Of Music Reviews

I suppose it's easy to bag on music reviewers; there are all sorts of horrible nasty things that could be said about how practically and, for my purposes, intellectually useless a music review really is. I get the sense that these things are written by people who don't even understand how a song works, how it's constructed, what notes are, what an arpeggio is, or how simply things like melodies and harmonies are composed. I'm not saying a marked lack of musical knowledge should disqualify you from ever writing about music, but at least be honest about what you can say. In the past three days I've come across ponderously vague phrases like "vocal caress," "minor synths," and "so moving it paralyzes." What exactly is "vocal caress?" The reviewer in question chose to use it in what appears to be an assumed way (i.e. "the vocal caress"), but I have no idea what it's supposed to mean. The review certainly doesn't make it any clearer.

But I understand what these people go through. Despite years of writing about music, we still lack a critical vocabulary to describe it, and often the more highbrow the discussion becomes the more likely you are to be dismissed by the academes you talk up to and ignored by the four or five people who actually read reviews. Then there's the fact that what makes perfect sense in a song (or whose earnestness is taken for granted) sounds almost silly when you sit down to write about it. How exactly do you represent in writing what may simply be tonal variations on a single syllable? By way of example, the lyrics to the bridge of Regina Spektor's "Folding Chair" run as follows.

Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo
Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo, oo
Oo-oo-oo, oo
Ooo

And in that form, a purely literal form, they are incomprehensible. It would be easy to write off such "nonsense" syllables as nothing but an empty form on which the important play is the note or tone. This speaks to me of the way we regularly invisibilize sound, even in songs. When there are "words," we ignore the sounds and talk about the language. But when there are no "words," what do we talk about? The simple answer is, we don't.