|
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. |
|