it doesn't matter if i think it's good or bad, that's just what's happened

Chuck Klosterman (MN represent!) said some things about music criticism that I thought were kind of interesting in a recent interview: 

When I first got into criticism as a life in 1994 or 1995, one of the prerequisites of the job was, “Can you distance yourself from the life of the artist and just look at the art? Do you have the ability to do that?” Because at the time the thinking was: A lot of people can’t. A lot of people in the audience can’t do that. They can’t look at somebody like Marilyn Manson and not think of his character as a way that informs them about what the music means, but as a critic you’re supposed to be able to that. You’re supposed to be able to say, “I can just look at this art and examine its merits almost separate from the individual.”

And now that has completely reversed. Not only do people not expect you to do that—they don’t want you to. There is an expectation that, of course, you’re going to think about the individual’s real-life persona within even their fictitious work, so that has changed.

Isaac Chotiner: What’s your feeling about that?

My feeling doesn’t matter. [Laughs.] It doesn’t matter to me if I think it’s good or bad. That’s just what’s happened.

          ---

There’ve always been critics and writers who went outside of the text, where it would be like everybody’s writing about Hootie & the Blowfish, everyone’s writing about the Hootie & the Blowfish record, and they’re talking about whether the music is cool or lame or are they actually talented or are they not really talented or talking about who the audience for this music is.

And then there would be a few critics outside of that, who’d be like, “Let’s think about Hootie & the Blowfish as an idea. What does it mean for this to have happened that this band is so much bigger than all of these other artists who we perceive as being more talented or more important or more insightful. What does it mean, almost politically or socially, that for this brief period of time the biggest band in the world is Hootie & the Blowfish?”

There was always a sliver of people doing that. I suppose, when I first got into this, I sort of perceived myself as being in that sliver of people doing it. And now this has completely flopped. Now that is the overwhelming majority of criticism. That’s the only way to do criticism now. What used to be sort of the fringe is now the center of everything.

It seems like Klosterman is describing two distinct, but very entwined ideas that are foundational for a lot of music criticism today. The first is that we should reject the old(?) notion of separating the art from the artist. Amanda Petrusich explains this idea and its rationale here in somewhat more depth:

 

The second idea described by Klosterman is that we should analyze music in terms of its broader cultural meaning. Here's just one example of what this approach looks like in practice, but you can find it pretty much everywhere.

Anyways, the interesting thing about these ideas is that--despite being tenets of current (popular) music criticism among journalists--they are pretty controversial outside that inner sphere. The video above, as of my writing this, has 44 likes and 271 dislikes--which seems pretty rough for an unassuming "professional from x field opines on a topic in that field" type video. Even Klosterman, who I'd expect to be more aligned with music journalism, expresses some misgivings in the interview above about how prevalent these ideas have become. I generally don't like them much either.

That said, I also think that it would be crazy to evaluate such ideas from a majority rule angle. What would Petrusich think about the backlash against her opinion in the video? Probably not that her ideas were wrong, but that the people who hit 'dislike' weren't ready for, or felt challenged by them. That's probably sort of true. Comments on the video are disabled, but if they weren't, there would no doubt be a lot of whining about "ess jay double yoos", etc.

I'd like to think, though, that we can have better reasons for (at least some of the time) rejecting these ideas. I sort of already explained why I'm not a huge fan of Petrusich's approach in this post. As for the cultural meaning tenet, this ilm forum post from Οὖτις nails why it can be unappealing (it's "otm" as they always say there lol):

some work is less important for the experience of actually digesting the content it presents to you and more important for the discourse that it has created

and this is the point I *really* disagree with, because thinking like this is how music criticism (and to some extent the broader music industry - certainly the mainstream industry) arrived at the sorry state it's in today, where the "narrative" of an artist's career is more important/of more interest than the work itself. Celebrity becomes everything, telling (and discussing and responding to and judging) the larger meta-story about the celebrity's life transcends the work itself. Which, I have to say as both a musician and a fan, I very much resent and hate, because it devalues the work itself, the actual content/creation that is supposed to be performing that function of engaging and absorbing the listener. With great works, I forget p much everything about the creator and myself and get immersed in it, it's like a little world to walk into, a comprehensive experience. But artists will be less inclined to even shoot for that goal if their primary concern isn't creating something good, it's just *being* interesting themselves.

Anyways, to end on a more positive note, here's a excerpt from John Luther Adams that's (part of) maybe my favorite music-related quote period. I'm not gonna say it completely BTFO's the views expressed by Petrusich in the video (Adams himself probably wouldn't think so) but...

In fact, nothing makes me happier than when you think or hear or feel or experience something that I, the composer, didn't anticipate or didn't understand was present…was implicit in the music. That is very exciting to me. Look, the music always knows more than I do. And the reason I do this…the reason we dedicate ourselves to music and the reason music is so essential to our lives is that it’s bigger than we are. It’s deeper…. it’s like the ocean. There’s not just one current or one stream. There’s this ocean of possibility. I revel in that. I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just listening and trying to hear something I haven’t heard before, and then my job is to try and make that audible so you can hear it too. What it means is up to you.

...it sure seems liberating by comparison.