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Shenanigans!! - The Criticorial Shaft

Or: Please Indulge Me As We Journey Temporarily Up My Own Ass.

During my senior year of high school, I clambered out on to the limb of actual effort and took AP English. It was the only AP class I ever took, and I got a C each quarter (this was mostly due to the fact that I had already read all of the novels we covered and thought that I could remember the kind of extremely specific plot points that our teacher relentlessly quizzed us on - it turns out the theme of 1984 is way easier to digest and remember than, you know, what actually happens). And I loved it. Here’s why: I discovered the word “rhetoric,” and it’s literal meaning, and it changed the entire course of my life. I am not exaggerating, at all.

Rhetoric: 1. The study of the effective us of language. 2. The ability to use language effectively. 3. The undue use of exaggeration or display, bombast.

All three of those definitions are important, but the one that’s truly key in my evolution as a human being who attempts to articulate thoughts in the written form? Number three. My good pal Chris Rubel and I, after being introduced to this concept of “rhetoric” (as opposed to the usual mind-numbing high school ritual of “brainstorming” and “outlining” and then following a very [arguably necessarily] strict format to produce a boilerplate five paragraph essay), became positively obsessed with our rhetorical skills. Not only did we get heavy into the technical and grammatical aspects of writing, we immersed ourselves in the culture of language and fancied ourselves veritable superstars of the compositional arts. Our rhetoric, we bragged, was fiery. It was florid. It was overflowing with the kind of improbable linguistic gymnastics that made our teachers type entire paragraphs into internet search engines to make sure we weren’t buying our shit wholesale from graduate students. While our peers compared muscles or car engines (or whatever normal teenage boys are interested in), we sat hunched over E.B. White’s invaluable style guide, whittling our rhetoric into the sharpest point possible. And none of this seemed lame to us. At all.

It’s a wonder we ever got laid.

But: My point in this is that language is important. Not just for the communication of ideas, but also, aesthetically, in and of itself. Writing a compelling essay or review is comparable to building a miniature replica of the Death Star from Lego blocks. Finding a satisfying rhythm, choosing words that compliment each other, varying sentence length to retain reader interest - it’s a constant process of building, tearing apart, and then rebuilding according to a new blueprint imagined on the spot. Writing, if you come at it with noble intentions and a sense of sport, is the most fun you can have without a case of Hamm’s Lager and a BB gun. The only thing that I enjoy more than writing is listening to music. As such, what I’m about to say will probably seem counter-intuitive:

There’s nothing I hate writing about more than music.

It’s widely acknowledged that music is the hardest of the arts to write about. The reason is simple: describing what you hear is much more difficult than describing what you see. Also, unless you’re listening to a concept album, music generally doesn’t have a “plot.” And even when story-like elements are present, they’re usually fairly jumbled - that’s the nature, and beauty, of the medium. For instance: I’m totally convinced that the most recent Sunset Rubdown album, Random Spirit Lover, has an intricate storyline behind the wonderfully spooky and propulsive melange of sounds that SR mastermind Spencer Krug whips up, and I’ve listened to the album incessantly for the last six months in an attempt to decipher exactly what that storyline might be, but - honestly - I have no fucking clue. The lyrics contain enough references to actors and whores to us in as to what general themes are emerging throughout, and there are characters named Maggie and Sam, but Krug keeps things so willfully obscure in almost every other regard that I couldn’t possible begin to create a time line or even give you some sort of idea about why it’s all so compelling and mysterious and beautiful. To understand, you’d have to listen to the album itself, probably numerous times. And that, in a nutshell, is music criticism.

The ration of time that I spend listening to music vs. watching movies is probably close to 5:1. And my knowledge of music runs much deeper and more passionately (I’d like to think) than my appreciation of film. And yet: I would rather review a movie for you (any movie) than review an album that I’ve studied during dozens upon dozens of listens. The intention of any given movie (unless it’s directed by David Lynch) is usually pretty clear; this makes it easy to break down where it succeeds and how it fails. And while it’s not necessarily rocket science breaking down what most musicians are attempting when they write songs, their intentions are way less important than the effect that the final product has on you. And the reasons for that effect are, more often than not, so specific and personal as to be almost completely irrelevant to anybody who doesn’t share you particular experiences and emotional quirks.

This is why, when you read music reviews, it often seems like a game of spot-the-reference - [this band] sounds like what would happen if [that band] had sex with [another band, preferably from a seemingly incongruous and unrelated genre] and had sweet musical children. Or, even worst, the critic seems to be mixing together as many self-consciously absurd ideas as possible, in an attempt to emerge, somehow, above the knotty tangle of intellectual and emotional reactions that good music invariably produces. For example, this is why there are so many articles about what kind of sweaters the members of Vampire Weekend prefer to tie around their necks, and so few about the mixture of droll social commentary and genuine feeling that make their best tracks resonate so much with so many. And this is also why I have almost no interest in music criticism; I don’t care what Ezra Koenig is wearing. I care about the gnawing sensation I get in the pit of my stomach whenever “I Stand Corrected” shuffles up on my iPod. And that’s not a sensation that’s easy to convey, even for the most dedicated and skillful practitioner of rhetoric - so we focus on the natty duds instead.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to my core Shenanigans. And, it’s important for me to note, I realize that this is going to make me seem incredibly thin-skinned and bitchy. But I am both of those things, and I admit it upfront. So here we go: Every time that I write a music review for this website, I get antagonized by some random troll on the comments section. And it never has anything to do with what I actually write about the music - it’s always the fucking format. When I reviewed the new Say Anything disc, some disgruntled emo flamed me for not mentioning enough specific tracks. For my review of the recent Santa album, I have been accused of mentioning too many specific tracks. What really got me about the Santa commenter is that he accused me of being “pedestrian.” While I understand that there are far better writers than me out there, and while I’m aware that my My Bones review was probably one of the weaker pieces I’ve written, I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that it was pedestrian. You want pedestrian? Go read any user review on Amazon.com.

What I’m trying to do here is engage with the music. That’s the first step in my reviewing process. I’m trying to think critically. To analyze. But also to enjoy and appreciate. And then my goal is to write down a few thoughts in a semi-organized fashion to give you an idea of how the music made me feel, and what I think about it as a result of those feelings. This sounds really simple, but it’s important to me because I don’t see it a lot on the internet. Go over to Pitchfork or Aversion and what you’ll get are (typically) long winded diatribes about what the artist is attempting to do, and how they fail because they didn’t cater to the reviewer-in-question’s particular personal preferences. I come at music with an open mind, and all I want to do is share the experience with you, in whatever (admittedly) fumbling, mealy-mouthed way that I can. And whether you agree with me or not in what I glean from any individual album, can we at least agree that the intention behind my efforts (and the entire SWinc empire in general) is a sincere effort to open up dialog about the arts that’s neither scathingly critical nor awkwardly fawning?

I’d like to point out that I didn’t write this simply to discourage people from leaving negative comments; if we didn’t have negative comments, we wouldn’t have any comments at all. I’d love nothing more than for these articles to hum with the buzz of fingers click-clacking away on keyboards and sending bite-size nuggets of flaming hot rhetoric into the blogosphere.* But would it be possible, even just once, to actually discuss something of substance? Or are we completely doomed to use the internet as nothing but a tool to measure our penises?

- Adam Angiulo

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* Yes, I just said blogosphere. I did to be deliberately annoying.

[A general note about this article: I recognize that it is formless, rambling, and horrible self-indulgent. It has also just become irritatingly self-reflexive. In addition: There is no clear thesis. It was written out of frustrating with the pettiness that the internet brings out in people, and the way that this pettiness typically precludes any kind of meaningful discussion occurring. Which is absolutely pathetic, since meaningful discussion is, if not what the internet was invented for, what the internet should have been invented for. The problem with having the opportunity to speak with thousands of people that you could never meet in real life is that you will never meet them in real life, and are thus spared the possibility of them punching you in the face. So we say idiotic things, and call each other's rhetoric "pedestrian" {yes, I am seriously pissed off about that - it's just the kind of person I am}, and pick fights that have nothing to do with what's actually important, which is an ability to share feelings and information as a community of like-minded individuals all searching for that same elusive quality of momentary transcendence that great art delivers. In other words, QUIT FUCKING FLAMING ME.]

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