Another View: I’d Rather be Disliked than Ignored
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I just heard a panel discussion at the Village Vanguard about the state of jazz–there were three jazz critics and three jazz academics on the panel. One critic, Gary Giddins, said he doesn’t waste his space writing about things he doesn’t like. He also said that jazz writing shouldn’t be just boosterism but that he was in fact a booster.
If you only write about what you like you allocate to yourself tremendous power. If you don’t like something but it is part of human discourse, part of the range of expressions that are out there, you hide it with your disdain–not even worth the time to criticize. I’ve read reviews of films that were panned and thought I’d like the film. We, your reading public get short-shrifted in our understanding of your biases if we only hear about what you like.
Doubly annoying, the academics at this same panel discussion proclaimed they based a great deal of their work on what critics say. Well, the critics are severely circumscribing the discourse with their omissions. Commercial art is often written about whether it’s liked or not because big bucks are behind the promotion of it. Less commercial, more sincere, and sophisticated work is left hanging by a thread in the hands of demagogues.
We shouldn’t waste our talents that way. We need ideas floating around. We need to hear from the whole range of bright, sensitive, brave, articulate, truth-seeking, creative artists. We need them, we should treasure them, foster them, make it easy for them.
It seems like there are lessons that have yet to be learned. The people who today treasure artists that suffered real deprivations in their lifetime are still more than willing to do the same thing to the artists of their own time. Gary Giddins, discussing Monk, said innovative artists always have a hard time and suffered, yet Giddins is one of those people who contributes to the suffering of many an innovative musician in the time he lives in simply by ignoring them.
So critics, write about things you don’t like, use your power of description. Maybe others will like it or get incensed and/or inspired by it. At least your readers will know it exists. Aren’t you writing, at least in part, to serve us? Don’t you have a responsibility to seek out a vast range of things that are going on and to let us know about them?
Reviews aren’t just an opportunity for press kit blurbs. Reviews that are only exercises in glad-handing are worse than useless, they’re numbing. I think you understand the power accrued by limiting the dialogue to music you approve of, a.k.a. like. The range of powerful human expression is bigger than our individual likes and dislikes.
A friend of mine said, “How do they know they don’t like if they never see (hear) it? As far as I know only one New York critic has ever attended one of my performances (which are evening-length collages using improvised and notated music and words with chance elements, electronic music, and video or film). Press releases with personal “notes” have gone out, callbacks have been made, advertisements have been placed, and demos have been sent throughout the fifteen years I’ve performed in New York City. When I can afford it, publicists are hired. But as all small business people know, you have to have or generate enough money to keep your initiatives going.
My frustration with this situation is balanced by an interest in what is going on and how the world works. When there is a flash of contention in the cultural pages it seems to die back quickly. The fights brought to the public’s attention are short and intense; and it seems to me, from my extreme prejudice and boredom with these self-same pages, many battles are not joined.