Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Credibility, authenticity, the genuine, feeling really real and clubbing a baby seal…
Written for The Turntable…
The thing is that all these notions are obsolete, and what’s more I’m not sure any of them were ever not obsolete. The problem is that they encourage a belief in universal truths, in objective facts about music, art and humanity, and there is no objective truth about these things. You may find Ott an interesting writer, Todd, but for me he’s flawed because he thinks he’s got it all worked out, when the reality is that there is nothing to be worked out. Ott’s “where’s your cred at” jibe may be amusing, but it’s also dangerous because it assumes that if you like X then you must ergo like Y as well, and what’s more that you must dislike Z, as if the vagaries of human tastes must fit directly into analogous compartments linked by threads of logic, when they don’t. We’re not dealing with logic, we’re dealing with aesthetic and emotional responses to things, to music, art, and ultimately through that, to the people and events and objects that compose our universes. “Credibility” as such, trusting a writer’s taste implicitly and completely, assumes that you’re the perfect fit for that writer; the only way you can be is if the writer created you as a perfect work of fiction designed to fit, like in The Circular Ruins by Borges. And like in that story, once you start trying to create things as objects of your own perfection you lose track of your own creation and existential choice, and thus lose the credibility you were pursuing in the first place. This is the whole problem with Pitchfork. As soon as you think you know the order that everything fits into then you’re fucked, because that kind of codification, linearity and mathematical proof simply doesn’t exist outside of science and mathematics. Even science as a discipline recognises now that none of its findings and laws are immutable, because the universe, like individual people, is a work in progress. Much as we can’t understand it, given that the universe is infinite, gravity could stop working tomorrow if something alters in the fundamental physics of the cosmos for whatever reason. If something that you’ve invested a great deal of faith and thought in as being a permanence, a given fact, an absolute, if something like that ruptures, flails, and alters completely for a reason beyond your understanding, then where does that leave you? Because if you pin yourself to a mast of one system, define yourself by it, and that system turns out to be wrong one day, then you have nothing of yourself left and you have to start again.
It’s interesting then that we still, as music writers in general, try to pin these little numbers on works of art as if we can state the immutable and universal quality of them, as if we actually know the minute differentials in class between a 7.8 and a 7.9, as if there’s a quantifiable (qualifiable!) system for working these things out. One of my lecturers at university sent off my final essay to be externally moderated, and it got sent back having been bumped up 3%. This didn’t alter its grade or even bring it nearer to a higher grade (it was already a first), and my lecturer confessed that he had no idea why they saw fit to add 3%, and also added that anything below 40% (a fail) or above 70% (a first) was simply arbitrary. With music writing this is accentuated, in that every mark is arbitrary, because there are no guidelines as to what constitutes a certain grade like in academic work; you simply have to rely on how you feel about something. As such I’m erring closer to Julio Desouza’s assertion that you ought to give everything either a 10 or a 1 – ie; bother or don’t bother.
Smashing apart these meta-narratives of universal truth is what postmodernism does at its most useful and positive utility, because it encourages (for me at least) a degree of incredulity and existential awareness (by removing meta-narratives it forces you to choose your own path and understand your own opinions). Cannibal Ox are not necessarily/intrinsically better than Jurassic 5, The Jesus & Mary Chain are not necessarily/intrinsically better than Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, post-rock is not necessarily/intrinsically better than trance. You cannot ever hope to prove these memes (ideas? - opinions) as fact. All you can do is understand and explain why you’ve come to any conclusion that you have come to. As soon as you start accepting these kind of memes as universal truths then you’ve given away your existential control to an external party (and what’s more you don’t even know exactly who that external party is).
What this comes down to is that all you have is you, your own opinions and feelings about things, and your ability to communicate them to others and make yourself receptive to the thoughts and feelings of others in turn, in order to further your own understanding of your opinions and feelings. There isn’t one system of order which you can buy into which sorts it all for you, and believing that there is, and that understanding and subscribing to it gives you credibility, is both futile and short-sighted. I have much more time for the opinions of someone who knows their own mind and feelings and is open to suggestion and tries to understand different values and cultures and approaches and forms on their own terms, rather than trying to squeeze them into a matrix of pre-defined judgement. I prefer the incredible to the credible.
9/03/2003 10:57:00 am
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