DC 11/09/09
Word count: 1,373
The wonderful new Nick Hornby book "Juliet, Naked" is in many ways essential reading for music fanatics like us. While telling a brutal story about doomed relationships and the choices people make, Hornby touches on many of the crucial questions that music fans have been debating for years. For me the most vital and interesting is this: is music something that can be evaluated and rated in absolute terms (e.g. "this record is good, this is bad"), or is it really something subjective that can only be assessed in terms of the impact that it has on a particular listener at a particular moment. To put it simply, can you or I ever say that the Black Eyed Peas suck, based on our in-depth study of all things musical, or does the fact that a 15 year old girl really digs "I Gotta Feeling" invalidate our opinion?
In Hornby's book, one of the characters is a music enthusiast called Duncan. Duncan is an avid fan of a singer-songwriter called Tucker Crowe, and he believes that he has listened to Crowe's albums so many times, has studied their intricacies in so much detail, that he can definitively say that they are "good music". By extension, he believes that he can say with certainty that anyone who doesn't appreciate Crowe's work is an idiot, or has no taste. This reminded me of the furore that surrounded the choice of bands on this year's Warped Tour. Throughout the summer punk bands were criticising Warped founder Kevin Lyman for picking electro-pop bands Brokencyde and Millionaires for the tour, often resorting to stating that the young bands "just made bad music". Influential and respected scene figures like Anthony Ranieri from Bayside, rapper P.O.S. and even relative newcomers like Florida pop-punkers Set Your Goals were quick to declare that the bands "sucked", without so much as an "in my opinion" or a "compared to..." to soften their distaste.
Up until this episode, I'd always struggled to frame my views on this subject. When we are young we are trained to think that behaviour, art, performance can always be evaluated in absolute terms. This is necessary, I suppose, if children are ever to obey parents and teachers, and to be encouraged to avoid things that are corrosive to young minds. After this, I'd arrived at University and had Professors spend three years telling me that nothing should be examined in such a way, that everything was about interpretation and relative experience. However, the Warped episode and reading "Juliet, Naked" have helped clear up my views. My immediate reaction to reading Ranieri's comments were "wow, it's slightly ironic to hear a guy who has spent years asking people not to be judgmental about music and to think about things intelligently simply dismissing something as "bad" without even acknowledging the fact that Brokencyde perform to hundreds of kids a day, kids who seemed to be drawing real joy from their performance". I thought that Ranieri was falling into the Duncan trap of assuming that his years of experience of punk rock entitled him to declare what was good or not, what was punk or not, what was Warped Tour or not.
The problem with the absolutist argument, it now seems to me, is about the standard that you apply when evaluating something. To feel able to say definitively that something is "good" or "bad", you have to have a measure to use, a set of criteria that serve to separate things. In this case, people have suggested a number of indicators of the suckitude of the Warped bands, including:
- "they suck, because [Influential Person X] says so". Bullshit, plain and simple. Look, I will admit to having deep feelings of reverence for certain members of the punk community. If Brett Gurewitz or Tom Gabel or Dustin Kensrue says something, then I tend to view it in a positive light because of the integrity that I believe those people possess. However, I would never assume that everyone else feels the same way, or that the opinion of those individuals should automatically override the opinions of anyone else. So I'm sorry Mr Ranieri, but there are no such things as "scene points" in real life, and your word can't be taken as gospel.
- "they suck, because they don't play instruments". Well, plenty of great musical performers haven't played instruments (off the top of my head, almost every top-class rapper fits this bracket). And while Mr Punk Rock might not view rappers as real musicians either, I think the Jay-Z / Noel Gallagher Glastonbury fiasco put that argument to rest once and for all.
- "they suck because they don't write their own songs". I agree that there is a genius inherent in writing a song. I admire people like Ryan Adams, who can do it seemingly at will. I think that to be seen as a truly great musician, you have to write your own material. But to be a performer, and that's all that Brokencyde claim to be and aspire to be, you just have to get on a stage and kill it. You don't need to have written what you play, you just need to play the shit out of it. And, as much as you or I (for I don't love their output, and think that songs like "Freaxxx" potentially encourage date rape, but that’s a separate issue) might not like them, they have fans who think their performances are brilliant.
There are other standards that people have tried to use, but I have similar problems with all of them. Which, again got me questioning my beliefs, and I came to this conclusion: the thing that I loved most about punk rock when I was first getting into it was that, to all intents and purposes, it was unjudgemental. Punk rock said to me, as a 16 year old who didn't quite feel like he fitted in, "you are welcome here, whatever you are into". You might like hardcore, it might be thrash that gets you off, whatever, it doesn't matter. An integral part of being a subculture is about having flexible standards - as punk rock fans we are saying to newcomers "listen, the mainstream may not seem right for you and that's fine, you have the right to be into whatever you are into". In the light of that, turning around and attempting to tell people what they should or shouldn't like seems hypocritical - if you feel angry when people tell you that your band or the music you love "sucks", why do you then perpetuate that by telling other people that what they like "sucks"? Why not accept that they aren't the same as you, that your tastes may be different, and get back to doing something positive?
Ultimately, the thing that made up my mind, the thing that convinced me that Hornby is right in advocating the relativist view, was rock and roll. Last week, I watched a video of Against Me! playing at a festival in Florida a couple of years ago (you can see it here: http://nationalunderground.org/national-underground-recordings/29-against-me-the-fest-4 The second video is particularly amazing, if only for the phenomenal runthrough of "Problems" and the stage invasion at the end of "We Laugh At Danger (And Break All The Rules)”). Their performance was just wonderful, powerful and passionate, everything I love about music. And I realised, while lost in the energy of it all, that some people would hate it. Would note that Tom Gabel can't really sing and that the guitars are slightly out of tune and that a lot of their songs sound kind of the same. And you know what? I would love to debate that with them, I would love to try to convince them to see things my way - but if at they end of the day they didn't see it I would hope that they would accept that my opinion was as valid as theirs, and that we would part as friends. That's the problem with the "they just suck argument", it robs us of both the excitement of the debate and then the camaraderie of agreeing to disagree. Losing those things... well, that would just suck.
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