i've
done hundreds and hundreds of interviews over the last 15 years, what
with the various books coming out in the various countries.... also trips abroad to conferences and festivals in countries where the idea of
a visiting Brit rock critic is a novel occurrence.... and various other
things (e.g. increasingly, i'm hearing from academics who are doing research
into the history of music journalism and rock criticism).... these
interviews are sometimes in person and other times by phone/skype and
email, there's others still on the radio or live onstage at various
events .... struck me that quite possibly there's been as many as 500 interviews! .... naturally
there's a fair amount of repetition and redundancy in all that talk but
quite often an odd-angled enquiry will get me thinking a thought or two
I've never had and would never have had otherwise... thanks to the
thought-full folks on the other side of the mic
in
the first of a sporadic series, here are morsels from a dialogue with a
couple of such thought-full fellows, the Estonian critics Tõnis
Kahu and Siim Nestor:
Q: There are two ways
to see a critic’s role. 1) A critic must have firm principles that never change
2) A critic must go where the music leads him, even revise his/her own earlier
statements. What’s your choice? And do you admit that there are some
contradictions in your writing, too?
SR: I think it’s a bit of both.
On the one hand, someone who has no values or central core of beliefs,
inclinations, attitudes, taste, is unlikely to be that interesting as a critic.
You want to have a sense of a person there, someone who has a set of audio
erogenous zones, stuff that turns them on. On the other hand, they should be
curious, willing to step outside their comfort zones, capable of new discoveries,
of being stretched, and also able to admit when they been wrong, or missed
something that was important. So the ideal state is a combination of
flexibility and rigour. I also think that the job of the critic, as opposed to
just the reviewer, is always to attempt to systematize one’s ideas and
response. You may decide later that the system has major flaws and misses too
much stuff and so you decided to junk it, and maybe build another system. But
at least you’re trying to find some kind of coherence, always.
Certainly in my case, if you
track through all the writing and the books, there’s a series of attempts to
build a coherent system of values (aesthetic, sociopolitical, etc). But in each
case that eventually needs to be rethought in response to the arrival of new
music that doesn’t fit those criteria but is totally compelling. Sometimes the
theory needs to be drastically altered;
something the entire edifice is scrapped.
At the same time, if you look at
all my writing, underneath all the changing ideas, there are consistencies,
there are preoccupations that recur. A lot of my “table” was laid out early on,
in the Melody Maker writing that went
into Blissed Out, and I have often found myself returning to those early conclusions and
expanding them, complexifying them, going into further depth with those ideas.
On the other hand many of the obsessions of that time seem dated and
questionable: the fixation on jouissance,
this cult of an asocial, anti-historical bliss that is at once mystical and
nihilistic. That seems an inadequate
model to explain every kind of musical pleasure and significance. But it does
describe a certain moment in music culture, as well as in my life, the late
Eighties. And if I hadn’t put all my energy into making my ideas into a
consistent systematized theory of music ... well, I don’t think the writing that made up Blissed Out would have had the impact it
did or even the entertainment value it has as prose.
I think anybody who comes up with a Grand
Formulation, a mega-theory about what music is and how it works and what it’s
worth – that is a valuable contribution. That’s why I admire people like
Joe Carducci, or Kodwo Eshun, who have dared to set out a set of large claims. I would rather be one of those people, than
one of the nitpickers, those people who poke holes in the Big Theories that
others come up, but who never dare to build system of their own. Hubris, rather
than ressentiment.
Having that said, I actually think it
is even more arrogant in a way when music writers just present their eclectic
tastes for the world to contemplate and don’t attempt to make a coherent
aesthetic of them. I mean, why I should care that you like X, and Y, and Z, and
P, and L? If you can’t bother to try and make some larger claim for the
aggregate of all your disparate taste positions and aesthetic reactions, than
why should I pay any attention?
