In one of his last columns for the LA Weekly, Henry Rollins wrote this about music writers:
‘Music is such a great idea that, when music writers attempt to deconstruct and critique music's better examples, they rarely put on the page anything worth reading. I reckon if you can't write about a record or a band that you are not absolutely fanatic about, then don't bother at all, because truthfully, no one cares all that much about what you think in the first place, and when you write about how some record isn't any good, you are wasting everyone's time and basking under the dim bulb of your self-importance.’
And you know what, he has a point. First of all, I have often come to the sad realization that writing about music is damn hard, I mean you can always fill a page or two about an album you just listened to, or a show you just saw, but what does it mean at the end? Translating into words and sentences the emotion, the pleasure is tricky and often not completely reachable, but Rollins is talking here about the futility of writing about music you don’t like.
Is it worth it? Do we need to destroy music when we don’t enjoy it? Are negative critiques necessary? Rollins thinks it’s totally unnecessary and Iman received this comment ‘Next time you decide to review a concert, make sure it’s someone you actually LIKE’, after writing a negative review of Adam Ant’s show.
Since the development of the internet, times have changed, before only newspaper writers were allowed to write about music, now as you know, everyone is part of the media, everyone can start a blog and everyone can write about music. Obviously this multiplies almost to the infinity the number of reviews an album or a show can receive. Since bands have also multiply, there is probably a very large number of reviews posted on line every day and inevitably a lot of them are gonna be negative, even very negative.
I personally never grade an album or a show, I do that all day at school, so thank you I pass! But I am amazed at some grading systems used by some websites – I am of course thinking at Pitchfork – which dare to use decimal numbers for their reviews! What does a 5.6 or a 7.4 mean for god’s sake! Nothing, it’s total bullshit if you want my opinion, music reviewing depends largely on your musical tastes, and it is arbitrary, totally subjective, so I am with Rollins for this, nobody cares if Pitchfork gives a 5.6 or a 5.8,… But do they even realize how stupid this is? When I grade a paper I have to justify each one of the points I don’t give to the student, so if they come up with such a scientific grading, I want to see their precise scale of grading. I bet they don’t have one, and they get these numbers, just like politicians, at the top of their heads.
I came to the conclusion that art, and especially music is not gradable, yes there is bad and good music – and still, it is debatable as your bad one will always be appreciated by a part of the population, so what do you know? – but between these two extremes there are a lot of nuances and your appreciation of some of these nuances depends on your taste. You cannot use a scientific tool to evaluate something you judge with your emotions, it simply doesn’t make sense. And music appreciation is always emotional, as Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and also musician, elegantly demonstrated in his famous book ‘Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain’: ‘The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain…Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves’. Sacks is an expert in the field, so if music reproduces emotions, and emotions are all subjective, it is definitely not gradable.
However, I don’t think we should only review music we like, may be it is a waste of time as Rollins says, but reviewing only albums and shows we like is the easiest thing in the world, as we find more inspiration. Actually, the same can be said of albums and shows we hate: as long as emotion is involved, positive or negative, there is something to say, ideas come along. The difficulty comes when there is no emotion involved, when you simply don’t care for the music, since having no emotion means having no opinion.
At the end there is no more good reason to review music we like than music we don’t care for, if we review music, all music should be reviewed. Still, because of its immense subjectivity, the value of reviewing music in the first place has to be demonstrated.
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