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.