#meta-criticism

I’m working on some much longer pieces that are basically my takes on recent developments in pop music history that will go up here eventually, but I also wanted to address something kind of strange I started noticing: seemingly since Pitchfork launched its “Sunday retro review” thing (or whatever they call it), music criticism/journalism seems to have entered a period of mass revisionism, and I find the whole thing a little...unsettling.

Not just because it’s led to some incredibly bad takes, like “actually, Enya is good”, or “Total Eclipse Of The Heart is better than Let’s Go Crazy” (thanks to Stereogum’s usually-better The Number Ones for that one); not just because it give sites like Pitchfork a way to enact a kind of cheap “systematic apology program” for artists who they feel they’ve unjustly criticize in the past (and even here, they’re weirdly selective - Andrew W.K., sure; why not Black Kids, though?).

There’s just something very weird about the whole thing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe it’s the feeling of a lack of integrity/willingness to stand your ground on takes you’ve thought through carefully in the past. Like, it’s good to admit that you’ve been wrong...but at what point does that curdle into a kind of compulsive, guilt-driven spree of revisionism based on the fear that being a harsh critic is turning you into a bad person? I also feel like there’s a point of unsustainability here with regard to any pop music canon that’s been built over the last half-century - I know, I know, canons are shams, canons are constructions, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be interesting, or even useful. Certainly, I think younger listeners benefit from having some kind of guiding “canon” to check out so they can avoid wading through the trash heaps of the dud albums of yesteryear before discovering what they like. But if we start including every new age compilation or forgotten Paul McCartney solo album that piques our interest, the volume of the canon can easily become bloated and spiral out of control into something completely unapproachable to most listeners, likely driving them further away from criticism (and any music beyond the current charts).

it’s not a bad example of the kind of criticism that plugs in relevant social justice concepts in place of stylistic consideration. if a work fails to deal with the issues effectively, that’s a fair critique, but i feel like this is not that. 

from the review: “At its best, it reminds us that the whole point of self-care is to replenish ourselves for a larger, communal fight.” 

is it? i don’t like the phrase as much as the next guy, but is there a ‘point’ to recharging beyond if you don’t do it you will die?

Tired of RWBY Criticism "Drama"

“Constructive Criticism is a lie”

Hmm...

I feel like I say this phrase a little too often for my taste: "I mean, it's a bad movie, but I love it so much."  First of all, the "I mean" is completely unnecessary and just awkward, but more important I'm not really sure in what way I'm qualifying something as "bad" if I do in fact "love it".  Let's move on and put all those quotation marks behind us.

I think music writers are a bit confused about the So So Glos. I think this is due a lot to the fact that they pretty much existed in a vacuum of opening slots, record store cut out bins and major label vanity imprints for most of their career til now. So when Pitchfork finally gets around to reviewing one of their records (despite coexisting in the same borough for six years) it's not really surprising to me that they are trying to place them alongside Wavves and other 90s nostalgniks (as they do most of the guitar music they cover,) but it is completely fucking wrong. To call their "oh-oh-oh"'s akin to Japandroids is to ignore almost 40 years of punk music. That comparison does nothing aside from try to force the So So Glos into a narrative Pitchfork continues to spin and evolve with every new release by a guitar band: a proposed new wave of Springsteen acolytes that grew up on radio pop-punk. Yeah, that certainly exists, but the So So Glos aren't anywhere near it. They're chilling at Rockaway Beach like they have every summer since they were babies. And to say that Parquet Courts "feel like their spiritual cousins" is worse than the existence of Brooklyn Flea's Philadelphia annex. The So So Glos are Brooklyn lifers. Andrew Savage moved there three years ago to start a middling garage band.

The So So Glos are squarely punk rock, but I don't think they are of the same subculture that spawned Blink-182. As they are quick to note in this interview they, like the Clash before them, are more inspired by Woody Guthrie than Milo Aukerman and their own arrested development. I don't know how that could be made more clear if you listen to their music. Alex's vocals are Mick Jones' whine and Joe Strummer's phlegm interwoven in one man's throat and their lyrics are all sociopolitical paens to their home and regional identity. 

I mean, it's whatever. The So So Glos are not the kind of band that would cave-in to music press' impression of them. I don't see them getting roped into doing a Green Day cover set for a Vice Magazine party. I am worried about younger bands that might wind up stuck in a magazine's narrative construction site, though.

The SSGs existed long before the internet decided to give a fuck about them. It sucks that their new fans' perceptions will be colored by these weird as fuck comparisons to late-century pop-punk, but if you weren't made a fan when the Glos were running the Market Hotel and doing time opening for Titus Andronicus and Ted Leo/RX, do you really deserve to be one now?

Ok, here we are. I’ve been hinting all week that I think 808s and Heartbreak is not very good. That’s a bit of an oversimplification: I just think that 808s and Heartbreak combines the worst parts of my two favorite Kanye albums, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Graduation. It has the former's shitty sound, and an under-cooked version of its theme; it has the latter's space age sound, just all simultaneously damp and hot. 808s and Heartbreak is a big mess of an album.

It is an intrinsically transitional album. That’s not a terrible thing, necessarily! I think every album, except for his first and his last, are transitional. The three albums in the middle of his work all flow very logically forward to solidify grandly into the masterpiece that is, well, you get it.

I think a big part of my antipathy for 808s and Heartbreak is that it’s taken by many to be such a singular achievement within West’s canon. It is not. Some people like it for its emotional heft. That's a fine reason to like something, but it's not a great reason to think it's a great work of art. And sort of meta-critically, it seems like 808s and Heartbreak codes as 'white'. (Did'ya see that Factory Records allusion on the cover?) That is a laughably misguided way to take the album. I'm going to elaborate on some reasons why people like and don't like the album, and then I'll tell you why I sort of dislike it.

It’s been argued that 808s and Heartbreak is a great, ambitious leap forward in music. I find the argument a little tiresome, even if it was made by the artist himself. West told The Telegraph,

This is not hip-hop music. Taking a sample, looping it and doing all that 'throw your hands up in the sky' thing has become such a cliché. Hip-hop is over for me. I sing, not rap, on this album. I've had to create a whole new musical genre to describe what I'm doing now and I'm calling it 'pop-art' - which is not to be confused with the visual art movement. I realize that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of a generation.

West is right about one thing: 808s and Heartbreak became a template for the new generation. It’s been widely noted that the album paved the way for atmospheric rap and r&b by the likes of Kid Cudi, Drake, The Weeknd, and others. In this way, 808s and Heartbreak was the hip-hop version of chillwave, an alternate path to a similarly mood-oriented, atmospheric space. As well, in order to reach a sing-along-able speed, the music often slows to a syrupy pace. The production does recall aspects of Three 6 Mafia. In this way, 808s and Heartbreak also anticipates the very of-the-moment fascination mixtape rap has with cloudy lo-fi southern sounds.

Virtually every review of 808s and Heartbreak notes the different inspirations behind the album: everyone from Neil Young to Prince. Kanye’s particular genius was not simply to blow up and re-build the constituent elements of sad-sack synth music. His genius was to foreground this move, making the musical devastation just as prominent as his own emotional devastation. The music even comes first in the title. It’s not Heartbreak and 808s. Kanye West must have known he wasn’t doing something that new or innovative, but he had the brilliant good sense to make a big deal out of it, which ultimately inspired the next generation of musicians who were forced to sit up and listen.

I asked around on Twitter yesterday for why some people seem to like 808s and Heartbreak so much. Many of the replies had to do with the album displaying Kanye at an emotional nadir (or apex). In a related and curious manner, it seemed like it was this emotional intensity that allowed people to actually connect with him, often for the first time.

It makes me wonder, what is it about extremes that are so relatable. I see a guy get in a fight at the bar, and I think he’s a schmuck. Achilles lets hundreds of his friends die, and then goes on a murderous rampage and he becomes a great personal hero of mine. It can’t just be that extremity expresses the widest range of emotion, thereby offering the greatest chance at reliability. It’s more likely that human beings themselves have generally a limited range of emotions, with the extreme ones being the most salient. (This is called an availability heuristic, by the way, and it’s a psychological trick.)

It is an extremely selfish response to like 808s and Heartbreak because I’ve been there, man. Believe me, I have been there, but for some reason I don’t really want to relate too strongly to Kanye. (That doesn’t stop me from doing so, and the ways in which I relate to him are selfish in their own ways, though.) This seems like a ridiculous argument: everyone basically likes works of art because they represent something the reader relates to. But, really? I believe art is transformative, and there’s very little transformation in 808s and Heartbreak. There are moments of redemption-via-survival ("Street Lights"), and deep prostration that inspires real pathos ("Coldest Winter"), but the album is generally uninspired. I mean, literally uninspired. There’s little imaginative leap between event and thought. It’s a lament, a cry, a wail. See, for me, though, the difference between 808s and Heartbreak and its closest comparable in the canon, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is that the latter is the story behind the cry and fall whereas 808s and Heartbreak is the shocked and un-aestheticized event itself. That makes it a compelling document, but not a work of art.

Another problematic aspect of the album is, to put it plainly, 808s and Heartbreak is the one Kanye album that most white people like. When Scott Plagenhoef reviewed the album, he made a dichotomy in the use of artifice: on the one hand, there is professional wrestling and "radio-ready rap"; on the other side there is the vocal manipulation of Capital-A Art, "records like Radiohead's Kid A/Amnesiac, the Knife's Silent Shout, and Daft Punk's Discovery". He also mentions an Auto-Tuned Bon Iver song, which the New York Times's Alex Pappedemas also counterpoints (as Art) as opposed to radio rappers like T-Pain. This emphasis on 808s and Heartbreak rising above the dregs of music, pop-rap, is a breathtakingly condescending move. It is also a repugnant form of racial interpolation.

It seems like there’s a rockist trope of a musician increasing his artistic merit score by upping the game’s difficulty setting. (Think: Radiohead are better artists than, like, Kings of Leon.) There seems to be some of that going on with 808s and Heartbreak. The whole singing-so-bad-it’s-good thing, too, is just the practice of music criticism touting its authority via self-flagellation.

I don’t think the album is — despite Kanye’s assertion — particularly post-rap. Rap arose from a spoken word and R&B tradition. If anything, it’s a return to Here My Dear-era Marvin Gaye than a leap into the future. And West has sung (poorly) from day one, from the very first song of the first album.

This supposed divergence from rap more than anything, I think, makes the album signify more like Art (and therefore more 'white'). But this criticism or evaluation is, in the end, mistaken. Since the beginning, Kanye has been 'criticized' as making music for white people and being too soft. Those are beyond-stupid points. And 808s and Heartbreak really is a rap album.

It’s a Ship of Theseus type of problem: how many aspects of his music can Kanye change before what he’s doing isn’t hip-hop anymore? The songs are still strongly inspired by hip-hop, they have keyboard melody elements similar to his previous two albums, the epic song lengths hinted at by "Gone" and "We Major", and the Auto-Tune vocals of, oh yeah, all of that era’s pop and rap. I’d say 808s and Heartbreak is squarely a rap album. The ways it diverges from rap are the ways Kanye always diverges from rap — his force of will and genius insight into sound.

It is particularly ironic and sad, then, that it’s Kanye’s utter disinterest in making a good-sounding album that dooms 808s and Heartbreak. There’s a very simple aesthetic argument against the album that essentially and ineffably damns it: the album attempts to sound cool, spacey, chilly, sad, and disinterested. It tries at these feelings: you can tell by the lyrics and atmosphere. However, it only makes passing grabs at these feelings because the album sounds claustrophobic and hot. But is not imbued with the burning heat of regret and sadness. It's more redolent of burning plastic. Digital clipping, bad mastering, no space in the mix. I do not think these are aesthetic choices, since they actively work against most of the album. It's just a curious blind spot in Kanye's recent work.

The album constantly clips. It constantly and distractingly clips. I don’t have audiophile gear by any means. I listen on headphones that are known for their great bass and reasonable price. And nearly every track on the the album sounds terrible. The only solution to this problem is to 808s and Heartbreak on shittier gear. Maybe in the car. That seems like an essential and unsurmountable flaw to me. If any album were a headphone album, one you put on and lay back in bed or walk around the city at night, it should be 808s and Heartbreak. But listening closely to the album reveals more flaws in its production than in any of Kanye’s doomed relationships.

"Welcome To Heartbreak" should be an aesthetic triumph. Instead, every big drum hit brings with it an electric crackle that cannot be ignored. "Amazing" shares a similar fate. Virtually every drum hit (except for the album’s genuinely affecting wooden drum motif drums) brings a painful crackle. The chorus of "Love Lockdown" should be one of the most memorable events of the album, and it is, because it puts your ear drums in a vice and doesn’t stop squeezing until its finished. "Love Lockdown" should sound buoyant. It should sparkle like a split of Veuve Clicquot. Instead, it’s as murky as the East River. There are so many moments where the sound of the album works against the grain of everything it seems to be trying for.

Despite this, the effect works in favor of some songs. The distorted tone works in "Street Lights", which is distorted all over as a matter of principle. "Coldest Winter" works because it’s one of the clearest songs on the album. It’s a pretty complex song, with a more melodic, pre-dubstep wobble on its crushing bass, some interesting keyboard instrumentation, and, even more muscular than the bass, huge drums. I love huge drums! But even with huge bass and drum presences, there’s all manner of interesting things going on in the mix. The only 808 part of the song is, I think, a small snatch of persistent and quiet drum sequencing that opens the song. I love that moment in the song 1:17 when Kanye let’s out a percussive "Oh" that echoes for a bar. The song’s production is as thoughtful as its lyrics are vapid. "Paranoid" is a straight-ahead steam engine of a pop song. It’s a joyful-sounding rebuke, a sugar high mania before Kanye’s afternoon nap.

The unevenness of the album’s sound results in a queer lack aesthetic unity. The terrible mastering manages to flatten Kanye’s elaborate productions. And the hotness of the mix means that the one thing I can count on Kanye for, the one thing I always fucking love, the drums, often sound like shit. That all amounts to one thing: a colossal, ambitious, not-terrible-but-not-great failure.

I think this aesthetic dishevelment lead a lot of canny reviewers down the same path. Even though the album is basically as elaborately staged as his previous work, 808s and Heartbreak has Kanye making a work that is strangely skeletal. I would not call it thin or unfinished, but it’s sort of under-cooked.

The New York Times’s Jon Caramanica noted that "in an earlier era these would have been demo tapes, left in a vault to await exhumation for an anniversary edition". Plagenhoef’s review mirrors this sentiment, saying, "colleagues at Pitchfork have therefore wondered why this wasn't a private record West made for himself". Andrew Nosnitsky harshed the album on NPR, calling it "a sketchbook" and condemning it as "laziness disguised as minimalism and vulnerability".