Who Killed A (Meta)Critic: Where Quant Meets Qual, And Both Are Disappointed

I’ve seen several articles over the past couple of years speculating on whether the value of criticism has disappeared with the advent of “you like this, so we recommend that” functionality on consumer sites (Amazon leading the pack). Well, not so fast. That feature can be helpful for dabblers, but if you’re reasonably up on popular music or getting anywhere off the beaten path, you’re not going to find those recommendations very revealing: if you bought one technical death metal band, they’re going to suggest you try Meshuggah and Necrophagist; if you look at anything really obscure, you’ll learn that the same people who bought it also bought Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber records. The engine runs into the main pitfalls of quantitative analysis.

Professional critics may think of themselves as defending true art from the savage tedium of the marketplace (and they may be right about that), but most people read record reviews hoping to buy something good, or avoid buying something lousy: They want an in-depth opinion from someone who’s good at forming and presenting opinions. In other words, they’re looking for qualitative analysis. And that can be extremely helpful: To name just one example, I’ll be forever grateful to Maura Johnston for hipping me to Sleigh Bells. But one limitation of qualitative analysis is that respondents (like torture victims) tell you what they think you want to hear, and in the case of music critics that results in an oddly non-conformist conformism: As Lester Bangs pointed out forty years ago, anyone looking to make a name in the field will look for stuff the masses aren't interested in, and try to get them interested in it. Over time - as the scribes push their pet acts, and their colleagues don't want to be seen as falling behind - groupthink develops, and the next thing you know there's critical consensus on boring, trivial acts like the BLAND (Beach House, LCD Soundsystem, Arcade Fire, The National and Deerhunter) Class of 2010.

Being aware of these pitfalls, market researchers usually seek to combine quantitative and qualitative analysis, and that’s exactly what Metacritic tries to do: filter all the blathering of critics into recommendations that a consumer can use. The trouble is, their methodology not only doesn’t cut through groupthink, but actually celebrates and elevates it: the flavor-of-the-month acts clutter up the top of their list, who also tend to be the artists you’re already familiar with because every other article is about Frank Ocean or Jack White. So it ends up being a technology-based version of the Pazz & Jop Poll: useful if you need to know who critics are hyping, not useful if you’re looking to find compelling art that might enrich your life or at least inspire you to put down that bag of chips and get off the couch.

Surprisingly enough, it’s that venerable Village Voice poll itself that suggests a way out of this mess: They’ve taken the annual vote numbers and thrown them up on a sortable page that lets you see, for example, which records were picked in the Top Ten by only one critic; which records were picked mostly by non-groupthink critics; and (interesting for a dweeb like me) which reviewers had the most similar lists to a given critic. That dataset only includes Top Ten picks and only covers five years, but it’s a big step in the right direction. We’re getting within hailing distance of the system I consider ideal: You enter in your favorite albums, and a database matches you up with a critic whose taste is similar to yours, but (we assume) listens to a lot more stuff and thinks about it a lot more, and is thereby in a position to bring lots of amazing, transcendent, mind-exploding music to your attention. Wait, did I just give Metacritic that idea for free? Dang.

PS In case anyone’s interested, just two of my 2012 Top Ten albums received votes in P&J: Regina Spektor’s What We Saw From The Cheap Seats and Angel Haze’s Reservation. I was much more groupthink-y in 2011, where seven of my Top Ten received votes, and my #1 pick won the poll.

High Ceilings and Low Floors

I'm rarely right, but it sometimes happens: In 1996 or '97 I was hired by an encyclopedia company to write a few music entries, and one of my assignments was Alanis Morrissette. Though her latest album was the best selling release from a female solo artist ever, I identified her as a flash in the pan, and I'd say history has borne that out. I called the decline of Oasis pretty early, too, but I wasn't confident: that was largely wishful thinking. (On the other side of the coin, I first heard Tracy Chapman and Living Colour on the same day in 1988, and instantly determined that they'd never catch on.) While those may sound easy - akin to predicting Psy will be a one-hit wonder -an artist's early peak is usually clear only in retrospect. Was it obvious at the time that Hootie & The Blowfish would never approach the success of Cracked Rear View rather than cluttering up the airwaves for years a la Nickelback? (Darius Rucker's subsequent country career proves rather than invalidates the point.)

Evaluation of potential doesn't square with an album-based rating system very well. For example, when I rated the Sleigh Bells debut ahead of Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid as the best record of 2010 I was still looking forward to Monáe's followup more than Sleigh Bells', because I had a sense that Sleigh Bells had already maximized their potential and Monáe had room to grow. To put it another way, I think she's at least one hundred times more likely to make a five-star record someday. A more recent example: in 2012 I rated Gökçe's Kaktüs Çiçeği four stars, and Angel Haze's Reservation "only" three and a half, but I'm certain Haze's best future album will be better than Gökçe's.

Where does that sense come from, and what's it based on? Well, sometimes there are obvious, easily fixed problems with an early album: The arrangements and mix on Kaktüs Çiçeği are polished and precise, while the backing tracks on Reservation sound like they were whipped up in a weekend - Haze could make a much better record without improving a whit as a rapper or writer. Similarly, it can be a positive indicator when an artist's reach exceeds her grasp: Treats shows marvelous mastery of a very limited sonic palette; The ArchAndroid reaches into a wide range of genres and approaches but not always successfully, and it's easy to imagine Monáe digging deeper in plenty of different directions. (I try not to talk about Frank Ocean, but by these criteria he's a cinch to make a better album than channel ORANGE one of these days.)

Maybe this makes me an Auteur Theory goon, but I do cherish my suspicion that low floors imply high ceilings... In other words, any Jane or Joe can cut a bad record, but it takes a true original to get far enough away from stylistic norms to make a terrible one. For example, Lumpy Gravy is worse than anything ever put out by early peak/low ceiling icon Liz Phair. So rather than pegging artists by how good they can be on their best day, you might want to hear how bad they can be on their worst.

Free to be you and me, but maybe try being someone else for a change

For the past month or so, I've been listening to a playlist on my phone that alternates tracks from my favorite album of 2011, tUnE-yArDs' W H O K I L L, and my favorite album so far in 2012, Sıla's Joker. This is partly because I profoundly enjoy listening to each record, and also because I'm sort of checking myself on whether the two are indeed roughly equal in quality (I rated each 4 1/2 stars). I do stand by my high recommendations, but the differences between the two were instructive in a way I wasn't expecting.

Though both are basically solo artists (not to diminish the contributions of tUnE-yArDs bassist Nate Brenner) who write their own material, Merrill Garbus and Sıla Gençoğlu have little else in common: the song structures on W H O K I L L are boldly original where Joker follows pop conventions; Sıla's sound is smooth and sophisticated while tUnE-yArDs is unapologetically unpolished; Garbus multitracks most of the instruments herself while Gençoğlu - at least on Joker - relies on live band interaction. It's overly reductive but not inaccurate to say that Sıla's approach is communitarian while Garbus's is individualistic. It perhaps goes without saying that Joker has been unnoticed by U.S. reviewers, after W H O K I L L was a critics' darling and Pazz & Jop winner. Finally, Garbus has a raw, instantly identifiable vocal approach, and Sıla adapts her singing style to suit each number without binding herself to a particular, locatable identity. That got me thinking (for once).

Film criticism has long differentiated between actors and movie stars, on the grounds that you go to see an actor to see her - Meryl Streep being the most obvious example - or him disappear into the character they're portraying, whereas you go to see a movie star play herself or himself (or at least the same approximation of same that they play in every other movie). And the underlying assumption has been that as great as a movie star may be (Katharine Hepburn, say), the actor is performing at a higher artistic level. What seems curious to me is that rock critics (and me as much as anyone) have tended to assume the opposite, that the sui generis performer is making the authentic artistic statement, while the singer who loses her/himself in the tune is more or less a hack. Someone pointed out to me a while ago that one reason critics dislike Billy Joel so much is that he played characters in his songs, in the musical theater tradition, rather than sounding his own barbaric yawp. I'm not retracting any of negative things I've said or thought about Joel over the years, but it's a good point: while it's one thing to assert that his parade of 70s Brooklyn guys - Joey, Eddie, whoever it is who walked through Bedford-Stuy alone - are too similar to each other, it's bordering on puerile to complain that they aren't authentically him. Without a doubt, Garbus's accomplishment is more audacious, but I think it's equally indisputable that Gençoğlu's inhabiting of received forms is more subtle and in its way more difficult: Self-expression is essential, but I in privileging it over empathy I - and I’d say I’m not alone in this - have gone too far. (DBW)

The Great Recording Artist Draft, or, What Do I Have To Do To Hear A New Angela Winbush Album?

Maybe someone can explain to me why this is a dumb idea, but I'm wondering why we can't set up a mechanism where fans of a particular artist can bid money to "draft" the artist back into the studio to make a new record. Like Jill Sobule in reverse: if you haven't been following that story, she raised about $75,000 from fans and other well intentioned folk so she could record and press her 2009 release California Years (other artists, including Cris Williamson, have done similar self-fundraisers without getting the same media attention).

I'm not talking about recluses like Axl Rose and Sly Stone, who have issues unrelated to financing which keep them from releasing product. I'm thinking more about someone like Ernie Isley or, yes, Àngela Winbush - people who presumably wouldn't be averse to hitting the studio if they could be assured in advance that they would get back their costs and (ideally) a bit extra.

I'd picture it working somewhat like an eBay auction (remember eBay? It's where you used to go for rare LPs before they all starting turning up on Rapidshare). Anyone interested could sign up for a central clearinghouse where you could put down money toward a new album by a given artist, who might or might not be amenable - it would be up to the artist to indicate interest, specify a minimum bid, etc. Everyone going to the site could see how much money had been pledged toward each artist - you could track fastest movers, newest additions, largest budgets, and so on.

The money would be placed in revocable escrow, so that you'd really need to put up the dough but you could get it back if you got tired of waiting for that next Leo Sayer disc - this would address the hypothetical problem where an artist could have an incentive to wait indefinitely, letting the budget go up and up, rather than actually making the record. Once the artist said yes, got the cash and recorded the CD, everyone who fronted money would get some freebie, like an autographed copy. (Sobule made an elaborate system with various levels, so that if you contributed enough you could even sing a duet on the record, but I doubt many artists would be that flexible.)

To really build a system like that you'd need someone to hold the money, and I'm certainly not volunteering. Thanks to the financial crisis nobody's making any interest to speak of anyway, so the only thing you'd need to worry about would be someone running off with all the money. But we're all music fans, we can trust each other, right? Right? Did I just lose everybody? Anyway, assuming the practical part can be straightened out if there's enough interest, let me throw out my price list:

Alec R. Costandinos	$50
The Abdul Hassan Orchestra	$50
Carole King	$50
Lunachicks	$50
Biz Markie	$50
Pajama Party featuring Jennifer McQuilkin	$50
Brenda Russell	$50
The Shaggs	$50
Bill Withers	$50
Chuck Berry	$100
Ernie Isley	$100
Little Richard	$100
Patrice Rushen	$100
Sleater-Kinney	$100
Àngela Winbush	$200