THE CRITIC'S DUTY I DON'T know what to blame it on-the rising of the sap after a nasty winter, the ravages of inflation and taxes (I'm writing this in mid-April), the threat of nuclear fallout, or the epizootic-but the number of letters from Irate Reader the past few weeks has been great enough to make me feel like Sisyphus watching that old rock roll down the hill one more time.
"Everyone knows," writes one correspondent, "that critics are supposed to give unbiased views untainted by personal tastes" (everybody, one supposes, except the critics themselves). Another accuses us of "practicing a criticism which vacillates between a petit-bourgeois moralism and a chatty, informal pop sociology . . . an exercise in preening and self flattery rather than an honest appraisal of music." (I, for one, delight in bourgeois morality, petit or otherwise, believe all sociology to be at bottom "pop," and doubt that an "honesty" reading can be taken off a printed page.) And still another reader, while admitting that "pop music is so inter twined with the social milieu that it is nearly impossible to separate the two," believes that "the role of the music critic is primarily a descriptive one" (it would be instructive to learn what alchemy he has found to separate describers from descriptions).
You will note that my correspondents are getting cagier: they no longer enter the lists waving the banner of "objectivity" against the heathen hordes of "subjectivity," though that is certainly what the three charges above amount to. But what is it that causes some people to conclude immediately that any opinion differing from their own is at best uninformed, at worst dishonest? One possibility is that their opinions are borrowed (ironically, from other critics, including friends), weakly held, or merely unexamined. When they are brought into question by someone who is not only paid to examine his opinions but pre pared to defend them in reasoned detail, the response is a kind of tantrum of defensive indignation. Another possibility is that it is the result of extending to universal applicability the convention of civility that rules out politics, religion, and (formerly) sex as proper subjects for polite conversation. But avoiding controversial subjects under circumstances where they might result in a poke in the nose is a practical consideration unnecessary in the world of print.
The proper stance for a critic is, I think, beautifully and succinctly typified by a line from a review in this issue by Edward Buxbaum: "I saw Fantasia when I was twelve, and it changed my life." It's all right there: the critic speaks out of the matrix of his life's experiences, he is honest about them, and he is eager to communicate their essence in a way that may permit others to share them.
This is not easy, for it requires a hard, unrelenting pursuit of the elusive, naked Self through the corridors of the resisting mind, but no opinion is worth anything without it.
The writer Flannery O'Connor says that "the moral basis of Poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God ... You ask God to let you see straight and write straight." A critic too can neither see straight nor write straight until he comes to terms with who he is, until he faces-indeed, embraces-the realization that what he knows, how he came to know it, how his mind deals with the knowledge, and how he presents it to others are all inescapably individual, unique, and subjective, that any other approach to his duties is mere dissembling.
AM indebted to the second of my correspondents above for the following: "Most of your columnists labor against the cult of expertise and instead celebrate the joys of amateurism." Yes, they do; I find that a very worthy set of goals for any musical journalist, and I could not have put it better myself.
by WILLIAM ANDERSON
Also see:
TECHNICAL TALK: Fuse Distortion? by JULIAN D. HIRSCH
GOING ON RECORD, by JAMES GOODFRIEND
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)