a grammar

Anonymous asked: Penny for your thoughts: I sometimes think the 'cultural turn' in pop-music criticism happened partly because prose about the sensuous qualities* of music can't help being super purple. (It's not so much "like dancing about architecture" but more "like writing a literary sex scene.")

*As opposed to the structural qualities of music, which are maybe more the territory of theoretically informed classical/modernist-music criticism.

[update: question from secondbalcony]

Well: I might question how much there’s been an actual “turn” involved — but yes, this is absolutely a thing. I think most critics are definitely aware of the potential for writing about that sensuous stuff to become purple, vague, airy, unhelpfully poetic, or hyperbolic. And that awareness only grows in an environment where readers can sample the music in question online, and work out some of the sensuous stuff for themselves. So of course there’s an advantage in tending to the larger goals of criticism, which are less about telling you what something’s like and more about telling you what it might “mean,” how it fits into the world, how it relates to larger conversations. And that’s not a bad thing, unless you get to the point where the larger conversations start swamping and overtaking the art you’re actually talking about.

It also means that it’s rarer and cooler when someone can talk well about the “sensuous” stuff. I have to give a nod here to Mark Richardson at Pitchfork, because his writing about electronic music has always done something really special on that front: instead of trying to find cultural or technical issues in things like Oval or Fennesz records, he’s figured out this amazingly straightforward, conversational, and not-purple-at-all way of talking about how things feel, what they might remind you of, what kinds of moods they fit. (I think part of this is just his willingness to be curious, instead of making big judgments — to let things be mysterious — and also being secure and unpretentious enough to say simple things: “this reminds me of water,” “this feeling is complicated,” etc.)

But the reason I say I’m skeptical about any of this being a “turn” is that, well … isn’t this pop-music stuff pretty much always cultural? Not in a grand or sociopolitical sense, but in a schoolyard one. The way adolescents start situating themselves in relation to music is, first and foremost, social, “cultural,” all about these exciting politics of cool. Deciding what you like and what you think is cool will always be informed by your self-image and aspirations, who you want to relate to, which tribes you want to be part of, etc. And I do like talking about music that way, so long as we don’t start confusing those things with really grand political issues. They’re culture-political issues, pop-world issues, which is interesting enough on its own. I think it’s important to find ways to address them that neither inflate their importance nor pretend they’re irrelevant.