I met someone recently who told me they occasionally read this blog and at some point in the conversation he told me he thought my subtitle, All Pro, No Con, was my way of saying that this blog is very professional. Funny. But no, it's just a little mission statement: that I try, as much as possible, to only write about things I like.
This led to the topic of a recent conviction of mine: there is no value to music criticism. And by that I don't mean thoughtful writing about music but the use of the medium to put something down. The idea of the act as a judgment.
I've done plenty of music criticism myself and even a few pans, particularly in the few exhausting months that I wrote for a local web magazine and had to write record and film reviews by the dozen every month. But I realized at some point that wielding my creative energy for the purpose of tearing down others' work was making me feel gross, in part because I'm a musician but mostly just because I'm a spiritual being.
Eventually, I couldn't really think of what purpose it was serving. I tried asking myself, was I acting as a filter, helping consumers sift through the internet-released landslide of pop culture, battling the problem of media saturation? Maybe, but I don't buy this excuse. The best filter against something mediocre is to just not talk about it. There is so much amazing music and art, a lot of it going criminally underpraised. What if all that copy space was devoted only to praising things that we believed in, instead of snarky jabs about records that failed to pique our interest in the 1 and 1/2 listens we gave to it before penning a review.
I brought this up to talk about the new Prince double album LotusFlow3r/MplSound and how the problems of excessive and negative analysis can be harmful not just culturally, but to the artistic process as well if they get out of hand.
I read Jess Harvell's passionate but frustrated dis of the new Prince records on Pitchfork yesterday. As a lifelong fan of certain artists who've continued to offer diminishing returns I could empathize with the over-aware fanboy perspective Harvell brought to listening to a new release by a seminal artist loved since youth. For instance, I will continue buying new U2 records the day they come out for as long as I live - it's Pavlovian - and I will continue having a love-hate reaction to them. I don't take issue with Harvell's dismissal of these albums in principle, but I do think that they're a case of someone being too close to the music, with too much personal history invested in the artist, to see them for what they are.
I only began to listen to, and love, Prince's music five years ago. I got a copy of Sign O The Times and it blew my fucking mind. My biggest issue with the Prince I had heard up until that point was the sheen - the wedding-band keyboard patches and Guitar Center-ish axe lines. I just needed to hear Deranged Prince, the pitched-warped funk vocals, the bony drum programming, the screaming and sex, the gaudy futurism, the sheer out-ness of it all.
As far as I can tell, the stock complaint about new Prince material is that he's just imitating his past brilliance. But listening to LotusFlow3r/MplSound, much of which sounds uncannily like an '87-vintage session cut concurrently with Sign, I fail to see what the problem with that is. Because Prince's brilliance was never co-opted. Unlike, say, Pearl Jam, who had hundreds of imitators take their sound and drag it through the mud by soulless imitation, I've never heard anybody make skewed pop music that sounded even remotely like Prince's best experiments. Listen to a track like "Valentina," the whole thing, and try to picture anybody else in pop today who could have composed this, let alone performed and produced it as well.
This is the problem with longevity in pop music. You can't win. It you break ties with your past, people are going to whine about the good old days. On the other hand, if you do more of the same, no matter how brilliant, they're going to pull the self-parody card on you. I have no doubt that if Jimi Hendrix was alive today he'd be dealing with the same underwhelmed analysis.
I like the fact that Prince just keeps making records. There's a workmanship to it that makes a nice balance to his other extravagances. This is someone who's weathered the storm of has-been accusations, whose dealt with people trying to fossilize him by framing his '80s work in hallowed terms and crafting a Michael Jackson-like narrative about him in which an '80s prodigy loses the magic in the '90s as the result of his self-indulgence and inability to innovate within a changing music culture. It would have been so easy for Prince to go all Kevin Sheilds on himself and crumble under the weight of his own legacy. Instead he just keeps doing what he loves without suffering from the psychological rot of self-doubt. There's a lesson in there.
Prince's showy self-love is the thing people are quickest to criticize him for, an Elephantitis of the ego. But it's also what's kept him functioning all these years when he was supposed to be disappearing in the retro shadow of his past brilliance.
LotusFlow3r/MplSound is some amazing music. As future-funky as it ever was. As long as you don't over think it.
Prince - "Valentina"
Prince - Chocolate Box
Prince - Here
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