And here lies the primary reason my dreams of Rolling Stone and Spin have been trashed with the heaping remains of a dozen other teenage ambitions (I’m gonna be a writer!).
I have no artistic convictions.
I was defeated by a massive band of quirky Canadians, exposed in my own head as a Massachusetts flip-flopper incapable of even the most basic musical judgments. Rock critics, after all, have to strong enough to “stay the course.”
At some point, it was so simple. “Funeral” was the most buzzed-about album of my brief earthly history. It was so easy to be disappointed – “Ha! That’s it?” upon first listen. It was overblown. It felt good to call it lame.
So when “Neon Bible’s” legend threatened to surpass the inflated hype of its predecessor, I wetted my lips. “This is going to be easy.” Finally, I can write something I really believe. Something I can get behind.
But when I popped it into my car, I was the one deflated. It was good – really good, in fact. For an album so overwhelmingly epic, it deftly evaded ridiculousness. It ebbed and soared at all the right parts, and the message was spot-on. It reminded me touchingly of my beloved Radiohead. I wasted no time retracing my steps. Upon revisiting “Funeral” I found that I had been wrong all along. The Arcade Fire is good.
The horror of this fact is difficult to explain. Obviously, criticism is a subjective science. However, critics (especially snobbish rock critics) base their careers on objective worlds they build in their minds. They must be able to speak about something as vaporous and diverse as rock music with absolute authority. “The new Modest Mouse CD is not as good as the previous one.” Or, in the case of Pitchfork Reviews, “Tim Kinsella is the worst musician of all time.”
A great indie snob once told me, “Will, the first rule of being an indie snob is that you must speak as if your opinions are the absolute truth.” For me, this has proven to be an impossible task.
Why do I like The Arcade Fire? It’s the same reason I can write “punk rock is dead” one week and then wonder what I was talking about the next. It’s the same reason I can say “guitar geeks are the scourge of music,” and then think, “are they really so bad?” It’s the same reason I can listen to an album and have no idea whether it’s better or worse than any other album. It’s the same reason I can love an artist one day and forget them the next.
“String Theory” implies an intellectual component to my criticisms. However, maybe I’ve been writing from the gut all along, impulsively more than philosophically. Maybe, like my long-time hero, I’ve been “adapting to win.” Just maybe I genuinely considered the Arcade Fire lame at one point in my life, and maybe I genuinely respect them now.
And today, as the dust clears from the wreck of my critical foundation, it’s boggling to think of how any critic manages to sustain these convictions. One piece of music can mean so many things to so many different people. In fact, one piece of music can mean different things to the same people on different days. Maybe to fail to acknowledge this is to misunderstand rock. So maybe the issue here isn’t with my own flip-flopishness, but with the science of criticism itself.
But who knows what I’ll think next week.
