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Chris Farah Farah's Faucet |
Let us take a bit of a journey, shall we?
A trip into the superior, self-righteous mind of the music critic.
I notice you cringe slightly. A little out of fear, perhaps. Could it be you feel disdain for the haughtily sophisticated, trendily cultured and loftily high-browed opinions of the music critic?
Could the wrinkled brain of the modern music critic - undoubtedly as pierced, tattooed, goateed and swathed in loose-fitting velvet as the bohemians themselves - untap some kind of deep-seeded anxiety for the average, slightly timid reader?
Fear not, my friends. Allow me to simplify the complexly artistic mind of the critic into a slightly less intimidating credo of sorts, outlining some logical foundations of these judgmental gods of rhythm and dance.
This includes anything by the following groups: lesbians, black people angry at The Man, white people disillusioned because their parents have too much money and also anyone in general who refuses to bathe on a regular basis.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I personally agree or disagree with any of these standards.
I think lots of black people have good reason to be angry at America's social structure, and I think a lot of them make pretty good music - although just as many make pretty bad music, too.
Rather than inspire me to join a line dance for some down-home fun, country music usually makes me want to get in line for a bottle of Pepto Bismol to spare me from wretching my guts out.
And who knows? Maybe people who don't take showers or women who don't shave their legs are better musicians because they have that extra 15 or 20 minutes a day to work on their songs.
I don't know. I don't know what really makes a song good or bad, or what makes a particular genre better than another one. And I don't think any of us - critics, musicians, teachers or the Pope himself - really do know what makes good music.
I think we do, however, know what we like - and based on that entirely relative standard, we often make some very sweeping assumptions. Assumptions that too often get branded as objective truth.
What matters about music - the only kind of objective, good or bad, that can really be determined - is how it makes individual people feel. Not whether it fits into a certain set of artistic theories, not if it conforms - or doesn't conform - to some critic's personalized notions of what is hip, cultured or trendy.
Maybe Bush and Smashing Pumpkins lack the feeling and soul of Hendrix. Maybe they play up teen angst to sell records. Maybe they lack talent.
But for some reason, who knows why, some people like them. Some people will remember with fondness the first time they heard "Machine Head" on the radio. I certainly won't, but who am I - who is anybody - to try to take away or lessen that legitimate experience for those people?
Songs, whether we happen to like them or not, take on an identity or meaning of their own once they weave themselves into the fabric of a listener's life. It no longer matters who they were sung by, what period they were originally from, or if they're rock, rap or R&B.
Music - all music - transcends over-generalized boundaries because it means so much to individuals.
Even country ... or so I'm told.
- Chris Farah can be reached at cjfarah@umich.edu
10-16-97
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