Pop goalposts.
(This is a response to a response to this response.)
Kind sir, you are moving the goalposts.
You’re absolutely right. I am. That’s because I don’t agree with where you’ve set up the goalposts.
In a recent post of yours on Lady GaGa, you wrote:
It’s because music criticism is in desperate need of a consistent voice with known, objective standards used to judge every song. No more moving the goalposts.
Rather, music criticism needs the exact opposite. Music criticism needs good listeners, not objective standards. We need to listen well and report our responses accurately and honestly, not to try to implement standards that circumvent our instincts in pursuit of an unachievable and undesirable objectivity.
To continue the goalposts metaphor, music is not like sports. In sports, we define the conditions for a goal, and then celebrate the occasions in a game when those conditions are met. But in music, our responses are weird, idiosyncratic, and sometimes contradictory. Where in one case, for instance, highly compressed guitars are sickening, in another context they might sound perfect. Where boneheaded, ignorant rhymes might be execrable from one rapper, they might sound glorious in the tones of another. The solution is not to pretend our responses are wrong, but to explain why they are different. In music criticism, we should celebrate the goal, and then work out where the goalposts were set up on this occasion.
See, for instance, how you treat the song as something composed of discrete elements, when it is instead something unified we only ever experience in whole form:
The emotional precision stems not from what Karen O sings, but how she sings it. And therein lies the real problem. You’re confusing two separate aspects of the song, and using the merits of one to justify the weaknesses of another. (It’s telling that your argument focuses mostly on the lyrics and doesn’t bother to tackle my musical complaints, especially since they would have been much easier to dismiss. “I disagree” would have sufficed.) The way I see it, a song has three “dimensions.” Music, lyrics, and vocal performance/delivery. Each has to be graded individually and added up to a whole in order to get the best idea of a song’s overall worth. Yes, “Maps” contains a great vocal performance from Karen O. But those lyrics still suck.
It’s entirely possible that you find the lyrics so bad that they interfere with your appreciation of the song. But that doesn’t mean it is naturally proper to grade individual components separately. We listen to songs; we don’t read lyric sheets. (Or we do, but only as a later, supplemental activity.) In the case of “Maps,” the emotional precision stems from how Karen O sings what she sings; the two are inseparable. And if emotional precision is the aim, then it doesn’t matter how she got there, just that she got there.
This relates to something I wrote earlier this year about a song, “Summer Girl,” by Stereos:
It cheats to get us to where it wants us to go, and we can hear it cheating. But the good news about pop music is that the rules are there to be broken, and if cheating gets you more points on the board, then the suckers are the ones who don’t cheat.
If the Yeah Yeah Yeahs create a moving song from “inscrutable” lyrics (though I prefer Theon Weber’s description of them as “incantatory”), then we should not claim it doesn’t count because they didn’t follow the rules. Rules are for physics and football. In pop music, the winners don’t fight fair.
