First things first — only really a couple things of note about the SFJ lecture from like two weeks ago that I’m just writing on now:
Overall, I think if he had had something specific to start off talking about, it might’ve had more direction and been a little more focused — I think doing the whole thing as a Q&A was a bit much. Also, I think he’s more of a writer than an off-the-cuff talker, and I can’t fault him for that, as I am too.
There were a few things I wish he had taken in a different direction — for example, one audience member suggested the intellectual/emotional dichotomy with respect to listening. I think that was a good opportunity to talk about differences in motivation for producing and consuming music, and to talk about how those two aren’t always necessarily separate and also can’t be privileged over one another. But it sort of just devolved into a discussion of Battles — which didn’t completely gloss over those ideas, but I’m not sure it was teased out enough as a concept to satisfy the question.
Also — and I’ll paste something I wrote elsewhere in the internet universe here about this — another audience member suggested that critics (she cited experience in the alt-weekly scene locally) don’t like to own their opinions, and tend to try to find good things in what they write instead of being straight about music they just don’ t like.
For my two cents, I think given the amount of space we have to work with at our paper specifically, I tend to try to only choose artists/bands to write about that I think have some merit. The only place that tends not to always be true is if we have room for straight-up reviews of local bands, in which case I tend to try to offer constructive criticism. I won’t talk up a band if I don’t think they’re got something good going on, but I’ll point out what’s good and not so good about their record so that they have something to work on.
Also I tend — and this is a personal preference — to not care that much about critics’ straight-up value judgments because a critic who’s focusing on whether or not they like an album will tend not to spend enough time (in my opinion) looking at why it works or doesn’t. Which isn’t to say I don’t want a critic to ever register a value judgment, but I’d much rather read reviews that put the emphasis on description rather than evaluation, simply because other people’s personal responses on an emotional level don’t necessarily inform my response to a record (or any sort of cultural artifact) and, for my part, I don’t think there’s anything about my personal response that ought to inform someone else’s.
The one thing that really got me, though, was SFJ’s response to the question about the state of hip-hop today; he essentially said that “IF hip-hop is dead, then maybe it should just hang up its medals,” because 30 years is a great run. His analogy was that Buddy Holly died in 1959, and in the 1980’s people weren’t mourning the loss of Buddy Holly as something that left a gaping hole in the landscape of pop music.
Obviously that’s a faulty analogy, and gets to the crux of what’s wrong with his entire idea here: Buddy Holly was one artist, and hop hop is an entire genre of music. I’d say — and Sasha would likely disagree, I suppose — that hip hop shouldn’t even be considered a subgenre of rock. It’s a musical form of its own with myriad subgenres and a tendency to constantly reinvent itself, just like rock & roll. It came up from oral traditions completely outside of the realm of the American pop music that came before it. I doubt he’d say that “if rock is dead, that’s okay;” there are all kinds of ways for rock to shift forms and refresh. Same goes for hip hop.
Of course, I suspect if challenged on that statement (and I would’ve challenged it but it was toward the end of the lecture and I didn’t want to make him go over time), he’d back down and explain that he just meant hip hop as it currently exists a mainstream, popular form, or something along those lines. There are ways to water down that statement to make it slightly more applicable, but it would take a lot of work.
All that having been said, I think that for he’s a good writer and normally astute critic who tends to put his foot in his mouth, then take some time to bring it back out.
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