"You Think Too Much..."

A preoccupation that weighs on me when I think, write and talk about music is whether or not I'm thinking about it too much. I think about my whole blog and desired career path being about the sharing, publication and analysis of music and wonder if I'm just sort of talking to myself and a few sparse others in the wind. First of all, how many people really care? I'm thoroughly different from a lot of my friends, even some of the closest, and I love them all hugely. But so many just don't really seem that bothered about the music I listen to, or the way I think about the music we all listen to. For a lot of people I know it doesn't really go beyond what they just enjoy hearing on the radio. And I often find myself wondering, shouldn't that just be how it is? Music made, goes in your ear, you enjoy, will listen to again, end of story. Shouldn't it all be that simple?

"And everything I had to know
I heard it on my radio"
- Queen, Radio GaGa

All my blog posts, my desire to pick apart everything about an artist, my distinction between music that's objectively good and music that I enjoy, my obsession with genre names, my increasing tendency to hunt for the influences on a track/album/artists - is it all just a bit too much? Sometimes I do feel like it is.

I know that a lot of the faithful readers of my blog are familiar with the music review website Pitchfork. If you're not, I'll provide a brief explanation. It's a highly reputable online source of musical criticism, publishing extensive album and track reviews, interview, articles and more. It's one of my personal favourite sources of new music, but I'm fully aware of some of its flaws; flaws that other people take in a much less positive way than I do. Pitchfork is, by and large, taken in two ways. It's either the irrefutable Holy Grail of musical criticism, the overlord of good taste and musical divinity, or the height of pretentious, intentionally "indie" balls that strives to sound intelligent and perceptive but is actually vacuous and self important. And I can fully understand why people take the second reading, though it's one that I disagree with.

Pitchfork assign decimal ratings to every album reviewed. A few popular recent albums and their scores:

The Fame Monster by Lady GaGa: 7.8
The Suburbs by Arcade Fire: 8.6
Come Around Sundown by Kings of Leon: 3.6
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West: 10.0

Now, as you might expect, such specific scores are accompanied by (mostly) extensive, in depth, detailed, highly analytic reviews. I read the vast amount that are published now and they highly inform my own writing and analysis. But sometimes I sit there, reading, and part of me thinks "is this too much? I mean this is just a new album, right? Is there really this much to say? Surely this guy is reading too much into this?"

People of a more hostile and deriding nature than myself published a parody of Pithfork a while back called Rich Dork Media. Sadly the parody site doesn't seem to be available any longer, but there are a few quotes from actual Pitchfork reviews which were used as "justification" for the parody, examples of the kind of supposedly pretentious, overwrought criticism that people dislike about the site. The choicest one for me is one from the review of Radiohead's Kid A - regarded by Pitchfork as the greatest album of the last decade. It reads:

"The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who."

Now I read that and just have so many conflicting voices flaring up inside me. I think how that might seem to different people I know. To many it may just seem like senseless babble. To others it might be extremely eloquent prose. Another, the perfect expression of their own feelings about the record. As someone who has listened to Kid A plenty of times now, I agree with what the reviewer is saying. And I love how he expresses it. I think that review is brilliant. I agree wholeheartedly. Yet I fully understand why someone would deride that writing. And I just can't help but wonder - am I thinking too much?

It's interesting that the indie community nowadays, convinced of its own impeachable nature and the deplorable nature of mainstream shallowness and spite, is in fact full of more factions and feuds than the mainstream pop universe. And as someone who - thanks to lots of normal, down to earth friends - finds himself firmly surrounded by indie music and the depths of obscure internet blogs as well as the comings and going of the Top 40, I end up feeling torn between all of these different groups and ideas. I want to be analytical, thoughtful and respectful to an artists work; and I also want to be able to unreservedly and simply enjoy a great pop song, yelling out a massive choon with my friends. Maybe it comes down to a fear of being myself. And I don't know why. My friends who have no interest in the supposedly pretentious realms of Pitchfork and its ilk are hardly going to think less of me. My other friends who read Pitchfork (FYI: I don't want this to seem like I'm ripping on Pitchfork. A lot of the blogs on the right of this screen put me in a similar position) are pretty much all as aware of things like this as I am, and either take it ironically or don't seem bothered. It's hardly as if I'm a professionally published critic, open to the derision of a paying readership, other critics or my boss. And even if I were - so what?

So at times when I feel like the weight of the musical world, with all its avenues and alleyways, is weighing down on my overloaded teenage mind, I cast my eye around, considering the value of everything I write in this blog.

And my faith is restored.

I see some artists, some bands, some albums, that comfort me. They reassure me. Not to say that my identity consists in all of this - far from it, I'm a Christian and my whole identity begins and end in Jesus. It just happens to take music in along the way, under his jurisdiction. A few immediately obvious things just reassure me. Let me know that I'm not thinking about this too much. Why? Because the artists who made the music put months, maybe years into their music. They thought out every detail. Lyrically, musically, visually. They put it all there, they spent their time thinking about it, probably a hell of a lot more than I'll ever do.

Like I probably will will all pop music now and forever more, I looked at the whole thing through the screen of Lady GaGa. There has never been a popstar who has had things more thought out than Lady GaGa. Perhaps slightly ironically, here's a quote from the Pitchfork review of her album The Fame Monster:

"...between the VMAs and "Paparazzi", she came into her own. And on "Bad Romance", the lead single from The Fame Monster, she became kind of awesome."

This set up for the next quote, from later in the article:

"I'd say once she became hideously popular Gaga was able to take more control of her career, the early result being 'Bad Romance'"

Taking her as a specific example. Lady GaGa HAD to have a master plan. Her ascent into pop's highest heights had to have been drawn out in every details and every phenomenally gargantuan action. As soon as she gained popularity from a fairly standard pop debut, she launched the first true offensive. Every outfit, every interview, every performance, every variation, every song, every video is strategically designed, thought out, staged and released by GaGa and her squad, The House of GaGa. It's brilliant. The amount of time (and money) put into it by a woman who is inarguably one of pop music's greatest geniuses is astonishing. And when she puts that much thought and effort into it, it is only reasonable and only fair that you and I should think about it. Should talk about it. We should be asking "why has she done that? Why is she wearing that? Why is this video like this?"

Now part of GaGa's assault on pop culture has been the rejection of the over familiarisation of the popstar and our increasing fascination with a Heat magazine culture that insists of rifling through the bins and underwear drawers of celebrities. And that attitude ironically (yet knowingly so, of course) draws waves of analysis and speculation.

Lady GaGa is just one example. Kanye is of course another, though is massively on the other side of the coin at the same time. Other recent examples would the Arcade Fire's album The Suburbs, which is probably one of the greatest cohesive wholes ever recorded. Crystal Castles with their effortless and terrifying mystique. These New Puritans who released Hidden earlier this year, an album that can't be listened to just once. The list goes on.

I will doubtless encounter the inner conflict I've described again and again throughout my life. Probably again before the week is out. But when I sit back (really far back) and look at the music that I love and the artists I appreciate, I slip into a wonderful place. A place where I can freely voice all of my thoughts about some music, listing the assocations, stimulations, images, links and reminscences it triggers in my mind. I can rant about it, wax lyrical about it or lay into it because I know that the artist has likely put time and energy into it that is deserving of such analysis. Sure, there is definitely going to be SOME point where you're just talking fluff, but that's probably quite far down the line. And when an "artist" or group hasn't put thought into what they do, then there's plenty of cutting criticism and bitter blogging to be done there too!