(no subject)
This post is spawned by a conversation I had with imperfectmedium on the bus yesterday morning. She had asked me what I’d been reading lately. I thought for half a second, and then replied “a lot of music journalism.” Which is true, and it isn’t. I mean, it’s definitely true in the sense that you can tell when I’ve been reading anything of the sort, because my posts tend to get like
I read record reviews almost daily, but a lot of the time, it’s just to see how well (or how ludicrously) they’re written - I remember that stitchtowhere and I were once cracking up over a review claiming that a band possessed “a lugubrious elixir,” with no further explanation as to what that meant within the context of the album being reviewed. So. Of course, the natural reaction to the reviewer was “dude, shut the fuck up.” Which, come to think of it, is my usual reaction to reviews, and why I should probably stop reading the damned things altogether.
Besides the use of pretentious, meaningless phrases, it's also pretty obvious that a lot of reviewers seem to just slam bands solely for the sake of doing so. I'm of the mindset that if something's not worth reviewing (in that it possesses *no* elements of *any* merit whatsoever) then don't review it. Don't even waste your time. That being said, it seems to be much, much easier (and possibly more enjoyable/expected) to say negative, snotty, cynical, ironic things about music than to say anything positive and/or meaningful. *That* kind of writing about music is pretty easy to do, especially given the fact that all record reviews are basically editorials, and voicing one’s opinion (whether disguised or not) always has the potential to make a person feel vulnerable. This seems to go tenfold for opinions on music. For every person who might agree with what you have to say, there will likely be ten who will refute you, and maybe seven will do so by talking strictly out of thier ass (just like I'm doing now.) So, a lot of the time, it’s easier just to be flippant or generally non-committal about anything of the sort, even if (*especially* if?) it's your JOB. I think that what I’m more impressed by, is people writing about music that they genuinely love, and doing so in *earnest*. Because that is much, much harder to pull off.
What I’ve found though, is that the easiest (and most engaging) way to pull off this type of writing is through the weird sub-genre of the music memoir. There’s an article that mentiones it here . My only hangup with the article is that it happily lumps in rockstar autobiographies. Which aren’t what I’m talking about.
What I *am* talking about is stuff that I’d probably situate content-wise right between an essay by someone like Robert Christgau (dude is the McDonalds of rock critics), and a musically *informed* work of fiction like High Fidelity. What I’m talking about are books like this. Or this. Or this. Which *are* what I've been reading lately. All of these are written by contemporary rock critics, and none of them are what you would consider heavy reading. Some of you might flat-out say that they’re fluff. Hell, gimmicky fluff, mainly because it’s really easy to discount anything being said about pop-culture as such. Okay, maybe they *are* fluff. But they’re pretty heartfelt fluff, I think.
Basically, all of these authors, to varying degrees, use music as a canvas for their personal stories. I say canvas instead of frame, because the music doesn’t just hover on the periphery. Instead it’s the basis for, and a necessary part of, these stories. The authors of these music memoirs use favorite songs and favorite bands as lead-ins for anecdotes involving these songs. But the songs don’t act strictly as some kind of background-soundtrack. The music carries the story as the story references the music, so the text (basic this-happened-to-me style of memoir) and intertext (music references) are equally important to the work as a whole. I find this especially interesting because of the fact that music in and of itself is comprised mainly *of* intertext, whether it be through something as direct as sampling, or something as intricate as influence.
That being said, I think this type of interplay also works well because music is such a highly subjective and personal thing, and so it lends itself quite naturally to autobiographical writing. Moreover, I think that using personal taste in such an already expository form of writing is damn gutsy, for reasons I mentioned above. Is it self-indulgent? Of course. What autobiography isn’t? The thing with this particular type of memoir is that the more self-indulgent the author is likely to be, the less posturing occurs, and the more honest they end up being instead, whether intentionally or not.
Honest writing is the best kind. Being able to find out what it was about a particular band or song that the author found so compelling that they had to write about it in such a personal way, is intriguing. It’s voyeuristic. In a sense, it’s the creative process laid bare. It’s many creative processes smushed together into a ball of string, and then slowly unraveled. It’s A) the author’s speculation on factors that may have led the artist to create the music to begin with, B) the author’s personal reaction to *and* relationship with said music, within the framework of themselves as a human being in the world and C) events in the author’s life that took place directly as a result of that reaction, thus forming a personal (hi)story for that person. Were these separate elements present in completely different (and differently "labeled") works, A could be viewed as straight-out music journalism, while C could be regarded as classic autobiography. The unifying factor is B, which turns a music memoir into something else entirely.
I’m reminded of a comment Christgau makes in one of his essays on avant-punk. He mentions that “all these bands were possessed of rock and roll's secret: they played a supposedly uninnovative style as if they'd invented it.” In the case of the music-memoir, the authors are taking *two* supposedly uninnovative genres and writing as if they’d invented both, by making it seem as though neither could ever exist independently within the context of their work.
And I think it's neat :oP
I read record reviews almost daily, but a lot of the time, it’s just to see how well (or how ludicrously) they’re written - I remember that stitchtowhere and I were once cracking up over a review claiming that a band possessed “a lugubrious elixir,” with no further explanation as to what that meant within the context of the album being reviewed. So. Of course, the natural reaction to the reviewer was “dude, shut the fuck up.” Which, come to think of it, is my usual reaction to reviews, and why I should probably stop reading the damned things altogether.
Besides the use of pretentious, meaningless phrases, it's also pretty obvious that a lot of reviewers seem to just slam bands solely for the sake of doing so. I'm of the mindset that if something's not worth reviewing (in that it possesses *no* elements of *any* merit whatsoever) then don't review it. Don't even waste your time. That being said, it seems to be much, much easier (and possibly more enjoyable/expected) to say negative, snotty, cynical, ironic things about music than to say anything positive and/or meaningful. *That* kind of writing about music is pretty easy to do, especially given the fact that all record reviews are basically editorials, and voicing one’s opinion (whether disguised or not) always has the potential to make a person feel vulnerable. This seems to go tenfold for opinions on music. For every person who might agree with what you have to say, there will likely be ten who will refute you, and maybe seven will do so by talking strictly out of thier ass (just like I'm doing now.) So, a lot of the time, it’s easier just to be flippant or generally non-committal about anything of the sort, even if (*especially* if?) it's your JOB. I think that what I’m more impressed by, is people writing about music that they genuinely love, and doing so in *earnest*. Because that is much, much harder to pull off.
What I’ve found though, is that the easiest (and most engaging) way to pull off this type of writing is through the weird sub-genre of the music memoir. There’s an article that mentiones it here . My only hangup with the article is that it happily lumps in rockstar autobiographies. Which aren’t what I’m talking about.
What I *am* talking about is stuff that I’d probably situate content-wise right between an essay by someone like Robert Christgau (dude is the McDonalds of rock critics), and a musically *informed* work of fiction like High Fidelity. What I’m talking about are books like this. Or this. Or this. Which *are* what I've been reading lately. All of these are written by contemporary rock critics, and none of them are what you would consider heavy reading. Some of you might flat-out say that they’re fluff. Hell, gimmicky fluff, mainly because it’s really easy to discount anything being said about pop-culture as such. Okay, maybe they *are* fluff. But they’re pretty heartfelt fluff, I think.
Basically, all of these authors, to varying degrees, use music as a canvas for their personal stories. I say canvas instead of frame, because the music doesn’t just hover on the periphery. Instead it’s the basis for, and a necessary part of, these stories. The authors of these music memoirs use favorite songs and favorite bands as lead-ins for anecdotes involving these songs. But the songs don’t act strictly as some kind of background-soundtrack. The music carries the story as the story references the music, so the text (basic this-happened-to-me style of memoir) and intertext (music references) are equally important to the work as a whole. I find this especially interesting because of the fact that music in and of itself is comprised mainly *of* intertext, whether it be through something as direct as sampling, or something as intricate as influence.
That being said, I think this type of interplay also works well because music is such a highly subjective and personal thing, and so it lends itself quite naturally to autobiographical writing. Moreover, I think that using personal taste in such an already expository form of writing is damn gutsy, for reasons I mentioned above. Is it self-indulgent? Of course. What autobiography isn’t? The thing with this particular type of memoir is that the more self-indulgent the author is likely to be, the less posturing occurs, and the more honest they end up being instead, whether intentionally or not.
Honest writing is the best kind. Being able to find out what it was about a particular band or song that the author found so compelling that they had to write about it in such a personal way, is intriguing. It’s voyeuristic. In a sense, it’s the creative process laid bare. It’s many creative processes smushed together into a ball of string, and then slowly unraveled. It’s A) the author’s speculation on factors that may have led the artist to create the music to begin with, B) the author’s personal reaction to *and* relationship with said music, within the framework of themselves as a human being in the world and C) events in the author’s life that took place directly as a result of that reaction, thus forming a personal (hi)story for that person. Were these separate elements present in completely different (and differently "labeled") works, A could be viewed as straight-out music journalism, while C could be regarded as classic autobiography. The unifying factor is B, which turns a music memoir into something else entirely.
I’m reminded of a comment Christgau makes in one of his essays on avant-punk. He mentions that “all these bands were possessed of rock and roll's secret: they played a supposedly uninnovative style as if they'd invented it.” In the case of the music-memoir, the authors are taking *two* supposedly uninnovative genres and writing as if they’d invented both, by making it seem as though neither could ever exist independently within the context of their work.
And I think it's neat :oP