Strikeouts are boring

“I think we live our lives the best we can,” Kevin said. “We’ve grown up with the idea that even when you’re at the top, act like you’re at the bottom. We’re growing and learning together, and it is important for us to stay true to the family that we are.”

- Kevin Jonas

This quote, from one of the Jonas Brothers (a pop-rock band that's been shot to success by the Disney machine), would seem to be fodder for people who want to dismiss commercial pop music, especially that music that can be accurately described as the product of a machine. It's a horrifying combination of banal and cliché, so inconsequential that your eyes can pass over it multiple times without really catching the meaning. It would seem to reveal its speaker as someone who does not think very deeply about things and who is terminally lacking in personality. Compare it to a quote from Dylan or Lennon and it's like a rice puff. Whoever said this does not match up with our idea of what a musician is supposed to be.

On the other hand, if an athlete said it, it would sound perfectly normal. In fact, it falls right in line with Kevin Costner's advice to Tim Robbins in Bull Durham:

Costner: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: "We gotta play it one day at a time."
Robbins: Got to play... it's pretty boring.
Costner: 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.

Say nothing, in other words, and it doesn't hurt you. Say something interesting and it's only going to cause trouble.

The difficult thing for critics dealing with commercial pop stars is precisely this kind of advice. Underground musicians get publicity for saying crazy things to the underground press; commercial pop artists, especially those with a young audience, can only lose sales from saying interesting things. So they're media-trained into oblivion, and come out with the kind of meaningless quotes you see above. For an athlete, that would be fine. Ultimately, we get our ideas of their personalities from their performances; the things that create meaning are their actions on the field. But for a musician, it's a hard thing to get around.

Musicians are not athletes because they are not creatures of action. Words and voices are a big part of their chosen profession. And so, when we're trying to make sense of musicians, we tend to regard speaking in interviews as a kind of extension of singing in songs. When we create our impressions of a musician's personality from their performances, this involves listening to what comes out of their mouths. If what they say in interviews is part of this, and what they say in interviews is boring, then they themselves must be shallow.

This causes a few problems. First, as various folks have pointed out, it leads to critics overvaluing "eccentric" pop stars. We might not pay attention to someone with a bucketful of hits until they give a wacky interview or take on an unhinged public persona. Objectively, regular mainstream pop music is no less worthy of our attention than any other genre, so we shouldn't require pop stars to act like eccentric geniuses before we pay attention to them.

There's a bigger issue, too. As much as I like the star system, as much as I think it's valuable and sit is awe of its ability to create meaning, it's just one way that meaning is created. There's no reason that we can't judge musicians in the same way that we judge athletes: look at their performances alone and marvel. Musicians don't have to create a persona, and they don't have to embody a social force. We can appreciate them as machines of grace, admiring the ease with which they produce beauty. It's certainly not the way I always want to approach music. But if a musician seems off-putting, it's one way to be able to appreciate the music they make regardless.

Labels: jonas brothers, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 4:13 PM