seems to me that we have reviewers for pretty much one purpose: most people, even if they care about a particular art, don’t have the time, energy, money, or means to sort through the piles of culture now created. So we each seek out reviewers whose sensibilities we trust so they can do the sorting for us. For me, Pitchfork was perfect for a stretch, as was David Edelstein. David Denby and A. O. Scott came and come close, and so forth. In the last years the Reverend has become my musical gatekeeper. But if this is the case, then the main and nearly only purpose of the review is to put you on to music that will be worth your while (that is you, particularly). A website like Metacritic increasingly seems pointless to me. I don’t really care what the average assessment of Spin, Rolling Stone, NME, and on and on is. I maybe care what Pitchfork or Tiny Mix Tapes says because I have a track record of successfully following out their recommendations.
In general it seems to me that you’re arguing we should replace the review with more substantial pieces of essayistic criticism. I’ve made a similar argument plenty of times about book reviews, so I’m not completely unsympathetic. At the same time, it seems to me that this argument works for book reviews much better than it does for music. Most people are flatly not interested in criticism, though perhaps serious readers are more than serious music listeners (witness the New York Review of Books, which has no musical equivalent I know of). But why kid yourself by reading reviews, then? Why not just seek out full blown criticism: the 33 and 1/3 series say? Reviews are almost always intended to be read before their audience’s reading/listening, so it would seem to be a straightforward category mistake to spend much time trying to analyze an experience the audience hasn’t themselves yet had. Just the reverse, criticism is generally worthless if one hasn’t already carefully taken up the primary text oneself. So I’m not sure the review and criticism can be put together. The long review/essays in TNYRoB seem to me to be the closest we get, 10 tabloid pages on, say, 5 recent post-apocalyptic novels. I’ve always loved the idea of these in theory but find myself abandoning them halfway through, however. I’ve usually only read a couple of the novels and find I just don’t care to read in detail about the rest. Frankly, what I need to know is whether I should bother picking up The Pesthouse in addition to The Road, etc. So: back to the review. Then, once I’ve read: on to the criticism. That Zadie Smith essay on Remainder and Netherland that we all passed around was the rare treat since we had actually all read (and loved) both of those novels. I don’t imagine it would be of much interest to someone who had read neither or only one of them. There’s nothing in the review’s essential interest in leveling a simple judgment (do/don’t bother to track this down) that forecloses serious engagement before the fact on the part of the reviewer or after the fact on the part of the consumer. There’s just an acknowledgment of where the review stands in the timeline, I think.
Further, the particular brand of criticism you seem to be interested in--a brand of phenomenology or response theory that describes the way a piece of art acts on us--seems to answer few of the problems you have with the review. If you want more description as a way of evading subjective judgment, this seems to me exactly the wrong brand of criticism: the ways that these things act on us, once we get past the empty generalities of good and bad, are incredibly peculiar and idiosyncratic. Hence the standard objection to Stanley Fish and reader response theory: that way lies subjectivism, even solipsism. I’m pretty sympathetic to response theory, especially if used as a jumping off point for broader concerns, but actually it’s here, I think, that there is in fact real danger of the reviewer influencing how other people listen, as David says, rather than simply putting them onto the unknown. Reviews rather than criticism, so things read before rather than after engagement, if they were to detail the reviewer’s own affective experience, would exactly blinder their audience into having similar experiences. Maybe this happens a little with critical judgments--e.g., everyone’s saying the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! is bad so I’m going to hear it as bad--but this seems to me a problem only for the weak-willed and flaccidly opinionated. But if I read your account of the last two tracks of A Ghost Is Born before ever hearing them themselves, I doubt I’d ever have any interesting reactions of my own to them rather than simply hearing a validation of that arc of response.
I suppose, as you'd expect, I have to disagree with many of the assumptions in your response. It may be the case, as I suggest in my original piece, that the only job of a music review is to tell me whether I'm likely to like something or not, and to expect a review to do otherwise is to expect a fish to jump up and tapdance. I think a music review can tell me whether I'm likely to like something AND engage in fruitful ways an album's complexities. Very very very few reviews do that. Yes, I can read a 33 1/3 on a handful of albums. Why can't I expect that level of engagement with more recent, less unequivocally canonical music? I want more from my review than a recommendation. I want a review, like a work of art, that challenges me and how I receive shit.
As to your second post - the impact of such a review on how we might then approach the work - again, why do reviews only have to be for those of us who haven't heard the thing, i.e. exist only to turn us onto stuff? I don't know about you, but when I'm trying to make sense of an album, or movie, or whatever, that I've just experienced, I devour reviews. It's how I interpret and understand complicated artistic stuff. Reviews that more complicated engaged the material are exactly what I want. Sure, phenomenological criticism is just one method of making meaning, but it's a method that I'm historically sympathetic toward, and that I find especially helpful in thinking through how music works on its listener.
This all was meant as a prelude to a more specific discussion of Okkervil River, even more specifically 'Pop Lie' and 'On Tour With Zykos', that is currently living on my laptop at home, 1000 miles away. I'll post it when I get back in a couple weeks. Till then --
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