Music Reviews? No Thanks.

                You won’t see me write about music a whole lot on this site (don’t worry though, I suspect you may get some of that from Baldur), and quite frankly I’ve been exhausted of the subject ever since hearing our good friend Baldur and another friend of ours argue incessantly on the merits of indie music versus popular music, Baldur, of course, taking the indie side.  As you can imagine, Baldur, being a bit of a douchey hipster indie music fan (though, to his credit, he’s improved on this greatly in the last year or so) is a big fan of the website pitchfork, as he will attest to in his article today.  I know it’s nothing new to rag on pitchfork (my favorite example) but I feel it’s worth voicing my opinion on what’s wrong not just with pitchfork, but with the idea of rating music at all, which I find to be utterly pointless.

                First of all, what use do music critics serve at all?  I read book and movie reviews because I don’t want to waste time and money involving myself in something lousy.  Music, on the other hand, is extremely accessible (for free) and intended to be listened to many times over.  Even if you’re opposed to illegally downloading music, you can easily go on youtube and listen to almost any song you would be interested in finding, and then judge for yourself on whether or not it is worth owning.  It’s much easier, cheaper, and faster than say renting a movie to decide whether or not it’s worth buying.  Shit, it’s probably easier to listen to a few songs from an album than to actually read a review of it.  If you want to know if a new album is good or not, listen to it!

                But to acknowledge critics as only serving the purpose of letting people know what media is or is not worth consuming, would be to ignore their much larger role.  As a movie fan, I often like to read reviews of movies I’ve already seen, or movies I know for certain I will see regardless of the review.  I like to see what other intelligent people thought of the movie, and perhaps what I missed or how I saw it differently.  When you have a medium on the mind, reading a critique of it is the next best thing to having a conversation about it.  Shouldn’t music fans have this outlet?  Well, maybe not.

                The key difference in my mind between music and let’s say, books, is that books have a much larger intellectual component to them then music does.  This is not meant to disparage music by any means, but instead to point out that music speaks much more to one’s emotions than books do.  The audience for music is one’s heart, whereas the audience for a book is one’s mind.  In my opinion, this makes music a purer form of art than books, but at the same time, it makes it necessarily more subjective.  The farther a medium gets from art, the easier it is to speak objectively: math problems or proofs are (usually) either right or wrong.  The closer a medium gets to art, however, the more it becomes a matter of taste, and as the Romans said, De Gustibus non est dispuntandum: among tastes there must be no disputing.

                I don’t think I’m the only one to feel this way: there’s a reason that people generally find the Pulitzers and the Oscars a big deal, but the Grammys are generally considered a farce.  This is not to say that music cannot be good or even great, but merely that it cannot be objectively established as such.  What makes some music great music is that a lot of people appreciate it, or maybe a few people appreciate it really really much, or maybe you just appreciate it a lot.  It’s the same thing that makes Coca-cola a great soda or football a great sport.   Which is also the reason that every time I hear the debate about popular versus critically acclaimed music it sounds like this:

Other friend: Apples (the fruit) are popular because they’re the best.

Baldur: People only like apples because they haven’t been exposed to other better fruits, like starfruit.

Other friend: People haven’t been exposed to starfruit because it sucks and no one wants to eat it.

Baldur: That’s just because most people aren’t sophisticated enough to appreciate starfruit.  Everyone who knows anything about fruit likes starfruit better.

Etc.

                To say that there is no aspect of music that can objectively be determined as either good or bad is a big statement.  Big enough, in fact, that I wasn’t even sure if I believed it.  So I looked at a few of Pitchfork’s 10/10 reviews to see if there was anything I could read in their description of the music that made this music objectively good, as opposed to simply enjoyable or poignant to the reviewer.  In their review of Radiohead’s Kid A, after five paragraphs praising the gods who created this greatest of all mankind’s accomplishments (including lines like: “Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper.”) they finally begin to describe the album, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it is that makes it so great.  Perhaps it’s because “Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction.”  Wait, what?  Is that what makes music great?  Well how about an individual song: “ ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ opens like Close Encounters spaceships communicating with pipe organs.”  Um, right.  Ok, well here’s what they say about “National Anthem:” “Mean, fuzzy bass shapes the spine as unnerving theremin choirs limn. Brash brass bursts from above like Terry Gilliam's animated foot. The horns swarm as Yorke screams, begs, ‘Turn it off!’ It's the album's shrill peak.”  I don’t mean to criticize the critic: he does an excellent job of expressing what the album has to offer, but just because this connected to him on a very deep level, doesn’t mean it’s the greatest collection of music ever recorded.

                Sadly, music media like Pitchfork has some aspects that take it past being pointless, all the way into slightly harmful territory.  It seems to me that people who frequent music sites or magazines (especially ones that have a clear bias towards certain genres of music) do not go so much to find out what music they will like, but instead to be told what music to like.  As much as we think of ourselves as individuals, it’s very natural for us to like what we know other people we respect like (and in that same vein, hate what is liked by people we have little respect for).  This tendency’s manifestation is especially obvious in the realm of music, in which it’s so hard to explain, even to one’s self, why a song is good or not.  We can see this in the striking popularity in some groups of lo-fi music, which has inexplicably become cool among far too great a fan base (if there is a subjective way to rate music, then lo-fi would by definition be at the bottom).  One’s taste for music is extremely personal and says a lot about a person.  Everyone has different genres and styles that they like, but beyond that, we all have our guilty pleasures, we all have songs that serve the purpose for getting us into a specific mood, and we all have songs that are meaningful to us, not innately, but because of the experiences we associate with them.  Our taste in music is a part of us, and to conform to someone else’s taste (no matter how “non-conformist” that taste is) is to lose a part of ourselves.  Music speaks to us on a deeper level than most other media and most other art; that’s what makes music great, but it’s also what makes it so hard to rate on anything more than a personal level.  For me, this makes the idea of music critiques somewhat futile, and it makes the idea of snobby music critiques especially inane.  If you don’t like a critically-acclaimed piece of music, you certainly aren’t any less intelligent or lesser in any way than someone who enjoys it; it just didn’t connect with you.  It’s not your fault.  It’s not the artist’s fault.  It’s just a matter of taste.

BV

Music Criticism as Intellectualizing an Art Form

Toss out the word ‘pitchfork’ at a party and its unlikely one of your friends will jump to its defense when someone inevitably begins a rant extolling it for excessive douchebaggery, among other things. However, your v-necked friends’ silence on the matter belies the fact that some of them probably read the website…just for the year-end lists, of course.

What is it about pitchfork that galvanizes so much hatred that even its supporters hide behind the Internet's anonymity? Other music sites such as Blender, Spin  and Rolling Stone gain similar readership, yet these magazines are neither referenced nor hated on as much as the indie music magazine. While they are Pitchfork’s contemporary music reviewers, they each also print physical magazines, while P4k (as it is lovingly dubbed by its admirers) remains an “e-zine,” existing only in the hyperrealm. However, even Robert Christgau’s website is more often visited, and the self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics’” reviews are on average more pretentious and more harsh than even the worst of Pitchfork’s, which is saying something considering the latter once reviewed Jet’s Get Born by posting only a video of a chimpanzee urinating in its own mouth.

Perhaps, in an instance of hating the player in place of the game, Pitchfork has come to epitomize music reviewing in general, and it is at that nebulous idea that disdain is directed. While Rolling Stone reviews music (albeit in a much more accessible fashion,) their magazine also covers movies, politics, electronics, celebrity culture and more, while Pitchfork’s website is primarily music reviews, music news and dense, esoteric musical essays. Thus, people who bookmark pitchfork.com aren’t in it “for the articles,” they are there to read music reviews. Their condescending and inaccessible reviews have attracted contempt towards music criticism in general. Hence the question becomes: “Should Music be Reviewed?” I submit that it should.

Let’s get one thing out of the way; music reviews are inherently pretentious. It takes a pretty inflated sense of self to deem yourself a judge of quality (ignore the fact that that is essentially what I will be doing on this blog.) In addition, when reviewers get mean (pitchfork has given 12 “0.0s” to date), things change. Its one thing to say that because one likes an album, its good. But it is entirely presumptuous to assess the quality of a piece of art as negative, although it does generally result in the most entertaining reviews (see anything given a negative review by Robert Christgau.) I applaud pitchfork for recently deciding not to review music they don’t like, and even removing a number-rating-system from their track reviews entirely.

Music Reviews’ most important function is to signify to the consumer what music is worth listening to. Lets face the facts here; there is a crap load of music out there, and some people get paid to listen to it all day and tell other people what music is good. Why not at least listen to what they have to say? While obsessively reading music reviews may directly lead to an overestimation of the popularity/quality/godliness of a band like, say, Radiohead, to never read critical examinations of music could mean a much more limited access to varied genres. One reason I listen to basically every kind of music (except country, because let’s be honest that’s just unreasonable) is that a bunch of people I’ve never met who seem to know what they are talking about told me a bunch of it was great. We listen to economists about the economy, doctors about our health and political analysts’ about politics before making our own educated decisions, so why not listen to what critics have to say about art when making decisions about art?

Music Criticism provides another important function, and that is to intellectualize the listening of music. I’m sure I just lost a couple friends for that statement alone, but hear me out. If you can ignore the ratings, a review is essentially the literary analysis of the music by someone particularly qualified because of a musical/literary education. In a world where the general population often does not see contemporary music as Art, and the consumption of music-as-an-album has been killed by iTunes, Pitchfork is there to remind us that sometimes, there is more to music than a danceable beat and glittery production. Some people like to go deeper into their music than others, and if they can do it without being insufferable about it, they should be able to live in harmony with people only interested in the next Ke$ha single. As long as you’re not pubescent or already a prick, you should be able to read music reviews without them inflating your ego to the point that you think your music taste is better than others, or that certain artists are more important than others.

In the end, there are many different kinds of music, and it should all only be evaluated on its own terms. I’m in favor of continuing to pay Liberal Arts grads to do said evaluation. When its said and done, the final arbiter of quality is not Ryan Schreiber, or Robert Christgau, or Stephen Thomas Erlewine, and its certainly not the Grammys; that power lies in the hands of the consumer. If you can remember that, and never to drop the word ‘Pitchfork’ in conversation, feel free to indulge in music criticism.

Correction:

An earlier form of this article incorrectly stated that Pitchfork was rated the 94,213th most read site in the US by Alexa.  This rating was actually for pitchforkmedia.com.  The real pitchfork.com is rated 913th as of this moment.