As you’d expect from Neil, quite some answer. (It isn’t a competition, though – not this time.)

What is the role of the music critic?

A qualification – I know you think of yourself as a music critic Everett but I don’t think you are, or rather I don’t think what you do can be circumscribed in that ‘role’ (i.e. a set of behaviors/obligations attached to that job) – music criticism is just part of what you do. I think you’re a writer first and foremost – you might reject that as too faffy/romantic but that’s the way I see myself, a writer who for the past 20 odd years has written almost exclusively about pop music. Why? Because pop made us, molded our consciousness and the way we look at ALL art. All a ‘critic’ does ultimately is critique – a writer does that and a lot more.

I’d say most of my ‘critical’ heroes: Pauline Kael, David Thomson, Orwell, Bangs, Reynolds, you, Taylor, Pricey, Lucy Cage, Frances May etc are writers I like to read writing about anything – s’just that they’re all kinda monomaniacally focused on a particular art-form – crucially though you get the sense with all of them that there’s a life going on behind that analysis, a life that itself has to negotiate and find space around that obsession. THAT ASIDE THOUGH – & finally to answer your question I’d say the role of the music critic is to try and use language to be as beautiful/light/dark/intense as the music they’re describing and to be as honest about their TOTAL (physical, mental, stylistic, psychological, political) response as possible. Anything else ain’t music criticism, it’s a needy attempt to be part of the party. Music criticism has little to do with ‘reportage’ or journalism per se: it’s about being able to hear something, then let the thoughts flow down from head heart and soul and out thru the fingers. You should write how you talk – if that means occasionally sounding like a right pompous/pretentious cunt so be it. The best writers are the ones where you can spot/feel their voices within a matter of a phrase or sentence. The ability not just to make words stick to a page/screen but give them a sense of life, make them walk and talk with your own spirit – s’tricky and the best music critics have always done it. I’m not sure that qualifies as a ‘role’ (and it’s certainly not lucrative) but it’s the only way to stay the right side of the angels/sanity in this shittybizness.

In what way are power relations around traditional taste-maker critics changing from print to web 2.0 environments? Were these power relations around traditional taste-maker criticism already changing before the advent of web 2.0 environments? 

Always reminded of Brecht: “There are times when you have to choose between being a human being and having good taste” & Genet: “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance” – I’m dubious about feeling like a ‘taste-maker’, if only cos my reverse-Midas touch usually ensures a band’s demise/disappearance, if only cos some of my favourite pop hacks have gloriously always refuted notions of ‘taste’ (or set up their own inversions of those canonical hierarchies). Also the best writers never come at you like they’re talking DOWN to you – s’always like they’re talking across to you, assuming a certain level of smartness, or at least making you feel like it’s gonna be fun catching up with where there heads are at. That’s not a ‘power’ relationship, it’s one of sharing an experience of music and refusing to dumbdown or condescend either to yourself as writer or the reader, maybe kicking a few doors ajar onwards to other music/books etc – that relationship changed in the mid 90s when suddenly the pusillanimous pie-chart wielding ABC-terrified (both in circulation figures & class-group senses) cunts who ended up owning pop writing started frantically worrying about what ‘the kids’ wanted. Dual twattishness – underestimation of the readership from the same people I used to see backstage at festivals sneering about the crowd out front (without realising that the way kids talk about pop is usually sharper/faster/funnier/more-brutal than anything someone with a wordcount & deadline can normally come up with). I’d say the power-relationship you refer to has entirely collapsed now but it started along time ago in the 90s when the whole music industry (press/pr/labels) were in retrospect massively unprepared for how technology was gonna tear down the structures/strictures they were so comfy in.

Beautiful 7″ on my desk. None of this “digital download” shit.*

Nice solid cover: sepia-tinted seemingly, but in a variety of tints, with the name of the band made up of Pac-Men in different poses. Colours are blurry, saturated. The main photograph looks to be somewhere on the Sunshine Coast – I’m guessing – but not too built up, couple of yachts on the beach, some folk walking through and enjoying the surf. The song is called ‘Secret Paradise’. It’s performed by this Brisbane lady, goes by the name of Scraps, been meaning to check out her cloaked electronic-looped live act for some time: all things being equal I would’ve done, but having three small kids and an overarching sense of guilt means I’ve been confined to quarters for time immemorial. So I can only imagine what this plaintive, personal, playful music would feel like in the company of some drunk people and little ventilation.

I like to think it’d be like standing on the balcony of the Old Museum on a warm Brisbane summer’s evening, watching the bats flit about.

Here’s the BandCamp. *Oh wait. Plenty of this “digital download” shit. Plus my record-player is deliberately out of commission, because of my fear what my kids would do to it if they saw a revolving turntable. So …

The Scraps 7″ is on a great label – Disembraining Machine. Would I like this as much if I hadn’t seen footage of Scraps playing live at the screening for the Eternal Soundcheck film, thus providing me with a necessary emotional connection? No idea. Maybe not, but really it’s one of those pointless rhetorical questions. I did see the footage. Next week I’m going to be lecturing in the QUT KMB003 Sex Drugs And Rock N Roll course and I expect to be arguing all semester long that, contrary to what is often taught at tertiary level, there is no such thing as good music, that it a) often comes down to the context, and b) often comes down to your training. Folk disagree with me violently on this point, but I will argue to the grave that Whitney Houston is an appalling singer as she was unable to interpret songs … this, however, doesn’t invalidate the emotional connection people clearly feel with her songs, because (as John Peel, that great arbiter of taste put it) there’s no such thing as good music, only good listeners.

Whatever.  Now it sounds like I don’t like this. You’d be wrong to think that. I do like this. I especially like it because it’s from Brisbane and there’s a connection, but I’d like it anyway. It’s like a less funky Ill Ease, or Alps (who I’m changing my mind on), or Pikelet or someone.

By Everett True

Reprinted from Drowned In Sound, July 2009. It helped serve as a wider introduction to a series about music criticism. It’s been reprinted (again) here because some of what I write here is still very much as the core of what I do. Or what I perceive that I do, which I guess amounts to the same thing.

Editor’s note from original article:
This is the full version of an article originally commissioned to run in a recent special edition of Philadelphia Weekly dedicated to former NME (and Philadelphia Weekly) music critic Steven Wells (‘Swells’) who’d died of cancer the week before. Space constraints meant it got edited down. We’ve chosen to run it in full here, both as tribute to Swells and also as an introduction to the week-long series discussing the changing role of the music critic in web 2.0 – hopefully it serves as an insight into a key approach to criticism.

YOU WRITE TO MAKE AN IMPACT

You write to entertain.

You write to put your message across.

You write, using whatever tools at your disposal. Entertain. You’re a music critic. ENTERTAIN. This is the entertainment industry, after all.

You write to make people remember what you’ve written and to act upon it. You write because you believe that you can change the world. If you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t be writing. You’re a music critic and you don’t like something? DESTROY IT. Destroy it. If you love you also hate. So … DESTROY.

Engage, argue, inform, irritate … but above all entertain.

I first met Steven Wells – when? I have no idea. It was the early 80s, he was Seething Wells. I’d seen him winding up audiences from on stage – in squats and at colleges, in support to the fiery polemic of rock bands such as The Redskins and Poison Girls – with his own home-brewed brand of ‘ranting poetry’. It was hilarious. It was rapid-fire. It was male and brash and SHOUTED IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

I was intimidated. I thought there was no way our paths would cross – especially when he became Susan Williams and started winding up the NME’s readership in similar fashion: liberals hate the sight of a man who views everything in black and white, who doesn’t necessarily but argues vociferously and brilliantly that he does, who believes that everything he believes is right, who is able to prick at the pompous and polarise everyone he comes into contact with.

Swells was funny and opinionated and smart enough to realise his limitations and work within them. He did it for himself. He was from the fanzine world. He was a tastemaker critic for sure. People took notice of his opinions, and acted upon them. And let’s stop this whole “brilliant music writer with no real interest in music” line before it gets too out of hand, shall we? ‘Course Swells loved music: he just didn’t think responsibility should begin and end in the studio, knew that everything exists within a much broader context.

Swells was a tastemaker. He informed people’s opinions, challenged them, led them, changed them … most of this by default, by sheer force of his personality and peerless ability to entertain. If something was wrong, it was wrong. Didn’t matter what anyone else thought. ‘Course, Swells might then change his mind the next day. ‘Course he was immature.

We did eventually meet. We shared a love for exclamation marks, capital letters, immediate communication, impassioned sloganeering, comic books and the Three Johns/Mekons axis. We wrote several articles together – including a cover story for NME on fanzines where every second word was in UPPER CASE. Indeed, he ended up being my closest ally at the paper (and I never quite understood why: he was so brilliant and funny and infuriating – larger than life, for damn sure – while I had difficulty stringing a sentence together). He was a tower of strength for me, something I never forgot.

Later, we were rivals – me, as a notorious Melody Maker critic during the 90s: him, working his inspired devilry, still at NME. And that’s where we left it. I remained so jealous of him. He achieved so much. He touched so many. He defined and fulfilled his potential.

(continues overleaf)

More than many countries, it seems – or at least the U.K. – Australia has this hidden musical history.

Makes me sad sometimes, that music like this might only be recognised after it happened. There again, maybe this music was recognised as it happened. I’m not really in a place to say either way. This is great, though. Three-piece Clag* were as ramshackle and cute and tough as you could desire … and from Brisbane (during the 90s), which means – presumably – that I might be working alongside a former member right now! Oh wait. Did Alison Bolger help form Panel Of Judges and Beaches? Well, that’s a bonus and then some – two of my favourite Australian bands right there – but they’re down in Melbourne, right?

Respect to the lady Bolger, though. Three of my favourite Australian bands.

There’s a retrospective compilation entitled Pasted Youth on its way, via those lovely folk down at Chapter Music – the first time Clag have ever been available on CD. The songs remind me a little of Ed’s Redeeming Qualities (is that obscure enough for you, hipster townies?) or one of those warm, bubbly, idiosyncratic bands that seemed to be everywhere in the U.K. in March 1984. The brass section seems lovably intemperate. The songs are about everyday stuff, and are sung like we all love Dolly Mixture or Girls At Our Best! or Clive Pig, and concern security men, goldfish, chips, gravy, cult sci-fi film stars and brains that refuse to function the way they’re told they should. Some nice offbeat covers (Devo, Sonic Youth), too. Tamsin Chapman will LOVE this. Cute, but tough. You understand?

Twink! That’s who this reminds me of. A very little. That’ll be the kiddie-punk element.

With its impromptu gargling and glugging, ‘Goldfish’ is a classic of its kind.

As Chapter put it themselves:

Formed around high school friends Bek Moore, Rachael Cooke and Alison Bolger in the very early 90s, Clag played a kind of psychotic kiddie punk, full of one note Casio keyboard solos and lyrics about cows, goldfish and gravy-covered hot chips. Their apparent innocence, however, was merely a front, disguising examinations of the human psyche that grew darker as the band progressed.

Live, the band would face away from the audience and play with masks taped to the backs of their heads, or dress in hospital gowns and bedeck the stage with fluffy Mr Men toys. Musically they were equaly confusing, staking out a bizarre middle ground between the Shaggs, Bikini Kill and the Banana Splits, In short, Clag were one of the most head-scratchingly strange bands in the world, and those who came across them either recoiled immediately or developed a lifelong obsession.

*I say three-piece. There appear to be at least five members in that photo. Ah well. Misinformation rules!

Oh, go on. As you twisted my arm. I just found this on YouTube. From last year. I love this song so much.

I’ve been sent this a few times. It seems like a good deal. So I thought I’d share it.

Foreword

Amour & Discipline is a non-profit DIY organization. We don’t get subsidies, nor are we financed by any corporation. Most of us are also involved in Grrrnd Zero a French collective promoting independent/underground shows. The project of A&D can be divided into three parts :

1. A donation platform where people can donate to any independent band or label in the universe.
2. A collective ad-free webzine gathering and involving all kinds of actors who contribute to the shiny world of underground/indie cultures. The mag is written by our favourite bands, labels & activists (promoters, venues, cool booking agents, webzines etc). List here.
3. A widespread diffusion of A&D links on all kinds of websites to remind people they can support music this way.

To cover our costs, we’ve decided that A&D users will simply choose if and how much they want to give us.

A&D is not a place dedicated to music download, but a place to support artists/labels. The only music available will be found in the webzine, willingly shared by the artists themselves.

Our website will launch on March 8th, 2012.

Until then, you can choose to read either :

• the A&D Breathtaking Full Manifesto (approximately 8 pages = 3 cups of black coffee)
• or the Short Manifesto (tells you the bare minimum in one page = 1 cup of coffee)

You can also go straight to :

• our “know-how” section by clicking on Functionning of A&D
• additional rambling on indie labels, digital era, Creative Commons (…) which we haven’t included in our manifestos, by going to Additionnal Topics For You To Shine In High Society

Choose from the left column menu !

If you think the A&D project is relevant, don’t hesitate to spread the URL of our website (via email, blogs, webzines, social networks, carrier pigeons…).

SHORT, REDUCTIVE AND INCOMPLETE MANIFESTO FOR THOSE IN A HURRY

• How much does a band earn when you’re sharing their music with a friend, or when you’re using P2P or direct download services to get it?
• Well, ok, zero. But how much does a band earn when you buy a $10 CD in a store ?
• $1.2. How much does a band earn when you buy a $0.99 song on Itunes ?
• 15 cents. How much does a band earn when you listen to a song one hundred times on Spotify ?
• $0.5. How much would a band earn if you sent them a free donation ?
• The exact amount you chose to give. Of course, these are average figures regarding both indie and mainstream artists; some manage to get better deals, others get worse. But most of the time, no matter how you listen to music, the artist gets very little financial support. In recent years, technology has made music shift from scarce goods to infinite goods: once the original is made, it takes zero marginal cost to make a digital copy and distribute it. All the music in the world is available for (almost) nothing, and less and less people are buying physical records. Global Non-Commercial Culture Sharing is now a reality – which, don’t get us wrong, is simply great – but the problem of decently funding artistic creation remains.

But Why?

• a lot of people want to maintain old centralized models of distribution in the digital world, creating artificial scarcity on infinite goods, and pretending global culture sharing never happened
• big entertainment corporations keep laying down the law
• many middlemen are still involved. Some of them are valuable (independent labels), some have to be questioned

So, why not directly support those who create music and those who really help to produce it?

This is what we’re experimenting with this Donation Platform. A&D project is not about charity, but Gift Economy. It is not about guilt, but common decency. Of course, good ways to support bands/labels already exist (buying stuff directly from them, for example).

Of course, good ways to support bands/labels already exist and crucial ideas still have to be tested, but we think A&D can be a useful step to promote two fundamental and inseparable points :

1. Non-Commercial Culture Sharing is essential and legitimate
2. We can and we must find new ways to support independent authors and producers, so the aforementioned fact won’t cast them in the sewers where they will starve alone

We think the combination of coercive (i.e. governments) and mercantile (i.e. corporations) tactics should certainly not be the only ones driving the legislation, distribution, and financing of culture. On the contrary, we believe the present situation urges us to invent new alternative strategies.

FULL MANIFESTO, SENSITIVE INFO & EPIPHANY ON   WWW.AMOUR-DISCIPLINE.ORG

Some bands/labels/webzines contributing to A&D Webzine:
Action Beat, Aguirre Records, Anders Hana (Moha!, Ultralyd…), Amen Dunes, Astral Social Club, Autumn Records, Ben Greenberg (Zs, Hubble, The Men), Ben McOsker (Load records), Brad Rose (Digitalis), Bruno Dorella (Bar la Muerte records, OvO…), Carla Bozulich, Chris Corsano, Chora, Clint Simonson (De Stijl records), Dan Deacon, Daniel Francis Doyle, Datashock, Dean Spunt (No Age, Post Present Medium), Deerhoof, Dirty Beaches, Doru Mihail and other Cookshop dudes, Dustin Wong, Dwight & Brian (Get Off The Coast / Secret Decoder), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeedyoublackemperor/A Silver Mt Zion/Constellation), Ela Orleans, Eli Keszler, EMA, Ensemble Economique, Father Murphy, Gangpol und Mit, Giuseppe Ielasi, Golden Cup/ 8 MM Records, Hoquets, Jakub Adamek (Weed Temple), Japanther, Jeffrey lewis, Jon Hency (Bathetic records), Julian Lynch, Justice Yeldham, Kemialliset Ystävät, Lightning Bolt, Liars, Marc Richter (Dekorder), Marvin, Mount Eerie, Nicholas Short (ex-Ruby Scoops), Orange Milk records, Our Brother The Native, Patrick Flegel (Women), Peter Nicholson (One Ensemble) Pheromoans, Pica Disk, Pierre Bastien, Pink Reason, Pneu, Prince Rama, Ramona Cordova, Rusty Santos (The Present), Scout Niblett, Sculpture, Sean Terroreyes, Senufo Editions, Shadow Grounds, Shawn Reed (Wet hair/Night People), Singing Knives, Sole, Sore Eros, Spencer Clark, Stadiums & Shrines, Stonerobixxx, Stranded Horse, Sun Araw, Sunburned Hand, Tape Drift Records, Teenage Teardrops, The Ex, The Rebel, Tonstartssbandht, Troglosound, Tune Yards, Upset the Rythm, Volcano the bear, Xiu Xiu…

By Scott Creney

Yeah, I know it’s only two songs — a 12” single or some such bullshit. Hey, if it’s over 35 minutes I’m calling it an album. Especially when it’s my favorite thing they’ve ever done. 

Here’s the A-side. Since it’s over 15 minutes long, it’s probably best to put it as early in the review as possible.

I’ve been trying for a couple of years now to get into Fucked Up. I love their ambition, their desire to take hardcore into new places. But no matter how hard I try, I just can’t get past the singer’s voice. I grew up in Southern California from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. I’ve heard enough punk fucking rock, and more specifically the hoarse testosterone bellow that comes with it, to last me several fucking lifetimes. To me, Fucked Up’s singer sounds way too much like the dude from Mighty Mighty Bosstones, or Rocket From the Crypt, or Henry Rollins, or any of those guys, for me to listen much longer than a few minutes. If I wanted some beefy, macho shithead to yell at me, I’d join the Marines. Or call my fucking dad.

For what it’s worth, in the interest of fairness or whatever, I feel the same way about women who sing like Chan Marshall, or in a babyish, lisping voice. Or who sing like Henry Rollins for that matter.

Thankfully, in Year Of The Tiger, the singer bro spends most of his time telling a story, buried impossibly low in the mix. Needless to say, this suits me just fine. You can just sit back and enjoy the way the song builds and builds in intensity over a quarter of an hour. It’s perfectly arranged, never getting dull for even an instant, and it’s absolutely wonderful.

The B-side is even better, a 22-minute instrumental/experimental musical palindrome called ‘ONNO’. Fuck yeah, Fucked Up! The obvious antecedent is Husker Du’s ‘Dreams Reoccurring’. It throbs and ebbs, running simultaneously backwards and forwards, a compelling mix of birth and decay. It’s the best drone I’ve heard in ages.

I recognize that my distaste for barking men is a personal preference. It’s completely subjective and completely unfair. But I know I’m not the only one. I’d hate for other people like me to miss out on this record because they’re not into Fucked Up. It’s too different from what they’re best known for, and too good to be ignored.

By Scott Creney

A friend and I were listening to an early Dream Syndicate show a while back, and I said to him that I wished there was a band like that today — fucked up and noisy. They didn’t even need to write songs. All they had to do was just pummel me with sound and employ a little tension/release. If they lived here in town, I’d go see them every night.

The new Royal Baths album is fantastic. It’s in the grime, the crust and the dirt, of the blues without any of the clichés that come with it. There’s no pentatonic scales being bent within an inch of their life, no walking up and down the same 12-bar staircase over and over. It’s the blues as imagined by the Velvets or JAMC, a slow burning scuzz in the vein of The Gun Club or The Birthday Party.

Jigmae Baer sings in the same slow, laconic drawl of Thurston Moore circa Evol. He’s got a real Caligula vibe going on, a sort of softcore de Sade. Royal Baths create a world where sodomy is a given, where the rugburns and the bitemarks are just part of the scenery. ‘Venus In Furs’ was a book report; this feels more like a diary. The people in these songs live violent, co-dependent lives. When their partner says “hit me”, they do it — maybe reluctantly but they still do it. They emerge from sexual encounters with scratch marks all over their chest and their back. They wear them like a badge of honor. They pity the poor straights and their missionary caresses. Life, they say, is pain. So you’d better learn how to enjoy the hurt.

It’s a tough life to live, but it makes great art when it’s done right. From around the 3:30 mark on, they get it just about perfect.

Better Luck Next Life is the sound of aristocratic decay. It’s spiritual exhaustion, the crumbling of an empire into petty, isolated camps of self-degradation.  I read recently that at some shows they just turn up their amps as loud as they can go and turn their set into a wave of feedback. Good. Their audience had probably been talking about how much they loved Whitney Houston.

The position of the top entry is rather ironic, don’t you think?, but not as much as it initially seems. Yes, its opening page gained the most views (just!) – mainly through various sneaky linking devices which involved not actually saying which band it was that had split – but over 85 per cent of those thus ensnared didn’t bother clicking through to the second and final pages. Sigh.

I can’t say that when we started Collapse Board I ever visualised one of these charts featuring four blog entries about Whitney Houston.

1. Another great band gone. No one notices. No one cares.
They knew the fuck the importance of editing. (Everett True)
2. Shut up about Kreayshawn being racist 
I mean, isn’t hanging out with, and working with other races pretty much the dictionary definition of NOT a racist? (Kelly McClure)
3. She led a troubled life, apparently. Doesn’t everyone? (see featured image)
“If a woman is photographed drunk at any point, the narrative becomes one of inevitability.” (ET)
4. Hello from Olympia, WA – 6: Why I Cried when Whitney Died (see featured image)
Even if you are not a fan, as a feminist I urge you to take some time to think about her artistic and cultural significance. (Tobi Vail)
5. Kathleen Hanna – The Collapse Board Interview
“It doesn’t matter what you do, if you’re not a straight white male you’re going to get more harshly criticised than other people so you might as well just do whatever the fuck you want.” (Bianca Valentino)
6. Whitney Houston sings Robert Wyatt (a.k.a. the greatest Whitney cover never heard) (see featured image)
I just thought a few of you might be interested. (ET)
7. excerpted from an interview with Damon Albarn of Blur, March 1996
I was drunker than a barrelful of Graham Coxons. (ET)
8. Hello from Olympia, WA – 4: Madonna Live at the Super Bowl
Does the marketplace necessarily kill radicalism or is it ever possible to be subversive in the mainstream? (TV)
9. PhD research issue #1. Trolling
“Trolling is a rhetorical strategy that attempts to discredit the conversation or speaker as absurd/obvious or otherwise shift the topic towards some other element of an argument than the one being addressed.” (ET)
10. Song of the day – 441: The Sting-Rays (something wonderful from the 80s)
The aura of menace is palpable, all the better for being kept on a tight leash. (ET)
11. Intelligent women – the best of IDM
Yes, I know it’s a loaded term. IDM. “Intelligent Dance Music”. (Princess Stomper)
12. Gotye – Making Mirrors (Samples ‘n’ Seconds)
He keeps insisting his eyes are wide open, but it’s anyone’s guess what the fuck he’s looking at. (Scott Creney)
13. There is a Whitney song I like … (see featured image)
Can it really come down to simple tribalism, familiarity? It could, you know. It could. (ET)
14. Hello from Olympia, WA – 5: Go Team Tour Diary Entry from March 1989: NYC – Madonna vs. Jad Fair and The Shaggs
The new Madonna record just came out yesterday and we wanted to dance. (TV)

Today’s offering comes courtesy of Mark Sinker.

What is the role of the music critic? 

The “role” of any and every public writer is simply to write well; to write sentences and paragraphs that repay the time spent reading them. That’s kind of it: the “type” of writer you declare yourself to be is maybe a shout-out to readers, editors and publishers that here’s something perhaps of (saleable or consumer?) interest to them, but that’s really all that’s going there. For me personally, music is — to put it in old-fashioned terms — basically the “occasion” for music writing: the spur for the author to put pen to paper, and (perhaps) for a selection of readers to gather. I have a spiel on what a reviewer does, as contrasted to a critic (the critic’s role for me defined more discursively, and negatively: because a critic ISN’T just a reviewer… c.f. this essay/review for full elaboration, since it probably helps flesh out some of my other answers:

To answer the question at a general level, I regard a critic as someone who values curiosity over cultural complacency, and knows how to enable this as a practice in others, passing on the means if not the impulse — the means being specific pointers to how to read, look, listen, smell, taste, touch, move, to open up material that seems opaque or rebarbative, and more generally techniques, routemaps, portals that enable more confident ease of exploration, of the familiar and the unfamiliar both. Plainly, there’s a built-in restlessness  to this model: because the mastery of that zone one beyond the norm can easily become its own new form of reactionary complacency, the critic in you is what nudges you further out from under the self-satisfactions of such mere embattled niche expertise. And there’s plenty to be curious about — richer and more unexpected because routinely overlooked — in what presents as the “everyday” (which pop after all can never ignore, even at its most would-be vanguardist).

Read Mark Sinker on Music, poetry, Parkinson’s Disease

This is week 2 of my final 15 weeks of my PhD candidature. For the next 10 weeks or so while I’m writing up the final draft of my thesis, I’m going to be throwing up semi-random quotes and findings from my research here. They are here for commentary, so please feel free to contribute. 

The first is a quote from Daphne Carr around the issue of trolling:

Trolling is a rhetorical strategy that attempts to discredit the conversation or speaker as absurd/obvious or otherwise shift the topic towards some other element of an argument than the one being addressed. Most of the time it stops conversation dead, or promotes the type of discussion where only combative or ironic statements can be made. It’s less a conversation and more an argument. At its highest, it can be a form of sharp-witted verbal play that exposes the bullshit of purple prose or group think, at its lowest it is mean spirited personal attack and written shout downs so brutal they silence the voices of others.

I do think trolling is useful. One of the biggest things I wonder about with critics is how their desire to be liked plays into their attitudes about how they approach a subject. You have to have a really strong sense of self to go against the grain of everyone and upset beliefs, arguments, darlings, etc. And you have to like to argue. A lot of critics do, a lot don’t. I like to have a good argument, but I will never yell at someone or tell them they are stupid for their opinions. For me, this is a very important part of feminism: to allow someone who loves art the dignity of their aesthetic, to seek to appreciate and understand it. And, if I am able, to help expand or engage that.

Have you seen these “your favorite band sucks” t-shirts? First, they’re so 90s. Second, that is something I would never say.

I am not of the school that believes that one should attack the critic her or himself, but rather their accuracy, ideas, arguments, their style. See my Bookforum piece on Simon Reynold’s Retromania for example. I walked the line there since I do talk about nationalism as it relates to the shaping of ideas, but I tried really hard not to make it about him but rather, for lack of a better word, his worldview and the potential lack of perspective that it would entail. Not to say that all British writers still wish for the authenticity of the Gang Of Four (!!!), but with Simon, it is a self-confessed modernist attitude that shapes his values for listening, and I feel that makes it possible to objectify and analyze his taste without it becoming a troll situation.