Writing About Music

At left: Lithograph of the cov­er art for Acid Eaters, The Ramones, 1993, signed by the mem­bers of the group at the time. 

A couple of weeks ago I was dis­cuss­ing the state of my media col­lec­tion with my wife, and how the ever-mounting stacks of stuff in cer­tain areas of our apart­ment were mak­ing her feel kind of claus­tro­phobic. The upshot of the exchange was that I needed to do not just some rearran­ging but even some cull­ing. This year is the eighth year of our mar­riage and our cohab­it­a­tion, and for too mong dur­ing this time I’ve, sub­con­sciously or not, kept up a lot of liv­ing modes that I got used to dur­ing my long bach­el­or­hood. I’ve nev­er thought of myself as a “record col­lect­or.” I don’t keep track of seri­al num­bers or keep my records in near-mint con­di­tion or any­thing like that; rather, for all of my life I’ve been a vora­cious appre­ci­at­or of music. Or is it just that I’ve been a vora­cious con­sumer?  Either way, my habits in this respect have made me a chal­lenge to live with. 

So I began clear­ing the shelves, or rather, the tops of my CD shelves, which had columns of discs of vary­ing height on almost all of them (there are five in all in our liv­ing room). “Tribbles,” an old girl­friend used to call them, many years back. That per­son could be amused by them, because she was­n’t liv­ing with them. Anyway. The point of the clear­ing was to just have CDs filed on the shelves, not on top of them. It would not solve the claustrophobia-generating prob­lem neces­sar­ily, but it would be a start. 

As I began this work I would look at single discs and ask the ques­tion “Do I really need this?” Which is dif­fer­ent from “How often do I listen to this?” or “What is my sen­ti­ment­al attach­ment to it?” Not infre­quently I’d come upon a title that I blew fif­teen or so bucks on because I was intrigued by a descrip­tion Scotch-taped below a dis­play shelf at a loc­al inde­pend­ent record store; I am a pretty easy lay in that respect. I would remem­ber that on such cull­ing pro­ject in the past, I would com­mit massive errors rel­at­ive to my sus­tained enthu­si­asms. For instance, in 1992 or so I decreed, for reas­ons I recall only hazily but am nev­er­the­less still highly embarassed by, that I was “over” free jazz. That was highly untrue. On the oth­er hand—and this pretty accur­ately rep­res­ents my cur­rent position—not every record­ing of a Peter Brotzmann set is neces­sar­ily going to yield a great disc. In any event, going through my discs revealed my past prof­ligacy in ways that were no less unpleas­ant for hav­ing been entirely predictable. 

Around the same time I came upon that Tumblr, the one in which the wife goes through her hus­band’s “Stupid Record Collection,” and it gave me a bit of a chuckle, even while I agreed with who­ever said that it would­n’t be con­sidered nearly as funny as a guy examin­ing his wife’s stu­pid record col­lec­tion. I began my pro­fes­sion­al career in writ­ing as a rock crit­ic, so aside from my acquis­it­ive nature I’ve also got some invest­ment in main­tain­ing some kind of big-picture author­it­at­ive back­ing for my opinions/observations. My wife loves music too, but she has­n’t got nearly as many records as I do. But I remem­ber when she first met, she showed me the liner notes she wrote for a mix tape she had made for a mutu­al friend, and they were beau­ti­fully writ­ten and obser­v­ant and witty and win­ning and enthu­si­ast­ic. It made me feel both admir­a­tion and affin­ity. (I sub­sequently invited Claire to con­trib­ute DVD reviews to Première magazine, which she did for a while, and won­der­fully.) So we’ve got that in com­mon, although our tastes diverge in a lot of respects, and in ways some might con­sider predictable—Henry Cow, Zorn, and Zappa are all non-starters for her. Although she is not averse to early elec­tric Miles, or some Wadada Leo Smith in a sim­il­ar vein. People aren’t as pre­dict­able as you think, or maybe like to think. But people also like to live a bit, in houses that aren’t de facto stor­age bins for com­pact discs. Still, I thought that doing a Tumblr of my own, about My Own Stupid Record Collection, might be funny, an amus­ing counter the more cel­eb­rated one. I did­n’t real­ize that Tumblr, much bruited as a Lay Person’s Blogging Tool, is really an unbe­liev­able pain in the ass to man­age. And also that I don’t need to do MORE writ­ing without mon­et­ary com­pens­a­tion right now. I got about 18 discs in, con­clud­ing that maybe I was keep­ing too many Acid Mothers Temple albums in my core col­lec­tion, before bag­ging it.

In the mean­time some folks were writ­ing about music cri­ti­cisms and gender issues, the loudest (there’s no oth­er word for it) such piece being by Tracy Moore at Jezebel, titled “Oh The Unbelievable Shit You Get Writing About Music As A Woman.” She is cor­rect: that sex­ist male rock enthu­si­asts make idi­ot­ic neander­th­al assump­tions about female music crit­ics, then call them hor­rible names and pelt them with hate­ful invect­ive when said crit­ics pen assess­ments they dis­agree with, is entirely deplor­able. Couldn’t agree more. It’s hard to read some of her examples without feel­ing some shame at being a man. After that, alas, Moore’s polem­ic gives way to a lot of truc­u­lent, “nerd”-baiting, anti-intellectual truc­u­lence and shared-lifestyle-tagging, as in:  “Too often, we for­get what records are for any­way — clean­ing your house, get­ting ready on Saturday night, going out for drinks, FUCKING DANCING.” That there might be a form of music that requests, or even demands, one’s undi­vided atten­tion seems entirely for­eign to Moore, who con­cludes that because so much con­ven­tion­al cri­ti­cism ignores her defin­i­tions of music’s util­ity value, “cri­ti­cism often deserves every punch in the soft­balls it gets.”

Yup, it’s cul­tur­al veget­ables all over again, but this time the twist is that the cul­tur­al veget­ables aren’t even acknow­ledged as exist­ing. Which is why I felt a little more sym­pathy for the com­plaint com­mu­nic­ated by the music crit­ic and his­tor­i­an Ted Gioia in a recent and much-bruited Huffington Post piece titled “Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting” than did Jody Rosen, who com­posed a feisty and per­suas­ive counter to it for Vulture. (The exchange yiel­ded a really scrup­tiously know-somethingish piece on “New Fogeyism” at Pop Matters; OF COURSE IT DID.) Rosen, cor­rectly chid­ing Gioia for provid­ing a dire assess­ment without recourse to spe­cif­ic examples of bad­ness, argued that it’s a big world out there, and while the crap may be more prom­in­ent and easy to find than the good stuff, or the ser­i­ous stuff, whatever you want to call it, the good stuff’s still out there. 

It is, and it’s more unusu­al than it was back in the print-only days. As mad­den­ing as I found much of Tracy Moore’s art­icle, I owe, her, because fol­low­ing her plea for more writ­ing that “approaches music inno­cently,” she recom­men­ded Anna Minard’s “Never Heard of ‘Em” columns for The Stranger, in which the ostens­ibly music-ignorant Minard listens to, and assesses, canon­ic­al records fois­ted upon her by more know­ledgable col­leagues. Minard is a delight­ful writer: breezy, funny, with an assured voice that’s rarely glib. Her per­spect­ives on records that have kind of been writ­ten about to death is largely bra­cing. I did­n’t even mind her half-dis of an old favor­ite of mine, King Crimson’s In The Court of the Crimson King, because her obser­va­tions under­score the very real fact that much of that record’s impact was temporal-context-specific (I’d cite Red as a more “time­less” Crimson effort). It helps that she has taste—the things she likes about Court are in fact (by my lights) its strongest fea­ture), and quite often when she’s look­ing into a “clas­sic” album she’s genu­inely per­cept­ive and appre­ci­at­ive of its sali­ent qual­it­ies. Which is to say, in a dif­fer­ent register, that she proves the nerds right. 

All of the above explains, albeit in a ram­bling and prob­ably oblique way, why I decided to devote this week on Some Came Running to mostly music writ­ing. That, and the fact that I had a few records that I wanted to write about, or had been asked to write about, and had no oth­er imme­di­ately access­ible out­let to write about them at. The ongo­ing debate about how much film crit­ics ought to write about form, which was spurred by the pieces about music and music cri­ti­cism cited above, has also been a spur. And also the fact that I don’t think I’m gonna have the oppor­tun­ity to write so much at length for no mon­et­ary com­pens­a­tion very much longer. Etcetera. But I also wanted to dir­ectly prove that the kind of cri­ti­cism Ted Gioia thought was dead IS in fact still out there. And I sup­pose I did, to him a little bit, because after I coyly poin­ted out my review of Randy Ingram’s Sky/Lift to Gioia on Twitter, he respon­ded that it made him want to hear the record. On the oth­er hand, this week the blog has had pretty much the worst “traffic” (so bad I’m put­ting the word in quo­ta­tion marks, you see) of its almost-six-year life. What are you going to do?