Whether I had a specific or genuine intention to be or not, I'm a critic. I critically compare or analyze the things I see and listen to. So rarely does anything make me "feel" that when I'm doing so it can register as if I'm being unfairly judgmental, jealous, or begrudging and negative for their own sake. I've spent a lot of time developing my tastes or competencies. I'm going to have an embodied and informed reaction, or lack thereof, to most things even just by virtue of continuing to stay alive and pay attention.
Why? Why criticize anything ever? Why not "let people create" or "live and let live?" It sounds so simple and easy, right? No one is obligating me to engage with what they're putting out. Tastes differ. What's the point of investing any energy whatsoever into an opinion, particularly one that's less than supportive?
That's the framing from the uncritical. To them, all information can be treated equally. They act as though any piece of music, any article, movie, or any interaction with another person just exists in this neutral space with more or less equitable consequences and presumed decent enough reasons for their existence. It's why you can have dipshit day-time talk shows that have been having the same conversation since their inception. There's a gigantic herd of people ready to be info-taimed via the perpetual novelty offered through their ignorance.
There's only so much time. There's only so many stages, radio stations, movie studios, or remotely informed opinions it's worth incorporating into yours. If your time isn't precious, say, because you think you're going to live for eternity after you die, whether you spent 5 minutes or 50 years trying to inform yourself on something, it doesn't matter. It's hard to believe you have a real concept of "trying to inform yourself." I'd argue you're mostly killing time.
It's scarcity that breeds critical opinions. If there's truly moving, energetic talent out there, they only have so much in the tank. You want to promote them. You want to enable them and connect them with people who share not just some naive sensibility that broadly "celebrates artists," but can say, "Oh fuck, this is different, special, or plugged into the zeitgeist right now." People who are paying attention want to hear from others who are actually saying something. Finding voices in an endless scroll of noise is hard enough without entertaining bad arguments for bad art.
I criticized Ayaan Hirsi Ali under her article describing converting to Christianity. It was really poorly written. It was wholly devoid of any discussion regarding secular and scientific value systems, which, she's perfectly aware exist and has written about in the past, and just kind of discarded. She straw-manned the word "atheist" as if it's a value or belief system. She spoke to her failing mental health and fear as the things making the argument for her. It was really bad, especially for someone who's a noted figure on religion.
What was the pushback? I should allow her to feel what she feels. You know, because I have the power to stop her? Every time I hear this one it confuses the fuck out of me. The usual attempts to read my mind and question my character came in. Laugh emojis, personal stories about dead daughters who came back as undeniable signs. Just a ton of nonsense. Per usual, no one quotes me. No one asked me any questions. I'm not even sure most even read the article, and they definitely didn't read Michael Shermer's response, which I also shared.
In the non-critical mind, any perceived affront to someone's profession of "truth" is worthy of vitriol. It doesn't have to make sense. In fact, that's precisely the point. The more and more sense you try to make, the more you fuel the fire they'll use to burn you. You're not occupying the same universe of values, words, attention, or evidence.
Artistic works of all kinds, good or bad, impress upon us regardless of whether we want them to or not. How many advertising signs can you recognize quicker than people you went to school with for 4 to 15 years? How many jingles come to mind at their mere mention? We, creepily, applaud rhetoric and obfuscation from propagandists. Hitler is literally Hitler, and it's rare you hear him mentioned without props to his performances. Because that's what they are, efforts to compel your attention.
I've written a few songs. I play a few instruments. I've made a little documentary about the Merrillville Marching Band. I've written jokes. I've written 1,100 blog posts. I have as much of the creative spark as anyone, and yet I choose to share it with almost no one. You have to come to me and seek it out. You have to cling to the rotting corpse of facebook or have bookmarked blogger.
I put out things that I actually wish to say or I think are worthy of sparking more conversation or reflection. I'm not keen to spam our shared space with "demo" level noodling and experimenting if I know that's what I'd be doing. Let me write and record a song I'm proud of, you'll hear it. If someone comes in to criticize it who listens to exactly one band over and over again, I'll take them as seriously as I do people arguing religion with bronze age insights. I say or share jokes I think are funny and at least make myself laugh first or while I'm thinking about them. I share poems that burst out of me. If I ever got an opportunity to publish things I wrote, 95% of it would be left on the floor.
The same criticism applies to myself and people who wish to create "great" things. They want the work to be recognized, not hop between a series of flukes and incidentals. How many artists get popular with songs they don't even really like or thought they wouldn't include on an album? It's a lot. Listen to interviews about song-writing processes or thoughts as stars are on the rise. The cultural forces that popularize dumb or annoying one-hit-wonders are riding that ambivalent arm-chair capacity for evaluation or cynical spam. Is that what you feel about what you might create? It's so much more noise to be tossed into the ether?
The tools you develop in being critical you can apply across domains. You can be tough but fair to yourself instead of anxiously and despotically tearing down every effort you might make. You can borrow and allude to elements from patterns you notice verses plagiarize. You can work a sensibility into your bones that translates through nuances and between other critical sensibilities. You see this in music constantly in trading off jazz legends and guitar heroes.
I find myself begging for criticism sometimes. I don't exchange a lot of information for all I share. I have like 2 people left in my life who I can talk in depth or at length about some things with. We don't have a competent and critical culture. We have fandoms and feelings. We have tribes. We have overwhelming amounts of debt, sadness, health issues, and we're staring down the literal potential fascist takeover. It feels silly, one might think, to be critical of art or music at times like these. Irony forever wins the day and you might start arguing chicken vs egg.
If you dismiss, or are too exhausted, or "just don't care," or rush to call everything "fair" and declare what everyone's "rights" are as though you're not shitting on expressing them when they arrive in reactionary turn, you lose the whole game. A willingness to offer and engage sincere feedback bred from an earned perspective feels like it's wholly evaporated.
I have incredibly strong instincts about people and relationships that get proven too right way too often. I feel like I'm cheating and clearly must be ignorantly doing what others are so keen to do to me, but unfortunately I just keep seeing the same patterns and people willing to mindlessly let them play out. I'm deeply informed by having worked with, partied with, or attempted to engage in things "differently" or "better" with thousands of people over two decades. I actively listen to hundreds of bands and watch hundreds of shows. I've earned the right to say at least a little something about how someone or something is operating. I'm not stomping my foot and screaming my right to, I'm citing and reflecting on my experience.
Only when you do that do you afford yourself the opportunity to see how many gaps it contains. I can be incredibly right about someone's shitty romantic dynamic. It has nothing to do with every beat of their history and day to day that I'm not privy to. I can summarily dismiss cliche, boring, derivative bands and watch them soar never even knowing I exist. I can reduce the years I've spent learning about religion or human psychology to facebook pissing matches. Whatever amazing person that cunty moron might be when they're not talking at me I'll never know.
Take what gets into your head seriously. Respect yourself enough to utilize the evidence and recognize the patterns. They are there. From the fascist pattern to the shitty country music pattern, you don't have to listen or pretend it's tantamount to Bach. You don't have to stay silent as though your polluted landscape isn't worth coughing out of our collective lungs. All it takes is sincerely qualifying what you don't know, asking questions, and actually sharing what you believe is worth people hearing. We don't really have a prayer as individuals or as a society otherwise.
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