

Music-review reification

Bookmark and Share
Thursday, Oct 20, 2005

Occasionally, I review albums. I know this practice is slowly destroying my ability to appreciate music altogether but I wasn’t sure precisely why. I started listening to anything new with a kind of bitterness at the recalcitrance of this material I was responsible for processing into words. I resented anything I struggled to categorize or compare to something else. (By the way, I think this could be true of many reviewers; many cease to be music fans once they professionalize their responses to music, the same way English professors begin to treat poems like a job. A postulate: the less professional the music writer, the more sincere and useful his response is likely to be. The amateur is not writing to flex his own chops or to position himself in some hipster hypeathon or prove that he was there first with some well-lauded band. This is why generally is the best place to find music advice outide of your circle of friends.) I thought my growing contempt for new music may have been a product of the surfeit of mediocre music reviewing exposed me to that ordinarily I would have ignored, but that’s not it—that’s not the only reason, at any rate. It’s more that once I finish reviewing an album, I never feel like listening to it ever again, even when I’ve purported to really like it and insisted on how often readers will find themselves listening to it should they happen to buy it. I mean those things when I write them; it’s just that saying them suddenly invalidates the comments by standing in as a proxy for them. Once I announce I’ll be listening to some record forever, I no longer feel the need to actually do it. Also, the act of articulating what I feel about a record ossifies it immediately; the summing up of how it made me respond foreclosed the possibility of having further responses, of having those initial responses deepen or transmogrify. Fixed by my careful formulations, the record is no longer dynamic to me, and thus there’s no more reason to listen to it.


In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz sheds light on some of this in his discussion of the dorm-room-poster study: A group of students were offered a choice of posters (some fine art, some cartoons), and the students who were forced to justify their choice of poster in writing chose different posters than they would have had they simply chose on unreflecting instinct. Those who had to write chose the (theoretically) funny cartoon ones because it was easier to put in wards why they were funny; those going on instinct took the fine art posters. Schwartz concludes that the students who took the cartoons would have chosen the fine-art posters only they weren’t confident about explaining their reasons why they preferred it—they lacked the vocabulary to describe their appreciation of fine art, while it was easy to make a plausible justification of why a cartoon was funny. So if forced to articulate why we like something, we’ll like more facile things; we’ll like what we’re already capable of articulating, rather than like that which forces us to come up with new explanations and new ways of thinking. Also, once we commit to one justification for a choice, we stick to it, and let it preclude our awareness of other reasons and factors, of criteria that might induce us to question our choice. People who chose the cartoons defended their choice but didn’t actually hang them up. People who chose the art did.

Applied to record reviewing, this suggests that the most well-reviewed records will be the most easy to understand at a single listen, and that the criteria evinced, on the whole, in reviews will be the most shallow things about music. And once reviewers say these things, they’ll feel locked-in to them, even though they reflect what’s easy to put into words more than what they actually experience when they listen. Music that summons inchoate, contradictory, complex responses; this will either be dismissed or go unreviewed, or will be apprciated for simpler reasons. And once those simple reasons are put down, the record, for that reviewer, will be forever limited to those simple reasons, and will be far less interesting to her than the records she hasn’t reviewed.


But what of the notion that the unexamined life is not worth living? The road of the “inarticulate as truth” leads inevitably to dubious ideas like the innate moral sense and spontaneity being mistaken for authenticity. It leads to a Calvinistic sense of cool, that some people, the Elect, just have it, as demonstrated by their natural interest in sophisticated things, and some people don’t. (Renaissance Italians such as Castiglione called this sprezzatura, the by-definition indefinable—it’s a bit of a paradox—suaveness of the effective courtier.) Those without aesthetics would be doomed never to learn them. Isn’t it better to see aesthetics (and love) as not being inexpressible, as not being somehow too ineffable for words, and see it instead as something worth refining and expanding one’s language for? Even if it is an unmaintainable illusion? I console myself with the thought that writing about all those records and ruining them permanently for me has made my overall responsiveness to music more sophisticated, more intricate, more articulate; they were the sacrificial lambs to the development of my music taste. I sharpened my skills on them to better treasure that which I won’t speak of.

Now on PopMatters
PM Picks

of PopMatters Media, Inc.

PopMatters is wholly independently owned and operated.