MUSIC CRITICISM: Why it’s important to give the benefit of the doubt

I once read that critics are merely “paid to whine about free shit”. This statement has shaped how I critically analyse music, partly because this is not how I nor anyone would want to be described, but also as it completely sums up the way one feels when they read a negative review of something they got a lot out of.

Reviews need to consider what they are trying to achieve. Scathing reviews can be funny, but usually leave a sour taste in the mouth, and ultimately achieve little other than discouraging the reader from looking into the artist themselves. Critics have made fools of themselves negatively reviewing art that has gone on to find wider appreciation. They are often divided, and often get it wrong. However this raises the question of what it is exactly they are getting wrong.There are two obvious ways one could interpret the contention of a review. Firstly, that the critic is trying to explain whether said art is good or bad,or secondly whether or not they personally liked it. And implicit in the author/reader contract is at least an element of the former.

This suggests that there are some characteristics that are objectively good or bad. There are certain themes that feature strongly in commercially successful music. My personal list of ‘good’ characteristics would include: innovation, little reliance on ‘catchiness’, emotional engagement and lyrical depth. These are as vague and genre independent as possible, and music does not necessarily need to include all of these to be ‘good’. Unfortunately this approach is open to the criticism that it is elitist and discriminatory to popular music, and there is no easy way to decide whether my characteristics are universally true.

Another approach might be to consider the artist’s intention. Art is not without context; it is a method of self-expression, and so naturally the thing (emotion, political position etc.) that is being expressed weighs into consideration. However there remain troubling ambiguities.

John Cage is an experimental composer most famous for a piece called ‘4:33’ – a song that is literally four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Designed to challenge musical definitions, it functions only as a statement. If a rock band stood on stage for four minutes and 33 seconds while they tried to fix technical issues, nobody would see any value in the performance, even though it consists of exactly the same thing. So much of how we interpret art is wound up in our expectation, or our perception of the creator. And this means that when someone like Radiohead journey further into the avant garde, they are viewed in a very sympathetic light due to their reputation and previous work. Let’s just pretend that Nikki Webster is actually a genius art musician who uses sickly sweet bubblegum pop as a kind of dissonance designed to annoy, and comment on modern music in the process. It’s very unlikely, but since we never really have any way of seeing inside the head of any artist, by being optimistic we can minimise our psychological predispositions. This might sound silly, but since without context one might assume that My Bloody Valentine are bad at their instruments, or that free jazz is just someone hitting piano keys at random, or the 20 million dollar abstract painting Blue Poles was created by a toddler, we are selecting the lesser of two evils.

All of these subtleties cannot be summarised in 100 words and a star rating out of ten. And many of them are not accounted for at all in modern criticism. It seems that the only way to avoid problems of context is to always assume the best of the ‘creator’. It’s certainly not an intuitive way to view music, but it has the virtue of allowing for ‘innocence until proven guilty’, so to speak. And more importantly it serves a purpose; it provides a framework for demonstrating what an album does well, which is immeasurably more useful to a prospective listener. Reviews should ideally assist people to make up their own minds, not undermine artistic creation.

An example might make this clearer. The 2011 album LIVELOVEA$AP by A$AP Rocky prompted divided reviews. Pitchfork’s Jeff Weiss sums up the negative side very well: “It’s pretty easy to point out the pitfalls of LIVELOVEA$AP. Thematic and lyrical concerns are basically limited to Rocky being a pretty motherfucker, repping Harlem, doing drugs, and getting…women”. However he went on to give the album an 8.2/10, putting it in the ‘Best New Music’ category, almost entirely because of the “stellar production” contributed by Clams Casino. “If anything LIVELOVEA$AP is a triumph of immaculate taste,” Weiss writes in reference to the backing beats. It would have been easy for Weiss to judge the album harshly for Rocky’s flaws, but instead he praises it for what it does well, and in doing so opened my mind to what I now think of as a great LP. Every album deserves to be approached in this way.