| January 3, 2005
Attn: Rick Overwater
I have just read your open letter to the music department of December 23, ("Music Critics Suck"), and was impressed by the number of interesting points you raised.
This said, and with all due respect, it’s attitudes like yours that have turned the once rather admirable CBC into the Stepford Wife of the Canadian arts community. You are so comprehensively wrong, I hardly know where to begin.
Perhaps the basic problem is that you ask some very good questions – What does it mean to be a music critic? What should be the qualifications for this job? How will the Internet change all this? – but then decide that they’re not worth answering because music writing should, a priori, never be taken seriously.
Pop criticism is certainly a marginal activity, but I have always felt that it was precisely this marginality that made it important.
The CD review section of a small weekly is one of the few places left in the mainstream media where you can still find people writing about what they believe to be important in the terms they (and not their parents or employers) think appropriate. Elsewhere, the financial and political stakes are too high to risk confusing or offending readers, or being fired.
I hope I don’t need to point out to you, or to any of our readers, the role that music plays in our lives, not just as entertainment but also as a tool of socialization and personal development.
It is through music that we learn of society’s false dichotomies and equivalences, that contrary to what you see on TV, cool is not the enemy of conformity but its best friend, that power is not the opposite of cowardice but its dream, and that originality has less to do with saying something new than recognizing when something has not been said enough.
It is largely through music that we teach ourselves to accept or to resist, to just go along with what others consider proper or to explore the world on our own terms.
And it is largely through exploring music on our own and then discussing our discoveries with friends that we learn the limitations of formal qualifications – the simplifications and over-generalizations, the disconnects between theory and practice, the rapid obsolescence of expertise. It is no coincidence that alternative music mags almost always originate at universities, as a reaction to our undergraduate experiences.
While popular music may not be as serious a subject as politics, I doubt that there is any better introduction to any of the social sciences or humanities than the spectacle of contrasting and contradictory viewpoints that a good CD review section presents (often within the same article).
Yours amicably,
Timothy Heck
P.S. For the record, my credentials, in order of importance:
1. My CD collection is larger than yours.
2. I did a radio show on campus radio for longer than you.
3. I’ve been in a wider range of bands than you: a punk rock band in ’79, disbanded after three months when we realized that we were already two years too late to be relevant; a twee pop band in ’91, and a laptop-post-trip-hop project in ’98.
4. In 1990 (or thereabouts), the music editor of a major Calgary daily held a seminar on music writing attended by aspiring critics from across the country. He used one of my Vox reviews as a perfect example of what he would never allow to be published in his newspaper (among many lesser sins, the review boasted two layers of footnotes). |
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