CHAPTER 18

CRITICS

If you are in a group, after the applause has died down and the autograph signing biros have been put away, one question will haunt you: “Are we good?”

Such musings are not unusual. Because no matter what the group is, it will encounter audiences who stare blankly before wandering off, applaud perfunctorily while yawning—or simply don’t exist. The selfsame group might, the night before, have enjoyed robust demands for encores, delirious fan interest, and enthusiastic invitations to play concerts in faraway locales.

Can any of these sorts of “feedback” be trusted as indicators of whether the group is doing right or wrong? No. Certainly not. Even mass popularity isn’t a reliable gauge, since spectators attend gigs for all sorts of reasons: social compunction, fascination with freaks, and prurient interest in other attendees.

Still, one traditional way to determine the worth or justness of a group’s endeavors has been to judge by audience applause, crowd size, record sales, et al. Therefore, groups and singers with “chart success”—records which have made the “Hot 100,” for example—are an arrogant bunch, like sports stars whose teams have won championship rings or trophies. They imagine themselves as a special class, believing their accolades to be a barometer of their exceptionalism, not the lucky result of payola, zeitgeist, or other circumstances.

No matter how “good” or talented the hit-maker may be, though, “success” is arbitrated by a thousand factors. In any case, neither massive popularity nor official-sounding awards are sure ways to determine whether what one is doing is worthwhile. Grammy winners have been making this point for years.

Similarly, whatever people say about one’s group, whether they claim to enjoy it or despise it, find it boring or life altering, one mustn’t take it personally. Their opinions are due to the circumstances of their digestion that day, what happened at work, or the alignment of the stars. Compliments can be a signifier that your group is nonthreatening, they can be sincere, or they can be based on pity, lust, and fear. Still, they are always nice to hear and one should accept them graciously. Calorically harmless, they are “popcorn for the ears.”

Ultimately, no one really cares about your group to the degree that you do, so chitchat about your group must be regarded for what it is: chitchat. You will never actually know if what you do is “good,” “bad,” or just confusing. You are, in any case, too close to it to understand what it is. If you were actually imbued somehow with the ability to experience your music or performance in an out-of-body way or through someone else’s eyes and ears, it would probably cause trauma, anguish, and depression, as you would have to reconcile your self-image to another’s idea of you. After all, who’s eyes and ears would one choose? A critic’s?

“Everyone’s a critic” is a common complaint, and one that certainly resonates in the modern era of self-publishing and electromagnetic commentary. And, indeed, there is fierce criticism from all quarters, which will bedevil your group if you let it. But public criticism is best ignored, as it’s arbitrary and often anonymous. Even when it bears a signature, the ideas are usually clueless and quite audacious. After all, who are these critics and who asked them anyway?

 

 

A critic is one who believes that his or her opinions should be a guide to other people’s taste. This is normal. It is the impetus behind deejaying, mix tapes, records as gifts, and so on. There are many musician or scenester writers who want desperately to steer their milieu in a way that suits their aesthetic or ideology. These people’s ideas on groups and records can be valuable and should be encouraged. They have helped shape—and even invent—some of the more interesting trends and movements of the group era. But there is also an industry of establishment critics who write judgments on music, whose purpose is more sinister. After all, to transcribe one’s opinion about records one might not even care about or like, in an era when anyone can listen for themselves, requires a sense of evangelism or anthropological conceit. Indeed, the modern critic often sees himself or herself as translating the experience of sound into something their reader (too thick to really “get it”) can understand. They are interpreters, deciphering the language of a remote tribe to their own flock.

To the critic, this strange tribe (of groups) comprises hucksters, itinerants, and gurus. Some are shoeless prophets proselytizing true “art,” but most are pretenders, poseurs, and cheats, trying to pass off trash as treasure. Like hustlers on an urban avenue, they are constantly preying on the gullible music buyer who, without proper guidance, will fall into some den of aural iniquity, just like a hapless teenage ingenue wandering down Haight Street in 1967. Luckily, the critic is a kind of heroic character, like Curtis Sliwa (of the Guardian Angels), who can intervene. He or she has special insight, and is uniquely equipped to understand who is for real and who’s a big phony. In fact, the critic’s experience of the music is not just about the music, it’s intrinsic to the music. As with the tree falling in the forest, “If a record is released and the critic doesn’t write about it, did it even happen?”

When these critics purport to write about a record, they are really writing, “Me, me, me . . . What About ME?!?” And because they are actually propagating themselves, they resent performers and groups with any character or personality of their own. This competition with the subject is perfectly logical from their perspective. These critics see themselves as artists in their own right; their writing needs a clean slate on which to project, a tabula rasa. Just as a lead guitar player wants a steady backbeat over which to “shred,” the critic celebrates the performers and groups who will provide a clean, tidy, soil bed in which their word-seeds can sprout—groups and singers whose personas won’t overpower the writer’s own voice.

Therefore they reward formalistic, inoffensive, dull, pretentiously unpretentious groups, who “rock” with a studied indifference, who try too hard to not try too hard, who compose a kind of indefinable muddle sometimes described as “indie rock.” The groups the critics celebrate, though middle class and usually college educated, are not intellectual or poetic, nor are they threatening in any way. Their style is varsity casual; they’re smart enough to be bland and unassuming, and they are attractive in the sense that they received the right nutrients when they were young during their unremarkable but privileged upbringing.

Their type of music isn’t necessarily “bad.” In fact, it might even be “good” in some sort of way. But it is typically unassuming, introverted, unexciting, dealing in mawkish emotionalism better left on daytime television, inscrutable in a manner which betrays cowardice on the part of the “artist,” and is often state-subsidized by the government of its country of origin, whether it be Canada, France, or Sweden. If it’s American, it indulges in obscurantism and is entirely lacking in political content because of a nagging concern of the performer that they not offend whatever future employers in whichever entertainment conglomerate or lobbying firm, or chase away a prospective sorority girl by seeming too “far out,” weird, or radical.

Because of the critic’s starring role in the music scene, he or she is concerned with maintaining decorum. If Little Richard were appearing on the scene nowadays, he would arouse the ire of the critics, who would resent his humor, his showmanship, his costumes, and the Dada content of his songs. The same goes for Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, and the Beatles. The critic would dismiss these as comic or novelty acts, not to be taken seriously, as opposed to, say, the tedious and highly regarded Sigur Rós and Radiohead.

Of course, Little Richard isn’t appearing on the scene now. He is an institutionalized favorite, beloved by critics. Why is he so beloved by them? Because of his “otherness” and his irrelevance. In music, personality is only forgiven by the critic if the performer is firmly ensconced in the “other” category, or if they are retired or dead. If he/she is irrelevant or a completely exotic quantity, he/she is granted a right to showmanship, personality, stage name, and even political expression. But that is simply not acceptable for the contemporary domestic artist. In stark contrast to their historical forebears, modern rock ’n’ rollers are supposed to be celebrated for their void of personality; they are expected to maintain the integrity of the status quo, and behave in tandem with the system and its organs of expertise, which lend credibility to the insanity, horror, and absurdity of capitalism. Anyone who attempts to escape the void must be shunned.

The artist is expected to be a silent partner and unannounced extension of faceless authority; one more brand name alongside Standard & Poor’s, the NASDAQ, the New York Times, Merchant Ivory, Procter & Gamble, Monsanto, and the MoMA. Sting, Bon Iver, and Vampire Weekend fit right in. This policy is propagated via the critic, who feels him or herself trapped by the void. For the official rock critic, the modern group represents “fashion” or “art,” whereas “other” music is “costume” or “craft,” somehow authentic and outside of critique.

The critic feels a great deal of pain in listening to music that doesn’t conform to standards of proper behavior. It threatens the status quo, their ideas of dialectic progress in music, and their own place within the narrative. Therefore, like the media from which they take their ideological cues, they seek to control the conversation about what is happening. To do so, they use a grading system, which reduces the critiqued object into something absolutely quantifiable, something without menace, mystique, or potency. Even if the grade is five stars or an A+, the critic has superseded it; without their expertise it would be floating in space, sans meaning.

 

 

Reviewers have in recent years become so central to a record’s perceived importance and success that they imagine their remarks about a record are more important as a form of expression than the record itself. In fact, the editors of the influential Internet record review sites have proposed a system whereby records from hence onward be made about the reviews instead of vice versa. In this system, reviewers will go on tour and be feted with fame and glory, while the groups—more and more irrelevant to the whole process—will eventually be phased out altogether. Whether this reversal is to be institutionalized remains to be seen, but certainly now the official reviewer, a kind of cosmic dope or transcendental lecher, is in a role of rare and arbitrary power, like Joseph Stalin but without his bravery, guile, or cunning.

Another one of the critics’ jobs is to have an opinion about things they actually have no regard for or couldn’t care less about. This leads to annoyance on their part with regard to the records and groups they discuss. Their opinions are therefore contrived, conjured up in order to make a statement that addresses the perception of the thing in question, and not the actual thing. Perhaps they will perversely champion that which is unpopular, or vice versa. Or they may try to “break” an unknown. But typically these writers will fastidiously maintain a status quo, an aesthetic which they feel reinforces an aspect of their equally contrived personal “identity.”

The critics must be entertaining too, if they are to generate ad revenue. They are read or are considered readable for their hyperbole and style. Therefore they affect a position of caring for one or another thing. Since they feel vulnerable if they “like” something, the default mode is to be either bitchy, blasé, dismissive, or sometimes outraged. These emotions about the record are summoned up randomly, perhaps using the I Ching or a roll of the dice. Cruelty is seen as a bit of derring-do; the critic will sometimes eviscerate a subject, but only if the group in question is considered a lame duck or socially impotent (i.e., unable to grant favors to or inflict violence on the writer in the future).

Rock ’n’ roll musicians tend to gravitate en masse toward some particular stylistic template. Critics do the same. Though there are many critics, they only have a few voices. The most common one is the “omniscient,” who holds forth as if he/she were a deity on a mountaintop who’d incidentally seen all of humanity’s foibles transpire, including the entire back catalog of whatever “artist” they are discussing. As an astral being, they affect a tone of chiding condescension. Another is the “memoirist,” who tells you a few incidental comments about the record while you learn oodles about their experience in traffic or their dinner of tikka masala. This is supposed to be refreshingly unpretentious. As opposed to an actual music enthusiast who is invested in a scene, none of these creatures can tell you what kind of music they like and why this does or doesn’t fit into their ideal. To do so would undermine their right to caprice.

The establishment critic is also aware of the role of money. Even on the “independent” level, critical popularity is bought through a form of payola called “publicity.” Publicists are like farm league lobbyists. They are “connected” people, usually ex–Condé Nast employees, who are hired to tell their acquaintances who work for periodicals or music blogs to write positive articles about the group which has paid them a fee. They control the way a group is written about too, as they distribute something called a “onesheet,” written by the group’s record company, summarizing the new record’s promo campaign with “bullet points.” This is why, whenever a group’s record “blows up,” the articles you see written about it are uniformly similar. The Strokes, for example, were said by all press organs to evoke the Ramones and Television, despite no discernible similarity to either group. The extraordinary obedience of the press in following orders from the publicists shows how little many of the writers care, not only about the subjects they write about, but about music itself.

And this is understandable. Because music is not for everyone. Most people, in fact, shouldn’t listen to it. This isn’t meant as an insult to them, or as a way to question their decency or intellectual capacity. People who shouldn’t listen to music are often very competent at their jobs and may also be responsible pet owners. They should not, however, use the groups as a prop for their future career in journalism or as a way to generate ad revenue for their website. Listening to music won’t make one interesting, hip, in-the-know, or better than other people. All of these elitist conceits are common to the enthusiast and are undeniably a factor in listening to music, but ultimately it is music that must liberate one from such concerns.

Unfortunately, it is precisely those who shouldn’t listen to music who constitute the majority of its most influential critics. These people, the snarling dogs who enforce mediocrity through their vehemence, sneering, and know-it-all pretensions, resent music because to them it is an unfathomable, inscrutable riddle. They want to speak about it, hold forth on it, determine its future like the parched schoolteacher who crushes the spirit of the child because he too was crushed so long ago.

This type of critic resents organized sound just as a mole resents sight or the ostrich resents flight. But instead of just turning away, he has been taught that music is intrinsic to a person’s sexuality, to their attractiveness, so he pushes forth in his nonsense elucidations, tracts designed to be read by other confused individuals who need an expert to explain the music to them. Yet music is like food or touch or modern banking—it defies explanation. Explanation or elucidation is an embarrassing redundancy which has no relation to the sensibility borne of the sound itself.

It’s important to identify “music for people who shouldn’t listen to music” and separate it into a different camp; it is indeed another “thing.” It should occupy a space for so-called music which isn’t music at all—in the same manner that television news isn’t news and fast food isn’t food. This new genre would be for people who don’t like music at all, but are gleaning some sort of identification through it. The establishment critic, while steering clear of mainstream artists, reflects their values, production aesthetics, and motifs in what they taste-make for their audience of would-be snobs.

That the record company executives and their industry critic-serfs are given such an enormous role in determining what music is played on the radio, what music is covered in the press, and which musicians are feted with wealth and fame, could be seen as something that is just incidental, irrelevant, and comic. But it has a detrimental effect on music, and even on the course of history itself. Since these po’-faced bean counters are determining the content of radio and which “artists” are granted “historic” stature and therefore attain ubiquity, we all must live in the world they have constructed. And just as demonic architects and developers have cursed us with a strip-mall universe, the music critic arbiters have pushed aural tedium into the clubs and onto the airwaves, leaving us wading in their pollution.

This is not entirely the fault of this sort of critic, who is a victim him or herself—just another measly member of a society so aesthetically stunted, conservative, and conformist that he or she cannot imagine anything but the most trite and one-dimensional mode of expression. The USA, a corporatist state whose propaganda organs mouth an individualist ideology while aggressively eradicating the unusual, is lousy with sameness. When one crosses a border from one state to another, one sees the same chain restaurants as in the previous state. The televisions and the radios are programmed according to a national agenda. Ice hockey is played in Arizona. There are almost no singular shops, restaurants, local customs, or regionalism. It’s simply not tolerated.

Any defense of independent productions is cast as small-minded, pastoralist, against progress, quixotic, and sad. Groups, the United States’ last cottage industry, were also the final vestige of localism in the 1980s and 1990s, with rap groups not only announcing their locality, but embodying it formalistically (continuing the mid-Atlantic tradition of doo-wop and girl groups). But this nod to place has disappeared, and groups are now emigrants to either of the two centers of media (LA/NYC) or are just simply conjured up from the Internet.

So the establishment critic, self-selected from the United States citizenry, is an agent of repression and conformity. But, as such, he is simply an active participant in the police state he represents. He or she is typically unpaid, making “citizen’s arrests” to correct or eradicate aesthetic and ideological misfits.

Though these sorts of critic/writers might seem maddening to the group member, they must actually be encouraged. They are a vital part of the fragile ecosystem of rock ’n’ roll and serve an important—albeit irritating—role in its continuance. If one were to exterminate them or the conditions under which they thrive, it would seem pleasant for a little while, but ultimately would cause a chain reaction that could threaten the very foundations of the milieu.

After all, the industry critic serves as a tangible stand-in for the authoritarian “establishment” which rock ’n’ roll purports to kick against. Their arbitrary decisions and perceived influence mirror and augment the power of such faceless opponents of the group as radio, television, state control, nightlife as we know it, the war machine, social programming, et al. Without this figure, the group—already marginalized and made to feel irrelevant in the electromagnetic age—is deprived of one of the primary foes which gives it its very purpose and meaning.