TS: Critics liking bad stuff vs critics hating good stuff

(Tom, what's the better way to get a hold of you these days, the hotmail or the gmail address?)

or

Hey, Everyone's A Critic.

A Comedy of Modern Manners in 25 Interminable Acts.

STERLING CLOVER'S VOICE REVIEW OF THE BLACK EYED PEAS TO THREAD

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m.

Also, I think it's silly to get upset over critics "hating good stuff," because for every CD released there's somebody who thinks it's good stuff. If we start bending over backward in those cases, we become publicists, or Rolling Stone writers (though not much of a zing at this point, is it?).

...ALWAYS SHOULD BE SOMEONE YOU REALLY LOVE

Used to be that's what all pop criticism was, right? Cf. Meltzer.

...

ASSUMING "good" and "bad" are just measures of relative popularity, and all the critics involved are being 100% sincere in their pieces..

A piece by someone praising something normally univerally hated can be just as enthralling as a piece by someone trashing a sacred cow.

I'm on the fence, but I'm going to go with "Critics liking bad stuff" only because "trashing sacred cows", whether well written or not, has been more common than the other.. and I'd like to see more sincere, well written pieces praising music that's "bad", for a slight change.

Not the best analogy, I admit.

"critics who are very obvious in their attempts to establish a unique niche of opinion that sets them apart from the rest. That is, its their main goal to say something different"

Implying that said critics don't really believe in their scandalous praise of crap or debunking of goodness. You see this charge levied a lot. Peepee, for example, says "there's a lot of them out there." Just wondering who these people ARE ...

oh yeah? where? (or maybe i'm misunderstanding you, because in a way, critics darn well *better* establish their own unique niche, and say something other than what everybody else is saying. why would an editor want to use writers who parrot what everybody else says? and reviews had *better* be at least as much about the writing as the subject, assuming the critics writing them are writers, not hacks. in fact, wasn't there a thread here arguing that just this week? but as far as writers whose primary purpose in life is to be contrarian or perverse, sorry, none come to mind. again, please name some names.)

I'd love to see examples of this (mostly) imaginary creature as well.

[DISCLAIMER: I'm speaking as someone who no longer purchases muzik based solely on some "critic"'s recommendation. If I was, my answer would probably be the opposite. And even if I had any personal animosity toward any critic, named or otherwise, which I don't, it wouldn't apply to anyone here; 'cause there's no 'critics' on ILM, just music fans.]

An honestly, as an editor, I can't imagine why I would let somebody write the above. It's either self-contradictory, one of the oldest cliches in the book ("guilty pleasures," cough cough), or both.

Insecurity.

of course, plenty of them have taken indentity in the fact that they don't like what they're supposed to. see jeff foxworthy.

m.

As for insecurity: One might hope that, once people decide to become critics, they'd have the courage of their convictions. (Though there may well be some great critics I'm forgetting of who contradict this. Okay, here's a good question: Who are the best critics out there who have no idea at all what they like? Have there ever been any? I am so sick of all this anti-wishy-washy shit. Insecure critics, stand up!!)

This was a joke, btw. (Actually, they are mostly Pavement fans.)

I didn't intend to lay into y'all. I just thought that little old me and my opinion could be heard. I don't know how many of yous are music writers, but I am not. You may have heard me state before that I use reviews and articles to find out about all the music I can't hear through more traditional (and dead) media, such as radio (RIP). I understand (somewhat) about the pressures "yous" face in finding your unique voice (getting and keeping a gig?), but most of what I care in a review is your sincerity and honesty. The writing means more to you than to me. If its sincere, AND good writing, then great, but if one's gotta go, then for me its the writing. I don't wanna hear how tough a job it is to write about music, cuz I'd always assume it was (that is, to do it well). Maybe it was misleading for me to state that "there's a alot of them out there", its just that I really notice them when I read them.

No offence to most of you who do this for a living, but I rarely notice or remember names of critics. I read reviews daily, all over the web and in print. They mean a lot to me. Please don't take my statements as an indictment of your profession.

I like that. Initially, I was intimidated by ILMers cuz I ain't a good writer, but then the general "fuckthat"edness of the board comforted me to add to it.

...and honestly, I have often wished I was one of them. It might make life a lot easier.

i wonder how these people manage to be in such a vacuum though? it seems to me like the critical ideal that's a bit unattainable. like being an outsider artist, you don't get to choose that status. (do you?)
m.

...Let there be no mistake about it. Bob Dylan is a terrifyingly gifted artist - as both writer and singer. But, as with any important artist, we must ultimately come to grips with the substance of what he is saying. And underneath it all, this is what the fuss is really about. In the final analysis, I do not believe that Dylan's vision of the world is really where it's at. What he sees is there. But to stop and go no further is the path to either destruction or compromise. I'm not prepared to buy either.
--Irwin Silber, Sing Out!, February 1966

When I read this at age sixteen, five or so years after the fact, Highway 61 Revisited was the most important thing in my life. But I was impressed by Silber's review even though it was standing contra to my hero Dylan, since Silber was taking in and taking on something in Dylan that somehow wasn't part of the general perception and adulation of Dylan's "poetic genius": that Dylan romanticized the shit out of destruction and self-destruction, out of taking a razor-blade eye to the world and then turning the blade on himself while celebrating himself for the whole screaming fucking bloody mess (in his own words, "he brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously"). I also understood that Dylan was pushing beyond - Silber himself should have looked further, listened harder. The sentimental sap in me perceived the sentimental sap underneath Dylan's nihilism; but I noticed that Dylan seemed to do the nihilism better than the sentiment, and that the destruction was a big hunk of what was thrilling about the music.

I don't know how I'd rate Silber's piece now - typing it in here, it seems slight in relation to how I'd remembered it; it'd be a better-than-average ILX post, a good talking point: "This is the thread where we talk about Bob Dylan's relation to existentialism." (And some copy editor should have asked him not to do something about the unintentional assonance of "essentially existential" and the inadvertent "stop and go" in "stop and go no further.") At the time the review knocked me out: Here's someone who gets it, even if he doesn't like it. I remember Silber in another old Sing Out! referring to rock as "neurotic music," and my thinking, "Yes! And that's why it's good!" In any event, Silber's review was a goad to me, to think about what Dylan was really getting at, what its implications were, etc. (and to read some existentialism, about which at the time I knew nada). And I can't imagine why someone would come to a place like ILX and not want to be goaded in such a way, to read reasons for liking what he dislikes and disliking what he likes.

a lot of that seems to revolve in sync with critical opinions.

eh, maybe that's my view from "in the pool". have i been in so long i've forgotten what it's like to be dry? hmm.
m.

But they have some idea of what their acquaintances like and dislike.

Oops. Delete the "not."

I am still down on the idea of critics talking about them, not cos they're 'illogical' or whatever but because they're usually shorthand for "this record evokes some contradictory responses in me and I can't be bothered to unpick them".

Inasmuch as I'm a critic, I'm a critic who isn't sure what I like. Finding out what I like is one reason I talk about and write about stuff.

that's me... but often i write and still never get a good conclusion. decisions are annoying. plus, i'm not one to feel very comfortable with a chisel and stone tablet to write down my tastes.

i reviewed the new nin record very recently and found that i hated about half the record, but really loved 2 or 3 songs. a lot. i could really go plenty of directions. next week i might really dislike that record.

i guess that's always been my personal problem with being a critic. i enjoy writing about music because it brings out the need to say something, but i'll be damned if i'm supposed to guide another person in their purchasing decisions.
m.

funny, though -- i think i almost *always* know when i like a record; if it gives me enough pleasure that i know i want to play it again and keep it, i like it, and therefore it's good; if i'm writing about it, part of my job is to figure out *why* it's good. but i might not know right away *how* good ( = how *much* i like it), which is why grading records like christgau does would be pretty difficult for me. but there's some chemical reaction that happens when i hear records i like that doesn't happen when i hear ones i don't like (though sure, there are many times that i might just like a song or two, of course. and it is definitely not unheard of for me to eventually change my mind, but when writing a review, it's my opinion *now* that counts.)

Oh, and I always felt like, ages ago, critics decided they didn't want to be fair with DD, and so they needlessly slagged off the band, even when a few contemporaries who were being taken more seriously (e.g. Marc Almond) were saying good things about the band's work. And I felt like this slagging off trickled its way down throughout the years, making it ever harder for someone to proclaim that they actually took the band's music seriously. And even The General Public took all of this endless negativism as license to declare open season on the band and its fans, even as recently as 2001 - 2002.

There are STILL large segments of the population who believe this way, BTW. Don't tell me they're being accepted now, that it's become "cool" again to like them, because that's a bald-faced lie. There are still more people who find it more than okay to be snarky toward the band than those who acknowledge this newfangled "respect" thing toward them.

So maybe the person who sees critics as "liking bad stuff" or "hating good stuff" has either become so tired of the Usual Suspects being hailed and so bored by what they're hearing from the Usual Suspects that they consider this an example of critics latching onto something that's crap, or they've become such huge fans of and passionate believers in a band's music, in spite of a massive pattern of critical disapproval, that they feel like the critics are totally missing the boat on something that's great.

Like it or not, critics have a MASSIVE impact on the future music listening public's attitudes toward bands and artists. It can take many years to restore an artist's integrity after just a few years of constant "They're tuneless, shallow, mindless crap that the kids only like because they're pretty".

(xpost)

You're right - I was just being lazy when I used the word "trash". I was thinking of bubblegummy stuff like 1910 Fruitgum Company or Spice Girls or whoever. That isn't trash - it's more like the musical equivalent of a Big Mac, compared to filet mignon-performers like Van Morrison or Jackson Browne. (Whom I hate, but never mind.) Everyone loves a Big Mac, right? (Well, not me - I haven't eaten fast-food beef in a decade, but again, never mind.)

yeah, the phrase "guilty pleasure" never made sense to me. If you love it, why on earth are you feeling guilty about it?
-- Alfred Soto

"Guilty Pleasure" - Yeah I know, another lazy term, a short way of labeling music you like that is terminally uncool. (Horrors!) But there ARE occasions when that term is the only one that'll do. Suppose I really enjoyed the music of Skrewdriver? (A way-extreme example but you get my point.)

Even if someone has what strikes me as a totally wrongheaded approach to music, if they've gone to the trouble of elaborating it and thinking about its outer reaches and borders and weaknesses and contradictions and moments of inconsistency etc. etc. at some point I can't violently resist it any more.

Geir is a good example of this: I find it difficult to treat him seriously when he talks about Britpop because his understanding of Britpop is so blissfully free of contradiction or ambivalence. Whereas when he writes about synth pop or europop and the like he's more interesting because he has to tread a minefield of ambivalences and false binaries (authentic vs artificial, songful vs tracky etc. etc.) that even he can't ignore completely.

I like music critics be excessively open to different types of enjoyment of music, which means both to be open to enjoying different types of music and to be open to enjoying a single piece of music in different ways. That doesn't mean I have a problem with critics not enjoying something or even hating it, but I don't like reading harsh reviews of records where it's clear that it's never occurred to the critic that there might be different strategies of enjoyment available to them.

Positive reviews which are annoying often fall into two related categories: 1) reductionist expressions of enjoyment, and 2) praise which screams with every fibre of its being a blanket rejection of some other music or way of enjoying music, while never taking the time to actually examine the latter.

But not quite enough invigorating hating. It really is the duty of anyone with half a brain in 2005 USA to develop the capacity for scorn. No one earns or reserves mulligans.

Whadda you mean "legacy"? Legacy-shmegacy. "Lengthy pattern[s] of negative reviews can etc..." Check: Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Uriah Heep, Loverboy, Nightranger, Damn Yankees, everything issued in the Millenium and "Best Of" omnibuses, countless metal bands and AOR groups.

(IS Loverboy actually being taken seriously these days? If so, you're kidding me.)

There are still people who are generally snarky towards the 80s in general, with the possible exception of underground guitar bands such as The Smiths, R.E.M, Pixies and Sonic Youth.

I think that was an American thing mainly. Here, at least during the first half of the 80s, the New Romantics were dominating to such an extent that there was no way you could possibly ignore them. Sure, a lot of us may have a problem with "girl music" such as Duran Duran and Wham!, but then we would go on to enjoy some Depeche Mode or Soft Cell (or even Culture Club) instead, meaning the "gay" argument just wouldn't fit. In fact, Norwegian kids are probably more prejudiced towards gay people today than we were back then, since we were, after all, aware of the fact that a lot of our favourite acts were, indeed gay.

IF you write a cogent defense of Skrewdriver it might cause a few readers to reevaluate their opinions. In writing about rock music, form will almost always triumph over content.

(p.s. i still don't undertand the non-love for bep. they're totally like jr. sr.)

That's not a legacy. It's just a selection of articles or a perceived lack of them. The lack may not exist depending on your eyesight, ability and persistence with Google, or collection on your bookshelves.

And metal/classic rock acts are kinda exempt from all of this

Nope.

because their core fanbases aren't so much concerned with musical reputation as they are with being correct socially with certain circles

And other "core fanbase[s]" not metal/classic rock somehow do not suffer from this?

Interesting perspective here from ex-NME contributor Sarah Dempster. For me it comes rather too rashly on the heels of a lot of other similar recent articles in the broadsheets, which taken together constitute a "It's All Gone To The Dogs" meme, but this one is at least cogently argued and the downside of doctrinate entrenchment in the past is acknowledged.

(That is another partial and minor reason why I stopped Koons; it was for my liking getting bracketed in a little too much with the Rowley/Hornby mindset)