Only Solitaire: G. Starostin's Record Reviews, Reloaded c intro Notes
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- Baby, What You Want Me To Do
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| My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
Obviously, I cannot speak on behalf of anyone but myself, yet I have reasons to believe my answer would be typical of many. I have been an avid music listener and lover from early childhood — at first, limited and conservative, later, not so much so, although some musical forms still remain pretty much inaccessible to my soul — and at some point, my desire to take had somehow morphed into an almost equally strong desire to give, to not let the impressions, feelings, thoughts and conclusions that my listening generates within myself to go to waste, but to be able to show them to anyone who might be interested in looking at them. Who knows, said I, maybe this will be able to do some unknown good, and then my musical immersion would not simply be born and be deceased with my own birth and death, but serve some extra purpose as well. Sort of a "missionary drive", if you like. Of course, this is presumptuous. Who am I to make my opinions matter? Basically a nobody — not a musician, not a musicologist, not even a superb connoisseur of the pop culture, and not even a native English speaker. There are so many people in the world who are better "qualified" for this line of work than me, it's not even funny. And who am I to give someone something? How have I been authorized? How have I even been able to suppose that someone might want to consider taking this bullshit from me? The answers are simple: you cannot really know until you try. If all of us started operating based on this logic, chances are nobody would ever get nothing done in the world — we'd spend more time doubting our capacity to do something rather than simply trying to do it. For me, the realization that the work I'd done was not entirely useless came in once I started getting — on a regular basis — E-mails of support from people whose knowledge and intellectual power, as it seemed to me, exceeded mine, sometimes vastly. If anything, these letters showed that the "giving" process was at least partially successful, and that kept me going. There were, and still are, other kinds of letters, of course — ranging from polite disagreements and corrections to violent flames, sometimes deserved in all fairness. But those, too, convinced me that I was moving in the right direction; if, to those people, all that crap I wrote seemed deserving of a written answer, then there must have been something to it. The only thing that would have completely discouraged me could have been complete indifference, and people were not indifferent, and that was nice to know. What I discovered was this: there were plenty of interesting people who were quite willing to take from me — and give in return, usually in the form of reader comments, but sometimes even in the form of mailed CDs of music they wanted me to review, some of which, I am ashamed to admit, I have not even had the time to listen to so far. Sometimes I was enriching their experience — by making them look at some piece of music in a new light, or even by making them want to go out and get a new piece of music — and sometimes they were enriching mine in response, in the very same ways. The thing became an endless, but never boring cycle of "showing off" (in the good sense of the expression, if it ever had one) between myself and my readers, and every new loop would usually leave one of us more open-minded than before. The mutual benefits were good. Then, at one point, the rut set in, and a crisis was imminent. First came the understanding that the process is endless; timeless musical masterpieces may be few, but "good" music stretches out to infinity, in width as well as in depth, and my idealistic "encyclopaedic" dreams of covering everything worth covering were shattered and smashed (especially by the likes of Tangerine Dream and by the fact that, as we progress further in time, the number of musical artists seems to grow on an exponential basis). Second came the understanding that I had run out of things to say — there's only so many different words in the English language, and far from all of them are easily applicable to a music review, and this brings on the horrible idea that, perhaps, if you catch yourself applying the exact same words to a dozen different albums by different artists in different times, this might mean that the music sounds exactly the same? And if it does not, what good it is to try and capture its essence with such inadequate means? And even if you write in different ways, what does the difference between "this album packs a real wallop of energy" and "this album stomps along like a 4,000-pound black rhino" really imply to your reader? Maybe it means something to you the writer, but what if your readers just don't get it anyway? Or, worse, are animal-haters?.. At a moment like this, the only thing that keeps you going is understanding that, if you just drop it, this means you have wasted an awful amount of time and potential with all your previous writing. There is also the idea of "obligation": people who like to read you expect you to entertain them further, and maybe they have a certain flimsy right to. But going on just for the sake of going on isn't a lot of fun, either. One can slow down, lose whatever quality one possessed before, or simply go off on all kinds of tangents (something akin to what happened to Mark Prindle, who used to match the definition of 'oddbeat music reviewer' but, today, is more of a cross between Lester Bangs and George Carlin — still a great read, but you have to be equipped with a metaphoric magnifying glass to actually find scraps of music-related text floating on the waves of his endless impressionistic rants about whatever has just wandered into his head). What I am coming to is this: it's fun to write about music at first, but eventually you start to think that, perhaps, it would be a nice change to dance about architecture instead. This is where the professional critic has you on your knees: he, at least, is getting paid for his work, and money is a big factor here, especially if you don't really know how to do anything else for money. But that doesn't mean that money is a solid guarantee for quality; even the best paid critics rarely go on being interesting for all of their lives. If you need an example, take a look at Robert Christgau. (And let's not even mention Jann Wenner). 3. Baby, What You Want Me To Do Actually, speaking of Robert Christgau and his ilk, there is at least one major plus about reading his brief, snug, holier-than-Jah snippets: he has been around for so long, and has written about so much different stuff, that he has managed to give his regular readers a near-complete, wholesome picture of the critic as a young, mature, and old man combined. One may not agree with the values of "Pop Music Filtered Through The Bowels Of R. C.", but it is hard to argue that the bowels of R. C. are completely incapable of filtering music, or that they are not, per se, a relatively interesting place to visit. Let us not forget that, although all people are different, this variation is not nearly as high as a hyper-individualistic mind would like to imagine, and quite a few of us have their bowels genetically programmed in a way that is very similar, or maybe even completely identical, to that of R. C. For such people, R. C. will hold a particular interest, and, most likely, will display a major predictability force. Others may not share his views completely, but intersect with them in some points. Still others will rather want to align themselves with the likes of Mark Prindle, or Wilson & Alroy from www.warr.org. The rather obvious trend, as my experience has shown me, is that people usually value musical criticism not so much according to the literary skills or erudition of the writer, but according to how much their opinions on music coincide with those of the writer. This gives even us the illiterates plenty of hope: we may write like third-graders, but we are still bound to find admiring fans because we think the same thoughts of Led Zeppelin. Or, on the contrary, you may be a reincarnation of Lenny Bruce, Nabokov, and Jean-Paul Sartre combined, but you will still be hailed an incompetent hack by the first reader who takes insult at your sacrilegious treatment of the German industrial scene. In the end, once you have reached your 1,000th review, you probably will have used up all of your words, idioms, and metaphors, regardless of whether you have the gift of a Shakespeare or of a Dan Quayle. But you are not doing this to be really deep or witty; superficial musical criticism isn't drama of the highest order. You're doing this to show your readers on which shelf of your preferences this or that piece of music is supposed to go, preferably with a bit of explanation (you could just give out ratings and leave it at that, but it's kind of boring and doesn't provide for a good opportunity to kill time, which is the main stimulus for people to read criticism). For some reason (call it youthful stupidity), it seemed important to me to make each review as long as possible; the usual explanation was something along the lines of "every piece of music, no matter how bad it is, took time and effort to produce, so shouldn't an honest review also take time and effort?", but in reality I was probably just trying to come out "smarter" than the lazy stupid competitors on the market. Some people liked it, most did not. Looking back at some of that stuff, I am amazed at much of the empty, redundant verbosity — it's one thing to write a mini-monograph on something like Blonde On Blonde, which deserves a dozen big monographs by itself, but a five-page review on AC/DC's Ballbreaker? Did I even write that? Geez. That, of course, is also one key factor of why I fell out of the reviewing process: forcing myself to come up with ideas even when the fields lay completely fallow. It all went in the wrong direction. This, then, is my next and probably last effort to reboot and make some good use of my previous experience. The decision is not to repeat the past mistakes — and write what I think should be written, and not one sentence above that. This does not imply the opposite, namely, that all the reviews will be as laconic as possible; plenty of records inspire plenty of thoughts. But that is much more likely to be expected from the likes of the Beatles or Frank Zappa than the likes of Albert King or J. J. Cale. One other important decision is that I will not be making much use of my earlier reviews. Rereading some of them, I understand that, regardless of how good or bad they are, most need rewriting, and usually it is more difficult and takes more time to rewrite a review than to produce a new one, not just because of the editorial work but also because you are essentially one person in your twenties and a seriously different one in your thirties. I have softened up on some stuff and hardened up on some other, which is, I guess, natural (but, thank Heaven, I still love ABBA and still think that Bob Dylan's Selfportrait is vastly underrated); more importantly, too many of the reviews were too heavily dependent on the «name each song, come up with some observation about it» principle, which I cannot and will not uphold any longer. So, let us wait and see. To be continued. 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