Assay Office

Assay office [from Wikipedia]: “Institutions set up to assay (test the purity of) precious metals . . . . often done to protect consumers from buying fake items.”

Music critics are motivated by opposing, mutually exclusive, desires. On the one hand, they strive to identify and distinguish the very best albums currently being marketed to mass audiences. On the other, they seek to shelter those same albums from mass consumption—from a homogenizing process that consists of assimilation or “popularization.” The critic’s sorting process is predicated on an epistemology that makes real/fake distinctions, its aim to vilify the counterfeit and praise the genuine item. Because of the critic’s status as an expert in the field, the critic’s discourse, merely descriptive or impressionistic, has the rhetorical force of science (applicable to critics of the arts in general, in fact).

Fortunately, the authenticating discourse of the critic can be subject to parody, undermining the critic’s epistemological certainty. Jazz critics have been especially subject to parody, and rightly so. Steve Allen’s spoken-word recordings, “Cinderella” and “Crazy Red Riding Hood,” issued on record in 1953 prior to the publication of his collection Bop Fables (1955), satirize hipster bop talk. Marshall Brickman’s hilarious “What, Another Legend?” (1973), mocks the jazzographer’s tendency to erect a jazz hall of fame. Perhaps the best parody of critics’ attempts to transform jazz into language is Donald Barthelme’s short story “The King of Jazz.” In Barthelme’s humorous story, a jazz fan responds to a question about how to describe the peerless sound of trombonist Hokie Mokie, the current king of jazz:

“You mean that sound that sounds like the cutting edge of life? That sounds like polar bears crossing Arctic ice pans? That sounds like a herd of musk ox in full flight? That sounds like male walruses diving to the bottom of the sea? That sounds like fumaroles smoking on the slopes of Mt. Katmai? That sounds like the wild turkey walking through the deep, soft forest? That sounds like beavers chewing trees in an Appalachian marsh? That sounds like an oyster fungus growing on an aspen trunk? That sounds like a mule deer wandering a montane of the Sierra Nevada? That sounds like prairie dogs kissing? That sounds like witchgrass tumbling or a river meandering? That sounds like manatees munching seaweed at Cape Sable? That sounds like coatimundis moving in packs across the face of Arkansas? That sounds like—“

Barthelme’s metaphorical feat, in fact, illustrates “the normal practice of music criticism,” translating “a work (or its performance) . . . into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective" (Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 179). 

My Bird Sings Sweetly

In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985), Italo Calvino suggests that “melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness,” just as “humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight” (19). He also observes that the ancients thought the so-called “saturnine” temperament was the one “proper to artists, poets, and thinkers, and that seems true enough. Certainly literature would never have existed if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion, discontented with the world as it is, inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end to fix their gaze on the immobility of silent worlds” (52). Calvino contrasts the saturnine temperament with the mercurial one, the former “melancholy, contemplative, and solitary,” the latter, mercurial one, “inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity” (52). Yet despite the fact the saturnine or solitary temperament is essential for artistic creation, and for reflection and introspection (“know thyself”), individual (private, solitary) experience is typically denied or devalued by the general culture. Roland Barthes makes the observation in Camera Lucida, “Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask” (35). He goes to say, "Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise . . . which will make it less acute" (36). What he is talking about, it seems to me, is the way "society" (to use Barthes' term) prefers the stereotypical (the general truth) rather than the singular (the particular), in this case, the undeniable validity of solitary, contemplative experience. I think Barthes is here making the same point as Michel Leiris in his essay, "The Sacred in Everyday Life" (1938), in which Leiris uses his own past experience to argue for what he calls "the personal sacred" (the need for the sacred in a secular society). Following both thinkers, society tends to avoid the difficulty of the singular or personal, preferring general meaning instead, because the general meaning (the stereotypical) is more easily accessible and therefore "safe"--the comfort of generalities and commonly accepted truths, rather like Flaubert's “received ideas.” Hence Leiris's essay is unusual in that he is trying recover the validity of the personal, singular experience, the undeniable reality and value of his own experience, which the general culture devalues or denies. As Camera Lucida reveals, for Barthes, the value of photography is precisely its ability to capture the This, the singular, irrecoverable moment. In turn, Leiris would say that the validity of singular experience is abject, that is, is degraded (as irrelevant) by the general culture. What Leiris is trying to recover is the value of the personal (private) in human experience.

I was once told by a friend that because my astrological sign is cancer, the crab (one who carries his home on his back), my temperament is to prefer being home. I take this to mean that I'm happy to be alone, to be solitary, and I think that's probably true. Not that I'm a misanthrope, but my temperament is saturnine. I'm perfectly content to be alone because, as the title of the song by XTC says, "my bird performs." The cage is open but I have no urge to fly . . . because my bird sings sweetly. I guess you'd have to call this song by XTC my theme song.

Parlor Game

According to Roland Barthes, virtually all music criticism “is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective” (Image-Music-Text, p. 179). Seeking to find a new way to listen to music and a new way to write about what he hears, Barthes says about typical music criticism:

Music, by natural bent, is that which at once receives an adjective. The adjective is inevitable: this music is this, this execution is that. No doubt the moment we turn an art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates; in the case of music, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form, that of the epithet. (179)

For Barthes, adjectival music criticism—or what he later calls “predicative interpretation”—is the most common (“institutional”) form of critical writing about music. Predicative criticism typically perceives a piece of music as being simply a codified form of expression, to which the critic is obliged to ascribe an ethos (qualities and traits, i.e., adjectives).

Having picked up at the bookstore yesterday a remaindered copy ($3.98) of the hardcover edition of The New Rolling Stone Album Guide: Completely Revised And Updated Fourth Edition (2004), I thought I would test Barthes’ theory whether predicative interpretation inevitably resorts to the epithet. Since the potent tome purports to represent “three years of work by more than 70 writers and editors”—a declaration which I assume means a selected group of writers and editors—I think the book would qualify as a good indicator of common, or institutional, popular music criticism at the present time. Below I have reproduced a few passages from the book, on a particular musician, band, or album, which I think is illustrative of Barthes’ observations about music criticism’s penchant for the epithet. I have also selected few statements that I think are illustrative of how the critic seeks to identify an underlying ethos (traits, rendered as adjectives) in an individual piece of music.

On The Beatles:
It [Revolver] contains their prettiest music (“Here, There, and Everywhere”), their bitchiest (“And Your Bird Can Sing”), their friendliest (“I Want to Tell You”), and their scariest (the screaming-seagull acid-nightmare “Tomorrow Never Knows”). (53)

On Fleetwood Mac:
After striking such a perfect balance between self-expression and commercial appeal, Fleetwood Mac succumbed to studio artiness. The double-disc Tusk reveals Buckingham’s secret fixation: to become Brian Wilson with a touch of Brian Eno thrown in. (304)

On Daryl Hall & John Oates:
But it [Voices] did have “Kiss on My List,” a slick, bouncy #1 synth-pop smooch that taught Hall & Oates the way to make rock girls, disco girls, and new-wave girls scream together. (359)

On Kiss:
Kiss’ early albums are thin, cruddy-sounding hard rock recorded on the cheap, with only occasional lapses into catchiness. . . . (461)

On Led Zeppelin:
The [cover] image [of the band’s first album] did a pretty good job of encapsulating the music inside: sex, catastrophe, and things blowing up. (479)

On Midnight Oil:
…The Oils’ U. S. debut, 10, 9, 8 is a stunning, sunbaked answer to London Calling. Midnight Oil’s ferocious jeremiad against corporate greed and American military imperialism is powered by the apocalyptic delivery of bald singing colossus Peter Garrett and the twin-guitar assault of Jim Moginie and Martin Rotsey. (541)

On Ted Nugent:
“Journey to the Center of the Mind” (1968) would be just another pleasant psychedelic excursion without that lead guitar: Nugent makes the instrument snarl and stutter like a Harley-Davidson in low gear, shifting into a high-pressure whoosh on the solo breaks. (594)

On Neutral Milk Hotel:
Although psychedelic retro-pop and neohippie experimentalism defined the cadre of affiliated bands known as Elephant 6 . . . Jeff Magnum’s Neutral Milk Hotel stands out as the unique, even visionary, one of the collective—and the most enigmatic. (579)

On Ratt:
Ratt may be the platonic ideal of ‘80s pop metal/hard rock. (679)

On Patti Smith:
Teeming with ambition, primitivism, anybody-can-do-this chutzpah, and casual androgyny, Horses demands a reaction. (751)

On Warren Zevon:
With a head filled with ideas lifted from “cyber-punk” paperbacks and an imposing synthesizer arsenal, Zevon [with the album Transverse City] set out to do for art rock what he had done for the singer/songwriter movement—kick it in the ass. (905)

Let’s play a game: Try to revise each of the above epithets without employing any adjective at all or without the various traits attributed to the individual piece of music, and also without the various conceptually elusive taxonomies (e.g., “'80s pop metal/hard rock,” “psychedelic retro-pop,” “neohippie experimentalism”), and see what you’re left with.