Mike Doughty said what I was thinking…

Mike Doughty said what I was thinking…

If you haven’t yet, go check out Mike Doughty’s blog, in particular this post. Mike was an early adopter of the blog art-form and he’s perfected a concise, visually fascinating and fun balance that most bloggers can’t touch. The site is packed with lovely photos, self-examination and sharp observation. You’ll like it.

In the post I linked, Mike writes about a New Yorker magazine article on pop music which had really gotten under my skin when I read it. In the article, Sasha Frere-Jones examines songs and political stances in the new Beyonce and Lady Gaga albums. The article is presented as a “battle of the diva titans.” Unfortunately for that storyline, there’s another lady in pop who is far outpacing both B and GG: Adele.

So Frere-Jones needs to get Adele out of the way. He does this in the first paragraphs of the article by glibly dismissing her and her new album, “21,” as the province of “middle-aged moms who don’t know how to pirate music and will drive to Starbucks when they need to buy it.” When I first read this phrase, I was perturbed that SFJ was implying that it is uncool to buy music rather than to pirate it – as if only middle-aged moms are uncool enough to actually buy albums.

And being that middle-aged mom’s male counterpart, one who would happily drive to Starbucks to buy albums if the incredible Amoeba Records weren’t closer, I was perturbed by the general implication that it’s just plain uncool to grow older.

I was reminded of the day when I realized why I was so bugged by my hometown’s “alternative” weekly paper, the City Pages. On that day the City Pages’ music section was praising some obscure bit of hipsterdom for its sheer twentysomethingness, when I suddenly realized that the ads and political articles in the paper were aimed at thirty- and forty-somethings. The newspaper’s age-conscious arts sections were designed to make its readers feel ten years younger, and thus ten years hipper! (Or maybe ten years hipper, and thus ten years younger.) I ran this revelation past my wife, who was unamazed. “I can’t believe you hadn’t already noticed that,” was the gist of her response. But I was thunderstruck.

Could it be that the New Yorker is no better? Happily, most of the cultural sections of the magazine seem to celebrate brilliance, regardless of the age of the artist. Is music somehow different from other arts in this respect?

But all this is stuff Mike D says more pithily in his blog. Go check it out.

Another aspect of Frere-Jones’ article about Beyonce and Gaga has been nagging at me since I read it. In the piece, Lady Gaga is praised for the politics in her lyrics and gestures, while Beyonce is in turn downgraded for not having enough politics, or confrontational enough politics, in her songs. I often get the nagging feeling that critics demand that pop singers have a clear and interesting political point of view in their music; but for the indie rock and hiphop that they champion, the political standards are low or absent. It often seems that the critic assumes that the indie rocker is a like-minded soul, and gives her or him credit for a political stance that the critic might merely be imagining. Apolitical texturizing, lyrical obliqueness, navel-gazing: if you feel an aesthetic affinity with an artist, you can read implicit politics in between the lines, maybe based on who hangs out with whom and nothing more.

I’ve never quite figured out how to relate to rock criticism – my first real band, Trip Shakespeare, went from promising new band to critical punching bag in the Minneapolis press in a few short years, and I have to admit, it stung. We wanted to be loved and lauded. Near the end of that band, a local magazine published a very positive article about us, entitled “Kings of Uncool.” That was as good as it got by that point. My next band, Semisonic, amassed record sales too quickly to develop a relationship with the rock writers. So we got dumped on a little and praised a little, but neither one very passionately. It was probably a wash.

In a way Semisonic jumped past the critics straight to the public, and although I admit I sometimes wished for deeper critical assessment, graduate-thesis-type examination, I have to say we were treated generally far more kindly than Trip.

My real confession to you is that no amount of praise is ever enough anyway. When my next album comes out, if I read nine raves about it and one pan, I will instantly forget the nine and obsess about every word in the negative review. I know this about myself, so I try not to read reviews.

But every once in a while, a mention sneaks past my defenses. In a very enthusiastic piece about Adele’s “21″, the Village Voice unreservedly glorified Adele’s and my song “Someone Like You.” In passing, the article identified me as a member of Semisonic, a 90s band “so-underrated-they’re-now-overrated.” I had to laugh. The article was praising me among the uber-producers and -writers that Adele worked with on “21″, but all I could think about was that little logical slipknot, “so-underrated-they’re-now-overrated.” Would it have been too much to ask, I kept thinking, to have been notified of that magical moment when the two curves intersected – when the band was neither under- nor over-rated, when it just rated? Still, that phrase tickles me.

I know, I know, I know – most artists get neither good nor bad press. How lucky does a person need to be, anyway? But I still wonder what the ideal relationship between an artist and her or his critics would be.