Future Brown vs. the critics: music, theory, and criticism
In a Facebook post, Fatima Al Qadiri (member of Future Brown) accused Alex Macpherson (review removed from Red Bull, reposted here) and Meaghan Garvey (review on Pitchfork) of describing / constructing Future Brown's music as too theoretical, without asking the band itself about its intentions.
While I think both reviews are wrong (for me, Future Brown is more about sound than about songs, or theory, as I wrote here), and at places outright stupid (quoting a press release to prove something about the band? or anything? come on! holding Future Brown responsible for the ignorance of the "middle-class" music press about Shawnna? seriously?), that's not my interest here. It's Fatima Al Qadiri's implicit claim that the key to the music's theoretical aspirations, or lack thereof, belongs to the musicians. That's why the critics should have asked them.
Can Future Brown be too "theory-driven" despite its own intentions? That might seem to be an odd question, but just think about how a song can be, or be accused of being racist or sexist, despite or independently of the intentions of the authors. Remember when Robin Thicke stated that "Blurred Lines" can't be misogynistic, as he as a person was happily married and adored women etc.? It didn't matter to the problematic of misogyny in the lyrics, as that is about what the words mean, not about what the person who sings / wrote them feels or thinks. I assume anyone who is prone to address questions of racism or sexism in lyrics will admit that it the discussion is not (or not always) about the individuals, it's about the system they operate within (the language, the industry, the society). What you know about the authors may or may not corroborate how you interpret the work, but does not prove or falsify it.
So why and how is "theory-driven" music different from that? Why is it harder to imagine that a piece of work represents or expresses a kind of theory, all the while the author doesn't intend it to be like that, or maybe doesn't even hold the theory true? I think maybe the answer is that we take (pop?) music to be primarily a vehicle of passion, as opposed to theoretical thought. So we may implicitly assume that if the work represent a theory, instead of expressing feelings and whatnot, than it requires a conscious effort on the part of the author to somehow suppress that inherent passion. That can't be done sub- or unconsciously, as it is working against the grain of music itself. If you are theorizing, you must know about it.
Maybe that's true to some extent, I don't know. What I know is that we can't take it to be a universal, unquestionable truth. One of main tasks of criticism is, or should be exactly to reflect on these kinds of implicit theories. But while it has become a common practice the question, even hunt for implicit claims about race, gender, society in pop music (good luck finding a review of, say, Taylor Swift not mentioning those!), critics engage much, much less in that kind of reflexive thinking regarding our received notions about music itself.
