Rules Of The Game #21: When The Wrong Song Loves You Right

[koganbot]

I talk about Celine and the White Stripes. I quote Nia (and once again rely on her brain).

The Rules Of The Game #21: When The Wrong Song Loves You RightThis time I'm doing something of a free association, stitched together at the last minute - I'd envisioned writing a different piece and then abandoned that other piece and did this - and the

Comments

[skyecaptain]

Yeah, my use of fairly-in-square-quotes is trying to avoid some of the neutrality baggage. "Standards of analysis" is a bit more fudgey, since those aren't set standards, but there are standards depending on what it is you're talking about.

The court metaphor is pretty good, though one thing I'm thinking about is that there are often legitimate reasons not to WANT to listen-according-to-standards. I'm thinking of it in terms of reading theory, which is often more explicitly intertextual: if a piece makes no sense without my having read another piece, but it isn't really engaging me to actually read that other piece, I will probably ignore it. But I also won't understand it well enough to attack it very well (prosecutor tactic #1: KNOW YOUR SHIT

[skyecaptain]

those are SCARE quotes, not square ones.

[koganbot]

Aren't scare quotes usually trying to be hip quotes?

[skyecaptain]

They can be plenty square! Observe: "I think we could be focusing our attentions toward 'hip-hop' music as a productive avenue of thoughtful discussion."

[dubdobdee]

yes i'm not sure i think of jurisprudence as a metaphor -- i think it's good as a model and a comparison, for the purposes of clarification

if the purpose of criticism is just to say this good that bad -- to provide a judgment for everything -- then yes, exactly: is this a process that generates curiosity? i agree that it somewhat damps it (the moral hazard introduced: yr incentivised to be incurious bcz curiosity is more likely to generate hostile judgments)

in other words, if curiosity is considered a value, criticism had better (in way to be determined) be LESS like a trial -- in other words, its undoubted similarities to a trial had better NOT be the only thing going on

[skyecaptain]

Hm, y'all are probably right about this, though there's something appealing to me about jurisprudence-the-metaphor. As long as we're finding limited comparison points and not suggesting (as "fairness" in a certain way suggests) a (relatively) inflexible value system with clear outcomes (but of course there are outcomes -- Ashlee Simpson's Autobiography will never stop being good, which isn't to say I've exhausted its possibilities by a long shot.

But judgment doesn't damp curiosity because it never acts alone, or if it does, it's not really criticism (along these lines, is jurisprudence really primarily about the outcome to the prosecutors?). "GOOD" doesn't describe why I like Ashlee Simpson, so the curiosity isn't just in listening to it instead of not (though I basically went through this phase a few years ago and said plenty o' dumb things), but in trying to understand it. This is one thing that's (allegedly) affected by shortening hype circles, the ability to sustain engagement or whatever, but frankly I don't think you can blame

[skyecaptain]

Simon R used this line of reasoning: "an actual opinion is where the process of thinking comes to halt. if you're dedicated to the thought process as supreme value you can get into this thing of making and unmaking your mind up that goes on forever."

No, an actual opinion can come to a relative halt and still entail total openness. Good criticism remains open but isn't afraid to know what it likes!

"Making and unmaking your mind" might deal with specific strategies of music/how it works for you, without ever having to undermine whether or not your Big Judgment (GOOOOOD or BAAAAAAAD) is final (it usually is; as I've said before, I've never disliked something after liking it, and I've often liked things after disliking them, after which point I never dislike them again!).