Care for a Square Dance?
Music criticism is a job for the professionals, says Mark Cobley
I’m sure that many a journalistic career has been kick-started, not by dreams of shiny Pulitzers, but by the enticing freebies that student newspapers offer to their impoverished hacks. Chief among these is the tacky, cardboard-sheathed promo single, which you get to keep if you’ve written 150 half-intelligible words on it by the following week. That’s how I got started, anyway. I read the NME, like everyone else. How hard could it really be, writing about music?
In considering the question, then as now, it’s impossible to avoid the famous epigram attributed to Elvis Costello, or sometimes Frank Zappa, so I might as well get it over with: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.’ And that pithily sums up the difficulty in this most esoteric form of writing. It’s like translating between two incompatible languages.
Certainly, writing about music isn’t easy. It can produce some of the clunkiest prose you’ll ever have the misfortune to trip over – such as this corker, from the hallowed pages of GQ, ‘reviewing’ the latest Kasabian album:
While their excessive self-importance is not justified by an album which lacks the focus and variation that would make it truly great, with many songs sounding like ready-made terrace chant-a-longs, some of it, such as the wonderful ‘British Legion’ and ‘Sun/Rise/Light/Flies’ hints at a far greater depth and musical palette than hitherto suspected. Who knows, the album may justify the hype after all.
After this (anonymous) review, who knows indeed? Certainly not the reader. The paragraph tells us almost nothing about the music itself.
So is it hopeless? Perhaps the most common, and least useful, answer to the question is to say, ‘Well, it’s all a matter of individual taste’. But this negates the point of even talking about it, which in turn creates practical problems of its own. As Immanuel Kant pointed out: ‘We cannot say that each man has his own particular taste, for that would be as much as to say that there is no taste whatever, that is no aesthetic judgement which can make a rightful claim on everyone’s assent.’
Robert Seiler, associate professor of communications and culture at the University of Calgary, offers a threefold practical strategy for musical criticism. It owes much to Aaron Copland in his 1957 work, What to Listen for in Music. Copland contends that we listen to music in three distinct ways, or on three levels – and Seiler says we must consider them separately when writing.
The first is the sensuous plane, which treats music simply as entertainment, or escapism. Close your eyes, listen, pay attention to the medium: is it a good recording? And the proficiency of the artists: can that woman sing? It’s the simplest, maybe the purest way to enjoy music – but it’s useless for review purposes. If you write in this way your criticism basically amounts to ‘Well, I liked it’. Or, to put it another way: is Bob Dylan’s atonal whine just that, or is it the laconic voice of a generation?
Listening to music on Copland’s second plane involves the emotional reaction to the sounds. Here we’re talking – and writing – not about the style or the genre, but about how they make us feel. This is the expressive plane. Copland observes that music can express serenity or exuberance, regret or triumph, fury or delight, and many different shades of all these and many more emotions. We must be willing to interpret the music and then support our interpretation with musical evidence from the piece. Perhaps we need to consider which emotions the composer sought to make us feel, and whether he is successful or not.
The problem, of course, comes once again in interpretation. How are we to know what the composer intended in the absence of obvious clues, such as explicit lyrics? And does it even matter? If a song intended as tragedy instead makes us laugh, but we enjoy it anyway, who is to say that’s wrong? Think of how many student unions up and down the land are rammed with dancers enjoying every minute of Chesney Hawkes’ ‘The One And Only’. Is this really because its message of rugged independence truly speaks to them? Or are they just having fun?
Copland’s final mode of listening is the sheerly musical plane. Now we listen to the form and structure of the music, playing close attention to its elements – melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre (tone quality). The listener and writer now analyses and describes each in turn, telling the reader what he believes the artist or composer is trying to say with each. This is a bit like studying the character of and plot development in a novel, rather than just summing it up as a swashbuckling thriller or a weepy romance. It’s the most sophisticated form of musical criticism, but it can come across as rather soulless and analytical, and makes for drab writing. Can it really capture the essence and energy of a live performance, for example?
So far, so unsatisfactory, but in my view Copland and Seiler miss a fourth way of writing about music – perhaps the most important way. This is music in context. To do this properly the music critic has to become a professional. Music in context is the job of the reviewer-as-scholar. For perhaps its greatest exponent we should turn to the example of George Bernard Shaw, one of the first and best music critics in the English language.
Shaw was a critic in the latter half of the nineteenth century, writing for several London papers including The Star and The World, before he found fame as a writer in his own right. He saw his remit as not merely covering performances or pieces, but encompassing the entire world of music. As the Shaw scholar William Irvine notes:
Shaw was by no means content to tell composers how to compose, musicians how to play, stage managers how to produce, and audiences how to feel. He also told financiers of music how to venture and manage, and the government how to legislate with reference to musical problems. In his critical pages the English, a placid and political people, discovered with amazement that music was a burning political issue, and might at any moment explode into social revolution.
Or, for a more modern example we might turn to the rock critic Lester Bangs, whose authority comes with no greater a stamp than a name-drop in an R.E.M. tune – 1988’s ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’. Bangs, a prolific rock journalist and author, is cited as the man who invented the term ‘punk’ and there was almost nothing he did not understand about the history and context of the movement. A typical review, taken from the 1971 anthology of his work Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, is clear about where punk originated:
Punk bands started cropping up who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds’ sound and reducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter.
Shaw himself was equally clear that a critic has to know his subject. In an article entitled ‘How to Become a Music Critic’, written for the Scottish Music Monthly in December 1894, he opined:
It is quite clear that if music criticism is to win from all papers the space and consideration allowed it in The World, the critics must be persons of considerable accomplishment. There are three main qualifications for a music critic, besides the general qualification of good sense and knowledge of the world. He must have a cultivated taste for music; he must be a skilled writer; and he must be a practised critic. Any of these three may be found without the others; but the complete combination is indispensable to good work.
And he continued:
It is one thing to set up an ideal of perfection and complain as long as it is not reached; but to blame individuals for not reaching it when it is economically unattainable, instead of blaming the conditions which make it unattainable; or to blame the wrong person – for instance, to blame the artist when the fault is the manager’s, or the manager when the fault is the public’s – is to destroy half your influence as a critic. All the counterpoint or literary brilliancy in the world will not save a critic from blunders of this kind, unless he understands the economics of art.
Music scholarship, then, is an essential prerequisite for the critic. It requires knowledge of the musical, artistic, social, historical and even economic context of the art under discussion. Where does this record or performance fit? What are its influences? What will be its effects? Who does it reference and where are its roots? Does it stand at the head of a movement, of a trend, or is it jumping on a bandwagon? Is it an ‘authentic’ record or a corporate cash-in? Is one necessarily better than the other?
If the music critic-as-scholar does his job, the contention that everyone’s opinions on music are equally valid becomes a nonsense. They are not. The late, great John Peel owned tens of thousands of records and had an encyclopaedic knowledge – therefore we can say, with certainty, his opinions mattered more. Not hugely democratic, perhaps, but what would true musical democracy give us? Westlife as the best band of all time, that’s what. It’s time we admitted it: music criticism is inherently snobbish. It consists of self-appointed experts and intellectuals telling us what to like and what to hate. And when it’s done well, there’s just no substitute.
Laurie Anderson, the American performance artist, once responded to the Costello/Zappa quote with the riposte: ‘How about a square dance?’ So provided you know your stuff, take up your pens and do-si-do …
