Peter Suderman scans the sidebar of Metacritic’s music section and points out that “Nearly all of the review averages are positive or very positive, and almost none of them are straightforward pans,” a state that stands in stark contrast to the film section and its panoply of bad reviews. Why is that? Well, there are many more albums released than movies, and since a publication can only run so many reviews, critics naturally tend to pick albums they like. But there’s also the fact that music critics–who as a group can be said to be of the indie mindset–can always seem to find a way to like things. In a reaction to Friday’s post about the nature of lists, Marc Hogan noted that “the perspective generally afforded under the ‘indie rock’ audience umbrella is wider than for other genres.” But is that really a good thing?
As I mention in a comment on Suderman’s blog post, that difference between movies and music goes beyond the number of releases. Ever week, some movies that are released that are trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, and so these all get reviewed. But very few albums are released that aim at anything broader than their obvious audience, whether that demographic likes metal or rap or indie or teenpop or parent-pop or tweenpop. So when you review an album, it seems odd to place it in any context other than its target audience. Yes, Cradle of Filth would be annoying to most David Archuleta fans, and vice versa. But it’s hard to say that this makes either one objectively bad. The indie audience and the critics that spring from it have become so catholic in their tastes that they can see the good in almost anything that’s not bad on a very basic technical level. (And even that’s not an absolute barrier, given that critical darling Times New Viking sound like they’re recorded by pointing a digital dictaphone at a twenty-year-old boombox).
An example: I hate the Arcade Fire. If you asked me my opinion of them, I would say that they’re a very bad band doing horrible things that make me want to punch puppies. But were I to write a review of an Arcade Fire album–which is unlikely in the first place, since my hatred isn’t so active as to make me bother engaging with them–I would probably not write that. The fact is, I know too many other critics whose tastes otherwise match mine and who I greatly respect that really like the Arcade Fire. Moreover, my tastes are so catholic that I know exactly why I hate the Arcade Fire: I hate them because I hate U2; I hate them because they’re meaningful-core. And at that point my opinion on them becomes no different than it would of a bluegrass band. I’m not too fond of bluegrass either, but I wouldn’t feel at all qualified to write a negative review of a bluegrass band just because I didn’t like the genre. Since I don’t like bluegrass and/or bands that sound like U2, I don’t know enough about them to have an informed opinion, and since the audience for my review would be people that are highly informed, it seems awfully presumptuous of me to offer a lesser-informed opinion as the definitive one. My hypothetical Arcade Fire review, then, would consist of a lot of description, context, and the reactions of others, with a brief mention of the fact that I didn’t like it. But then, their albums aren’t even that bad; they just annoy me. They are one of the bands I hate most right now, but I would be hard-pressed to actually pan their album.
Maybe this isn’t a problem other people face, but the general phenomenon is widespread. We all know someone who likes the things we hate, and who seems like a smart person. Similarly, most things we like are probably hated by someone else who’s a reasonable and decent person. At that point, what is there to argue about? As facile as it may seem, vigorous criticism seems to require that critics divide things up into virtuous and evil, and that other critics disagree with that. Indeed, the phenomenon Hogan describes comes out of just such a critical conflagration:
Saw a post on a hip-hop blog the other day of Drake’s Lykke Li remix, and the blogger (Shake on 2dopeboyz, I think?) was sort of sheepishly saying that a lot of his readers would think it was totally lame but the people with more adventurous tastes would like it. That’s like what people used to say in the comment sections of blogs a few years ago when p4k would rate, like, Clipse or T.I. or Lil Wayne, sure, but I think the average person who shares the broad aesthetic generally defined as “indie” nowadays has a more open mind, more varied tastes. I mean, look at, like, John Darnielle, someone who probably wouldn’t ever describe himself as “indie” but is certainly something of a contemporary standard-bearer— loves metal and R. Kelly. …Whom Bonnie Prince Billy covers.
This didn’t just happen, as far as I know. It came out of a deliberate critical effort to get the indie audience and music critics as a whole to accept the legitimacy of non-rock genres, and as Hogan says, this mostly succeeded. These were the infamous popism/rockism debates, and it seems like critics think of them with some embarrassment these days. Fair enough, I guess: they did get a bit ideological and purist and then imploded, scattering everyone to their niche corners. But they produced a whole lot of good new writing and critics and forced people to take sides. We like to think of such things as irrational and overblown, of course, but that seems like we might be taking ourselves too seriously. What’s really to be lost from going too far in public? A certain degree of cool, perhaps, but not if it’s executed with enough style.
Since I lack such style, though, let me not go too far. I am by no means arguing that indie’s acceptance of these other genres isn’t a very good thing. It’s really nice now not to have to clear my throat for a paragraph before discussing Britney, or for rap critics not to have to field (as many) complaints that betray a basic unfamiliarity with the conventions of the genre. And I’m glad that indie is opening itself up to new influences, or at least admitting its uncool influences rather that stowing them away in some dark corner, waiting for the oral history twenty years after the debut comes out to reveal your secret Bob Seger infatuation. But I wonder if a genre that by dint of its name lacks a connection to a specific sound isn’t losing something in the process.
What is “indie”? What does it stand for? What does it mean? It’s nice that critics, who tend to come out of an indie or punk mindset, have been able to take things outside those areas seriously. But you can make a good argument that indie was defined for a long time by its opposition to pop, by its lack of tolerance for things outside what it considered acceptable. Certainly that set of options was constantly shifting, subject to the ebb and flow of style and consensus. But there was, at least, a set. If all restraints really are loosed from indie, as Hogan seems to be saying, then what holds it together anymore, other than a shared affection for Sonic Youth? If eclecticism becomes the rubric, what happens to older indie values like experimentation, difficulty, thoughtfulness, or cleverness? These seem like unimpeachable virtues, but as we know from accepting pop, they’re just one option among many. Still, they play their part in the system, and if they wash out with the tide, the system will be worse off as a result. Is this the kind of thing that could be rescued with one of those embarrassing, irrational, uncool critical conflagrations? Maybe, but it’s hard to see what it would emerge around. As long as the music fails to provide us with anything solid to grab onto, there’s are sides to take. Other than, you know, for or against goddamn BoingBoing.
In Praise of Negative Reviews [The Confabulum]
What I’m getting from these comments is that critics generally don’t feel they have time to engage things that they don’t like, or even feel they won’t like. Which is a shame.
I agree that it’s irresponsible to trash a bluegrass record when you hate all bluegrass and aren’t sure why. But if you’ve listened to some bluegrass and really thought long and hard about why you hate it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to write a negative review of a record. Of course, nobody wants to spend their life listening to music they hate just so they can write some fire and brimstone tracts on why it’s all so terrible. That’s masochistic. But I do wish critics would take more time to periodically pan things. When they don’t you end up with RS style 3.5/5 star standards and nobody wins.
@Eugene Langley: There’s also a “fan” versus “critic/cognoscenti” component to listening. I have an hour of listening time. Should I give a third spin to the Brother Ali record that I feel kind of lukewarm on or should I dig into my pile of 90s Weezer rarities that do fuck all to advance my broader conception of things but that I know will make me giddy the whole time? At what point am I guilty of being as narrow as the people who say “I like all kinds of music, except for rap and country?” by virtue of my own laziness?
@Eugene Langley: For me, it’s goth, not bluegrass, but no matter how much I listen, to review a goth record for me would still be a critical cheap shot because I don’t share the genre’s values. I can’t take its vocabulary seriously. Vampires are on par with hobbits for me, and anything that is supposedly dangerous and/or transgressive in goth simply sounds silly or pretentious to me.
@Michaelangelo Matos: I think listeners are branching out more, and I base my evidence solely on the iTunes listeners at the Starbucks across the street where I worked. I was able to jack in using wifi to see their playlists (I do this at the university all the time as well), and I’m regularly astounded by how diverse playlists are. They aren’t “deep,” per se…I’m not seeing Bubble Puppy records on there. But I see kids with everything from Modest Mouse to Jack Johnson to Ciara to Trace Adkins to Mastodon. There’s a healthy mix of popular indie, au courant hip-hop, modern country, some classic rock and r&b (oldies basically), and 80s pop hits. But I see more curveballs than I expect. I remember this one girl had every Mastodon record and TWO Michael W. Smith records as well as lots of Randy Travis and every Outkast record. I wish my iTunes was that diverse. Well, maybe without the Michael W. Smith. I thought about actually starting to get stats on this, but it would be a bit of an invasion of privacy, not that I wasn’t already playing music voyeur.
Now these are Starbucks customers and UGA students, so it was primarily white middle-to-upper-class folks, but I found it illustrative and more than a little hopeful.
So, uh, am I missing something, or is this entire discussion based on a couple totally faulty assumptions? Namely (1) That metacritic’s critic ratings, which have always been notoriously arbitrary in both the reviews considered and how those reviews translate to numerical scores, are remotely trustworthy and (2) that, even if the ratings *are* trustworthy, a non-low average metacritic score indicates that the album received no low reviews. Of course the latter isn’t the case — to get a low average score, the album has to be panned almost *across the board*. So if there are no low average scores, it doesn’t prove that critics aren’t disliking anything, or writing negative reviews — it just means that critics aren’t necesssarily in *agreement* about what they dislike. And why, exactly, should they be? Isn’t a little *suspect* when albums (like, I dunno, Katy Perry’s — pretty sure that, for a while, my 3.5 star Blender review was the most positive one on there) get panned across the board?
Also, look. As people here have pointed out, critics will generally gravitate toward stuff they kind of like. Believe me, I have little doubt that I’d pan most high-average-scoring metacritic albums *if I actually wrote about them.* Editors may well realize that, too. (Though then again, maybe if metacritic took into account my skeptical to less-than-glowing Rhapsody blog reviews of TV on the Radio, Gang Gang Dance, No Age, Los Campesinos, Hercules and Love Affair, Santogold, etc — like they count the reviews I write in lots of other places — that might make those scores more fair. But they don’t.) (And those are all acts that I actually think are *worth writing about*, which is more than I can say for *most* indie rock, which isn’t even *worth* panning to me.)
Finally, sorry, but I really don’t see evidence that the critic population, in general, is becoming more open-minded. I dunno, I guess these days you get your token metal or teen-pop or Nashville country album on year end composite lists, which you wouldn’t have 15 years ago. (Or, for metal, maybe 25 years ago — pre-Metallica.) So there’s that. But in general, I’d be kind of surprised if the last couple Pazz & Jop (or Idolator) poll lists are more diverse than Pazz & Jop lists from the early to mid ’80s. Which happens to be the last era in which such lists coincided remotely with my own tastes. So I find it kind of laughable thi time of year, when people whine about such-and-such album they like missing from, say, Blender’s or Paste’s year-end lists. So wait….there’s ONE album you like that didn’t make some random consensus? Not 100?What are you, a frigging pod person? Jeez.
(By the way, I was too lazy to actually check the metacritic scores of TV on the Radio, Santogold, No Age, etc; I *assume* they have high composite scores, but I could be wrong. But if so, I could just as well have listed my Rhapsody reviews of Harvey Milk or Made Out of Babies or Raphael Saadiq or Lindsey Buckingham or plenty of other acclaimed mediocrities.)
Personally, I tend to spend what limited time and energy I have for writing record reviews talking about the stuff that I like. If you only have a few hours a week to piece together a review or two, you may as well spend it bloviating endlessly about the new Gaslight Anthem album or something….
On the other hand, sometimes an album comes along that simply demands a good beating…of course, in this Internet age (unlike the bygone era of print criticism), no critical review ever goes away, and I still receive hatemail every now and then for an appropriately negative review of Vanilla Ice’s Hard To Swallow that I wrote a decade ago.
On the whole, though, I’d rather spend my listening and writing time enjoying Scott Kempner or the Hold Steady than have to sit through some o’ the crap the labels are flinging up against the wall these days.
Film is just a very different medium than music, and the idea of success or failure is a much more all-or-nothing proposition. It’s a lot easier to look at a movie and say unequivocally that the acting or the writing or the directing or the lighting or the special effects or the editing is completely incompetent and wrong, where a piece of music is more open to interpretation, and failure is rarely as easily pinned on a technical shortcoming. I think that extends to the opinions the artists themselves have of their work…Instances of an artist completely disowning an album they made are few and far between, but it seems like everyone in Hollywood is willing to admit when they’ve made a dud or that they can’t even bear to watch it.
“Personally, I tend to spend what limited time and energy I have for writing record reviews talking about the stuff that I like.”
That’s also the case for me. Part of the reason I got into music journalism is the urge to evangelize on behalf of records I like. People are always saying that critics want to be nasty and tear artists down, but I honestly cue up every new album hoping it’s a masterpiece. Doesn’t happen very often, of course, but when it does it sure is satisfying.
Let me use one specific example of my own here: I remember reading Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists in 1999 and being completely humbled by it. I was 24, I’d been writing for money for a couple years, and I’d gotten a job editing calendar listings in Seattle, where I’d just moved. I was cocky and thought I knew a few things (which I did, though not as many as I thought I knew), and I liked hip-hop enough to think that was one of the things I knew something about. Have I mentioned that I’d never read any specialty hip-hop press up to that point? That in Minneapolis I’d been surrounded by people who though the Beastie Boys were the greatest MCs of all time and had never listened to Biggie or Nas? That I’d barely listened to Biggie or Nas? (I had heard and liked them, but didn’t really follow it up.)
The Ego Trip book didn’t make me a stark, raving Biggie and/or Nas fan, though I like both. What it did was make me realize I’d been half-consciously knee-jerk dismissing them as “the rap I’m not supposed to like.” That, I think, is the key thing: people tend to dismiss whatever isn’t marketed directly to them, even in bloggy free-for-all times. Part of a critic’s job, I felt even then, was to be open to things that weren’t necessarily for them. I’d rather read a critic who’s actually made an effort to understand something and then dismissed it gleefully and with malice aforethought (I’ve been learning, thanks to [archivedmusicpress.wordpress.com] that mid-’80s Melody Maker was especially good at this) than “are you kidding?” disdain for something the writer plainly isn’t getting. Not everyone needs to get everything–I’m never going to understand what the hell people like about Guided by Voices, for starters, and I never want to. There are writers (and, god knows, musicians) I enjoy who think the techno I treasure is garbage. So it goes.
The rock-first mindset has been around so long, and has devolved into such cliche, it’s hard to remember how startling it was at first. A lot of the late-’60s stuff by Marcus, Marsh, Christgau, Bangs, Willis, etc., was clearing ground: making the case for rock as worth discussion in what amounted to lit-crit terms. (Early rockcrit’s over-reliance on lyrical analysis is a direct result of this.) The idea that stuff kids liked was worthy of any kind of analysis was dismissed on its face by, oh, 99% of everybody, and that still happens now, albeit under very different circumstances.
I wonder: are music fans in general, not just critics, beginning to listen more catholically, across genre lines? Or even more to the point, are non-indie-ID’ed serious fans doing it to any greater degree than before? I honestly have no idea, though my hunch is that it has to be true to some extent, however small, simply due to the ready availability of such a wider swathe of information and access than ever before. That could just mean people are buying more Putumayo comps, who knows. Too bad my girlfriend flew back to New York last night; she’s a social-work Ph.D student at Columbia, first year of three, specializing in statistics, and would know just how to make a questionnaire to quantify that info.
@Chris N.: I agree, Chris. When I slap a new CD on the box, I hope to get the same jolt that I received when hearing Beggar’s Banquet, Paranoid or Born To Run (to name but three) for the first time. My intention isn’t to tear somebody down (unless it’s Rush) with a review, but rather to preach about their qualities.
Of course, I have pretty wide tastes in music…from Beethoven to Black Flag, from Black Sabbath to Biggie, and I’ve written extensively about rock, rap, punk, metal and the blues. It’s getting harder these days, though, to sift through carbon-copy rock bands, bland rap music, and mindless country to find those few gems, but I guess that’s part of the game, innit?
@Michaelangelo Matos: This makes my head hurt a little but 1) yes, people are definitely crossing genres, but 2) if you tell them that, I think they tend to freak out a little. That being said, the history of music is pretty much entirely about x-pollination, so this is nothing new. However, what is interesting is that it’s happening as people’s interests and pursuits are becoming more compartmentalized as we all become marketing demographics. Then again, you could say that for all the flood of information we all deal with everyday, that compartmentalization hasn’t really put us forward, it’s just … different.
What it all boils down to in the end is a) tolerant listening mixed with b) exposure to new things equals progress. And at the end of the day, I hate to say it, but 90% (a guess) of people out there are still completely intolerant of anything too shockingly new and will point blank ignore anything that doesn’t fit into the parameters of their established taste — no matter how much more new and wonderful things they’re exposed to via the internet, viral marketing, etc.
But we all know this already! So, I’m here to say that though it may appear that people are becoming more tolerant, I’m positing that that’s actually not the case — that people are actually more compartmentalized, there’s just a better vehicle (the internet) for making sure that everyone’s compartment has a soapbox.
Right now, I think that indie is defined more by (on an ideological level) progressivism than opposition. One of the major things that popism helped clear (in my mind anyways) was the whole “authenticity” hangup, which sort of stood at the root of a lot of the genre-based objections that kept pop, rap, etc. out of serious consideration. Even if you’re like me and know that you’re partial to a certain set of values that often crystallize most readily in indie rock, chances are that you have at least an ethos-level sense that you should maybe listen to “Year of The Gentleman” or try to understand Lil Wayne or Coldplay’s appeal. Granted, this throws all of us into an ongoing false-consciousness minefield (i.e. Do I like “Illmatic” for some ‘realer’ set of rap fan reasons or do I like it for the same rockist reasons that I like Wire or Bob Dylan?) that kind of forces everyone to cop to being a dilletante on some level. However, I feel like it’s good that there’s at least an open-minded ideal that either corners people into taking apart their own reasoning (i.e. Why do I hate meaningfulcore?) or intimidates them into informing themselves. (i.e. It’s only a matter of time before my cluelessness about Motown bites me in the ass.)
To appeal to post-modern criticism (in the academic sense of the word), everything is a ‘text’, and the critic’s job is to decode it. Aesthetics is so subjective and relative to in the end be meaningless. At the same time, every record review is a ‘text’ as well, and a reader’s job when reading a review is to likewise decode it. The best criticism has a distinct point of view, and by examining that POV along with the critic’s reaction to the music, one can decide whether it’s worth your hard-earned shekels to purchase that music.
And POV is also malleable. I helped a friend of mine mix down his CD of noisecore tracks several years ago — He was working with an old sampler, a couple of guitar pedals, and little else, and I had a bunch of rack processing gear and a decent mixer, so we married our rigs for the duration. In the course of working with him I was able to hear what he felt was ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a genre that I don’t normally listen to at all, or enjoy when I hear it.
My poor wife had to put up with several evenings of screamed obscenities, distorted bass and relentless gabber beats. She never really got with that aesthetic, but surprisingly she heard enough of it to make comments like “that one sounds like it’s coming together well.” So she wasn’t entirely immune.
My point being, when it comes to music, everyone is so subjectively affected by it that there’s no real hope for any sort of objective grading of music.