. . . in which I step on dangerous ground: discussion of taste, mine own and others, that of popular culture in general but especially of some 'critics' . . .
I think the one thing that causes and ends more friendships and intimate relationships is the question of taste. It brings people together and sets them apart. Taste directs our shared interests and activities, and it also determines how we present ourselves to others and what we find interesting and attractive in them. People have good taste, bad taste and a complete lack of it, and it's such a powerful way to determine who we are and what we are like as people in the context of a larger society that any discussion of taste that brings us to comment on another person's is full of emotional tension and can require an exquisitely delicate choice of words. So, here goes.
There's a musician, now deceased, by the name of Arthur Russell who made a few singles and LPs in the mid 1980s to early 1990s, mainly playing the cello and singing. He was a well-liked and regarded figure in the downtown NYC music scene, and at the time, while I was not much aware of him as a person other than his work as a musician, I did hear some of his more popular songs, especially "It's All Over My Face." Russell made, generally, dance music, disco. Over the past years some record companies have been compiling his work, digging up tapes, remixing and remastering. There are now some 5 CDs available, including a 2CD compilation released in April, "First Thought Best Thought," which I only had to listen to once to decide it was one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life, and in fact felt insulted that I had been expected to pay for this crap.
You're probably wondering why I bought it in the first place. My excuse is that I was swayed by the critics! It's true, but I don't mean it as an excuse. I'm voraciously curious and as I read about Russell in The New Yorker and the New York Times back in 2004, my memory and imagination were tickled. Now, the Times is generally idiotic on pop culture, and the New Yorker critic is Sasha Frere-Jones who is just awful [more later], but the idea of some kind of underground musician doing pop and disco intrigued me, my favorite pop culture juxtaposes the "pop" and the "culture" with as much tension as possible. So I got the collection "The World of Arthur Russell" on release, listened to it, was pleased to remember hearing some of it in real time when I lived in NYC and promptly traded it in. It's a disco record, certainly sweetly made, but disco nonetheless, and there's just nothing there, nothing, except the endless, tedious disco backbeat which I find so stiff and dull that it's hard to believe people actually danced to it . . . I danced to it!
Chalk that up to experience. So, why did I get this new record? Well, the reputation of Russell as a maverick endures with the critics, and I saw this was all instrumental music and thought, well here is where I can hear what Russell is all about. And I feel I did just that: Russell was a sincere musician, a decent enough cellist for pop music and a sweet enough singer, and one with a severely limited musical imagination. The first CD consists of a series of musical sketches that would have made effective transitions in a larger piece of music, and have some appealing surface textures, but the discerning listener keeps waiting for something else to happen. It never does. This is followed by some electronic music that should never have been seriously presented to any listener.
The second CD is so awful that it is infuriating. This is also an apparent set of sketches, although that is a tremendously generous description. The passages of music consist of a small ensemble of players producing a slow paced serious of chords. Russell is here taking advantage of the presence of other musicians to have them play chords for him he could have handled himself on the piano had he needed to hear how the progressions sound. Just one chord, then another, then another, not even any modulations, ending abruptly with the apparent splicing of tape, which absolutely reinforces the idea that this material was never meant to be presented to the public. A further drawback of the entire enterprise is that these also sound like rehearsal tapes, recorded on a condenser microphone by musicians who play with the reticence and stiffness of sight-readers.
I've learned my lesson from this fraud, but what about the public at large? I do not doubt that there will be listeners who find this satisfying. More power to them, there's no accounting for taste, especially in a country that sees movies as successful based on the amount of money they earn, not on their actual qualities as film. America is a vast, dense and varied commercial enterprise, the goal being to sell the most to as many as quickly as possible, so pop culture is mass produced, which of course means it is mainly mediocre, imitative, bland. There are exceptions, of course, but people eat so much at McDonald's because they know exactly what it will taste like before they open their mouths, no matter which franchise they go to, and that's what the majority wants in their music, their movies, their books. The vast public is an arbiter of taste in the sense of what they spend their money on. But we also have a class of critics who are supposed to assist the vast public in their choices, to sort through the variety of cultural product, to explain a work with enough accuracy and sense of metaphor that a listener or moviegoer can gauge how much interest they have in the new product. I mean critic in a specific sense: a professional ignoramus and political demagogue like Michael Medved cannot be counted as a critic since he has no idea what culture is. To return to the example of Arthur Russell, I mean this guy, who calls the musician a genius, thereby proving that language and comprehension are thus impossible to describe Mozart, or this guy at Slate, or the fellow who provides the blurb on the sticker on the cover of "The World of Arthur Russell," calling Russell the "Sun Ra of disco" and demonstrating he cannot know who Sun Ra was. I mean the likes of Sasha Frere-Jones, the critics without taste.
I tried to recently read some discussion about a meaningless term, `rockism,' and Frere-Jones' running attempt to prove, seemingly empirically, that Stephin Merritt is racist. The point of all this `criticism' escapes me. Well, of course it doesn't, because the point is to be cooler than the next guy/posse/group by branding oneself with superior taste. But neither one of these ideas has anything to do with critical listening or thinking, or taste itself: this is about nothing but the exercise of social power. Who is cooler, who is more authentic, who is hipper, who has better values as defined by the ideology of their musical taste. The absolute ignorance about the subjects of taste is infuriating and nauseating. So, Merritt is a racist because he doesn't like hip-hop? I find hip-hop pretty much dull and frequently ugly myself, so I must be a racist too. But then again, I must have about 2,000 recordings by black musicians, music I consider to be some of the greatest ever made and at the absolute center of the soul of America, so am I really a racists if I prefer Louis Armstrong to Kool Keith? One thing common between them that I appreciate it is both had dirty minds, but Armstrong made an art out of his while Keith settles for obvious public exposure, so to speak. I'm probably not a racist, but now I guess I'm `rockist' for my preference for a more `authentic' artist? But I find most rock pretty dull and ugly too, but Sonic Youth and Radiohead both make magnificently beautiful music. So what am I? I'm a listener, and I have taste, which I indulge and exercise and examine and argue with, because taste is something, learned, acquired, altered and hopefully approved. The rest is just snobbery and social power based on a disregard or even hatred for actual art.
This was learned the hard way: everyone goes through a process of the socialization of taste, especially if they have a passion for things. But the passion, combined with experience and honesty, leads to a truer sense of taste. For myself, it was the realization that I had to stop dismissing Minimalism as an idea without experiencing the music itself. So I went to the music library and pulled out and LP of John Adam's `Harmonielehre,' and within four bars I had found a new path, which meant listening, not dismissing, regardless of labels. And so now I love Jackie MacLean and Anton Bruckner, and that has added the richness of beauty and better taste to my life.
I feel intuitively that taste is an inherently moral value, which of course makes discussions even more perilous: no one wants to be told that their bad taste, or lack of taste, is a moral failing, especially in a contemporary American culture where, strangely, the idea of not `judging' someone has become a treasured public façade, with people striving mightily to proclaim they are not judging anyone when of course we are all constantly judging people, be it the stranger who tries to halt us with an `excuse me' on the street or James Frey appearing on Oprah. Without judgment we cannot be protected from Arthur Russell anthologies. Judging people is a necessary part of human interaction, pretending we don't puts us in the bind of not judging what we absolutely should, and that especially means taste because, at least indirectly, there is a political component to taste which ends up determining how, and against whom, power is wielded in this country and across the globe. Here I must defer to the eloquence of Joseph Brodsky, who said in his Nobel acceptance address:
If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I". Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem by, say, Rainer Maria Rilke. A work of art, of literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct - free of any go-betweens - relations.
It is for this reason that art in general, literature especially, and poetry in particular, is not exactly favored by the champions of the common good, masters of the masses, heralds of historical necessity. For there, where art has stepped, where a poem has been read, they discover, in place of the anticipated consent and unanimity, indifference and polyphony; in place of the resolve to act, inattention and fastidiousness. In other words, into the little zeros with which the champions of the common good and the rulers of the masses tend to operate, art introduces a "period, period, comma, and a minus", transforming each zero into a tiny human, albeit not always pretty, face.
. . .
Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the previous fate of the means that each time demand (or suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found "ahead of progress", ahead of history, whose main instrument is - should we not, once more, improve upon Marx - precisely the cliché.
. . .
Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is.
I can think of no better explanation of the moral importance of taste, especially in this place and in these times. An essence here is Brodsky's statement that political evil is a bad stylists. While he emphasizes literary taste, it's no challenge to extrapolate to tastes of the eye, ear and palate, tastes that I would emphasize in this place and in these times since the literary life of contemporary America is fractional.
We live among the vastness of bad stylists, although most of them are not consciously, deliberately evil. Instead, they take their cues from others, who should know better, who create, promote, or assent to bad style, bad taste, lack of taste. This is the nexus of tastelessness, amorality and the simple lack of good [which to St. Augustine is the definition of evil] is found, most egregiously and dangerously, among our political media, the political officials, journalists and professional ignoramuses conscripted to devise government policy and to tell us all how we should be thinking.
The substance of political media is, nowadays, akin to arts criticism. When was the last time The New York Times discussed a political question or campaign in terms of how this would affect the lives of American citizens? Instead it is endless discussions of style, lazy and clichéd speculation and shallow pop-psychology, everything seen as a contest with no consideration for what the meaning of the results. And it's not as if these `critic' have much ability to discern quality, substance or value. They are tastemakers with, at best, no taste whatsoever, and more often bad taste, atrocious taste, execrable taste.
It was a point of the political media to mock Al Gore in 2000 for choosing to wear earth tones on public occasion, this from people who lack the taste to point out the dullness of mind and the easy conformity it takes to march about Washington, D.C. in the uniform of navy blue suit and red tie. Does anyone have anything else in their closets? The cover of the June Atlantic shows John Roberts and Sam Alito walking down a set of steps, dressed almost exactly the same in solid navy blue suits and solid red ties, a picture that says everything about conformity, accepted wisdom, the `received morals of the parlor' and power in America. These are men with no taste whatsoever, who wear what everyone else is wearing. And they will be deciding our futures. And as they sit in front of panels of Senators at their confirmation hearings which are observed by herds of journalist, is it any surprise that they end up participating in, and being approved by, the methods of bad theater? A panel of dully-dressed Senators [including Joe Biden, who may pay extra for good tailoring but chooses to dress like a banker, which indicates undue influence from all the credit card issuers who are the base of his constituency], thinking and speaking dully, following the approved script which calls for as little mention of anything of consequence as possible and for the press to praise this lack of substance for its conformity to the accepted processes of power. It is a purposefully dull business, approved by critics who crave this very dullness.
There is the noted critic of Washington, D.C. from The New York Times, Elizabeth Bumiller, who praised President Bush's recent national speech on immigration policy as `subtle.' I personally feel obvious is the exact opposite of subtle, but then again I read books and listen to music and do so with an active mind and soul, that is to say I exercise taste about things which convey their own ideas of taste. What I find subtle is Solomon's consideration of the human soul in deciding the means with which to determine the true mother of the baby, while Bumiller would see the actual halving of the child as subtle, as long as the blade was sharp and the cut swift and sure. Her mind and sense are so dull that the only thing that makes in impression on her is the most obvious gesture of power, to which she thrills. She's the Peter Travers of our political critics.
The recent past is still richer with this evil of bad taste smugly protecting us from our own ideas and inclinations. Jacob Weisberg actually thinks he's telling us something of worth by taking received wisdom about certain politicians, which perhaps was supplied to him in pleasing suppository form, mixing it together with fragments from the iPod databases, and then using this to confirm his own opinion of them as leaders, which is so incontrovertibly carved into his mind that he has no more capacity to actually think than does the microprocessor on my computer. If Hillary had the exact same playlists as Weisberg, he would have criticized her for pandering to himself alone, and if Bush listens to nothing but music Weisberg detests, Slate's chief music critic would have praised the President for his bold tastes. Richard Cohen in The Washington Post asserts, without providing one single bit of factual support, that he is a funny guy and thus we should take his word for it the Stephen Colbert was absolutely not funny. Critically, I would call this a Pyrrhic victory for Cohen: Colbert indeed was not that funny: satire, one of the more refined and difficult literary forms, is often not so much funny as abrasive and clarifying, revealing truth in a manner close to that of good criticism. The laughter heard from the White House correspondents and their special guests was plainly that of a group of bewildered people, confronted by someone exercising some sort of strange and magical skill, vaguely related to what they themselves considered their profession, yet somehow so advanced, beyond their meager imaginations that they could not quite see what he was doing, as if with they decided to view the entire universe through the wrong end of a telescope. But I don't expect them to even be aware that a telescope has a right end. So Cohen, prime example of the taste and capacity of our political critics, decides Colbert's satire was not funny, since it wasn't parody. And when a man can only taste parody he won't know anything else actually exists. But don't cry for Cohen, the fall TV season will bring a constant stream of soon-to-fail sitcoms from which he can hone his reputation as a `funny' guy.
These are our most important critics, the people who are supposed to protect us citizens against the depredations of foolish, clumsy, ignorant and evil power. Yet they themselves are foolish, clumsy and ignorant, without taste and without the ability to develop taste. They are obviously not interested in reading good writing, listening to good music, or even laughing at good humor. They are interested in turning their faces towards the warmth of power, like seedlings beneath the sun, from which they draw nourishment and in which they bask, believing that this glory which shines on them is a reflection of their own stature, that power traverses over them because they are worthy subjects of such a vantage point. But from where I stand, they are merely weeds, not even edible ones like dandelions. They only way to expunge them from our gardens is to read the good books and shove away the bad, read the poets, listen to the music makers who have things to tell us that are as valuable at 45 as they are at fifteen, and ignore the ignoramuses and shills who merely want to see us all in some version or other of that navy blue suit and red tie.