Mark Richardson: A Proposed New Year's Resolution for Music Critics →
Maybe we could spend extra time in 2012 thinking about how we, as individual listeners, respond when the music of the present seems especially connected to the music of the past. To figure out when and why we forgive artists that seem only the sum of very clear influences and when and why we actually seek out such artists. And maybe we could articulate a set of criteria for when “originality” is important to us. What does it really mean to “transcend influences”? Is that something that can be explained? What does it reallymean to say an artist has a “unique voice”? We use these terms often, but I’m not sure we’re clear in our own minds what we mean by them.
Mark’s point is absolutely crucial, in my opinion, to being a good critic of anything. This has been something of a pet idea of mine for a couple years now, and it goes beyond Retromania, all the way back to what it means to be a modern citizen. To get all anthropologically dorky for a second, the sort of judgment Mark outlines above is part and parcel of the historical move in any society from pre-modernity to modernity. In the former society, people are mainly concerned with passing down culture from one generation to another, carefully preserving it to the degree that they are intellectually and technologically capable. Myths, folklore, “oral traditions,” and so forth—the sort of thing that gains power and value through the force of direct, perfect repetition. Once a society starts modernizing, however, more and more cultural objects start circulating—this is what modernity is, in part—and especially in capitalist societies, their “newness” is privileged as a form of their value.
This involves a different sort of cultural judgment than that which held in pre-modern societies, one which acknowledges continuity with the past, but adds the necessity of understanding what new about it is valuable. Modern societies don’t advance if they don’t create new things. So human beings start asking new questions when they encounter a cultural object or idea: what about this can I identify (i.e. what about it is “old”), and what aspects of it are new (i.e. novel enough to create demand for it)?
As time passes, cultural stuff accumulates to a degree that average people start contracting out this evaluative labor to public spheres of people who supposedly have the time and knowledge to make these distinctions for everyone else. These spheres develop their own codes of cultural value, but they’re not created in a vacuum from the larger modern imperatives toward valuing the newness of culture along with its ties to the past.
Newness easily gets reframed in critical discourse as “originality,” which is an incredibly important standard of judgment. Of course the importance of more traditional forms of cultural creation continue apace, yet a clear emphasis is placed on hybridization over replication. Cover bands are never critically acclaimed, but critics will bend themselves into pretzels to praise bands that are viewed to “build upon” or “transcend” their influences to create something slightly new.
This isn’t an ontological issue, of course, but an epistemological one—belief, not being. No cultural creation under the sun is ever “new,” because creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum either. Music that appears new, or that combines influences in a particular way that feels really novel at a particular historical juncture, are those that are most privileged.
Again, an ideology that privileges tradition still exists, and moderns need it to keep a sense of rootedness with the past and not get too unmoored by the consistent innovations that are proliferating all around them. But the idea of hybridization, of “improving” upon the past is generally far more privileged by critics.
The questions arise: What specific aspects of the past are appropriate fodder for new hybridizations, or what methods of hybridization are privileged over others?Most importantly, why is this?
What Mark is wondering, and what I am too, to a certain degree, is if critics can somehow develop a sense of reflexivity about this cultural maxim, instead of, well, uncritically replicating it to make an argument. Again, while explaining where a work comes from is only part of a critic’s job, I think a sense of reflexivity with respect to value judgments in this area are a crucial aspect of being a critic at all. Critics need to be able to explain their positions on the prior works a new work draws upon and they way they do it, and not assume that readers and listeners are going to tacitly share their assumptions.
I think these are interesting issues - funny how they are coming up on New Year’s - and I generally take the tack that an artist is original when they change our interpretation of a previous form of music. I’ve been thinking of the Knife recently and how they changed my feelings toward the steel drum (or at least its electronically produced imitation): they brought out some of the creepiness of an instrument that had its resonances deadened by the flat joy of ad campaigns for trips to Jamaica. Creative misinterpretation: when you don’t read the emotion of an instrument or technique in the accepted manner.
At the same time, as someone who is trying to create something, I’ve come to realize that I have to get all notions of “originality” out of my head. What the wider culture deems as “original,” usually has more to do with its own needs than the work being considered. Lana Del Rey has been a touchstone for arguments this year. Partially because her persona and her sound are original - a hybrid of Mazzy Star and some of the older pop-orchestral music her clothing and appearance more solidly gestures toward - but also because the creative misinterpretation she is making with her music seems to be going the wrong way: toward a reactionary politics and immersion in nostalgia. A lot of my wariness around her songs is due to my awareness of how others might be interpreting them. (As silly as that sounds.) It’s why I don’t really want to talk about her - I can’t really give her work as an artist the due it deserves because I’m afraid of implicitly supporting the argument that her music seems to be making. (She is also a touchstone for arguments because she is an attractive female - but that is obviously not the only reason.)
And this is why I dislike the world “originality.” It has a very 19th Century Romantic feel to it, and because - as Eric says - it becomes a stand-in for “pay attention to this one new thing out of many new things.” When actually trying to be “original” in a creative act, all that is required is to examine whatever it is that fascinates you - a sound, an influence, a memory - as deeply as possible. The creepiness of steel drums was always there; the Knife simply pointed to something that I wasn’t generally paying attention to. We ignore a lot in our daily life (out of necessity) - originality is about shifting the collection of non-ignored things in our direction. A good critic shouldn’t ever have to use the word “original.” The only thing she needs to point out is the number of things that the work made exciting that had previously seemed boring.
