John Gardner, from On Moral Fiction  (1978)

Merdistes! Love it - I wonder if it is his own coinage? And who did he have in mind? 

Letter to a Young Music Critic

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate about

Otherwise it can feel a bit forced

If you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you can maybe get round it by finding something interesting in the larger phenomenon, or the question of why do people like this...

It’s tricky one, passion, because it’s easy to overdo it and slather on the superlatives and "lyrical" descriptions

Nothing worse than that sort of SHOUTING LOUD prose mode, or uncontrollably gushing , or overly poetic

Because gushing and superlatives can be quite vague – the praise terms are interchangeable, you could substitute a different artist or record’s name – the tricky bit is being precise in your passion

I think the goal is a sort of ‘controlled passion’ or ‘controlled power’ – it’s actually more effective if you ration it out, have a little burst where some kind of excessive feelings cut through

How you develop that, I’m not sure – you could experiment with different registers, more personal elements – do some writing that isn’t for publication, where you write about your emotional responses to films or books or music, how things have related with what’s going on in your life

Then you can see if there’s a way to ease that element into your writing that is published, without it becoming cloying or too memoirist-ic

And read some more criticism – read some of the classics, in lots of different fields, to see how they managed it

Lester Bangs is the king of the super-passionate rock critics, it reads often like a guy who is drunkenly spilling out his guts in a bar (he’s the only rock critic to have a biography written about him and it was called LET IT BLURT), but then later he gets more controlled and elegant while still passionate and moving. E.g. piece on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison (it appears in his posthumous collection of writing but also in the various writers collection Stranded). Try writers on film like Pauline Kael or David Thomson (although his stuff is cooler and calmer in tone)

There is also negative passion, where people denouncing stuff. Mark Fisher was good at that! He called it nihilation. For that to come off, though, you really have to believe in the moment of writing that there is something deplorable and pernicious about the thing you are decrying.

Nowadays that kind of outburst oriented, fiery style of criticism - positive and negative -  has gone out of a fashion a bit. Or at least the younger generation don’t do it as much.  Music writing today seems quite hung up on authoritativeness, knowing your facts, having done your research, and also positioning – where does this fit into the scheme of things, the artist's’career moves, what they are trying to signify, statements being made etc… It’s often done very well and is precisely written, but feels dry to someone of my generation.

What’s too often missing for me is that sense of music’s power to seduce and to break you down – the flooding of pleasure almost to the point of swooning –   the bliss and in a way the violence of music– whether it’s a very physical thing of the bass impacting your body or the way melody and harmony can lacerate you emotionally, because sometimes the softest music has the most powerful effect  - if a record (or a film) can make you cry that is really powerful, much more being noisy or slamming.

There are some great music writers who never go into that aspect and they produce work that is well reasoned and eloquent. But for me, for music writing to be complete, it needs to register at some point the sensual and emotional power of the music. There should be at least a little bit of rhapsodizing about the beauty – that’s what we are in it for, surely, the beauty, the intensity.

Experiment with this element -  listen to things and try to think, why do I like this so much, what is it doing to me?

"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die. Jasper Johns’s Flag – Abstract Expressionism’s ghastly patriotic shroud – had its first showing at Leo Castelli’s in January 1958. You might say, especially in retrospect, that Flag was always waiting to be draped over Suburb in Havana’s dream of freedom. Flag never grows old.

‘Lay down to die,’ I wrote. But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle. De Kooning certainly did."

 T.J. Clark, 2026

 ‘Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash – it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.’ 

-  Willem De Kooning,, 1960, to David Sylvester in 1960 

"Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it, you know. In other words, I’m not a pastoral character, you know, I’m not a – how do you say that? – ‘country dumpling’. I am here and I like it in New York City, but I love to go out in a car. I’m crazy about weekend drives even if I drive in the middle of the week. I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways ... They are really not very pretty, but the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like, or dislike, but I wholly approve of it ... I mean, I am not undertaking any social ... I’m no lover of the new – it’s a personal thing ...When I was working on this [Merritt Parkway] picture, this thing came to me: it’s just like the Merritt Parkway."

 - De Kooning, ibid

:There is this strange desire which you can’t explain. Why should you do that? I think I like it because of the ordinariness ... The landscapes I made in the 1950s, such as Parc Rosenberg, were the result of associations. But I had a vast area of nature – a highway and the metamorphosis of passing things. A highway, when you sit in a car – removed ..."

De Kooning, to Harold Rosenberg, 1972

 

from T.J. Clark's critique of Clement Greenberg

asignifying craft

… a new millennium style of pop writing / rock criticism that is cautious about reaching for significance and concentrates instead on a kind of inventory of pleasures, which in turn involves a breakdown of a track into its components and constituent sources, where the song/album/artist is positioned within the genrescape, etc. (A generational sensiblity perhaps, shaped by the internet, mixtapes and playlists, the disintegration of larger entities into the song as unit-of-pleasure). In the case of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round" that approach fits perfectly because as Mark Richardson notes, the song is exactly the sum of its perfect parts ("an intro, a variation, a funny little break with a sound effect, a section that pauses just before the big refrain, and then that huge chorus"), assembled with an "astonishing level of craftsmanship" and succeeding "brilliantly for the same reason great Burt Bacharach songs work-- because every chord change and turnaround and melodic leap is in exactly the right place." You could substitute "Steve Miller" for "Burt Bacharach" in the sentence and everything would still apply--indeed 70s and 80s "radio rock" is more what Ariel's aiming for. As Mark further notes, those radio artisans "were pros who knew something about intros, codas, and middle-eights, how a certain kind of chord change can cause the turnaround to the chorus to hit a little harder... there's a real sense of musical delight on Before Today; the sections sound logical but never predictable, and there are wild bridges and short bits that emerge seemingly randomly but wind up taking the song somewhere unexpected."

A huge amount of what makes rock and pop enjoyable relates to this level of asignifying craft: aspects of the songwriting and recording process that are far more technical than they are expressive or communicative--how this bit fits with that bit, the way one song section transitions into this song section, bridgework and arrangement, contrasts of texture, hooks, ear-catching gimmicks (the flurry of handclaps in Miller's "Take the Money and Run") and their timing, the swerves that still surprise even when you know they're coming because it's your umpteenth listen. It's something that music criticism generally hasn't dealt with much in the past, because it's hard to do with any specificity, and also there's been all these other levels of significance, resonance, expression, intent, to work with and make a meal of. The emergence of a criticism that attends to this stuff and is "against interpretation" (or at least guarded about it) seems like an interesting and valuable direction. What it would need itself to guard against is lapsing into a kind of culinary conception of music (all about ingredients, the harmonious balance of flavours, etc). In practise, it tends to be a little too plaisir and not enough jouissance for my taste. But then I'm a captive of my own generational sensibility in this respect, no doubt.

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit"

- William Blake

(in antipathy to Joshua Reynolds belief that "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind" and his pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty") 

Nabokov on music

“Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds.”

- Nabokov, Speak, Memory

"I have no ear for music [...] I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians [...] But I have found a queer substitute for music in chess—more exactly, in the composing of chess problems."

- Nabokov,  Playboy interview 1964

"Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting. 

"I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener. 

"A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people such as of the radio or records.

"In Kafka's tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today. 

"What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animal-like quality. 

"This attitude must be kept in mind in interpreting an important sentence that has been misunderstood by some translators. Literally, it reads “Was Gregor an animal to be so affected by music?” That is, in his human form he had cared little for it but in this scene, in his beetlehood, he succumbs: “He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.” 

- Nabokov, lecture on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"

Cioran on music

 

qualification when talking about anything aesthetic is a huge no no. never do it.

everything has to be the greatest thing that ever happened or the shittest.  nothing inbetween

i once believed in that as an article of faith (when i was reviews editor at Spin for a year, i tried to make it so that review grades were either 10s and 9s or and 1s and 0s- ie. just like in the UK music press - my thinking being that if something is a 6 it might as well be a 0 really if you think about it - although the editor in chief was initially attracted by the idea of bipolar reviewing, a dynamic range from gush to snark-sneer.... ultimately this didn't go down well with my employers, who favored the measured New Yorker-aspiring tone. Things got tense and in the end I quit - second-best decision of my life)

however in reality, the truth is there's lots of things in music or whatever that are neither amazing nor reprehensible... there's the aesthetic equivalent of mixed emotions in terms of response to them - movies or records that have some things going for them, but major failings or flaws, wonderful aspects but also off-putting elements

art, like life, is not necessarily black-and-white

so nowadays i quite like the ambivalent, conflicted, attracted-yet-repelled, weighing-it-up approach to criticism 

but perhaps i've just mellowed with age. succumbed to stolidity... 

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hands."

- Ezra Pound

 Nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain. 

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! 

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick. 

 "As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realise how insignificant they are." - Peter Cook.

(via David Stubbs)

 "There is not a single case in musical history of a composer being a century ahead of his time: the greatest composers have been perfectly comprehensible to the average instructed music-lover of their day" 

- Sir Ernest Newman, 1925

In partial reinforcement of my thought-probe in the previous post....

Although that said 

a/ a century is long time to be in advance .... how about someone who's five years ahead of their time?

b/ greatest composers being comprehensible to the average music-lover of their day .... how about a not-so-great composer who is incomprehensible to most everybody?

 a lot of stuff that gets retroactively adjudged to be ahead of its time, or farsighted...  it isn't really. it's completely abreast of its time

... there is this corruption of sensibility that sets in after the first few decades as a music nut, where you get more of a buzz from contemplating shit music than good music. 

Not so much actually listening, but the idea of trying to understand it, work out what its appeal is, how on earth the creator thought it was a good idea to bring into the world. 

Shit music can be better food for thought than good music, which somehow explains its existence more simply. 

I say "not so much actually listening to shit" - but there is a stimulus from the sharp tang of something really rank and abject.... it's like an aural palate cleanser.... or a reset (or even 'rest; which is how mistyped it first) of sensibility

You get bored with your own likes and preferences.... the predictability of the reactions, how you're wired 

It's interesting to wonder, what if I was a person who loved extreme metal and only wanted to listen to that.... and had consequently developed finely tuned discrimination for the different shades of aural offal.... what would it be like be like that? 

It's a kind of decadence maybe.... like Des Esseintes in A Rebours, the lengths he has to go, to get off... 

Well, of course, Eno said it first , said it punchiest:

"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good"

Which is the epigraph at Hardly Baked 2, whose output is largely if not wholly based on this approach (ShitBrit, the Bad Music Era, etc). 

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."

It's not going to be generative music, though - sorry Brian!

See, one of the things people like about music (or art or anything) is the definitiveness - this is the way it is, this is the way it will be each time I look at it, hear it, watch it, read it....  

This is the way it is, and more than that (as with a novel's plot), this is the way it should be - this is the only way it could ever have been  - 

People like the idea, or sensation, that something has arrived at its ordained form, the best version of itself

Exactly this organized arrangement of colours and lines, or notes and timbres and beats, or storyline and characters. 

That's why there's only ever been a limited ultra-nerd consumer base for alternative takes and demos and prototype versions of e.g. "Strawberry Fields".... or for Director's Cut expansions (like the fairly poor and utterly extraneous additional material in the extended Apocalypse Now) and deleted scenes and so forth...  It's why only scholars of literature like to inspect the first drafts of novels and plays... 

What about remixes? 

Ah but you see - a great remix, a successful remix, achieves its own definitive form....  you want to hear that over and over again, exactly those same perfect decisions made by the remixer....

A remix that remixed itself each time you played it and was majorly or even slightly different - that would be exasperating!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ah but you say - 

What about jazz improvisation in the live situ? 

What about singers interpreting the great American Song Book? 

What about conductors and orchestras with their different versions of the classical repertoire? 

What about re-staging of plays (modern dress versions etc?)

What about what deejays do in the mix, taking two records and making a third one out of them? 

Hmmm.... well see I like listening to jazz records, born of improvisation though they may be, as if they were composed - it's just a different route to definitiveness as far as I'm concerned. I get as bored with the mega-expanded On the Corner / In A Silent Way etc boxes with multiple takes and prototypes as I do the expanded Beatles / etc 

The fact that you have to do research to find out which is the best version of the Pastoral Symphony or Carnival of Animals or "Trois Gymnopedies"  is annoying to me - the fact that there is a range of opinion on the subject and a bewildering number of options.... I always think, "why can't it be like pop, where's there's only one "Strawberry Fields" that really counts?"  

Different readings of "My Funny Valentine" or whatever is slightly more interesting / appealing to me for some reason...  it's like different actors playing the same classic part...   but I wouldn't want to listen to a whole range of different recordings of Sinatra doing "You Make Feel So Young". I'd want the definitive Sinatra version as captured on Songs for Swingin' Lovers...   A live version would only make me contemplate the ways it departs from that definitive and unimprovable rendering in the studio.

Plays - well yes, I suppose so ... but at the end of the day, the script, the dialogue, the characters, the plot, can only be faithfully rendered. The stuff that is at the discretion of the director, costumer, stage designer and the actors themselves is not the essential element....  although it's true that when misjudged and ill-conceived, or badly executed by the players, it can mar that essence, badly vandalize it. 

I think deejays and deejaying are overrated. There is a ratio between the magic that a deejay can do and the indistinctness of the records being mixed. The more unique and stand-alone brilliant a particular track is, the harder it is for deejays to do their work. 

That's why the really creative deejays like LTJ Bukem or Jeff Mills work with characterless materials, stuff that blends easily or that can be concatenated (DJ tools - unfinished tracks, effectively). 

Bukem created a whole label Good Looking / Looking Good and marshalled a stable of admirer-producers to generate Bukem-a-like tunes for him mix seamlessly. Which he did brilliantly - one of the most amazing dj sets I ever saw was Bukem making this amorphous blob-blur of dolphin jungle in a NYC club, where the whole set was like one shimmering track. 

The inverted ratio at work here: the creativity of the deejay must be correspondingly absent from the tunes they are working with. 

Q Among lesser known artists from less mainstream cultural traditions, which ones would be good for our hearts to listen to?

I would hesitate to claim anything is “good for the heart”. There are virtuous, emotionally-healthy people who listen to very boring, very obvious mainstream music, or to no music at all. And then are people into all kinds of experimental, adventurous, exploratory music who are not good citizens or nice people. I don’t think someone’s music taste or how wide open their listening is, is a reflection of that person’s moral or personal qualities. But perhaps I misunderstand the question and you are just hoping I will recommend something that most readers may not have heard?

I personally do feel I am elevated in some hard to explain way whenever I listen to roots reggae or dub reggae. It is spiritual music and even though I am not personally religious, let alone Rastafarian and indeed find many of the moral values of that belief-system to be the opposite of my own values, I find myself uplifted. The meditational serenity, the sense of belief and purpose that suffuses the sound and the singing, irradiates me. And then the grooves, the vocal melodies, the amazing production effects are just wonderful. So I would recommend the 1970s albums and productions of King Tubby, Lee Perry, Linval Thompson, Augustus Pablo, Keith Hudson, Creation Rebel, The Congos, Burning Spear and many more. And there are some beautiful examples of lover’s rock, a more romantic and secular form of reggae – artists like Janet Kay and Kofi.

 Better an honest curmudgeon than a career generalist with Botox prose, say I!

(A seasonally appropriate maxim)

in response to someone hailing jungle-in-1995 as the genre's mature peak, and using the phrase  "adulthood - a zenith of identity" - i.e. when the genre is most like itself, least like other genres, has sloughed off its formative influences...

I agree with this idea, but it raises a question or two

We tend to regard genres as organic or biological entities - as a person (growing through the ages of man: infancy, childhood, adolescence etc etc) or as an ecosystem (evolving, mutating, expanding, assimilating, withering)

Does this make sense - seeing social constructions and assemblages as living, quasi-natural systems? It seems irresistible to think of them in those terms but I wonder if there's any reality to it. 

But going with that conception of a sound or subculture as a living, growing thing - that leads to the melancholy thought: when a genre achieves adulthood (formative phase completed, influences shaken off) it enters its prime, but that can only ever be a brief moment before the next step, the onset of decline and senescence.

With genres, that doesn't take the form of the musical equivalent of arthritis or Alzheimer's, but genres as they age out do mimic one characteristic of the aging mind, which is inflexibility and an inability to generate fresh perceptions or thoughts. 

The character hardens and becomes a confinement.

It happens to genres and individual artists alike - they become predictable. You know what they are going to say before they open their mouths. They repeat the same anecdotes. They have their little catchphrases. 

It's that thin line between achieved style and self-parodic mannerism.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here's a playlist I made recently based on the Dissensus thread - it's enormous but still far from exhaustive of the year's mature brilliances. Frontloaded with the thread-starter's selections (sadly he never completed his own enormous run-down) and then into my own faves not as yet listed by him, and then some of the forum member's own choices...  What a year! 

(1994 is still my favorite jungle year, though - 1993/1994: something about sounds emerging, on the cusp. Jungle's early adulthood, maybe, as opposed to mature prime)

"music is the superb illusion"

 E.M. Cioran having a rare chat with Jason Weiss - in this excerpt talking about music, without which life would be a mistake