Report From the Underground: A Manifesto of Sorts

Over the past year, my Fake Jazz reviews have shakily vacillated between the two ends of the review-writing spectrum. On one hand, I’ve written about my singular experience with the album in the hopes that my idiosyncratic language would not be the signifier of a subjective experience, that indeed, I was merely the instantiation of a universal feeling that the album somehow generated, maybe through language that should have the same effect or evoke similar ideas in all who are part of my culture, maybe through the music that I felt was interpretable like a Stephen King novel, that is, in a straight-forward, non-disputable way. The other end of this though has been the direct facts: what the album is, what the music sounds like, what the true statements are that concern the album. A gamut defined by that dreaded philosophic dichotomy: the Subjective and the Objective, set apart like two cliffs separated by a chasm.

While the last few hundred years of philosophy have been dedicated to finding ways to bridge this ‘epistemic gap’, that is, in theorizing about how we can ever get out of our own minds, it has been only in the last century that people have come to the conclusion that the problem lies not with bridging the gap, but rather, with the model itself, that if we draw a redacted illustration of the problem, making the subjective and the objective merely different facets of the same experience, then the problems dissolve, and we no longer waste our time trying to figure out how we ever cross from subjective to objective, for really, they are the same coin seen from two different sides.

In this way, I think, it is time for me to do the same thing with my reviews. Instead of wavering unhappily between the two poles, I need to rethink the above conception and instead come up with a different, and ultimately, more fulfilling way to write about music.

While I have attempted in an admittedly clumsy way to interject some kind of meaning or engender some kind of discussion about different aspects of the albums I have reviewed, each and every time I have done so, it has been more about some aspect of the band, the lyric-writer, their history, etc., and not about the album itself. I have shied away from interpreting the work because I had once (now I believe erroneously) thought that as a reviewer, I didn’t want to color the reader’s mind or prejudice it with a point of view before they could form one on their own. This, however, has prevented me from being able to really engage the album. Sure I can tell you what it sounds like. I can use the tools every other writer uses, the grandiloquent metaphors, the descriptions, but I don’t think I’d be doing the reader any favors.

I don’t begrudge those who write that way. It’s interesting and entertaining and if done well (like many of my fellow reviewers here) can really get you excited about the music or curious to hear it. But after all is said and done, I don’t think writing like that serves much more than the economic purpose or the “introducing worthy yet obscure music to a wider audience” purpose (both themes I have expounded upon before ad nauseam), which are both important, especially for many of the artists we review here, but one of the reasons I have harped so much on these ideas in the past is that I am not satisfied with those options. Some reasons why:

1) I write mostly about pop music (read: indie rock and pop) anyway. It is what I am most qualified to write about, but at the same time, I feel like it is the most worthless. Maybe a few times a year will I hear any of it that I actually think is worthwhile and most of it is well known already thus defeating the purpose of exposing it to a wider audience. Who the fuck doesn’t know who Steve Malkmus is? As much as I hate Pitchfork’s reviewing, I’m sure their Pig Lib review filled the same role mine did.

2) I constantly want to write about music that is pushing the boundaries. However, the actual paradigm shifting music - see, paradigms don’t move because of one artist, and usually you can’t see it as it’s moving anyway. Eventually, enough artists do something new and you can identify it as a movement of sorts, a somewhat sketchy line between the new way of doing things and the old way of doing things. This though is a bad way to review music because, ultimately, 99% of the stuff I review will fail this test. And as far as the stuff that is really revolutionary, my neophyte status and lack of concrete knowledge when it comes to these things has prevented me from being able to really tackle the new and different within music. And furthermore, artists that really are new and different deserve more of a “describe them to interest people in them” kind of review more than they merit some kind of interpretational infusion of meaning critique.

Anyway, I think I’d like to write a different way, hopefully one that will be better and instead of every review being a milquetoast mishmash, like an unobserved photon that can’t “decide’ whether it is a wave or a particle, I’d rather just outline, like I have somewhat done, a style that I want to adhere to, and hopefully this will be, if I can indeed follow it, helpful to you, although in a different way.