Humanizing The Vacuum

Rather than yield to the temptation of posting resolutions for which I’ll be accountable in public, and inspired by Mark Richardson and Eric Harvey‘s own remarks about originality and its discontents let me add a shibboleth to the short list couple of points I made a few months ago: confusing press releases for criticism, or more generally, confusing description for criticism.

How many times did we learn this year how mixtape phenom The Weeknd evokes a bad trip at a house party or being left alone at said party scratching your nose after snorting too much blow? We often appreciate a work of art for precisely these mimetic qualities, but it’s incumbent on the critic to explain the value of these qualities and why the feelings invoked by said qualities deserve a closer look. In other words: why is an album that evokes a 3 a.m. coke hangover worth listening to? The most flippant response came from another critic, who despises The Weeknd: “If the house party was bad wouldn’t you have bounced long before the end?”

The embrace of Destroyer and Bon Iver couldn’t obviate a holding-your-nose attitude towards the eighties acts to which these acts purportedly alluded. If contempt towards a precursor is going to be the line, we owe it our readers to explain how Dan Bejar and Justin Vernon transpose these influences; we must examine the paradox whereby Chicago, Bruce Hornsby, Howard Jones, and The Blow Monkeys, to name a few artists cited all year by critics (including yours truly), suck but Destroyer and Bon Iver don’t. To be honest, I don’t think anyone came close this year — including yours truly.

I’ll see you on the other side.

…this NYT Magazine profile of Carrie Brownstein after gawking at this sentence: “Carrie Brownstein, the exuberant pixie rocker…”

Written by a woman.