Well, ahem, yes, well, that is rather the question. Everybody who’s ever written criticism (but mainly people who’ve given a bad review to a band that has a lot of fans) has received one or more examples of a certain class of complaint usually claiming to be from different persons though I am occasionally convinced that they are actually all from the same guy and what an outrageous sense of humor that guy must have, and the sense of these letters is something along these lines: “Who died and made you God, Mr. Asshole Man? You don’t know so much! Creed [or Disturbed, or Soulfly, or the James Gang] is my favorite band! What is the point of writing about music anyhow, you can’t dissect something so intense! You have to feel it!” And once the erstwhile critic has finished calling his T-shirt printer to tell her that he must immediately have one custom-silkscreened large white shirt with blue ringers, and that the legend on the shirt’s front must read “Mr. Asshole Man” in a tasteful font across its chest, he usually thinks proudly to himself about how the relationship between criticism and content is a richly complex, almost wildly organic thing, and that it’s not surprising that it should encounter the sort of resistance it does. After all, the first thing an act of criticism does is to append itself to its object, like a barnacle on the hull of a ship or an Egyptian plover in the mouth of a crocodile, cleaning its teeth & living off of the rotting matter in there. When a person regards something, the thing being regarded responds whether it wants to or not. And so on.
 
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-LPTJ-
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