For whatever reason, much of the U.S. media arena and it’s critics are obsessed with typifying every category of entertainment. To an extent I get it, top ten lists are fun to read and award ceremonies have their place, but at what point does it get tedious or fruitless? At what point does it cause us, the audience, to misinterpret a piece of music or take it for granted? I know many people, including myself at times, who will only listen to an album on grounds that it received the right amount of critical acclaim. For the record, I am a big fan of Bon Iver and think he makes extraordinary music, but I often find myself trying to reanalyze his work; I am constantly putting Bon Iver thought a critical filter, attempting to find debris. And I have. This isn’t about Bon Iver being a good musician in so far as it’s about how the majority of listeners have come to find this out. What if Pitchfork or SPIN or whatever other copycat source didn’t give the self-titled sophomore album 5 stars or a 9/10 or whatever it was? What if the day that influential review was written the assignment was instead given to the writer who was having a bad day and wasn’t really feeling the whole chamber-folk falsetto getup? This also goes for the phenomenon of people who hate an artist precisely because they are critically acclaimed (you know who you are.)
While these foolhardy rating systems and top ten lists have propelled readership for music magazines and websites and opened up a lot of avenues for independent artists, I fear they have additionally limited the way in which we listen to a work, and decipher it’s strengths and weaknesses. I’m not saying there aren’t objectively good and bad records per se. I have a lot of respect for music critics, and try to read a multitude of various sources, but what I am proposing is that we attempt to break away from the habits of skimming music like we would a textbook a half hour before a final exam.
Obviously most of us have thought about this before; I am certainly not the first to bring up how Pitchfork can be notoriously over-critical. Most of these thoughts actually sprung from a song I heard just yesterday from a largely unknown, new artist. It was a remarkable song by Jeff Tweedy’s (lead singer of Wilco) son, Spencer, called “Rushmore.” Even still, all I could think upon first listen was, “This is terrible. This kid will never get out of his father’s shadow.” It was a great first song. My first thought should have been, “Wow, this kid is going places.” But then I started over-thinking and coloring everything. I thought, “how much of this kid’s talent is fostered out of his father being a musician and having a bit of money, instruments, and influence?” I mean, how can he not get into a studio to record something great. Right?
Upon further contemplation, I found that that’s another thing the entertainment world is profoundly obsessed with. As much as Spencer Tweedy is at an advantage, he is already at a great disadvantage. That being his last name. Sure, Jakob Dylan has had a good run with the Wallflowers, and Ziggy and Damian Marley have achieved mainstream success, but it’s hard to think of any offspring of a famous musician ever living up to the legacy of their parent, or even being able to classify themselves as a completely different musician. Even the article where I heard Spencer Tweedy’s new song felt they had to mention that the song “hints strongly at his father’s own work.” I don’t know why that made me so frustrated. I expected them to mention how it sounds like Summerteeth, and I’m sure Spencer is proud of that fact, but I couldn’t help but think how this young musician would ever make it out from the shadow of his father’s sacred 10/10 rating from Pitchfork for 2001’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
This string of thoughts on the idea of “making it” was also spawned from a book I’ve been reading: The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan, which was the poet’s first and most acclaimed book. Throughout the book Berrigan fragmentally recounts friendships he’s had in his life. Part of sonnet XLIV reads, “Anne is writing poems to me and worrying about “making it” / and Ron is writing poems and worrying about “making it” / and Pat is worrying and not working on anything.” It doesn’t really matter who the people in this poem are. They were most likely friends of Berrigan’s, they might sound like friends of your own. This may not make very much sense out of context, but I think what I pulled from these lines is that we’ve become a culture that is much to worried about “making it” to the point where we forgot why we listen and talk about music in the first place.
I think part of what it comes down to is abandoning this whole umbrellaed idea of "indie." I don't really know where I'm getting at with all of these thoughts, but I think we've come to the end of the indie road, especially as it is starting to become synonymous with a word I hate entirely: hipster. Whatever conotations that word has started to carry could be the plague of the music world, but that is a whole different type of rant. Essentially what I'm getting at is this: if you really enjoy a piece of music or art then you should know why. Like, really know why. Basically, don’t end up like that pony-tailed-how-do-you-like-them-apples guy who gets bested by Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting.
Jeff Buckley>Tim Buckley......
Hank III>all preceding hanks.
Rufus Wainwright>Both Parents
And the Norah Jones-Ravi Shankar thing is up for debate too...
Just a couple examples of children surpassing their parents...
Tom, you and I live in an especially critical world; The world of music journalism, where ego's are abound and no one wants to look uncool by reppin' somethin' that's so obviously not. I always laugh when I talk to serious music people. It seems there more obsessed with the culture of music than the music itself. Everything is "what does it mean in the larger context". I wish it could just be "what does it mean to me". Anyways, I'm rambling, and luckily at Buffablog I don't really encounter that.
interesting post. lots to think about here.
Yeah I forgot about Hank Williams and Jeff Buckley.
Jon- I agree. Music is becoming cliquier than ever and this can be mostly contributed to people skimming music for meaning and trying to place it within a scene. But then the word scene is becoming synonymous with genre and everything becomes this huge war of trying to compartmentalize everything, Putting music in different boxes keeps the masses complacent and that is just not cool to me.