This Slate piece, in part on Jonathan Lethem’s 33 1/3 book, is really good. (via katherinestasaph)
So I think I guess (haven’t read the Lethem book, but have read his previous music criticism, which…it certainly does keep getting published!) that maybe the important division between Colin Meloy’s failure and Carl Wilson’s success, which is brought up at the end, and which I agree with, is that Meloy’s book was about him whereas Wilson’s book used himself as evidence. There’s a big and very important difference, it seems to me, between “personal” criticism that’s using art as a kind of thematic center around which to write a memoir or personal essay, which is either not-criticism or not-good criticism, and criticism fundamentally about art that is open and honest about the critic’s personal experience. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about yourself, or even that you can’t talk about yourself at length; it’s just that this has to be in some way about your relationship with the piece of art and what that says about art, not what it says about you. Give us something we can use for our own experience of art, not just a well-written Amazon review. Carl’s book used some great illustrative examples from his life as a way of demonstrating how many people relate to Celine Dion and as a way of being open about his own taste, and that’s great, especially when (as Carl does) you start interrogating your past self and your present self about your role as an audience member or critic or creative. (This also doesn’t mean that personal essays involving art are necessarily bad; indeed, when something is more of a personal essay or memoir, we shouldn’t be too picky about the taste aspects of it, since even if the person’s thoughts about art are tasteless or banal, they are their thoughts, and as long as that ends up revealing something compelling about the person, who cares, really.) But I think if you are setting out to write personal criticism, you need to be aware of which kind of writing you’re doing. The fact that you’re writing about a piece of art nearly sacred to you can easily turn into a conviction that it doesn’t matter what you say because you are writing about the greatest thing in the entire world, and that lazy transformation of collectively-held art into personal totem or bullshit “but I was there!”-ism makes for awfully boring reading. The mere fact that you liked an album is not interesting to anyone but you. There are too many examples of the good kind of personal criticism out there now for you to have any excuse.
