Making the Rules

I just read the two-chapter exerpt of Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, about the Celine Dion album, and one part kinda jumped out at me:

"[I]t’s curious how often critics’ “own enjoyment” still takes us all down similar paths at once."

This reminded me of an article I was reading last week trying to figure out why thousand of different news journalists all seem to come up with the same stories on a daily basis, and why the nightly newscasts on the different networks all lead with the same stories despite not discussing it with each other. The answer was that there are certain news rules, which can be divided up into "regulative" and "constituative" rules, the former of which decides how news is to be gathered and the letter decides what is news. So, for instance, ideas about balance and objectivity would be regulative rules, but the thousand of little signposts journalists have in their head about what exactly is a story in the first place are constituative rules. So for music critics, there are clear rules about how a review is to be set up and what processes you should go through before writing a review (even when these rules are violated, they are consciously violated, as when Meltzer writes a review without listening to the album or Pitchfork posts a YouTube video of a monkey drinking his own pee as a Vines review), but there are also a shared, constantly shifting set of guidelines about what's an important album and what's not. The records that get lots of critical notice aren't necessarily the albums individual critics love the most; they're just the albums most critics will pay attention to and write about, no matter how strong their feelings. The fact that something obscure lands near the top of a year-end list doesn't necessarily mean everyone agrees it's the best, it's just that lots of people think other people should be listening to it. The precise things that make an album attract lots of critical attention are hard to nail down and can't usually be consciously included, but once an album lands in that category, it's easy to see the signs.

The article also talked about, though, the fact that these rules aren't naturally occurring; they come from the audience that the journalists are serving. So ideas about how a review should be written come from what an audience needs from a review, and rules about what constitutes a meaningful, important album come from critics' perception of the public's need-to-know. This was, after all, why critics ultimately felt secure ignoring pop music: the public was taking care of that on their own. But just as some stories are news because the public is perceived to need the information, critics think the public needs to be informed about difficult musics. Wilson says it himself: "my usual critical leanings [are] toward knotty music like art rock, psych-folk, post-punk, free jazz or the more abstract ends of electronics and hip-hop. I write about such sounds in the belief that 'difficult' music can help shake up perceptions, push us past habitual limits." Music critics elucidate the public by picking these albums, they don't express their own tastes.

We all like to think we're unique snowflakes, of course, but music critics--and, to a certain degree, serious music fans--are also professionals. There are rules. And we do fight about them, but these fights always seem to have as one view the idea that the rules don't exist. But they do, and they come from a very particular place: the public. The article also talks about how the public's needs for news journalism are now changing, so news rules may change too. The music industry is changing, and music critics tried to change what the public wants from music criticism. It seems like they failed, though, and the old patterns are still in place, strong as ever.

(crossposted from poptimists)

Labels: carl wilson, critics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 9:56 PM