Why am I pontificating about music criticism in the midst of a worldwide crisis?
Because they're actually related.
Not exactly a news flash: It’s become increasingly difficult to try and communicate across ideological barriers.
Trying to talk to anyone about issues of import is like traveling across space-time to a completely different universe that operates according to its own rules of physics. When you first arrive, you have to go through a long de-briefing at customs where it’s explained to you that you must “Be advised — the laws of nature operate differently here.” Of course, we’re all in stuck our own paradigms, and I would never be foolish enough to suggest that I’m immune.
In the long run, I think it’s ultimately a good thing for us as a species to understand that each person has an utterly unique way of perceiving and processing the world around them and all the “information” they soak-in, which on arrival to the brain is already pre-shaded with meaning and context that’s distinct to that individual person. I suspect that, eventually, we’re going to learn how to communicate with one another by learning to step out of our individual paradigms first.
I suspect that “jumping portals” will come to be regarded as a skill, but we’ve got major hurdles to overcome before we get there — and we’ve all got a great deal of work to do (myself included), not to mention the fact that it’s not always clear where to even begin.
All of which is to say that I don’t feel it would be especially constructive for me to just hurl my perspective at you. There’s a tremendous chance you’d tune me out the moment I triggered one of your tripwires and expressed an idea that sounds like something you’ve come to interpret as a threat. We all choose our spot to plant our flag and stake our claim — each of us, in essence, defining our relationship to nature differently. Which means that, if we’d like to hear one another, we have to meet each other’s cosmological outlook halfway.
I mean, can you think of even one other person in your life who doesn’t harbor a viewpoint that seems utterly irreconcilable with yours, at least along one spoke on the wheel of ideas? Don’t we all have people close to us where it’s like “How does the wheel of our interaction even spin considering how far apart we are?”
Which is why I prefer try and establish some common ground with you first — and at least leave some space for something to grow in the gaps once you realize there’s a glaring chasm between your perspective and mine.
Such is the implicit contract we enter in when we engage in a relationship with anyone, even a media voice: “Eventually, we’re going to come to an impasse.”
I’d rather attempt to mitigate that impasse.
Of course, I’m paying attention to all these mega-huge news developments as they unfold. It would be impossible not to, like staring at my shoes during a meteor shower. A more precise comparison would be: staring at my shoes during a major earthquake, because in that instance, circumstances would prevent you from looking down and force you to act. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that what’s taking place across the globe at this moment in history has massive consequences for all of humanity moving forward.
That said, it would be a disservice to you if I were to just sound-off without 1) engaging in rigorous investigation and 2) counter-balancing my own views.
I’ll offer this for now: Art, culture and society can’t really be disentangled from one another. Which means that when people seize the reins on shaping how we collectively understand culture, they put themselves in position to shape attitudes about more than just “arts and entertainment.”
We need to be careful — and I’m okay setting decorum aside to say that I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of further enabling a class of people (critics and music/culture scribes) who’ve taken it upon themselves to dictate what our shared relationship to art is supposed to be. There’s just no place for the high priests of culture to chisel a false consensus on the temple walls so they can feel like they had a hand in history.
That sense of self-importance would be egregious and destructive enough on its own, but when the people in that position take their self-proclaimed “responsibility” (>gag<) to judge art a step further and act as a kind of modern day caliphate — where they’re no longer just assigning album scores but casually flexing the authority to dictate morals — that rises to a whole new level.
I am not in a position to twist your arm and manipulate, cajole, coerce or browbeat you into believing in the false notion that being a “good person” comes down to simple choices in the marketplace of ideas. Art criticism was always abusive to creative people. It was always a gaslight — using peer-pressure tactics to get the individual to doubt their own opinions and experience and align with a false consensus drafted by charlatans.
These days, though, there’s an abusive component to journalism that can’t just be shrugged-off anymore. In a climate of extreme volatility, polarization, fragmentation and nonstop manipulation by political factions jockeying for narrative control, the hyper-simplification of the truth is, frankly, an act of treason and betrayal.
As “journalists” — people who comment on art, culture, politics, social issues, what have you — it was never our job to be gatekeepers to the truth, or to collapse reality into a single monolith called The Truth.
I see our job more in curator capacity, where we unpack perspectives and leave room for the audience to find their way through them.
If someone is reluctant to step aside and take that approach when discussing music or art, then what are the limits to how much they’ll impose themselves on your understanding of anything else?
I am not your eyes and ears. I’m not in your mind. And I’m not your conscience. Anyone presenting themselves that way is overstepping. And the idea that social conditions are so dire that we need to allow people to use moral obligation as leverage to steer us into one perspective or another is a harmful, abusive lie.