Perfect Sound Forever

Part I: Gobbling Down Madelines

My kids are going to turn 6 and 3 over the next few weeks, which means they're still at an age where they're entertained by music and television no matter how ancient it is, and regardless of its objective "quality." If it's catchy, bright, fast-moving and/or animated, they're interested. They don't discriminate between old Mickey Mouse cartoons and Wow Wow Wubbsy. At least not yet.

But at some point, a switch is going to get thrown in their heads, and they'll start to develop a modicum of personal taste. They'll most likely be influenced unduly by the other kids they know, and by what they perceive as "cool" in the culture at large. If they spend every day inundated with the shiny and new, eventually they'll start to notice when something playing on the car stereo sounds dated, or when a cartoon looks like it was made in the '40s. Even if I put a home-baked chocolate chip cookie in their lunch every morning, the day will come when they'll ask me if they can have some brightly packaged super-sweetened chemical goop instead.

Yet even further down the road–maybe five years from now, but more likely ten–their tastes will start to turn again. Maybe some charismatic friend or relative will convince them that some outré comic or movie or band is really awesome, and that'll be the gateway to their discovering whole genres and artistic lineages. Or maybe the nostalgia impulse will kick in, and they'll start to crave all the popular culture they were exposed to in their first decade of life, because it'll remind them of simpler, happier times. And the cycle will just roll on from there. In the year 2020, my kids might think of themselves as independent-minded media consumers, who listen to interesting music and watch interesting movies–likely via the info-chip that will be installed in all of our skulls by then–and they might remain stubbornly unmoved by what's "popular." Then, come 2030 or 2040, they'll probably return to return to the music and movies that they turned their noses up at as young adults, and find that it had some redeeming qualities after all. (Or, again, that it reminds them of a simpler, happier etc.)

So much goes into influencing what we imagine to be objective evaluations of art. It's not that movies/music/books don't have objective qualities that can be dubbed "good" or "bad," but that we often over- or underrate them, depending on what we want to believe. When it comes to music for example, the acts we hate usually have more on the ball than we'll admit, and the acts we love are usually more hackneyed than we can hear. Just read any on-line discussion about music–or heck, have a conversation with your music-loving friends. Chances are, you'll find that smart, cultured people of good will share your likes and dislikes 90% of the time. But that remaining 10%…well, that's the bugger. That's where it becomes obvious that taste isn't wholly a matter of reason, but of, well, taste.

I know several older film critics whose preferences generally run to the avant-garde and the obscure, and who absolutely despise the heroes of modern cineastes, like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Michel Gondry, et al. And yet alongside Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas and John Cassavetes and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, they frequently make cases for the likes of Douglas Sirk, Frank Capra and Howard Hawks. Certainly, those three are great filmmakers. (As are Brakhage, Hou, etc.) But if those critics are considering objective cinematic qualities like mise-en-scene and the like, can they really say that Sirk is superior to Scorsese, without resorting to value judgments like "Sirk is more sensitive" or "Sirk is more humanistic" or "Sirk is more controlled," all of which have nothing to do with actual artistic merit? Or is the circumstance more that Sirk, Hawks, Capra and the like were the filmmakers they first came to love when they were young, and that the moods their films evoke have become inseparable from feelings of nostalgia? Maybe in all artistic evaluation, the crème-de-la-crème for all of us will always be the artists who come closest to the feeling of being sung to by our mothers.

Part II: Loving The Alien

Since this blog started in the fall of '05, I've used it occasionally to hash out what my personal aesthetic is, and why.* I'm not done with navel-gazing blog posts forever–this is a blog, after all–but this particular "meta" topic, for me, has been pretty well exhausted. Still, before I leave taste-parameter sketching behind, I've got to deal with music, which is the pop culture horseman about which people seem to feel the most passionate, with the most violent disagreement.

Over the past half-decade or so–probably since I turned 30, at the turn of the millennium–I've thought a lot about why I like the music I do, and how I can possibly defend some of the more disreputable CDs in my collection to those who refuse to understand how I could love, say, Hall & Oates as sincerely as I do Sonic Youth. In part, it's a fool's game to even try, because as I've learned lately, even bands that I thought were well-respected–or at least uncontroversial–stir up more resentment than I expect. These days, I find myself having to defend the Sonic Youth types more often than the Hall & Oates types.

So the only to have this discussion–now and ongoing–is to break down what music really is, and what I listen for in it. (A lot of this applies to pretty much every other artform as well.)

Divorced from matters of genre or production or sophistication, all music–popular and classical alike–is ultimately about one person or a group of people trying to express something of their personality, interests, biography, inspiration and influences, in a slightly abstracted form. Ultimately, since I'm not a musician myself and not trained in music theory, I can only judge what I hear based on two factors: (1.) How much of that personality comes through; and (2.) How much I like that personality.

As a critic, I think the first item on that short list is far more important than the second, though I can't deny how much the second affects us all. The older I get, the more tolerant I get of different kind of music, because I'm getting more tolerant of people in general, with all their far-too-familiar failings. (At least I'm tolerant of them publicly. Under my breath, I curse everyone.) There are some genres/modes of music that I do have difficulty with, like overproduced pop-punk and cutesy singer-songwriter fare; and my main problem with those two in particular is that they seem very calculated and posed, too removed from genuine personal expression. Yet to some extent that complaint is more about form than content. There's no reason to think that, say, Linkin Park doesn't comprehend and interpret the world in terms of Pro-Tools-polished riffs, beats and yelps. They may not be as calculating as they seem. Their sound may reflect exactly who they are. In which case, the question becomes, "What makes their sort of music–and their sort of personality–any less valid than what pops out of some off-the-cuff garage-band?"

There are other issues to consider of course, like how awkward and/or rote a band's lyrics are, or how much their songs lack certain structural necessities, like melody. But those failings are frequently forgivable, in the right context. (New Order's lyrics, for example, are often awful, yet they're one of my all-time favorite bands.)

For the most part, I think too many music fans get tripped up by form, first and foremost. If I were to play Glen Campbell's version of "Gentle On My Mind" for a group of young modern rock fans, I've no doubt that a lot of them would say it sucks, even though Campbell sings the song beautifully, and John Hartford's lyrics are evocative and poetic (and his melody gorgeous). The style of the song though, with its schmaltzy strings and earnest-yet-edgeless emotion, will put a lot of people off before they have a chance to really listen. Or maybe they'll think the song is "boring," which is one of the most useless criticisms ever conceived. (If you say a song or a movie is "boring," and yet other people aren't bored by it, then how do we break the stalemate?) Or maybe it'll remind them of things they find unpleasant, like elevator music, dry old variety shows, or long car rides with the elderly.

By the same token, maybe "Gentle On My Mind" really does suck, and the only reason I think it's great is because it reminds me of laying on my stomach on the shag carpet of my grandparents' den, looking forward to the ice cream floats we're going to have for dessert later, while rolling marbles around a circular wooden track and hearing the theme song to To Tell The Truth play on their huge console TV.

The point is that, again, neither of those takes on Campbell's recording has much to do with the qualities of the song, or even the performance–which is as successfully smooth and sentimental as it intends to be. That's why it's equally useless when a critic dismisses a band by saying, for example, "They sound like Chicago," or, "They sound like Journey." If those phrases are merely descriptive, fine. Sometimes it helps both music writers and their readers to put a band into context. But if it's meant to be a slam, then a step has been skipped: the one where the critic explains what's bad about Chicago and Journey in the first place.

(And don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that's bad about both those bands. But I can come up with 80 solid minutes of music by each. Unless we subject Journey and Chicago to the album-is-all snobbery that most '60s garage and soul acts are exempt from, a best-of sampler should be enough to give each their due. I suppose you could make the argument that Journey and Chicago aren't as brilliant as Bob Dylan, but before you do, you'd better check your record collection and make sure everything there is unassailable.)

Similarly, it says more about the writer than the band when critics concoct snippy terms like Pitchfork's infamous "dad rock" for Wilco, or one of our own writers' "NPR rock" for the likes of The Decemberists. There's a silly kind of value judgment implied: that music enjoyed by middle-aged parents or public radio listeners can't possibly be any good. And why, exactly? That part's rarely ever explained.

I should add that I don't hold myself blameless in any of this. I'm frequently guilty of what I'm accusing others of. Later this week, I've got a Permanent Records piece running in which I slam Soundgarden in passing for their sludginess, when there's no doubt that Soundgarden were exactly as sludgy as they wanted to be, and that millions of fans responded to that sludginess with real empathy. It goes against a lot of what we're taught as critics and/or as cultured persons to appreciate certain kinds of art: the "middlebrow," the corporate, the prefab, the overwrought. And yet that impulse may just be naïve, romantic humanism: a sentimental urge to root for the underdog.

To understand the culture we live in, sometimes we have to engage with the overdogs as well. And not just in a distant, superior way, either. We need to see through their eyes, hear through their ears, think through their minds, and even love as they love. Not to the exclusion of anything else, by any means. But in the interest of not being a miserable prick all the time.

*******

*Footnote: Here are some links to the earlier entries in this "occasional series," which weren't labeled as such–and may not have been thought of as such–at the time. Last week's piece on "middlebrow" movies is part of the puzzle. So is this wrap-up of last summer's "A Blockbuster A Week" series (and this Superman-themed post from that series). This Toronto International Film Festival '06 wrap-up enumerates what I generally look for in movies. This post about the elusive "good" movie probably qualifies, as does this post about contemporary blockbuster auteurs. On the music side, this response to the nasty comments on last year's best-of music list, and this response to the sour tone our message boards sometimes take definitely fit. I'll also throw in these posts on Boz Scaggs and Prefab Spout, and reaching way back, this post about what it means to be "right" as a critic, and this one about "spite opinions". So that's plenty. Time for a new hobby-horse to ride. Or at least time to go back to writing about junk food and toys and weird cultural phenomena. I now bid my navel "adieu" for a while. Thanks to everyone who's looked into it along with me.