two amendments
1.
Yesterday, I made a passing reference to a music critic who has a well-earned reputation, in certain corners of the internet, as a reliably vehement detractor of anything that remotely smacks of “indie.” For those of you who happen to know who I meant, I should clarify that I think this person is a solid and perceptive critic of those areas of music he does care about, that it was not my intention to entirely reduce him to certain online traits of his, and that I was in no way suggesting that his tastes were not genuine.
2.
I’d also like to clarify something I said about online music-crit discourse and its emphasis on the issue of what music is “Near” and what is “Far” — two categories built largely on notions of genre, race, and class. As I hope was obvious, my intention was not to suggest that (e.g.) white critics who like hip-hop are merely fetishizing the Other (“Far”), or that they should be more attentive to white rock bands (“Near”) — god forbid. My point was that I think the whole Near/Far distinction is problematic from the beginning and way too prevalent, and that it probably blinds us to what’s happening in music more often than it helps us figure anything out. My point was that a one-note Near/Far built on neuroses about genre/race/class becomes stifling and doesn’t do a good job of explaining what’s going on when we listen to music. For me, at least, it doesn’t account for much of what I get out of music; even on its own terms, it doesn’t account for the way Brandy and Taylor Swift feel way “nearer” to my experience than Iggy Pop or Spoon; it accounts for all sorts of artificial things but not much in terms of what you can get out of music. It erases personality and emotion and content in favor of big categories that can be argued over. And I think the reason it does this is that it’s a discourse that’s emerged between people arguing about music, and in that kind of argument it can be way easier to stake out big categorical stances on image and identity than to go out on the limb of talking about your personal, subjective, confusing experience of something.
The solution to this isn’t that we should side with Near, or side with Far, or mediate between the two — my solution would be that we should put way, way less emphasis on the whole artifice of Near/Far to begin with. I am not against genre, but I’m more and more skeptical of a music-crit discourse that’s just massively informed by this one misleading, overarching question of “Near” and “Far” and “predictable” and not.
