Since January, I’ve been writing record reviews on a mostly regular basis for 29-95.com, which (as best I can tell) is a culture website spun off from the Houston Chronicle. It’s a pretty great gig, even if it is fairly small. Last week I ran a roundup of relevant singles for May. Here’s a partial list of names that I mentioned in the article:
Rosa Guerrero
Marshall Preddy
Ben Murphy
Chris Kahlich
Ramon Medina
I first met Ben seven or eight years ago when he was playing with Lucky Motors. He now works with Trey Lavigne, who plays bass in the Jonx with me. A little while after the Jonx got started, I played drums in Chris’s band Frox Noxon for a few months. Rosa is one of the KTRU DJs that does the Mutant Hardcore Flower Hour, which I did for six (seven?) years, and she’s also photographed my band a couple of times. Ramon and Marshall, of course, you already know as NAP Saturday original and extra-crispy, and to boot they have recently become two of the unlucky people I’m most likely to bother during the day on Google Things.
I normally prefer to avoid writing about projects in which my friends are involved, in order to reduce the likelihood of bias, but after 20+ plus reviews of mostly local music in the last five months, it gets to be difficult to avoid in an indie-rock scene as small and congenial as Houston’s. Effectively, aside from a paragraph on The Krayolas, everything in last week’s review was about a record that a friend of mine had played on or financed.
Does this affect what I say about the music? Well. . . that’s a complicated question. I’ve been told that I have developed a reputation locally for giving “honest” opinions in reviews, and some friends have intentionally submitted their music to me in the hopes of receiving one. Interestingly, this doesn’t lessen the natural impulse to validate the work of a person that I like, but it does help remind me to tamp down that impulse. It does also encourage me to say more things about the record; in the case of the LP4 7”, for example, I probably wouldn’t have written this sentence if Ramon hadn’t specifically asked me what I thought of the record:
One thing that can be said is that this track is of a piece with the 2007 LP All Things Are Light in terms of songwriting; the band’s versatility and compositional smarts have grown significantly since their early days.
I definitely think this is true, but it’s a more broad statement than I’d usually be inclined to make in a review of a single. I wanted to give Ramon something more to bite into because he had specifically asked me about it, and I didn’t have anything more to say about that song in particular. As long as I didn’t say anything that I don’t agree with, I don’t feel I’ve violated my responsibility as a critic.
A more difficult situation is one in which the artists hasn’t solicited my opinion. For example, I’ve recently written reviews of local music for which I had to e-mail the artist directly to get a copy of the record. This practice creates awkwardness when you run a review that has any major complaints at all, even if you say a lot of nice things as well. Some artists take even minor criticisms badly. I completely understand this, since I’ve never taken criticism well myself 1, and I think that actually makes it easier for me when I have to hurt people’s feelings. However, any time the artist has done me a favor by providing me a review copy of their work at my request, that creates a feeling of indebtedness that needs to be overcome.
Interestingly, although the practice of distributing review material through a label or publicist theoretically creates a buffer that should lessen that feeling, for me, that’s not the case. I have roughly the same feelings when requesting a review copy from an intermediary that I do when requesting a copy from artists themselves.
I think this phenomenon suggests that true impartiality in music reviews is, much of the time, not really possible, at least for a freelance writer. Maintaining relationships with artists, labels and publicists is necessary in order to make the work financially sustainable- buying a CD eats up more than half of my pay for a record review, though I’ll do it anyway from time to time. The other parties in those relationships have interests which aren’t the same as the writer’s, and as a critic, you have to be aware that those interests exist so that you can take account of their potential influence on you2.
However, I’m inclined to believe that an awareness of the feelings of the people behind the records that I review is a good thing. Music, like all art, is necessarily tied up with the emotions of the people that create it. It’s not an objective practice and doesn’t admit to objective evaluation; music criticism must be aware of the subjectivity behind the work. That doesn’t mean that you can’t pass a negative judgment on a record, but it does mean that you have to understand where the artist is coming from before you can say anything meaningful about it at all3.
A critic, therefore, has an inherent advantage when they’re looking at the music of their own community, and if having friends in that community poses challenges in sorting through biases, it also makes the critic’s job easier by opening up the subjective origins of the music. I think this makes music critics (as distinct from music reporters, i.e. bloggers as that term is commonly known today) an essential part of a local music community, because they have, at least in theory, a heightened ability to see and explain the subjective parts of music so that their readers can “get” it.
As a final note, I’ve never encountered a situation in which I had to say something unequivocally negative about work that a friend of mine did4 and I’m unlikely to in the future. At 29-95, I have a lot of leeway to choose my own topics, and in that situation there’s little reason to run a negative review at all unless it’s a band against which I have a specific aesthetic vendetta5. I’ve definitely written strongly negative reviews in the past at the Austin Chronicle and Space City Rock, but those were situations where I was assigned a review of a record that had been sent directly to the paper, and begging off a review because you know someone in the band is certainly acceptable, whether you like the record or not. If I’m given a choice, I do not choose to write reviews of music that I really hate. I did that once when I was writing for Space City Rock, and it was a mistake; if I can help it, I won’t do so again.
1. The first review of a record I made, which appeared in the Rice Thresher, was so vitriolic and ill-informed that three of my friends wrote unsolicited letters to the paper complaining about it. . . I’m not really sure which part of that was more embarrassing, but it’s nice to be stuck up for I guess.
2. Of course, in addition to publicists making writers’ jobs easier by providing materials, they can also offer artist access, free passes to concerts, etc., and it’s easy for things to slip into a gray area between working together to individual ends and mutual back-scratching. Unless a writer is reviewing a live show, I’m not sure what the purpose of a guestlist spot is besides bribery.
3. To quote JFK paraphrasing G. K. Chesterton, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.” Hat-tip to Marshall for unintentionally sending me off down a Megan McArdle hunt which led me to this otherwise icky article that quotes Chesterton.
For this reason, a music critic shouldn’t say something along the lines of “I don’t get it” without admitting that as a failure of their critical faculties and, effectively, a non-review. Another useful link on this tangent is Roger Ebert’s article about the first eight minutes of Tru Loved.
4. I did write a largely negative review about the first Deer Tick LP, War Elephant, which Matt Brownlie (a former housemate and longtime friend) put out on his label Feow!.
McCauley’s range and tonal vocabulary are both severely, almost painfully limited.
That record actually ended up going on to be something of a hit, though not for Feow!. Sorry Matt.
5. *COUGH* The Sword *COUGH* *HACK* *SKNKXKNXKXX*. Hem. Goodness, excuse me!
Nice article on an issue that we all have to deal with. I also came under the conclusion that bias is impossible in the local scene just because you will gravitate to those bands who you happen to admire or with whom share a similar aesthetic ground. Also, there is a lot more joy in cheerleading the sucessful work of a band you admire than taking down a band you detest. Or to quote from the critic in Ratatouille:
“…the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends.”
That being said being on both sides of the table (as many of us are here) I always would rather take an honest and insightful negative review than a shallow favorable review from a guilty friend. That’s simply becasue when you go through the work of making something you really want to know how it fares.
anyhow yadda yadda yadda
nice piece.
One thing I love about Ramon, though it has caused me some trouble, is his openness not only with giving honest criticism but taking it. Hell, he solicits unvarnished opinion, and he is much more of a man about taking than I am. And, truth be told, stroking your friends bands in print, whether you are or aren’t a big fan, is pretty lame anyway. In my short stint as a HP scribe I worried a little bit about this very topic. Fortunately the only local folks I ended up writing about were people whose work I enjoyed a great deal.
I will say this – I take great pleasure in ripping into music I don’t like. It undoubtedly says a great deal about me as a stunted adult, but it’s true. In fact, I find it much easier to tear something up than to wax on about it. It’s important for me to keep in mind that nobody gives a shit about what I do and don’t like. Readers pretty much just want to enjoy reading, get some tips or they want to have the writer blather on about how awesome the reader’s own personal band is. With that in mind, I write about what I enjoy writing about, whatever that might be. Practically no one reads music criticism because they enjoy the writer and respect their opinion. I assume this is because there was only one Lester Bangs, one Paul Nelson and one Mikal Gilmore, etc . . . Weed out the talented writers and the rest are probably hacks with wishy-washy taste.
That’s something I can relate to.
To be honest, when I write reviews, I never think about what people want to read. The best I can do is think about what I like to read, which ironically almost never includes music reviews, because most music critics are terrible writers. Even Lester Bangs was not much of a writer; his work is driven by ideas, not by style. I think the biggest influence on my approach to writing music criticism in the last few years has been Troy Patterson (the TV critic at Slate) and the film critics at the AV Club. Aside from Sean O’Neal, also at the AV Club, I’m not sure I could come up with another music critic that I even enjoy reading.
But this is mostly a topic for another day. Maybe next week I’ll cover Chris Weingarten’s capitulation in the War On The Internet.
Should have said there ‘is’ only one Mikal Gilmore seeing as how the guy is very much alive, well and consistently writing at a ridiculously high level.
I can see how you could put yourself in a tough position; but certainly very glad to read that you grapple with these issues and try to stay honest.
I’m surprised at how much music criticism is out there. It would seem that access to music being made so free now, would limit the need. Just put the song out there and say “this moved me” or “this sucks.” On the flip side, criticism is entertainment in and of itself. And negative always garners more attention. But there is a whole lot of bad out there and only a little bit of good. So it would seem finding the gems and helping them shine would be the greatest and most rewarding challenge. Some unsolicited advice, just stay clear of all the blah blah blah about the attention Houston should be getting. A critic can help shape a community and make that sort of sentiment childish and meaningless.
I think it would be fun to put a song up on nap, then have each writer here post his/her critique in the comments.
Oh and, I don’t understand the comment (“as best I can tell”) about the website 29-95. Do you mean to say that you are writing for this site but you don’t know who runs it?
Some unsolicited advice, just stay clear of all the blah blah blah about the attention Houston should be getting.
Preaching to the choir, dude.
On the flip side, criticism is entertainment in and of itself.
I could say some things about Wilde and Proust here, but again, a topic for another time.
As far as my comment about 29-95, I was facetiously implying that I don’t understand what the website *is.* My paychecks come from Hearst, so it’s clear who owns it.
re: 29-95, I figured that out. It is what you make it Danny Boy.
PAYCHECKS??!!!