Why Do Music Critics Love Kanye West?
Slate‘s Jonah Weiner dares to use the B-word — “best” — in declaring that Kanye West’s new record, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is not just the best album of the year, but the best of West’s career. Serious critics tend not to use the word easily, but West’s album seems to be inspiring similar accolades all over; Pitchfork blessed it with a rare 10.0, and its current Metacritic score is an impressive 98. It’s as close as pop records come to a universal critical hit.
I tend to agree with those singing the album’s praises, and if I were still reviewing records regularly, I’d have issued a big fat rave. Fantasy is as rich and grand and satisfying as pop music gets these days, or ever really, and the primal, heart-wrenching melancholy that’s built into its foundation only makes it more compelling. As far as I’m concerned, after a dozen-odd listens, it’s an instant classic and a work of near-perfect pop art.
But I’ve written before about the arbitrariness of pop music criticism, which seems to have far fewer clear and recognizable standards than, say, movie criticism, or lit crit. Thanks in part to the walls between genres, it’s far more subjective. And thanks to a variety of incentives and cultural norms, music criticism tends to issue a lot of “pretty goods” and relatively few ratings of “this completely sucks,” at least in comparison with movies or novels or plays.
When you read pop music criticism, you’re not really seeing a record or a song measured on some roughly understood and agreed upon set of critical criteria. You’re finding out whether or not a certain critic or publication liked it. There’s just nothing like a universal scale, or even a handful of competing aesthetics. Sure, pop songs often rely on formulas. But pop criticism is much less standardized. The closest you get are different schools of criticism based around different publications — Rolling Stone or Pitchfork or Stereogum*. But even those aesthetic schools typically reflect the choices of some founder or editor or other influential figure.
So it’s strange, then, to come upon an album like Fantasy that pretty much every critic who writes about pop music regularly agrees is not just pretty good but stand-up-and-cheer great. And that brings me to what I’m really interested in with this post: speculating as to why Fantasy pleases so many music critics and music-critic-types (this is where I note that my first writing gig was reviewing a dozen or so records every quarter for the now-defunct indie-rock journal Skyscraper). Obviously it’s impossible to know for sure — this won’t be a data-driven post — but my guess is that most critics start with a genuine love for the form. Not just for innovation and experimentation, but for pop songcraft, in a strictly formulaic sense.
But of course, over the years, as a critic or music geek, you tend to hear thousands and thousands of variations upon that form. Most of them are pretty unmemorable at best. A lot of them are just okay, no more no less, which makes sense given that there’s a time-tested formula involved. And even the stuff that’s just fine is less exciting given that you hear so much of it, day in and day out. Which is why there’s a good chance that you end up turning to a lot of experimental acts that really push the boundaries of the form, and probably break them pretty frequently. But there’s a limited amount of satisfaction in breaking the form, because, when it comes down to it, what you want is the classic form delivered in some wholly new, artful, and unexpected way. And when it comes to pop music, that’s pretty much what Kanye West specializes in. He’s mixing hip-hop and indie-rock irony and lush pop and any number of other influences into something that’s both highly original and highly accessible. The only other current act that comes to mind that does this as well is Radiohead (though you can see elements of this in acts as varied as Nine Inch Nails, Dismemberment Plan, Jay-Z, and Sufan Stevens). And what both acts end up doing is fulfilling that innate desire of just about every cynical, cranky, jaded critic who’s heard it all — every variation, every innovation, every hook and every production trick and every effort to make something old seem fresh — to somehow fall in love with the form again.
*I thought about adding Spin to the list, but I’m not sure the magazine has ever developed a recognizable musical aesthetic. And no, something-other-than-Rolling-Stone doesn’t count.
Toronto music critic Carl Wilson wrote a really fantastic book for the 33 1/3 series called “Let’s Talk About Love.” It’s a deep dive into the Celine Dion album of the same name, but really more a look at why we like the things we like. For anybody who has spent time trying to write about pop music, it’s an eye-opening and fantastic read. Also really moving — Wilson wrote the book while breaking up with his wife, and treats trying to honestly enjoy Dion as a way of freeing himself from some of the more knee-jerk, elitist qualities within himself. Watching as the critical community loses their collective shit over West’s (truly fantastic) album is a good reminder that we like things partly because we like them, but also because we like what our liking certain artists says about us.
— Jake · Nov 23, 09:20 AM · #
I also think that Fantasy feels like a complete album with underlying themes (most obvious, lots of references to darkness and light throughout the album). That’s missing a lot today in our itunes era (especially with mega popular artists like Kanye). Critics love that.
— thehova · Nov 23, 09:22 PM · #
He’s perfectly positioned himself to develop just the right kind of cachet among whie music critics.
— Freddie · Nov 23, 11:17 PM · #
I thought about subtitling this post “Freddie bait.”
— Peter Suderman · Nov 24, 02:14 AM · #
Not sure I agree that songcraft is the real at-the-end-of-the-day guiding light for most popular-music critics. In fact, I’d say that’s limited to certain specialties — the power-pop niche, for instance, or the small handful of truly mainstream outlets such as Entertainment Weekly.
I’d also include Weiner in that list, but note that his straight-up adoration of pop form is actually what makes him stand out. Good old contrarian Slate is in the expectations-defying business, and that’s why Weiner fits there: His approach — a focus on pop craft — is unorthodox.
Pop criticism, especially rock criticism and its hip-hop cousin, seems more typically bound up in cultural signifying. (Of course, that’s one of the roles served by pop itself, where music choices help establish personal identities and sort out who sits where in the world’s school cafeteria.) The actual music — the song, the sound, the performance — is rarely examined unto itself, often relegated to secondary status and quickly disposed of with simple scene-setting exposition (“stormy riffs,” “Kraftwerk-meets-Beatles,” etc.).
Indie-rock writing is particularly tied up in this cultural marking, like one big, ongoing exercise in establishing in- and out-groups, in designating the latest Overton Window of cool. It rarely seems driven by concerns of songcraft; it’s about intellectual markers and knowingness and context. It’s the reason Pitchfork has been so easy to satirize.
All art is contextual, of course, but pop criticism just seems uniquely prone to context at the expense of content. Which is too bad, because I suspect when all is said and done most readers just want to know, “Will this music make me want to dance/cry/sing along?”
— Thomas · Nov 24, 04:32 AM · #
I should hasten to add -that doesn’t mean the music isn’t any good. I don’t like it, but I know fuck all about music. I just often wish the critics were a bit more open about the arithmetic of their aesthetic.
— Freddie · Nov 24, 05:42 AM · #
Freddie: Me too! Except that I sympathize quite a bit with the inability to make the math clear. And this is kind of — or at least part of — the point I’ve been trying to get at all these years, which is that music critics don’t have any kind of standard arithmetic. For some critics, 2+2=4, for others it’s 6 or 11 or BUY THIS NOW. I’m open to hearing suggestions as to how critics might be a little more transparent, though.
— Peter Suderman · Nov 24, 03:24 PM · #
The only value in understanding the critic’s math is in knowing whether you ultimately agree with them, such that their opinion becomes a useful guide, or cheat, for your choosing new music. You can gain the same understanding by following their opinions over time to see how they track with yours.
Music, for me at least, is an entirely visceral experience, I either like a song or I don’t, generally from the first listen. There are rare exceptions of songs that grow on me or in which my appreciation dissolves over time. I should add that this applies not only to Pop (short for “popular”) music, but to all genres that I consume.
— steve walsh · Nov 24, 06:30 PM · #
Oh, please: the “arithmetic of their aesthetic?” God, you must be a smart guy, Freddie? Music critics go on and on as cleverly as possible about the music they love (as do we all, maybe not so cleverly). They write volumes and now Freddie and Peter want them to be more transparent? Music is a mystery. Good music is a mystery. Bad music is mysterious in that so many people like it. Music is mathematical. Musicians sometimes make good mathematicians. But trying to explain why music is good in arithmetical terms? What the hell are you two brilliants talking about? Five stars? Five microphones? Five thumbs up? As far I’m concerned music critics may have it right about the music they love, but I KNOW they have way too high an opinion of themselves.
— jd · Nov 24, 07:34 PM · #
Re. Arithmetics of taste, I will cite my man Kant to echo what jd says (w/o the scorn towards Freddie’s entirely natural frustration): “There can…be no rule according to which any one is to be compelled to recognize anything as beautiful.” Judgment in general applies rules, but it does not proceed from them (it is “spontaneous” in Kant’s terminology), and in aesthetics there are no external rules to apply because the “object” is the subject: the phenomenon being determined is not, say, a species of lizard but a particular effect in the viewer/listener/etc. Affirmations on this basis have a “subjective universality.” I.e. we make aesthetic judgments “requiring” (i.e. anticipating or hoping for) assent from others but lacking any standards for gaining that assent. In a sense, every aesthetic judgment is an attempt to create or circumscribe a community in which this judgment is held to be valid. Of course, actual judgments do not drift out into a pure medium of latently shared taste and catalyze an unadulterated sensus communis. They emerge into existing communities riddled with or (if you believe Bourdieu) utterly constructed by anxiety and power and class bias, i.e. taste functioning as a weapon of social positioning. This is the frustrating thing about all arts criticism – its tendency towards scenesterism, the persistence of sleazy sub- or supra-aesthetic forces – but it cannot be resolved with reference to rules or arithmetics. A good confirmation of this is that whatever rules of taste you might think you’re applying, you can always find some asshole who is perfectly exhibiting the rules you think are THE rules but whose music/art/etc. you think totally sucks. If you think of tyranny as power wielded indifferent to external validating criteria (consent, results), then the power wielded by arts critics is inherently tyrannical. I don’t think this is an argument against arts criticism, which I love and find to be a sustaining cultural practice. It is an argument of arts critics to offset their megalomaniacal tendencies with a degree of generosity and circumspection towards the things they might be inclined to ravage or suck up to, and for people to interrogate critical biases – the contradiction between the universal form of critical judgments and the particular forces that secretly condition them – by asking questions like the one in the heading of Peter’s post, every so often.
— Matt Feeney · Nov 24, 08:47 PM · #
Matt:
Exactly so. I couldn’t have said it any better. In fact, I couldn’t have said it at all. I’m actually thinking that my keyboard might be different than yours.
I wish I had taken that Kant course in aesthetics way back when I could still read more than a few paragraphs at a time.
Back to the point, I think music is singular in its mystery and appeal. You can’t explain why some musical hooks work. They just do. I suppose visual arts and poetry have some similarities, but I don’t see that they have the same ability to click something inside you that says, YES, AMEN, AWWWW YAAA!!! It clicks and you want to hear it and feel it again. It goes directly to the pineal gland and says, How was that?
Music criticism is basically one guy telling you he likes it. If you tend to agree with that critic more often than not, then you can check it out. For me, a good critic starts with the Duke Ellington rule: “If it sounds good, it is good.”
— jd · Nov 24, 09:49 PM · #
I could point out that there is an obvious (even, perhaps, Categorical) difference between how music accomplishes what it does, and how someone chooses to define his or her presentation of how music is working in the mind and in the writing of music criticism. After all, if you merely say that there is no way to describe the musical experience… why write about music at all? Even here?
But that would be having a conversation, jd, and you don’t want to have one.
— Freddie · Nov 25, 03:41 PM · #
Aestheticians,
Read and then discuss:
http://videogum.com/249822/taking-one-for-the-team-the-brokencyde-concert-challenge/franchises/taking-one-for-the-team/
Thanks.
— D-Rock · Nov 25, 04:56 PM · #
Why did you link us to that, exactly? If ieanted lame 2007-erab poorly done snark, I’d go through Gawker’s archive. (The statement as a question thing? I don’t know? If it was ever actually funny? And certainly isn’t now?)
PS I would so much rather live The Hits life than that dudes.
— Freddie · Nov 25, 06:40 PM · #
Freddie:
I confess that my comment was a dig at you and Peter (though I agree with Peter as much as I disagree with you) and virtually all the writers and commenters here. I think that you guys are a little too much in love with your writing talent, sometimes at the expense of saying what needs to be said. You and your colleagues just love each other and your beautiful sentences. Music critics are especially good at filling up pages with cleverness written for other music critics when those of us who might want to give a listen just want a thumbs up or a thumbs down. I have enjoyed music criticism. Still do. I buy the Oxford American Music issue every year. But somehow the “arithmetic of their aesthetic” was just a little too precious, especially from someone who knows “fuck all about music.”
By the way, what did Peter mean by calling this post “Freddie bait?”
— jd · Nov 26, 02:55 PM · #
From Rhymes with Cars and Girls (a blog):
“So it’s basically hip hop/R&B, right? Am I missing something? I’ll grant that I can certainly imagine (from the 30-second cilps) that it’s an especially good hip hop/R&B album. But that’s like saying that a brand of paper towels makes an especially good paper towel. It’s fine, but there’s an intrinsic ceiling as to how excited I’m capable of getting over it. Ultimately, you’ve still got a guy grunting ‘yeah’ and ‘uh huh’ over a drum track.”
— JD · Nov 26, 03:14 PM · #
1) jd – you’re on fire.
2) How can we have this discussion without mentioning Kanye’s review of “Single Ladies.” I still don’t know if he was serious. I mean, that video is a bunch of people doing the same dance move and singing the same lyric over and over again, with some uninteresting variations, right? But Kanye West, acknowledged hip-hop genius, thinks it was the video of the year. So is West just f-ing with us? Or does he see something in it it that I don’t?
2) Generally, for me and music”
(a) There are some things that blow me away because they do something I’ve never heard before, in a striking way. (Early Eminem was like this. Tribe Called Quest rode the same wave 15 years earlier). Often this category doesn’t age well, once we’ve had time to get used to the new flow, but sometimes its timeless.
(b) Some personal hits do something I’m completely used to, but better. (Mama Said Knock You Out is a good example — nothing particularly new, just better than 99% of the stuff that used the same tricks).
( c) A few just touch me directly, in ways I find hard to explain.
— J Mann · Nov 29, 03:47 PM · #