There Is No Such Thing As A “Good Rapper”
Why Subjectivity Is Being Confused For Objectivity
“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.” — Stephen Dedalus, Ulysses
As another year comes to a close, music listeners delight in the avalanche of year-end lists that help us to put hundreds of songs, artists and albums into focus. These numerous “definitive” directories allow us to make sense of who succeeded and who disappointed, what was the best and what was the worst, and why. But “best” and “worst” are pretty stiff terms. Merriam-Webster defines “best” as, “better than all others in quality or value,” or, “most skillful, talented, or successful.” The Oxford Dictionary says “best” means, “of the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality.”
When we think about the “best” music of 2013, do we think of the most “skillful” or “successful” albums? Perhaps not, or else Yeezus wouldn’t be topping everybody’s list — it’s neither virtuoso nor certified platinum. And how can the “best” be the “most desirable” when two people can desire two different things from the music they enjoy? Something is wrong here.
Everything that we perceive is tainted (positively or negatively) by the fact that we are interpreting it — not only through our senses, but through our biases, beliefs, and experiences, too. If you look at a red car, the shade of red you see may be different than the shade of red that another person sees. This dissonance is caused by what Stephen Dedalus (in James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, called the “diaphane” — a transparent lens through which one experiences everything with their senses. We depend on our physical senses to apprehend the world. On a metaphysical level, that applies to all that is surrounding us: the only way I really know that a tree is there is 1) I can see it, touch it, etc., 2) someone else can see it and touch it too, and 3) the signifier that is that specific tree matches my idea of what characteristics all trees inherently share, despite their variations. But the diaphane also applies to how we experience and comprehend the arts. In other words, we all put our headphones on with our own preconceived, often elusive biases and pre-existing preferences about what we like in music. Life-changing music often cracks that hard-formed shell and opens your mind to new possibilities, while more ephemeral music tends to reestablish what we already believe and love, making the art easy to categorize, digest and thus forget. To use an uncouth metaphor, it goes through your system quicker.
As music lovers who are passionate about the art in the 21st century of split-second technology, we can quickly hoist our judgment onto a new release at the click of a mouse. This is garbage. That is amazing. But what we’re really saying is, “I like this” or “I don’t like that.” Every time somebody says that anything is “good” or “bad,” the implied but invisible caveat after that is, “…to me.” When we rush to Twitter to tell the world what we think about a new album, it’s purely an expression of how we feel, not an academic analysis. And if it is an academic analysis, we are analyzing our interpretation of the music, not the music itself. Nothing in art dictates “good” or “bad” — that’s what makes it so exciting. Like Nietzsche said of morals, these are arbitrary reference points that mean different things from one person to the next. One man’s trash is another treasure. When we say that we love an album because it’s so good, we’re only attempting to add a justification for the unexplainable feeling of joy that said music sparks in us. Why is it good? We don’t know. It just is.
That’s not to say that there aren’t hallmarks of talent in music. Notes and chords are set in stone. Sure, they can bend and some of the most effective musicians on earth have used timbre to their advantage, but an A flat is an A flat, no matter who plays it. This past summer, however, when ?uestlove was interviewed by the Red Bull Music Academy, he had this to say about Dilla’s influence on his own style:
“I wanted to be ice cold [on the drums], and then I met D’Angelo and J Dilla, who then made me dismantle everything that I knew about being cold. By the time of Illadelph Halflife, I just wanted to be extremely….cold. Even now it’s hard for me to play perfect because I’ve been reprogrammed to play the opposite way.”
He goes on to explain how D’Angelo and Dilla made him play a “drunken” style, dragging the beat and losing the lifeless perfection. You might call it Dilla’s trademark swing. It gave the beats vitality and “personality,” as ?uest says. Slightly off-kilter. Not exactly symmetric. Imperfect. The Soulquarians were playing fast and loose with the rules.
Art movements are determined by the people that choose to change the direction of any given medium. At any given point throughout the history of art, one can look to the past and see styles that have already been mastered. Groundbreaking modern techniques emerge when tradition is abandoned and an artist says, “I am going to do something that no other artist has ever done before.” The biggest change in the history of all visual art was the transition from depicting forms as they are — a dog looks like a dog, a bird looks like a bird — to more abstract, often disconnected images — a dog is now expressed as a triangle, a bird as a squiggly group of lines. The traditional acceptance of “good” art was suddenly worthless. This is what the Italian and German Futurists had in mind when they said, “destroy the libraries.” They wanted the institutional establishments that dictated history to vanish from the artist’s mind in favor of finding new, never-before-explored territory. The whole point was to break the rules.
Objectivity seems to be the only way that most of us can grasp art at all. We need to know exactly why it’s good. We need it explained, justified, illustrated clearly beyond any reasonable doubt why this lands on either side of the binary discussion: “good” or “bad”. We can’t just let it float around in our minds. Burdened with the ability to reason, humans have a compulsion to get to the bottom of our feelings without simply letting them be a natural effect of experiencing a song, or a book, or a movie. There is an implied necessity amongst intellectuals, but really all humans who comprehend art, to express how they feel about any given piece of art once they’ve experienced it. But do these “feelings”, which may or may not differ from our “thoughts”, always stay consistent? Have you ever heard an album that you hated at first, and second and third and fourth, yet it somehow ends up growing on you after an indefinite amount of time spent listening to it? If so, was your primary, second, and tertiary assessment of the art incorrect? Perhaps being “correct” when it comes to articulating the value of an album is solely individual; trying to justify that correctness to other people with different tastes seems like a foolish endeavor. It seems like the best form of music criticism is when opinions are set forth by eloquent people that are deeply knowledgeable about the history, far-reaching or recent, of that kind of music, whether it’s rock, rap, jazz, opera, whatever.
Polls help capture the consensus on certain matters, from music to politics, but a true democracy will never rule because everyone can’t have their whim satisfied by the government. As music fans, we can’t all love the same piece of music, and we shouldn’t want artists to cater to our tastes. Kanye didn’t get the album sales that people expected, but Yeezus was a change of direction. Months later, people are still talking about it while critics heap acclaim upon it. Ultimately, neither Soundscan nor the media will have the last say on the impact of that album. How Yeezus is understood in the future will depend on how each and every one of us digests it. Would you rather hear something you’ve already heard a million times, or would you rather hear something brand new?
Objectivity is a myth, a golden standard vaulted high above us that we’re told to strive for. We need to stop taking opinion as fact. Instead of “this sucks,” why don’t we try, “I don’t like this.” Let’s forget the idea that critical authority comes from anywhere but knowledge of the past and the present. If a writer is tackling larger cultural movements or impacts, then knowledge plays a vital role in accuracy. But the ability to articulate subjective thoughts and feelings clearly is not only the work of a writer, but of every music listener. Deciding what’s good or bad — that’s impossible. When a writer says something is “horrible” or something is “excellent,” that’s their attempt at projecting authority. They have to go the extra mile to prove just how much of an expert they are.
Take The Grammys, an event to determine the consensus of what most of a committee likes. Notice that nowhere in the entire explanation of the process is it ever explained what the exact, precise criteria are for winning the best album or best new song. If sales or chart positions dictated how good these pieces of music were, then there wouldn’t be any need for a committee, or even the Grammy Awards itself as an event. We could just pull together comprehensive Billboard statistics, see what was on the charts for the longest and how high it was, and hammer out the definitive “best of.”
But that’s the beauty of all art. There is no formula that you can follow from point A to point B that will guarantee you critical acclaim. Otherwise, everything would be too perfect, too formulaic and standard. There would be no differentiation, no straying from the pack to discover what lies outside the bounds of our knowledge and imagination. There would only be precise mathematical calculations. Test tube music.
There’s also an element of mysterious, untraceable chance when it comes to who will like what. Calculated algorithms can only be so effective in estimating what you’ll like based on the songs you’ve heard. There’s an elusive, almost intuitive human ability to recognize what will become hit songs, and if somebody knew exactly how to do it every time, they’d work for the record labels. That’s why Beats by Dre is looking to take the machines out of the equation and replace them with human music curators. Some people just have an uncanny ability to predict what a large majority of people will enjoy. “Good” taste is a myth. Palatable, widely appealing taste is more like it. One’s taste is only called “good” when a large majority of people agrees with it, and “bad” when a large majority of people disagrees with it. Why do we feel the need to affirm or dislocate someone else’s preference with our haughty, faux expertise? One thing has nothing to do with another. You love Future and Young Thug, but your friend thinks they’re awful. Your friend loves Slick Rick and Rakim, but you don’t hear it. How do we account for these abundant differences? How on Earth does “Paid In Full” have any detractors? Taste varies. That’s why.
Music criticism is a magic trick that attempts to take the subjective and make it appear objective through a use of different terms. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t larger truths in the music that apply to genres, movements, contemporary scenes, and groups of listeners. But that’s on a macro level. You could almost call that cultural criticism, as it traces music’s development within context. Sometimes, cultural context just isn’t a good enough explanation for what we feel inside when we hear a song. We have to zoom in on specific parts of the music to grasp why it conjures up certain feelings within us.
Critics and fans often strive for accuracy, as though the quality of music should be calculated in a scientific lab to the second decimal point. Empirical judgment is all we have to resort to. We as music lovers need to think about how we discuss the music that we love and hate. Your overarching objective statements are worthless. As David Hume wrote in Of The Standard Of Taste:
“We are apt to call barbarous whatever departs widely from our own taste and apprehension: But soon find the epithet of reproach retorted on us. And the highest arrogance and self-conceit is at last startled, on observing an equal assurance on all sides, and scruples, amidst such a contest of sentiment, to pronounce positively in its own favour.”
Wide-ranging taste is in and narrow-minded snobbery is out. It’s not that we shouldn’t use the words “good” or “bad” to describe music, but people should know what we mean when we do.
