I'm not going to pretend that any analysis I might offer regarding classical music would be particularly illuminating; my formal training on the piano began when I was five and ended when I was eleven or twelve, and while I could probably hold my own at the salon for half an hour or so, I'd be in over my head before long.

Still, I listen, with increasing pleasure, to my modest collection, and I increase its numbers whenever I find myself down at Offbeat here in Durham. A month or two ago I spotted a Midori CD, and remembered hearing about her when she was one of the Next Big Things. I always found the single-name moniker distracting (as I do in the case of Nigel Kennedy, who, when he cast off his first name, said it was because he didn't like the name "Nigel," which is just crazy talk), but that's a stupid reason not to investigate somebody's work. Still, life's short and the world vast, so I never got around to Midori.

The one I picked up is called French Violin Sonatas - note the niche-within-a-niche nature of the parameters here; it's like somebody was aiming specifically at my tastes - and to anyone who's looking for something distinctly autumnal as the leaves begin to turn, I recommend it. The Poulenc sonata that opens the disc is lively and bracing, and the Saint-Saens that closes is delicate and complex, but it's the Debussy in the middle that'll knock you over. Debussy, more than practically any other composer to my ears, seems to speak specifically to our time: not in the sense of sounding like he belongs here now with us, but as if the thing that he came to say had been meant especially for our ears, and our hearts. His sense of space and interplay is tranquil or light on the suface and slightly agitated underneath, except when (as in the middle of the second movement of this sonata) it's agitated on the surface and slightly tranquil underneath. Midori (with her pianist Robert McDonald) approaches this tension with depth and diligence. In my opinion - again, a pretty undereducated one; I'm mainly only got my ears to work with - Debussy's tricky; err too far on the side of the heart and you'll turn him into a romantic, but rely too much on the head and you'll exaggerate his modernity. This is an historical question, which is to say, a very pesonal one, and Midori's approach is to just dive directly in. She opens Debussy up for me, and if you've been wondering about him as I have - off and on, occasionally, ever since first hearing of him - then you might find this reading a good place to spend a few rainy afternoons inside.

New Babyshambles album: tremendous. Plenty of people can't tolerate the image of the junkie poet, although - may God bless their children and send them all plum puddings at Christmas - the NME don't mind if they do, thanks. There's a huge essay waiting to be written about how the British music press, for all their unseemly rubbernecking, do seem able to tolerate a pretty high level of ambiguity when discussing thief/dope fiend/lead singer Pete Dougherty: when he gets arrested, they jump down his throat, but they don't then turn around and dismiss his work in order to look righteous. They spill a lot of ink condemning him for the way he lives his life, but, lacking the puritan strain, they're willing to give a thieving junkie's work an honest listen. I suspect, though I haven't got the energy to spend a lot of time trying to prove it, that this dynamic is indicative of some pretty heavy cultural differences. I further suspect that in a rocking out contest between Babyshambles and the five leading American practioners of indie-ish Rock And Roll Properly So-Called, Babyshambles would snuff the competition without having even fully woken up: the band plays together with a loose, confident ease that's reminiscent of a bunch of great 70s California bands who I'm not even going to name because y'all got the wrong ideas about them and can't see past your preconceptions, and lyrically Doherty is so comfortably ahead of anybody who might be considered competition that he doesn't even feel the need to articulate his words. This isn't to say he's the best lyricist alive; he isn't; but the terrain he carves out for himself ("never surrender to flattery/frown on, come down on duplicity/and above all, my son/take the money and run") is both unique and worthwhile. It's part Morrissey - the self-deprecating asides, the ability to beat his critics at their own game before they can open their mouths - and part (yes, because across the pond everybody's saying it, and because it's true) Ray Davies - those vivid personal descriptions of both high and low daily life which announce to an American listener: "It's nice if you like this, but this is not about you."

Which, you know, may be - is - refreshing, but it's the whiff of Johnny Thunders that keeps the effort from coming off like an exercise: the feeling that for the people involved, this counts somehow: Doherty snotty and angry and despairing in "Baddies Boogie," keening "lousy life!" again and again in an isolation booth somewhere. The music, the phrasing, the lazy ease of the secretly gorgeous vocal lines. "I'll surely lay down and die if I can't lay by your ssssside." Stephen Street's production, sun coming into the canyon. Keeper, keeper, keeper.

In one of the most provocative pieces of music writing we've read this year, Jess Harvell wonders whether it isn't time to get a little stingier with the hosannas. His thoughts, which are passionately stated and rather more nuanced than one's accustomed to finding in online music-crit, give us pause here.

After all. Last Plane to Jakarta was founded, as a print 'zine, in 1999 (I think; it was a long time ago). I decided at the very beginning to only write about music I liked, and I carried that into my assignments for other press outlets. I've often described that decision as the result of reasoning, but it would be fairer to call it a reaction. The 'zine culture of the Indie! Rock! Explosion! had its roots in the earlier indie community of the eighties - guys listening to stuff on Homestead and Rough Trade and Touch and Go and Dischord and sometimes even SST and a hundred other labels who, while not averse to selling records, had broader pretensions: of importance, and all that. These pretensions were both hilarious and vital, as what's funnier than a guy who thinks what he's doing really matters, right, but at the same time: Minor Threat. Big Black. Sonic Youth. The Smiths. Guys who were into this stuff weren't afraid to snarl (or in the case of Smiths fans, to raise a disapproving eyebrow) at music they thought counterproductive, or lazy, or just plain shitty. They did not suffer fools gladly, though they certainly did suffer.

People tend to get infatuated with the sound of their own snarling, though. Young writers, especially, tend to feel like they're doing their best work when they're burning something down. By the middle of the nineties, it wasn't uncommon to run across a higher-profile 'zine editor ladling out seven hundred words & half a page in damnation of some band from east Kansas who'd put out their own 7" and blindly sent a hundred copies out to 'zines they'd read about in Fact Sheet Five. Whole pages of self-satisfied, pointless bile, much of it every bit as self-celebratory as bloggers who big-up bands that don't really deserve so much big-upping quite yet: the point then, as now, was to establish tastemaker status. To register credential. To belong.

Harvell's point is a good one: the hunger for something that feels good and exciting and important seems to have progressed to a point of insatiability, and the needling urge to be the guy saying "This band is gonna be huge!" seems more pronounced, in our climate, than the quieter desire to be the guy saying, later, "I told you the Birthday Party looked like they might be interesting." This relates directly and powerfully, I think, to the state of mainstream celebrity culture; indie culture remains, for better or worse, more reflective of the mainstream than it likes to think.

But I'm not ready to throw the positive baby out with the overhyped bathwater. I think the reaction against the Beavis-with-a-B.A. tendencies of eighties indie cats was reasonable, and that while it'd be nice to read better, more interesting criticism that didn't reach for superlatives at the first sign of vitality, the likely alternative is only a mirror of that: people making specious comparisons just for the sake of damning by association, or decontextualizing lyrics to be held up for ridicule without having the courage to say what about them is actually bad. We have seen a lot of that before, and it was a drag. It's true that much indie blogging reads like Tiger Beat magazine for the Goodwill set. I'll still take that over the alternative, because I remember the alternative. But I will throw my hat in with any call for aiming higher.

The ideal would be criticism that aspired neither to praise nor to damn, but to understand and elucidate; the ideal would involve not wanting to help or hinder the object of one's scrutiny, but to fairly describe it. That would be real progress toward something rigorous and difficult and exciting, and...well: does that sound like something our culture, macro or micro, is really equipped to do at this point in our history?