Critically damaged
I'll admit it, this was just an excuse to post the cover of one of my favorite albums.
Last week SPIN Magazine’s 100 Greatest Albums of 1985-2005 made the rounds on various blogs. I found out about it from Tom and my reaction was similar to Tim and Augie’s, namely that is a music critic’s paradise.
Now, I adore the vast majority of the albums represented there but let’s not kid ourselves, these are albums that appeal to people who think and analyze music very seriously, perhaps for a living. That’s not the only people these albums appeal to; many were huge hits with a wide audience. It’s just that albums like Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet give writers a lot to write about. Be it in books, magazine columns or liner notes to “deluxe editions” that’s the kind of music that let’s the pontificators pontificate. I’m talking from experience here, those are three of my favorite albums and while I’m not a rock critic I do love rock criticism (the good examples of it anyway). It’s interesting to go an about the mix of the avant-garde and punk rock in SY’s music (you can name drop Ornette Coleman and The Ramones! Score!). MBV created the weirdest sounding record that is still filled with pop songs. PE’s politics, vocal delivery and the complex production of the Bomb Squad is the kind of hip-hop that critics love to eat up. Looking at SPIN’s list the only thing I can get out of it is that it’s just writers celebrating what they like writing about.
I wonder if this doesn’t create a kind of disconnect with the rest of the music buying/downloading audience. The best reactions I saw to this list were the ones where people suggested what they thought should be on the list (Tom did it and more people did it in the comments section). It’s there that I saw that disconnect. While a lot of those albums are ones that got good reviews most of them are not ones that music pundits are going to come back to again and again. I think Foo Fighter’s The Colour and the Shape has a lot of great songs on it, with “Monkey Wrench” and “Everlong” being among my favorite Foo songs. Still, the band simply gives us well played rock and roll songs that are fun to listen to. Rarely do we see the emotional depth of Dave Grohl’s previous band, Nirvana. The song craft doesn’t have that striking contrast of ugly sounds and beautiful tunefulness that Kurt Cobain brought. Cobain had a lot of weird and disturbing lyrics, which is basically creates a feeding frenzy for writers. Foo Fighters’ songs are much more straight forward and easy to listen to. The band definitely rocks hard when it wants to but it’s more like a “fist pumping arena” rocking instead of “really good band at a seedy punk club” rocking (it’s sentence like this one that prove why I’m not a paid music critic). The difference is most evident when comparing Grohl and Cobain’s screams. Cobain’s was haunting while Grohl’s is energizing and fun. It’s no surprise Nevermind and In Utero made SPIN’s list while the Foo Fighters are not to be found.
That’s where I wonder about music critics speaking a different language than the majority of fans. For most people Foo Fighters’ well done rocking is enough and as much as someone likes Nirvana there’s no desire to examine it at length. That’s where the dissimilarity comes up. Critics and most audience members are looking for different things when it comes to music. Critics love music (I know they can appear negative a lot but they started the job because of an enthrallment with sound) and want to figure out how something works and why it doesn’t work. Most of the music fans out there have jobs that don’t have anything to do with music and play a CD because they simply want to have fun and escape the stress of the day. There’s a Hell of a lot in between these two and I do fear I’m generalizing here but this is something I notice around me.
It’s not just music critics either. Can a film critic who sees almost every movie released in a year and whose job is to think over every one possibly speak to the person who sees only two or three movies in the theater out of the year? Can we comic book pundits who come up with 1000+ words about a Batman comic mean anything to the fan who just wants to read his favorite superhero? And who the Hell listens to television critics?
I ask these questions to spark some kind of debate because the fact is I have no definitive answers to those questions. I like to think there’s a common ground between all music, movie and comic book fans so that we can all learn from each other. I just come back to the idea that a critic and a casual fan are on different paths towards satisfaction (i.e.: only one would write something like “different paths towards satisfaction”).
I do defy anyone to find a Wire fan isn’t coming at it from a music critic’s perspective, though. To paraphrase a Brian Eno quote: not many people bought Pink Flag but everyone who did tried to do record reviews for their college newspaper.
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