you risk nothing
oh, to be a critic
Despite I already sharing an excerpt of Dodgems from my short story collection for Yours Truly subscribers this week, I was writing a Substack note that kept increasing in mass and something told me I should hit a zig-zag and deliver this impromptu rambling as a newsletter instead.
While I was on holiday in Ireland, I stumbled on an essay entitled The Unbearable Wackness of Kendrick Lamar.
The urge to respond overwhelmed me. I’ve recognised people seem to enjoy when I respond to things and to be honest, I enjoy challenging/being challenged, too. Part of the reason why I didn’t pen a response essay was because I don’t want to be known as the Substack reply guy (even if I’m good at it). This is a life-long conundrum. I’m quite good at things that I don’t want to be known for being good at.
Splitting the difference, I responded with a long comment. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of criticism in our cultural landscape today and it eventually spurred me to write this:
In the comment about Kendrick Lamar’s alleged wackness, I spoke about a phenomena I’ve observed that I like to call “chasing the argument”— “where one tries to root their dislike of something/someone in evidence but they’re working backwards from the disdain, resulting in confirmation bias that they then attempt to present as objective.”
It makes for quite clunky criticism when the critic’s disdain overpowers their writing. There’s always a foul odour. The most unpleasant critiques I’ve read are when the critic is unfunny, mean-spirited and it seems they have a personal vendetta against the artist they’re writing about. To me—to love the art form is to avoid the trap of spilt vitriol. That is what having reverence for the art-form of criticism itself is all about.
A type of critique I find myself disliking: “it thinks it’s more important than it is”.
Such statements reminds me of the Family Guy scene when Peter Griffin said he did not care for The Godfather because “it insists upon itself”. Seth Mcfarlane shared recently that one of his film history professors said it about The Sound of Music and Mcfarlane didn’t know what the fuck he meant by it.
We can try to break down what “it insists upon itself” means.
To “insist upon” something means to “believe something is important/necessary” therefore to “insist upon itself” means “to believe itself important”.
This strikes me as an arbitrary criticism.
By virtue of being art it has already been birthed because the artist believed it to be necessary.
No artist goes to such painstaking lengths to rip their ideas from the peaceful void of non-existence because they don’t think it’s important. As Chris Griffin passionately blurts out, “it has a valid point to make, it’s insistent!”
The reason why that Family Guy scene is so funny to me is because ultimately, Peter thinks The Godfather is pretentious but he says it in the most pretentious way imaginable, which sparks everyone in the panic room starts cussing him out—to the point where Stewie becomes momentarily legible to the whole family. The genius of the scene is its creation of a pretentious ouroborous. Peter declares his opinion pretentiously and in kind, his family responds pretentiously. Chris reels off the names of actors as if having talented cast dictates a movie’s quality and Lois ends the argument with a veiled insult “the language they’re speaking is a language of subtlety—something you don’t understand.”
I understand why someone would deem certain art “pretentious”.
Personally, I prefer not to label art itself pretentious because my general experience is that pretentiousness is a woefully human quality—meaning it in the demeanour of the artist or the reaction of the audience.
A great example: Saltburn. I could easily say that Saltburn “thinks it’s more important than it is” but such a description wouldn’t be Saltburn’s fault. Now, my contempt for Saltburn is well-documented. I think it sucks because it relies on cheap shock-value, has banal narrative twists and the underlying misanthropic tone of the film feels like thin-veiling for the director’s fondness of the upper-class. I can also recognise it’s a beautiful looking film. But it rings like propaganda that’s trying to get its audience to find tories hot. That makes it mid in my books. Nowhere in my analysis would it serve me to claim the film itself thinks it's more important than it is—that conclusion seems shouldered by public reception.
“It thinks it’s more important than it is” is one of those statements that says more about the critic than the film/art/music.
If you believe it—show your working. What failures of scene, theme, lyric are provoking that feeling? What elements make you feel this way? Do you feel it because of the film/art/music itself or because of the attention the film is receiving?
All art requires us to delve deep into engaging with ourselves and the form. I’m of the belief that creativity deserves more thought than “I don’t like that guy so I’m just going to unload the clip on him”. Such carelessness contributes to the quickening erosion of anti-intellectualism that is so present in our culture.
We owe it to the art forms we enjoy to have coherent criticisms of them.
Some unsolicited advice for any wannabe critics out there: Before you decide to jump into a negative critique—I’d urge you to really think about the root network of your disdain. You are writing from a place of relative safety. You likely haven’t achieved the level of success of the person you’re criticising and you do not know the mechanics that goes into making and sustaining their creative endeavours. That alone, should make you weigh your words with grace and care. In one of the replies to my comment regarding Kendrick Lamar, I was asked if I was being too charitable. I concurred, because I understand how my admiration for Kendrick informs my opinion of him. By contrast, it is abundantly clear to me that anyone who writes that “Kendrick Lamar seems like a man with profoundly debilitating paranoia, someone whose obvious mental problems combined with his overexposure will likely lead to a Kanye-West-level meltdown” is being severely uncharitable. Perhaps reality lives somewhere between our perspectives. The question of “being too charitable” is a fascinating one; mostly because our immersion in a hot-take driven culture where we function as fanatics in the coliseum fiending for the sweet stench of blood rarely warrants the question, isn’t the critic being too uncharitable? It is possible—perhaps easy—to be an entertaining hater. Y’all know I’m known to indulge. Still, I believe it is useful to have a solid and clear-hearted accounting of own your contempt. To explore it deeply, wheat must be cleaved from chaff. Separate the jealousy, shame and misunderstanding from the disappointment and disagreement. Understand your why.
Or don’t.
Each of us gets to choose.
(Here’s a somewhat related scene from Iñárritu’s Birdman that I love.)
Yes, yes!! ----> In the comment about Kendrick Lamar’s “wackness”, I spoke about a phenomena I’ve observed that I like to call “chasing the argument”— “where one tries to root their dislike of something/someone in evidence but they’re working backwards from the disdain, resulting in confirmation bias that they then attempt to present as objective.”
“We owe it to the art forms we enjoy to have coherent criticisms of them.”
Couldn’t agree more. Most criticism today AND defense by fans is about the artist and how they move in the world, not their work. Strange, but likely informed by knowing so much more about artists than 40 years ago.
In my writing, I address the need for an informed set of markers that make up a uniquely black aesthetic in music. In my view, if someone is delivering an evaluation of black music, but can’t hear timefeel and kinetic energy, they are deaf to the whole point of the music and their criticism is invalid. It is akin to someone with color blindness judging color swatches. Absurd.
I hope you’ll check out my work as I’m interested in broadening discussion around this as much as possible, and substack seems the place.