"Lazy"

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After "Pretentious" this is probably my least favorite critical word. "Lazy" assumes that the artist could have made better choices but didn't feel like putting forth the effort; two levels of assumption is two too many. What's lost in taking as a given that this thing we're hearing is actually the best they could do?

― Mark (MarkR), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:30 (nineteen years ago)

if they have done better in the past, it might be reasonable.

― benrique (Enrique), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:35 (nineteen years ago)

"Overproduced" is my least favourite critical word. There is no such thing.

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:38 (nineteen years ago)

overproduced = over-egged

― ;_; (blueski), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:41 (nineteen years ago)

I thought this was going to be a thread about X-Press Featuring
DAVID BYRNE
Musician

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:41 (nineteen years ago)

eww i hate it when there are eggs in my music.

― benrique (Enrique), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:43 (nineteen years ago)

The writing on Pitchfork yo-yos between pretentious and lazy, imho.

― The Real Esteban Buttez (EstieButtez1), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:43 (nineteen years ago)

some people manage to combine them both

― ;_; (blueski), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:45 (nineteen years ago)

such as?

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:46 (nineteen years ago)

and here I thought this was going to be yet another Deep Purple thread...(guess I was just being, you know, lazy)...

― hank (hank s), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 12:50 (nineteen years ago)

"Overproduced" is my least favourite critical word. There is no such thing.

Wrong, again.

― Billy Dods (Billy Dods), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:06 (nineteen years ago)

i thought this was a Suede thread

― J. Grizzle (trainsmoke), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:09 (nineteen years ago)

...or Love and Rockets.

― Going Through The Motions (kate), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 13:26 (nineteen years ago)

You're right that it's an assumption to accuse an artist of being lazy. But sometimes the evidence is overwhelming, no?

Example: Morrissey is surely capable of extreme laziness, by not bothering to change his setlist on tours, when he *knows* that lots of fans pay big money to go to more than one show. (I'm not saying they're right to do that...) Therefore it seems fairly safe to assume that he's also probably being lazy when he writes and releases half-baked bollocks like most of the songs on ROTT and several other solo albums. In this case, it seems just as much of an assumption to say "oh well, it's the best he can do".

― meritocracy (spencerman), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 16:18 (nineteen years ago)

"Lazy" in music I think is just another word for "generic". As in, if an artist releases something that sounds a lot like his last album/single, I think it's sort of a fair enough statement. Of course some artists spend their whole careers doing just that, and some sound great with it, too, but even when someone has found a trick so great that just repeating it over and over still results in great music, I don't know how that makes him not lazy.

I suppose a positive twist on "lazy" would be "knows his boundaries".

― Daniel_Rf (Daniel_Rf), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 17:54 (nineteen years ago)

xxpost

...or in my case, The Primitives.

― You've Had Your Chances (noodle vague), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 18:01 (nineteen years ago)

Youre lazy just stay in bed
Youre lazy just stay in bed
You dont want no money
You dont want no bread

If youre drowning you dont clutch no straw
If youre drowning you dont clutch no straw
You dont want to live you dont want to cry no more

Well my trying aint done no good
I said my trying aint done no good
You dont make no effort no not like you should

― def zep (calstars), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 21:46 (nineteen years ago)

What's lost in taking as a given that this thing we're hearing is actually the best they could do?

Do you mean in possibly appreciating it more? Would that really happen?

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 22:03 (nineteen years ago)

Because I think if someone's describing something as "lazy," he/she may be making an assumption about the artist's artisitic capacities and framework for thinking about his/her own work, but the criticism nevertheless perhaps reflects a larger, broader criticism of *the way of the world*. And this argument perhaps too easily suggests a kind of bland critical relativism (not that it was intended).

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Wednesday, 25 October 2006 22:14 (nineteen years ago)

Mostly, I'm not sure: (1) how we can know how difficult it was for the artist; and (2) why it should matter whether he or she found the creation of the art to be difficult. "Lazy" means shying away from things that take effort, right? Doing what's easy in a given situation. But I'm not sure it follows that doing what's easy generally leads to bad art. It seems possible that, for a gifted artist, doing what's easy might even lead to better art, depending on if what's easy is also good.

― Mark (MarkR), Thursday, 26 October 2006 01:50 (nineteen years ago)

I would imagine that the term is overused in criticism and often perhaps in a, uh, lazy way, involving, yes, these assumptions about the artist ("could have made better choices but didn't feel like putting forth the effort"). But I wonder the extent to which this line of arguing extapolates out into the belief than any judgement of laziness, in any kind of human endeavor, in a person other than one's self is similarly regarded as presumption.

I tend to think that the matter is basically relative and that critics often can know a decent amount about an artist on a personal level such that the criticism of laziness is not always inherently invalid.

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Thursday, 26 October 2006 03:48 (nineteen years ago)

I thought this was going to be a thread about X-Press Featuring
DAVID BYRNE
Musician
I thought the same thing and was way too excited (aaaaaaaaaaand drunk)

― Morley Timmons (Donna Brown), Thursday, 26 October 2006 04:13 (nineteen years ago)