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On Reviewing III (and the way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me)

You meet neat people in the blogodome. Friend of the press Sarah Pinder over at Bits of String has recently uploaded a brief essay on reviewing which stemmed from reading this earlier dialogue on reviewing done over at Lemon Hound and has brought me to  a point where I felt I wanted to weigh in, as both someone without reviewing experience, and someone who has a lot of ideas about why and if reviews are important.

I remember sitting in my intro to film tutorial, surrounded by the stuffed shirts that leaned back in their chairs and gave sideways comments to the teacher about the nature of light and dark in Citizen Kane, or the lack of heart in Woody Allen’s later films.* We were discussing I am Cuba, a joint production by the Cuban and Russian governments to both showcase the expansive landscape and the extreme poverty / bangin’ social nightlife of Cuban citizens. One of the sideways-sitting, longhaired, Cassavetes-nuts started off a sentence with, “I mean, it’s a beautiful film…” And I felt shocked. Betrayed. Surrounded by a room of people my own age that were raised on Hollywood comedies, action films and severe oscarbation, I felt alone in not really enjoying this swooping look at the Cuban mountainsides. I thought we were in this together.

I admit that I am Cuba was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and I was younger. I’d probably appreciate it differently now. I know that. But my brain, (which I’m told is still probably the same physical size) did not have the mechanisms to appreciate it. And this guy did. His experience with cinema was fundamentally** different from mine. And of course, he was wrong.

The classroom setting of my INI115 Intro to Film Tutorial is a petrie dish example of the problem of the review in all of its microcosmic splendor (you’ve probably had a similar class and can substitute your own experience): Fresh out of high school, a room of embattled post-teens fight to dig their foothold in the great wide real world. These are people that no longer have to answer to anyone, and are willing to challenge even the established educational system at the very first opportunity. Each one hears their own voice floundering in the din of other voices. Each is hell-bent on getting their point across not because it is right, or because necessarily it offers something important to the dialogue, but at its very heart, it relates personal experience. Reviewing for a publication is no different. Offering a review of something, anything, relates your personal experience toward the genre, album, author, etc. That’s it. That’s all it can do.

But I don’t think this is a dark and cynical take on the printed review. This is the length to which its capabilities stretch–to offer another brain to the discourse, that is all. And yet we take these reviews as bible, as passable fact, as empirical evidence of a book’s worth or shit-ness. I’m not saying that people won’t go out and still form their own opinion, but we often appreciate the review for more than what it is: one person’s varied experience towards something. This is lunacy, and incredibly dangerous, because we run the risk of keeping anyone from really contributing to the discourse. As Pinder says, too truthfully, it’s easy “to be concerned about your interpretations not being correct,” and why should anyone’s interpretations of a material be wrong? Because the other people know more? We should be appreciating not what was said about a work, but how many people have spoken.

In the Lemon Hound interview, Jennifer Scappettone verbosely describes the ideal function of reviewing as, “to engage in a more profound dialogue with another writer than can be had in pre- and post-reading moments, across distance and time.”*** The review is meant to build community, but far too often is it held to an standard of exclusivity, of right and wrong. This ongoing fight for everyone’s opinion to be heard is important, and not in the “everyone is a precious snowflake” way. It is important we are still sitting, wavering, on the fence that is protecting us from a new era of experience and criticism brought on by the internet and the hideous act of blogging.

I’m the first to argue that books will not survive on the internet. Like, at all. We will never be a post-print culture because our means of understanding the things put out in the real world are better understood in that real world. But the way that we become informed, that we start to know things, is so different from person to person. There is a vast wealth of experience available from the library to the movie store to YouTube that people can access at whim, and there isn’t a reviewer alive that can argue that the way in which they access these things or the chronology in which they access them shapes how they appreciate them.

When I first saw the montage sequence in Rocky, I laughed.

We take the review as bible because it stems from a tradition of criticism that is slow: printed words coming out to attack older printed words, printed word being the only vestige of logic against printed words. The printed review these days is part of a canon of literary knowledge that is understood to be inviolable. But now criticism happens on a whim, in the form of a half-assed YouTube comment or angry e-mail, and we have no tools in our canon for this. The montage sequence in Rocky is hilarious because it had been parodied a thousand times before I had seen the original. People tell me I shouldn’t laugh when I see it because of how groundbreaking it was, but my experience towards this film cannot be made worthless simply because I didn’t see it in 1977.

I don’t know what to do with this information. We have a way of reviewing things that is treated with such reverence, but in reality, reviews should be given constantly. The reasons the internet is shifting to so synaptic a connection system is because of the vast and unfiltered experience each person has to offer each other person, and how important it is to aid that relation.**** Scappettone says that blogging helps allow for a “more fluid conversation to take place.” And yet we still cling to the idea that our ideas and reviews may be wrong; we still cling to a chronological canon that absolutely needs to be unloaded.

I’ve started going through the complete discography of the Beatles. Growing up I never appreciated them 1) because they were a pop band and very wussy to my ears, and 2) because every single person on earth told me that they were the greatest band who ever lived. Not only did I want to rebel against their quiet music, but also against the authority that deemed them to be so great. That I had to fall into that appreciation without question, and that I would just listen to them like everyone else did, humming along to “I feel Fine” and “Hey Jude” without context. Growing up long after the Beatles ended, my context was weaker than those that were raised in the era, those that pass down the fact that they were the greatest band ever.

Well now I have context. I wasn’t part of the Beatlemania generation, but I am part of the Nintendo generation, and Beatles RockBand has legitimately given me a starting point, a purpose from my perspective to explore something from the past.***** So I’m going album by album, song by song. “Within You / Without You,” is the most interesting to me so far, because it’s the first of their songs (chronologically) to cross the four minute mark, and the drums are really fun on hard.

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Rocky 1 – Awesome video clips here

*Caveat: Not everyone I met in film was this pretentious. Some of them are still good friends.

**Boringly.

***She argues the real reason (self-promotion and getting the word out), but this still wouldn’t change her reaction to any piece she reads.

****Whether this is actually possible is the subject of another essay.

*****I genuinely believe this. Argue me if you will but this is my reasoning. I am enjoying the Beatles discography, but literally after having played “Boys” with my parents on Beatles RockBand and hearing them say “I don’t even think I know this song,” I discovered it to be one of my favourite tracks on Please Please Me

Tags: blog, essay, non-fiction, post-print, review

review of a moment: of walking upstairs at king station, listening to “lay down in the tall grass” by Timber Timbre

The first track of Timber Timbre’s self-titled 2009 album, “Demon Host,” plays from my front door to the subway turnstile. Taylor Kirk’s Randy-Newman-esque, jaunty, haunting vocals are arguably the perfect background to a mid-evening fall wind as far as I know at this moment, and as I change surroundings and step inside, so too does the tune change.

Stepping back onto the subway platform at King Station, my left earbud (with it’s plastic sheath peeling off) twists slightly in my ear, pulling away the sound of the guitar solo at the end of “Lay Down in The Tall Grass.” With it’s “I Put a Spell on You” rhythm the song was already fighting to keep my interest, despite Kirk’s lyrics being both disturbing and beautiful. But the act of shifting the guitar solo out of phase opens up a series of mental connections expanding past a staccato organ or brush drums.

The false-alarm volume fade charged my brain with the aural-recognition task of thinking of songs that end with a guitar solo and, moreso, end with one fading off into the distance. With its twangy guitar and long pauses, the solo could only remind me of of Keith Richards’ playing on “Sympathy for the Devil,” which has been my favourite Rolling Stones song since I first parroted the slurred and furious “get down, baby” that precedes Richards’ playing. Though the two solos are vastly different in tempo and volume, this tenuous comparison only brought my brain to realize that, at that moment, “this song was that song.”

Even if it was a bit presumptuous to assume that one song emulated the other, a brief dialogue ensued that brought up the usual hot topics of nu-rock critique of the last five years: the somnambulistic shuffle of music from rock-revival to garage-revival to folk-revival always seemed like it lacked originality, (or, in the words of friends that grew up only on their parents’ music and shunned all future recordings, “Just isn’t the same,” or “Blow-Up is the best movie ever.”) There was always something tongue-in-cheek about the waves of young artists in the past half-decade emulating the sound of singles and b-sides and rarities of music that none of their peers could remember, or actively listen to. There’s an elitism to this irony music that always rubbed me the wrong way and kept these bands independent from the mainstream. (When the word “indie” was coined to describe their sound and make it discernible to radio audiences, I had trouble reconciling my brain between the facts that 1) “indie” meant “independent,” and 2) that all of these bands were signed to major labels–I’m sure the followers of “Alternative” music felt the same way.) There was always a knee-jerk reaction to the quiet (and getting progressively quieter) music that has been popular lately. And while I believe that yes, the spirit-of-68 sound is a little tried, there’s something that even I missed while shunning it in favour of my parents’ records.

Revisiting “Lay Down in the Tall Grass,” I drew more comparisons to “I Put a Spell on You” than the Rolling Stones tune. In researching this song now, I find that there’s a thread of humour that runs through it. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins had written it as a refined blues ballad but the producer, Arnold Maxon, “brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk,” for the recording, and this new sound was born. His wailing, snorting and warbling then plays out as accident, as the things you do on the take that you can’t take back, the things that make the song–”it’s the notes you don’t play,” after all. He posed on the single cover with his best Boris Karloff eyes, wore a cape on stage to solidify the persona the song built for him and danced around with plastic skeletons. This is a man that wrote a song called “Constipation Blues.” Bill Crandall of Rolling Stone called Hawkins “the Original Shock Rocker” for this performance in his obituary in 2000.

It’s possible then that the song, “Lay Down in the Tall Grass,” is an homage or a treatment of the rhythm and macabre themes of the Hawkins original. The series of connections that resulted from a shift in volume brought the song out in a different light and, whether or not Kirk’s appreciation of the original was intentional, it does bring in to play the “funness” of all of this tongue-in-cheek musical referencing. To appropriate the position or tone of a guitar solo from one song and the spookyscary rhythm of another, Kirk must have an ear for composition. Or familiarity.

Whether this song was written from familiarity and ironic reference, or a series of organ bursts and guitar twangs and lyrics about graves can only be answered by the composer; but its position in history places it at the mercy of critics that will constantly compare it to the vast pool of “other songs.” Myself included, this brief but dense series of neural firings had all but completely coloured my opinion of the song until the stepping rhythm I was forced into up the stairs of the subway mimicked the back-and-forth plodding of the tune. Bum-bum-bum-bum-babum-babum-babum, making me feel like a funny cartoon elephant or A&W bear. And while the song does fit into a trend of quiet, folksy indie pop rock, its spooky roots point to two very enjoyable songs, made enjoyable by playful rhythms and onstage antics. If the critics and myself state that it may be wrong to criticize something for being “elitist” and having fun with something forgotten, is the thing he creates automatically no fun? Or is it possible that we can allow the entertainment value of one thing to bleed into another and enjoy it on the same principles, even if there’s no snorting?

I rate this moment: 3 out of 5, for being brief but interesting and giving me a temporarily altered perspective on the godawful term “indie rock,” but still leaving me with little hope for irony music, as the conclusions I reached at the end are more “further thinking points” than “conclusive salvage material for popular music.”

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Tags: essay, music, non-fiction, review