Anti-Climacus

Brimful of punk, fuzz, feedback, noise, and the lovingly amped squelches of fingers sliding off strings, their seventh album is a subcultural tour de force, luxuriating so sybaritically in guitar sound that I'm reluctant to mention that the tunes are pretty good. ... As for the lyrics, you know--murmured, gnomic, pop culture references, that kind of thing. --Robert Christgau

Let's stipulate that aesthetic taste and personality, at some basic point, are formative of each other. You will like cultural item #10 if you have liked the first nine, because it fits into your taste. You will like it at the beginning perhaps because it fits within an already-established category, or perhaps because it speaks to something you would not have recognized otherwise. Or perhaps the new thing is itself constitutive: it makes you into the person who would like that sort of thing. Chasing the origin of influence is a mug's game; as a matter of intellectual biography I'm not sure how much it tells you, and I am uncertain what its value might be otherwise. R.E.M. is constitutive for me: I cannot not like those albums. Even in the long fallow period where they were being re-evaluated down in my personal canon, I couldn't deny that they were world-defining: those albums just were what it meant to write smart, interesting music and be cool.

This matters because of the nature of this form. Music criticism has taken a sharp turn in the direction of personal experience: it's the essence of the Pitchfork-style review, or music blogging a la fluxblog. Which is fine. I happened to be reading Robert Christgau (who, bless his heart, has essentially every one of his columns online) on the subject of Paul Simon. His argument was: Paul Simon is not a very good lyricist. Which is (undeniably, I think) true: he collects poetic words and sentiments that would be considered 'poetic' on the condition that you don't examine them too closely, but the collection is usually less than the sum of its parts. Graceland is a great album rather in spite of the words, title track excepted. Anyone who loves Simon and Garfunkel or Paul Simon's solo work is going to object, because this critical objectivity is the inverse of lived experience: life imparts the meaning because the song happened to be on at a crucial moment, or in your mind, and so imputed to it is some (undeserved) virtue. Which makes these Monday song write-ups awkward: I'm attempting to make the case for the objective greatness of some of these songs by appealing to personal reasons for liking them. And even when those reasons are not personal, they tend to be subjective. Well, so it goes.

The reasons for choosing any particular song are mostly a question of what happens to have popped up on itunes in the past week, but this is sometimes difficult to get across.

Now let's suppose that it's one in the morning, and you've been talking for several hours, and your conversation has been roving over a large territory, sometimes serious, sometimes comic, sometimes confessional, and you've reached the point where the pauses are becoming longer but you don't want the conversation to end quite yet, and then it's sometime later, and you're remembering the conversation and want a song that will remind you of it. This will be that song. It would be better if it were the song that had the appropriate lyrics, but that was two songs ago, and this is life, not art.