How I Became a Music Critic

At age 19, I was assigned to review Bob Dylan in concert, despite the fact that I had very little sense of who Bob Dylan was. I was doing a summer internship at my hometown paper, and the regular critic had fallen ill.

So it was off to the library, where people went before God invented the Internet, and where I discovered that Dylan had recorded 150 albums.

The show was at the Shoreline Amphitheater, a venue built atop a landfill in Mountain View. Dylan had just released Knocked Out Loaded and would soon join the Traveling Wilburys. It was not a good time for him, though I didn’t know that. I found a seat on the grass and started scribbling adjectives that seemed to bear some relation to the songs he was performing, the names of which I didn’t know. I also included observations of significant physical detail, such as, “Dylan stares at crowd” and “Dylan turns away from crowd” and “Dylan appears to need a blood transfusion.”

I had no technical training as a musician. Had I been quizzed on the meaning of the word glissando I would have answered (with some confidence, I’m afraid) “a type of fancy ice cream.” Not to be confused with vibrato, which was a gynecological instrument.

If this sounds absurd, consider the proposition that greeted me when I arrived at the El Paso Times two years later, fresh from college. Would I like to be the paper’s music critic? Of course I would. It was like being handed a license without having to take any exams, a license that granted me front-row tickets to all the big concerts and phone interviews during which I could indulge in the fantasy that, for example, Edie Brickell and I really were pals, based on our intense twenty-minute tête-à-tête, and that she really meant it when she urged me to stop by her trailer “to say hey,” and that if things went well in her trailer – which they very well might, thanks to my dazzling prose and chestal pelt – we would wind up engaged in a sweaty duet on top of an amp, an indiscretion she’d try to write off as a fling except that she’d be unable to forget that tall, virile music critic from the West Texas town of El Paso, meaning more breathy phone calls, more visits, an eventual leak to the press, and a clandestine elopement captured by People magazine. As it is, Brickell wound up married to Paul Simon, a man much shorter than myself.

Did it ever occur to me to learn more about music? Not really. I worked for a Gannett paper. The whole point was to write at a fifth-grade level.

Am I making excuses for being such a lazy and frankly suckass reviewer in El Paso? Yes. But I was also, in my own frankly suckass way, up against an ontological dilemma: the description of one sort of language (physical, auditory, intuitive) by another (abstract, intellectual, symbolic).

Talented critics can, of course, describe music with sonic precision. Take, for example, this passage from Sasha Frere-Jones’s review of the Canadian singer Feist in The New Yorker, a magazine I keep stored in my bathroom for research purposes:

The song is built around Feist’s vigorous acoustic-guitar strum: she plays like a street busker, strong on the downstroke and evenly loud. A three-note motif on a glockenspiel and an organ runs through the song, softening the forward motion of the guitar. In a short chorus, the guitar stops and Feist sings harmony with herself: “Ooh, I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart, I’ll be the one to hold the gun.” Then Gonzales plays a rising and falling two-note ostinato on the piano, subtly coloring the song. The accretion of felicitous musical details is typical of the album’s smart, unfussy arrangements.

Frere-Jones is certainly not messing around. He covers instrumentation, performance style, and lyrical content. True, he risks losing those of us who are musical dolts, but it certainly didn’t kill me to look up the word ostinato, which means “a musical phrase persistently repeated at the same pitch” and which I plan to incorporate into every discussion I have for the next ten years. The real problem here is emotional. The prose, for all its technical fidelity, conveys almost nothing about what the music feels like.

Consider the famous chord progression that Angus Young plays at the beginning of “Back in Black.” A good writer could tell us about those grinding, seismic chords, the distinct rhythm of their deployment, even that sly, arpeggiated little five-note lick that acts as a segue from one volley to the next. But those are just pale approximations of what it feels like to hear that intro, the squirt of sinister glee that makes most people – even decent religious folk – reach for their air guitar.

Now consider the rest of the song: the rhythmic structures (bassline, drums), Brian Johnson’s howling vocal, harmonic and tonal relationships, etc. But okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids and you’re able to describe all these elements. How, then, do you convey the simultaneity of all that noise, the blissful riot of sound we experience as a singular thing (the song)? But okay, okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids for years, you’re the Barry Bonds of Rock Crit, and so you manage to get this, too. You’d still be left with the Basic and Insoluble Crisis of Melody: words cannot be made into notes. And even if you somehow magically solved that crisis (which you couldn’t) you’d still be missing what it feels like for a particular fan to hear a particular song (let alone songs, let alone in concert) because this involves a collaboration between the music and the fan’s own needs: his or her own lust for joy, sorrow, power, rage, sex, and – oh what the hell – hope.

The closest I came to grappling with the Rock Crit Paradox was at an MC Hammer concert. I stood beneath the stage watching Hammer twitch in his weird Sinbad jodhpurs while a battalion of dancers in identical Sinbad jodhpurs replicated his every twitch. Hammer barked lyrics about jewelry and torture. The melodies, sampled from bubblegum hits, affixed themselves to the artillery of drum machines. Lights popped and scrolled. Sparks vomited from some invisible portal. It was like watching an ad for a delicious soda that makes people want to commit murder. But then I looked at the people around me, there in the fifth row of the Pan Am Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They were all dancing wildly. Hooting at the sweaty-boobed flygirls and barking along with Hammer and (without even realizing it) mimicking little Hammerish flourishes: the frenetic Egyptian jazz hands and his mincing bucklestep. These people were plugged into a powerful communal experience. They didn’t look upon MC Hammer as a musical huckster, but an entertainer of the first rank and maybe even, in a sense, a prophet of self-assertion, proof that any man endowed with sufficient determination – no matter how meagerly endowed with talent – might gain trespass into the kingdom of fame. Yes, I was stoned.

Still, it was clear my fellow congregants were having a radically different experience from the assigned critic. So I wrote two reviews that night, which ran side by side the next morning: one from my perspective (i.e. one that cold-cocked Hammer) and one from the perspective of the fans (i.e. one that fellated Hammer). This struck me as perhaps the cleverest thing anyone on earth had ever done. Pleasantly, copies of the reviews don’t exist to contradict me.

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This is an excerpt from the book “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life” (which we love). For more about the book, go to StevenAlmond.com.

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Read “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life #1.”

Read “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life #2.”

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• RECORDS OF YOU

I know I should be grateful to the NYTBR for trashing my new book. I’m not.

So the New York Times Book Review just reviewed my new one, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. The most awesomest passage of the review likens the book to Going Rogue by Sarah Palin. Hey, it’s not every day a guy gets compared to his spiritual mentor.

The overall tenor of the critique isn’t exactly a shocker. Having written a book that vilifies self-serious cultural critics, I figured at some point it would be reviewed by a self-serious cultural critic, who would use phrases such as “an aesthetic of quasi-handmade approachability” and quote the Velvet Underground adoringly and decree that anyone who might enjoy my book is a cretin.

It’s a sore bit of luck to have this critic deployed by the NYTBR. But it more or less lines up with my expectations of the venue.

This no doubt sounds like sour grapes, given the context. Probably it is. I’m long past denying that most of what I do in life amounts to sour grapes. Still, here’s what I had to say on the subject a few months ago:

I am so ungodly tired of reading all this crap-ass literary punditry that passes for criticism. I mostly avoid reading the NYTBR for this reason. Rather than documenting the pleasures and disappointments a reader might encounter in a given book – offering a serious consideration of aesthetic and moral intent – they just do this stupid trend-mongering.

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I’ll resist the urge to revisit Katie Roiphe’s lazily reasoned publicity stunt, which I’ve discussed elsewhere.

Instead, let’s check out the Jay McInerney review of Joshua Ferris’ second novel, The Unnamed. You could just see the editors sitting around with this one going, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll get the old It Guy writer to take on the new It Guy writer!’ McInerney’s eventual verdict: Ferris should stick to writing droll comedies of manner.

He has a right to that opinion, of course. But it’s a facile opinion, the sort that refuses to engage honestly with the book in question.

The Unnamed is far from a perfect novel. My own take on the book found fault with its ponderous prose. But any responsible critic would also have to recognize that Ferris did indeed have a moral and aesthetic intent.

His hero is afflicted by a mysterious condition that causes him to walk compulsively, through “the scuffed aisles of candies and chips … the dismal fluorescent brutality that chain restaurants wore like trademarks … the national color of insomnia and transience.”

Ferris isn’t just dragging the reader on a forced march into America’s bleak capitalist hinterlands to torture poor Jay McInerney. He’s asking an essential question: will the base compulsions of our bodies defeat the contents of our souls? Will our lust for distraction and empty calories overrun our duties toward those we love?

Whether or not McInerney thinks Ferris is successful, he should at least recognize the dude’s deeper intent.

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Compared to George Saunders, Ferris should maybe consider himself lucky. A couple of years back, Will Blythe wrote a review of the essay collection The Braindead Megaphone that was astonishing for its intellectual stinginess.

Blythe mocked Saunders for his excessive use of capital letters, which he diagnosed as part of the author’s larger effort to buff his persona:

Maybe, as a Chicago-raised guy, [Saunders] goofs on himself to show he’s not some East Coast Intellectual Twit. One suspects that the irony of this maneuver is there to protect the very Midwestern Sweetness of the Author’s Soul.

For George Saunders has a Very Sweet Soul indeed.

Blythe has every right, even an obligation, to observe that he feels manipulated by Saunders. He can even be snide about it, and try to score laughs. But he also has an obligation to give Saunders credit for his insights.

That doesn’t happen. He writes off the title essay as a “solipsistic analysis” of the modern media. I can’t express how disappointing I found this judgment. Saunders’ piece is a strenuously reasoned argument against the Fourth Estate’s impulse to wring profit from neck of stimulation.

But the end of Blythe’s review, I felt this creeping suspicion that he simply had it in for Saunders, that he resented the author’s ostentatious decency and/or his optimism and/or the fact that he became a MacArthur Genius despite his Inexcusable Use of Capital Letters. He did what the lit crit crowd back in college used to call “reading against the text.” He thereby flattened the entire experience of reading Saunders.

Again: I’m not suggesting that critics can’t dislike the books they review, and say so. I do it myself. But I’m really tired of reading reviews – in the NYTBR and elsewhere – in which I feel essentially stuck inside some critic’s cant, with no clear view of the author’s world, let alone the broader ideas that ostensibly made the book worth reviewing. Or in which the subject of the review isn’t really the author’s book at all, but the imaginary book the critic not-so-secretly wishes he or she had written instead.

One of the most glaring recent instances was Jodi Kantor’s dismissal of Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

Kantor’s agenda is plain from the start. She had a great wedding. So did her friends. So why is Mead being such a party pooper?

What never seems to have occurred to Kantor – or the editors who published her review – is that Mead’s book wasn’t written as a rebuke to Kantor or her fun-loving pals. It’s an exploration of something larger. Namely, the insidious reach of the bridal industry.

I suppose a topic like that wasn’t compelling enough to capture the fickle post-millennial reader on its own merits. So the editors turned to the tried-and-true gimmick review, the one guaranteed to generate debate – not about the book’s subject, but about the review itself.

***

Look: the NYTBR is supposed to be the gold standard of mainstream literary thought in this country. The disappearance or contraction of other outlets makes it, at the very least, the dominant arbiter. They’ve got scads of editors, and can get basically anyone on earth to write for them.

Given all this, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in asking them to stop doing business in such a shallow, small-hearted manner. As for the perpetual moaning about space constraints: I’d be more sympathetic if the editors took a knife to the gratuitous plot summaries and indulgent, trend-mongering leads that eat up so much of their word count.

On that note, let me reiterate an uncontested point: I’m reacting to the sting of a particular review. (Full disclosure: this is actually the second time my work has been torched by the NYTBR.) Our loyal literary pundits will inevitably seize on this fact to dismiss my larger point. It’s kind of their job to do so.

But for the rest of us – the writers and critics – let me offer some parting words, before I put the finishing touches on my upcoming masterpiece, Chasing Sarah: A Life in Hunting and Pornography.

First, you have the right to react to the critical reception your work receives, or doesn’t receive. There are zillions of writers out there who are, this very minute, cursing the NYTBR for ignoring their work altogether.

Books – especially literary books – should be filled with smart, provocative ideas that deserve a response. They are intended to initiate a conversation about what it means to be human. A good review enlarges that conversation.

But it’s a loser move – an imitative fallacy, actually – to dismiss a bad review. As unpleasant as it’s been to read the assessments of my work in the NYTBR, both of the reviews in question had something to teach me – about dumb decisions I made at the keyboard, about the limited appeal of my sensibility, about certain habits of excess borne of my own doubt.

So, yeah, it’s okay to get pissed, maybe even inevitable. But we must not stop learning as writers. Even our least sympathetic reader has something to offer.

Second, as writers (of whatever sort) we should discuss books as seriously as we want ours to be discussed. I truly believe this. And not just in print, but in our daily lives, in how we talk about books with friends and colleagues, on our blogs, or even within some aggrieved comment thread. To degrade another writer without a respectful consideration of his or her intent and labor is to degrade our own vocation.

It would be wonderful if the NYTBR had a bunch of editors who held themselves to this standard. But that’s not really their job – as much as they might think it is. Their job is to drum up interest in a cultural artifact (the book) that keeps sliding further out onto the margins of our frenzied visual culture.

Our job, as writers and critics – as plain old advocates of literature – is to keep this larger discussion alive, about what it means to be living in this perilous historical moment, about our good intentions and our bad conduct, about those ecstatic confusions that made us fall in love with books in the first place.

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Now then. In the interest of giving credit where it’s due, as well as promoting good works over sour grapes, here’s a brief list of critical dispatches I consider excellent role models:

*“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” by David Foster Wallace (from his fantastic collection Consider the Lobster). Note how precisely Foster Wallace articulates his disappointment in Austin’s memoir, then goes on to enlarge the conversation about our worship of athletes.

*James Wood’s review of Paul Auster’s Invisible demonstrates why Wood is such a badass. He goes out of his way to understand and articulate the author’s intentions. He cops to his biases. He puts the book into a comprehensive aesthetic context, by which I mean that he compares Invisible not only to other Auster books, but to Flaubert, DeLillo, and the post-modern tradition. (I’m pretty sure Wood would chew me up and spit me out if he ever read one of my books. But I’m also sure I’d know a lot more about what I’m up to as a writer after he was done.)

*David Ulin’s review of John D’Agata’s About A Mountain. Ulin discusses D’Agata’s controversial narrative decisions in a way that actually helps us make sense of this unorthodox book. He takes in the forest without getting lost in the leaves.

*Justin Taylor’s remarkable inquiry into Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad. Without passing easy judgment – the perpetual temptation for a critic – Taylor provides a detailed and thoughtful meditation on a book that most reviewers (myself included) would either write off as vacant hipsterism, or glorify for its affectations.

*Laura Miller on Eric Kraft’s Flying. I have a feeling I’d be less amused by Kraft than Miller, given my impatience with meta-fiction, but she does a terrific job of locating the writer, both among his contemporaries and a longer tradition of satirists. (Bonus points: This actually ran in the NYTBR!)

*Anthony Lane reviewing the film Lilya 4Ever. Lane can be savagely smart about dumb movies. Here, he’s unflinchingly honest about a heartbreaking film.

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Right. Enough of my blather. What critical pieces have you read of late that enlarge the conversation about literature, about art, about us? Even if you’re gonna rake me over the coals, that’d be swell to know.

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Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with George Saunders
• Katie Roiphe’s Big Cock Block
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A nontraditional review of you are a little bit happier than i am, a poetry collection by Tao Lin.

I Know Why The Caged Bear Sings — A review of Elegy for a Fabulous World, stories by Alta Ifland.

A review of The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, essays by David Grann.

Disinclined to Mislead Anyone — A review of We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, poetry by Nick Lantz. (also see this interview with the author, part of our Rumpus original combo, supersized with this Rumpus Original Poem)

Also, be sure not to miss The Rumpus Interview with Forrest Gander, a second excerpt from Steve Almond’s Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, this week’s installment of An Oral History of Love in Contemporary America, an excerpt from The End of Major Combat Operations, new nonfiction by Nick McDonell,  and the Rumpus reprint of “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You” by Debbie Nathan, which we republished in light of the clusterf— in Arizona.

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