Can You Be âProven Wrongâ About Music?
âWell, thatâs just, like, your opinion, man.â
--The Dude, The Big Lebowski
Music writing is, inevitably, a game of opinion-stating. However,âopinionâ is a word too often used as a pejorative, connoting a lack of seriousness or relevance. If someone throws out the accusation, âThatâs just your opinion,â s/he is really saying, âThis is bad.â (Though I donât have specific evidence, I have a suspicion that the same people who toss around âThatâs just your opinionâ are the same folks who will co-sign any opinion they agree with. Confirmation bias being what it is, Iâll avoid any further conjecture.) Of course music writers are writing their opinion; it comes with the territory. What good music writing ought to be, though, is the artful presentation of opinion. Giving a positive review to an album isnât the music equivalent of a scientist presenting a research paper; there are no numbers to crunch, no data sets to unveil. A writer hears an album, forms some thoughts about it, and writes those thoughts out in a manner that s/he thinks will be interesting to an audience. After that, things are up to interpretation and debate. The proper response to the âWell, thatâs just your opinionâ claim is, â...and?â
Because Iâm a believer in spirited and informed debate, I was struck by a piece written by Ernest Baker for Grantland in 2013, entitled âWhat If You Donât Like Beyonceâs Album?â, which deals a lot with what it means to agree and disagree about an album. Having discovered the piece well after its December 2013 publication, I was first taken by just how soon it was written after Beyonceâs release: a mere week. Just seven days after Beyonce was released to an unsuspecting world, the positive response to it was so overwhelming that Baker thought to ask the question, âWhat if you donât like Beyonceâs album?â The dissenting crowd, small as it was (and, it appears, still is), was already clearly partitioned off from the unanimous majority.Â
At first, Baker wasnât part of the crowd cheering Beyonce on. Not but a week after 13 December 2013, when Beyonce became one of the iconic âsurprise releaseâ LPs, Baker writes, âWell, I was one of those [who didnât love Beyonce]--emphasis on was--and I donât know if Iâve been brainwashed, or simply come to my senses.â Bakerâs experience with the record is one that many critics have with any number of albums: an experience with an can drastically change, whether it be over a week or months. Thereâs no reason why a critic should be expected to have a definitive grasp of a record over a limited window, even when deadlines are beckoning. (My PopMatters colleague Zach Schonfeld addressed this, rather brilliantly, in his 2014 piece âThe Year of the Overnight Release: How Much Time Should a Critic Get?â) Had Baker simply detailed his experience from finding Beyonce a âstandard type of goodâ into the top-tier work he now thinks it is, his Grantland piece would have been an interesting read, particularly for those who know what itâs like to pull a complete 180 on their opinion of an album.
In his Beyonce piece, however, Baker doesnât just give an admission of his changed opinion. He also interrogates anyone who doesnât like Beyonce. He answers the articleâs titular question in the second paragraph by writing, âNo, there probably isnât any place for people who dislike this album.â While he âunderstand[s] how one can arrive at that notion initially,â after spending more time with the LP he discovered just how âhuge a moment in pop cultureâ it really is. He came to realize that Beyonce is âgiving us the exact type of commitment we so often demand out of our artists.â The concluding paragraph of the Grantland piece opens with the interrogative, âIf you donât like the new Beyonce album, reevaluate what you want out of music.â
Now, there are two important things to note before approaching that bizarre sentence. First, Bakerâs piece is in large part an account of someone who simply didnât listen to Beyonce meaningfully, as he admits: âI was wrong to say I didnât like the Beyonce album after two days. I had barely experienced it... Remember those 20 times I listened to Beyonce? Those were passive listens.â To some degree, Bakerâs claims have to do with how he didnât give the music the time it needed, not that it was impossible for him to not be wowed by it from the first spin. Second, Baker does rightly point out: âBeyonce is great, and itâs not groupthink to acknowledge that.â Even in an age where hype and promotional cycles relentlessly cloud online spaces (see Taylor Swift--more on that later), it is still the case that liking a critically and/or commercially acclaimed album is not an admission of drinking Kool-Aid. Much of what Baker says about truly engaging with Beyonce (such as his spot-on observation about the âthumpâ of âPartitionâ) is evidence of actually listening to an album, rather than adopting the buzzwords and catchphrases of social media. I have no doubt that Baker genuinely enjoys Beyonce on his own terms.
I also have no doubt that there are people who genuinely donât enjoy Beyonce on their own terms. Thatâs what makes music such an elusive force: no matter how revered or canonized a piece of music, there will always be dissenters. Some people donât think that highly of Beethovenâs 5th Symphony. Not everyone has the Beatles catalogue memorized by heart. (Well, save for the people responsible for Rolling Stoneâs 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.) And, you know what? Thatâs okay. Divergence of opinion is what makes music and music writing such fun enterprises: thereâs always an argument to make. I, along with many contemporary critics, love the music of Philip Glass. I could listen to it for hours. I could explain what it is that makes his style of repetition so enthralling, getting down to the level of theory. Yet I have encountered people who find Glassâ music invariably boring, a kind of sonic wallpaper. No matter how much I wax poetic about Glass, thereâs no criteria by which I can say those individuals are wrong. They have their opinions, and that is alright.
I happen to be of Bakerâs opinion about Beyonce: itâs a fine album in my view. But unlike Baker, I donât view myself as in an epistemically privileged position above anyone who disagrees with me. When Baker asks those who donât like Beyonce to âreevaluate what they want out of music,â he is saying, âThe burden of explanation is upon the person who doesnât like Beyonce.â After finally being âbrainwashedâ or âbrought to his sensesâ to the record, Baker still âunderstand[s] how one can arrive at that notion initially,â with âthat notionâ being that Beyonce is not great. Here, Bakerâs language takes on the tone of the scientific proof: Beyonceâs greatness (or lack thereof) is a ânotionâ that can be proved or disproved, and in Bakerâs view, if you give the album âtime to set in,â you cannot help but admit that it is great.Â
Music would be extremely boring if it worked this way. There is no âbeing proven rightâ or âbeing proven wrong.â Even if one comes around to a different opinion than she initially had about a record, it is not that she was âproven wrongâ; rather, her experience with the music has changed. Quite often, a reversal in opinion has little to do with the acknowledgement of facts about the music, but instead about the time and place of oneâs life. An embarrassing example: as a budding guitar player, I was really into the music of Dream Theater. That bandâs obsession with technicality and intricacy are like crack to a young guitarist trying to explore the fretboard. Years later, *surprise surprise*, I find that music a little more than excessive, but I didnât âproveâ anything in the process. Hell, there are still some Dream Theater tunes that I find really rewarding. As a pre-teen learning an instrument, Dream Theater made sense to me. As an adult who has listened to a lot more music, it doesnât anymore. Looking back I know thereâs nothing I could tell my 12 year old self that would âproveâ Dream Theater to be a âbadâ band.
The ethos of Bakerâs Grantland piece, however, is that with albums like Beyonce, the only thing you need is time. Bakerâs experience with Beyonce--a snap judgment later overridden by a thorough listen--is one thing. By asking listeners to âreevaluate what they want out of musicâ if Beyonce doesnât do the trick, Baker implies that the music will eventually win everyone over to the ârightâ side. As a take on the Infinite Monkeys theorem, this reading of Beyonce is interesting, but as music writing, itâs pretty boring. Baker correctly rubbishes the notion of groupthink, yet his piece sure reads like a reinforcement of it. He writes that there is âprobably no placeâ for those who donât like the record, as if even the vaguest notion of dislike for the record is impossible to picture.
Moreover, it is of note that there is not a single place in the Grantland piece where Baker considers legitimate reasons why people might not like Beyonce. The only reasons he addresses are (1) the hype surrounding the LP, and (2) the high standards of perfection Beyonce herself is held to. Admittedly, those are actual issues in the music world: the aforementioned hype cycles do complicate the whole music writing enterprise, especially considering the short timeframes writers are expected to churn pieces out. But neither of those reasons have to do with the actual music of Beyonce. They are the clouds that overcast listeners and writers when Beyonce first came out. In Bakerâs characterization, if one waited until the skies cleared up, she would definitionally come to love the album. But Baker doesnât talk about the very different things others might see once the clouds have cleared; as it is with any other work of art, there will always be someone with the opposite experience.
This straw man by omission is something that crops up in another piece of Bakerâs (for ILLROOTS), in which he declares, without evidence of any kind, â90% of the anti-Drake contingency needs to admit that they hate Drake for purely selfish reasons and stop holding onto the notion that itâs because heâs Bad For The World or whatever stretch of the imagination they came up with today.â In that piece Baker talks a lot about Drake hatred, but fails to mention a single member of âthe anti-Drake contingency.â He cites no pieces that espouse Drake hatred, although it is quite plausible to read his own piece as a thinly veiled response to Meghan Garveyâs Pitchfork op-ed âIâm Breaking Up With Drake,â which was published a day before his ILLROOTS post. This tactic, fallacious as it is, does make his argument sound mighty strong at first pass. By framing dislike of Beyonce as something that needs to be âproven wrong,â Baker makes any dissent to the critical consensus sound like someone saying, âSo, I donât really think E = MC squared, you know?â
This âconsensus-as-fact-generatingâ crops up a lot on writing about Beyonce. She is not the only one to receive such treatment, however; Taylor Swift is probably the biggest recipient of critical gatekeeping in the present. A Buzzfeed headline declares, âYouâre On the Wrong Side of History If You Say Taylor Swift Canât Sing,â as if that is a legitimate standpoint that anyone other than the most irrational of online trolls actually holds. Corban Gobleâs Pitchfork review of Carly Rae Jepsenâs E*MO*TION concludes with a kiss-off that sounds like it was written by Swiftâs PR people: âE*MO*TION as a whole sounds like a slab of blank space. If only Jepsen had written her name.â The classic âpitting women against each otherâ tactic is here met with the lowkey mantra that Swift is the bar by which other female pop stars ought to be judged--as if, like Beyonce, her greatness is something one can be âwrongâ about.Â
The eager defending of artists like Swift and Beyonce is a lot of things, but above all else it is confusing. Pieces like Bakerâs and the many thinkpieces about Swift play into the lazy narrative of âthe lovers versus the haters,â even though by any sane account the former have won out handily in both cases. Dayna Evans smartly sums up the critical consensus on Swift for Gawker: âThe reviews of the 1989 tour have been overwhelmingly positive in that cracked-smile way that makes it seem like every writer was forced to write with a gun to his or her head.â The Metacritic profiles for Swift and Beyonce look like this:
Hardly the ratings of people being seriously challenged by haters, no? Furthermore, Beyonce has the rare distinction of having no negative reviews whatsoever; the only non-positive reviews are two âlukewarmâ reviews that are still pretty positive.Â
Writing for the Washington Post, Chris Richards argues, âDeployed reflexively, [poptimism] becomes worshipful of fame. It treats megastars, despite their untold corporate resources, like underdogs.â Whether or not the exultation of pop stars like Beyonce and Swift to the level of unassailability is specifically a poptimist problem is not of note here, but it is true that much of the pieces âin defense ofâ Beyonce and Swift are fighting a nonexistent battle. Both artists are sitting on millions of dollars given by millions of fans, and also have extensive critical adulation. As if life needed to over-literalize this issue, Swiftâs lyrics were used in a recent court decision. Thatâs right: Swiftâs greatness is inscribed in the law of the land.
There are, of course, issues where performers such as Beyonce and Swift will face unjustified social pushback, gender (both artists) and race (Beyonce) being obvious cases. But on the question of âgood or bad,â i.e. musical taste, the public, like Baker, has already made its decision on artists like Beyonce and Swift. Despite the prevalence of âright versus wrongâ narratives, dissenting viewpoints to majority opinions are rarely given substance in music writing. By and large they are only deployed only insofar as it helps establish a narrative about greatness (that, in the two prenominate cases, is already well established anyways). In Bakerâs case, the anonymous listener who doesnât warm up to Beyonce is told to simply give it time: after awhile, the âproofâ will show up.Â
So, no, there is no âbeing proven wrongâ about music, at least not in the way Baker characterizes it in his piece. The anonymous haters he alludes to in his piece donât have possible arguments for why Beyonce is a less than stellar album; for Baker, they are just impatient. Yet if Baker had scrolled through the various critical reviews of Beyonce, he would have found arguments that he is no doubt equipped to respond to. Philip Cosores of Paste writes, âThe lack of universality to much of [Beyonce] keeps it from being the great album it wants to be, and some of the fascination seems to stem from 2013 celebrity culture obsession and speaks to the need to disappear from our own lives and become so wrapped up in the world of the rich and famous.â In his review for the Independent, Andy Gill argues, âMusically, itâs the same kind of electro R&B with which radio is already awash.â
Those are arguable claims, claims that are par for the course in the world of music writing. Iâd be interested in reading a response from Baker on those terms, but based on his declaration that he was âproven wrongâ about Beyonce, I suspect he thinks that those critics will âbrought to their sensesâ in time. These arguments are fun because they will eventually bump up against a contrary opinion, not because they are scientific hypotheses meant to be subjected to tests to be âproven wrong.â Very rarely does totalizing consensus emerge on an album or artist--certain Kendricks Lamar notwithstanding. Instead of treating those one disagrees with about music as âwrongâ in a way that needs to be âproven,â one should treat them as music listeners with a divergent experience that is credible in its own right. Perhaps in time an opinion will change, but that change is not inevitable. If it were, then surely an overwhelmingly positive consensus is susceptible to the same principle.Â
Music writing as a game of rights and wrongs is dull. Music writing as a game of arguments and shared experiences is a delight. Give me arguments, not proofs. In music, proof is a fruitless exercise.Â
