It first started with this little off post about Demdike Stare... Not exactly a slagging but maybe a kind of shrugging. Now if you look at the (obviously unrepresentative) sample of commentators there's clearly a mini-consensus here which then got me thinking: how come no one else has said that before?
Well, one reason is the diminishing circles of the internet, of course and the even more diminshing circles of the live circuit... take my recent trip to the Exotic Pylon gig ; I was outside smoking when Chris Bailiff aka Position Normal popped up and said hello. Now, I've said nice things about Position Normal in the past on this blog but it occurred to me as we were talking... what if i hadn't? What if I'd written some terrible, slaked, gnarly, bitchling piece about him and now had to chat amiably as if nothing had happened...
And that got me thinking...
I referred back to the comments of the Demdike post and right there, in the very first comment, an anonymous comment agreeing about what I was saying but clearly uncomfortable about saying it because, well:
my newfound status as a recording artist (who sometimes gets mentioned in the same breath as Demdyke, and who has met and enjoyed the company of one of their members)prevents me saying too much, but just to let you know I feel exactly the same way as you. i feel like i should like this stuff a lot more than i actually do.
You see what I mean? Which then got me thinking even more about how these endless routes and cycles and spirals are getting tighter and tighter, about how maybe along the way they're crushing the life out of criticism itself because this isn't the days of the fanzines, or even the early days of the blogs. In these days, gulp, you might actually meet the people you're writing about, even if you live in the backarse of the West Country, with all the associated smoke and mirrors that that brings.
And these people, these kindly souls you've denigrated, might be really nice people.
Anyone not scared about this must be lying, I think. Or caught in a terrible arch of blankness, or self-immolation, or...
When I started writing for Freq, I remember thinking a similar thing. I'm getting lots of freebies sent my way, lots of stuff I like, lost of stuff I don't. I wrote a lot of positive reviews but felt weird when I wrote something negative. This wasn't even my site, it was someone else's; I didn't want labels to stop sending stuff to them for fear of the bitchy Loki reviewer gnarling them... One CD (nameless, naturally) I didn't even write about because I couldn't think of anything nice (or even eloquently nasty) to say about it... I started to worry that this terrible plague of positivity was going to corrupt me too.
But I got over it. Thought nothing more of it until a few weeks ago when I started to make and slowly let seep some of my own music... Immediately, you wait for feedback of course because, though music is supremely personal and I really think that the bext possible music is the one track you've made that no one else likes, there's still that need to put it out there, to gain something else from it, even if it's just a slight nod or a wink or a raised eyebrow...
And I did get some feedback and it was all pretty good (some of it was completely on the money) but then, I would wouldn't I? I let it out on my blog and my twitter feed, to people who are already following so, of course 1) it's more likely that they'll like it - that's the 'group' it's for (even though the group it's really for are mostly lying on their back in a ditch outside East Coker, or making their living selling drugs and whittling in the woods at Caswell Bay, or are dead) and 2) even if they didn't, would they say? They might bump into me, somewhere. They will bump into me virtually... I mean, it would take a lot of balls to be that rude, and it's the kind of balls people wouldn't want to have.
Again, I let it go. Calmed the fuck down.
But then there was this little bit of repartee with Kek over at his blog which was interesting from another, related, angle: what happens if someone who's already a mate releases something that's a bit shit?
Now, obviously, Kek is a mate but even he did a slight gulp when I (stupidly, I realise now) pretended to be offended by what he'd said (he was bang on, as usual) and that really got me thinking: if I thought, even for a second, via the irony-free domain of Twitter (curse that lack of italics) or the facial expression-free blogs, that I'd offended someone when I didn't mean to, I'd be scurrying back to my text, trawling over it, trying to find out where I'd slipped up...
And that's not all. Kek goes on to say:
Doing things for the right reasons (whatever they might be) can often balance out some of the potentially bad shit - vanity / attention-seeking / self-aggrandising / etc will almost always end in tears, so if anyone's gonna get into public-platform creative activities , then they need to weed that shit out of themselves pronto. But - gone round the block and met myself going the other way) I've certainly never written anything on this blog that I didn't mean. Though, sometimes I've meant to write something and didn't.
Which I think absolutely nails it and makes a mockery out of the lack of real criticism out there (The Wire, about a year ago, was full of reviews that refused to say anything negative - it seems to have gotten a bit better now, people are coming out their shells again); yeah, artists need to put away the self-aggrandising shit before even thinking of releasing anything and then the critics would be free to say whatever they really think, without fear of offending...
I mentioned this to a mate who argued that we didn't need haters; that they were an unecessary blight on the internet, hiding in their anonymity (confession: Loki's not my real name), spewing bad Exorcist bile but I can't agree... without them the circle contracts, the feedback artists get just makes them get worse, or go down blind alleys or try to second guess the critics by changing direction when, really, the old direction was where their mind was at...
I'm going to keep releasing stuff as IX Tab (maybe as Twiggwitch too - though I'll come to that) and it's gonna keep following my themes. That old bitch of a word - masturbatory - that's what I'm aiming for. It's music for me. If you don't get it; I don't mind you saying. I'll engage. I won't huff. There's no need for this politeness..
We need the haters, or at least the dissenters; they'll help... even if they don't mean to.
With that in mind the latest release of __________________________ is total and utter shite.
10 comments:
A great post / good points! There are few logjams in music fandom more intractable than the ‘nice bloke / rubbish band’ dilemma, and in the past year or two I’ve found myself sharing rounds of drinks with people whose music I don’t care for with alarming regularity.
In theory, I’m a big fan of negative criticism (reading it, writing it, harping on about it’s overall positive effect), but as a blog-type writer the only reasonable survival mechanism is often just silence. Back in the old days when writing was more purely magazine-focused, I suppose everyone would tend to get a lot more “write about this by Thursday” kinda stuff, and thus would have to retain their (ha) self-respect by taking a deep breath and telling the truth. Now that we’ve got a blank space in which to write about absolutely anything (and even the magazines probably have far more records coming in than they can possibly cover), it’s much more difficult to justify pissing on somebody’s chips just for the sake of it, so: praise the stuff you like / silent treatment for the rest – a solution that’s boring, but workable, and hard to avoid when the only other option is “being a dick”.
Sadly, this makes music writing as a whole a lot less interesting and a lot less worthwhile, but there ya go. I don’t have a solution. I don’t wanna be a dick.
The net result is that rather than filtering good feedback / bad feedback when they put something out, bands/artists have to measure good feedback against an eerie silence, which must be assumed to be negative. Not much fun for anyone really. Speaking as a band-type person, I’d LOVE to get some really vicious, angry reviews – it would make my day. In fact I’m almost tempted to start making some truly horrible, offensive music, just to see what would happen – would friends & allies admit their displeasure, or would I just be able to revel in a massive, awkward silence…?
Also, I think the catharsis expressed here by the band Life Partners is very pertinent, and hopefully something we can all share (even if we're probably all pointing our ire in different directions):
http://lifepartners.bandcamp.com/track/music-is-hard
the eerie silence is infinite though isn't it? No matter how many positive reviews, there'll always be more silent ones (and when you imply they are negative... which, of course, many will be...)
Yeah, I know what you mean about being a dick... i feel like a dick pissing on fireworks all the time... it's not a great feeling and, mostly, I am silent when someone's gona to the trouble to send me stuff which i don't like... but when it's out there and universally praised... i feel the equal need to broach the silence, to contaminate it with words...
I feel it might make me a bit Clarkson though, so the panic continues...
Actually, Loks, what I actually meant by "Though, sometimes I've meant to write something and didn't" was there were occasions when I really wanted to write about Album X in a positive way...not that I kept diplomatically quiet when something clearly sucked LOL
I'm sad that I've not written about certain things that cleary needed to have been written about / championed / celebrated.
I've certainly written a few potentially unkind reviews both on and off of the blog in my time, though I take no pleasure in saying that. These days, though, I tend to think twice before ripping into something /someone...by that I mean, I step back and think: what's my motive here? If it's kicking someone else because I'm in a bad mood or I'm projecting onto something, then clearly THAT IS NOT A GOOD THING, right? So, it's always worth taking a VERY long and deep breath and ask yourself what is it you're trying to achieve here at potentially someone else's expense? If I'm trying to make a point about something or bucking against a consensus I don't agree with and using that artist as an example or whatever, then I usually try and make the point reasonably clear....
You would not believe (and this is pretty fucking sad to admit) the amount of time I've spent at various points trying to figure our why I don't like album / song / artist X...I've played certin things over and over again, over several days just to make sure that it wasn't a random mood thing...I've tried to find all sorts of redemptive things in the suckiest of albums / tracks....I try to be fair as best I can...*shrugs*....but the truth is I usually know within 30 seconds whether something's working or not.
Still having said all that, James Blake's still bloody crap.
Hey, I knew what you meant... I was really talking about the first part of the paragraph... And I agree with the rest of it too... motives need discerning... Mine aren't clear either... just the occasional surge of "Stop! Really listen!" and general antipathy to stuff that isn't great but is consistently deified because, in my feel, the over-lauded stuff is over praised at the expense of a lot of great stuff that I like that gets ignored...
I was talking to a guy I know - big music fan with NO interest in the internet - about all this and he was saying that, far as he's concerned, magazines (and he reads a lot of music mags incl the classical and jazz ones) are still loaded with snidey / negative / diss-off reviews (well, not loaded exactly, but they're def. present and correct)...anyway, his view was along the lines of - and this made me chuckle - "might it not just be that people form aggragated clumps on the internet and social media, and that there's a sort of 'gravity' present that brings people with similar tastes / interests together, so most of you therefore have overlapping tastes - pundits, bloggers and pro critics alike - including those who also make music - so that seeming scarcity of negative reviews is BECAUSE MOST OF YOU ALL LIKE THE SAME SORTS OF THINGS...?"
I kinda went, "Well, uhh..."
Yeah, I think that's it... we're all in a bubble... or maybe the gravity is so intense we're turning into a black hole... Hope so.
write a song, or whatever.
and then put it out
since you know so much
until then, well...
Keith... I, er... did you actually, er, read what I wrote?
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