In 'Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs', Chuck Klosterman has a wonderful essay on the perils (and ease) of writing beyond what you know for the sake of a good story. Called 'All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers', he writes about a brief phone interview he once did - containing mostly small talk -and the subsequent article he wrote, full of vast and sweeping inferences about said artist.
I'm no friend of Pitchfork , so in some ways this feels pointless. But HOLY GOD did this make my brain explode to read. In his review of Broken Bells 'Meyrin Fields EP, Stephen Deusner makes many assumptions regarding the band and its members, and finishes off with this:
Still, this EP sounds like more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it's the realization that Gnarls Barkley will never top "Crazy" or that the Shins may never re-form, but there's an intriguing sense of desperation on these songs, as though both Mercer and Burton are realizing that this band could indeed be their lives.
Now, I don't know a hell of a lot about the Shins, or James Mercer. But I DO know something about Brian Burton aka. Danger Mouse.
Due to the strangeness of fame and popularity, it is likely true that Gnarls Barkley (one of Burton's projects) will never outsell their biggest selling single. It is also true that some of the tracks on Meyrin Fields could be described as sounding desperate. But here's where it gets really smelly. To imply that this 'desperation' that one reviewer perceives is a PERSONAL desperation on the part of the artists due to having no other professional prospects is flat-out fucking ridiculous.
Since the first Gnarls Barkley album, Brian 'Danger Mouse' Burton has produced the Black Keys 'Attack & Release', Beck's 'Modern Guilt', and done a collaboration with Sparklehorse that included Wayne Coyne, Iggy Pop and David Lynch (!). He has previously produced Gorillaz 'Demon Days' and did a side project with bizarro-rap extrordinaire MF DOOM. He is also the most recent Grammy winner for 'Producer of the Year' and is making U2's next record.
None of this is communicated in the review. The introduction does the very tired job of reminding us that Danger Mouse did the 'Grey Album' - and then by the end of the peice Danger Mouse is apparently desperate because he's without things on the horizon as if he's been squandering one-hit-wonder wealth for 5 years.
What makes Chuck Klosterman's article so compelling is that he doesn't do the usual "The Media is evil and stupid!!!", in fact, he directly denounces this. A lot of the error that people attribute to devious editing, he suggests, is often a result of: a) A lack of time, and b) Bad journalism can make for good writing. With this article, the final paragraph feels solid as a piece of writing. We're introduced to two characters at the start of the article, the album is discussed in relation to some of their earlier work, and the final paragraph ties everything together by attempting to explain the sound of the record while forecasting what future work might sound like.
Except these aren't characters. They are real people. With actual lives in which events happened that are now facts that mean something. Musical tastes are subjective, and so are reviews to a large degree - but facts are not subjective. If you think an album sounds 'desperate', just fucking say so. That's cool. I could even agree with that reading or the disc, but to draw these really tenuous (and in the case of Danger Mouse at least, untrue) connections between how you think it sounds, and what you think might be going on in the artist's head is hack journalism.
That's what's so risky about doing this kind of inferring. Stephen tells a good story and writes well, but his role here isn't to be a storyteller or a psycho-analyzer, it's to review music. Enticing writing shouldn't get in the way of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment