It’s rare that I listen to music these days. Isaac doesn’t enjoy it all the time. When we’re in the car (which is one of the rare occasions when we can listen to music, un-intimidated), we need to turn the music down so we can hear his chatter from the back. If we’re smart, and remember to announce before listening to a new CD that it’s “his new CD” then it becomes easier. We got away with playing the new Camera Obscura album that way, but forgot to fade in Ray Rumours appropriately.
This means he doesn’t associate it with anything in particular (extra special hugs, for example). Not that he usually argues much in the car: it’s accepted on all sides that the car is a ‘proper’ setting for hearing music.
So what about the actual music? Well, both albums enhance our driving experience. Both are sweet. Both are refined and confined by certain parameters (a love for Sixties pop, texture that dwells on certain instruments). One is more Mazzy Star than the other (by that, I’m referring to a sense of ennui: Camera Obscura’s album even begins with the line, “Spent a week in a dusty library”, which gives as fair an indication of Traceyanne’s mindset as any). One is more continental in feel than the other (Ray Rumours often sing in languages aside from English). Both have female singers, and sooth while retaining a certain melancholy. Does this have relevance, the fact I’m comparing one to the other? Music shouldn’t compete.
This isn’t music criticism. Not in any understandable form. There’s no dialogue, no argument or description. It doesn’t align. Bringing Isaac into the equation may well make sense in the context of my life, but not on a wider scale. Should I give historical context, mention allies?
Maybe if I started adding numerical value to the end of each sentence 2009’s crop of music criticism readers could relate, and my fumbling attempts at making sense with words wouldn’t matter?
May 8, 2009 at 8:57 pm |
I think it’s criticism. I’ve had this nagging sense for a while that there’s terrain worth exploring somewhere between the kind of music criticism you mean (the traditional, interrogatory, didactic – in a non pejorative sense – kind) and an Iain Sinclair-esque psychogeography. That’s what you’ve got here: music as a feature on the map of your life, and a description and investigation of your relationship to it. I think this is what I was trying to get at in those 140-letter bursts the other week: music “criticism” doesn’t have to be obsessed with values and being a buyer’s guide (as I know you know all too well), but we’ve all allowed it to become too strongly identified with that. The engaged “critic” finds their fuel in their relationship with the music. Without that relationship it’s just cataloguing, curating; that’s part of it, but not all of it. You need to be investigating that relationship, and as long as you do, it doesn’t matter who’s reading or listening or thinking about what you’re saying.
June 15, 2009 at 10:28 pm |
It’s criticism, but veers rather close to Nick Hornby.
Sorry.
June 15, 2009 at 10:39 pm |
Oh cheers. Thanks Tim…hey wait. Maybe I could get a job with someone – anyone – after all!