Courtesy of Random House
I’ve been reading—with varying degrees of amusement and outrage—Steve Almond’s book Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life. Amusement, because Almond is a capable writer whose work I have enjoyed in the past. His 2005 book, Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, sent me scouring the aisles of local five-and-dimes in search of Valomilk cups and other types of sweet treats I hadn’t thought about since I was a kid.
The outrage, though—that comes from the low regard Almond has for my profession of the past 20 years or so: that of music critic (although I’ve always preferred the term “music journalist,” because it more accurately reflects what I do). Almond thinks he knows of what he speaks, because he was a music critic himself. Despite his utter cluelessness about music, he claims in the book (and in a Boston Globe op-ed piece, “Love Music, Hold the Criticism”) he fell into the job because of “a willingness to work nights and hit my deadlines.” Almond describes his road-to-Damascus moment after a night he spent reviewing an MC Hammer concert. (This is back in the days when Hammer could still hurt ’em, on an arena-sized scale.) Almond spent the show writing snarky comments in his notebook and later published two reviews: one of them a nose-in-the-air dismissal of an experience he obviously considered beneath him; and the other an appreciation of the show from a fan’s point of view.
“I turned my attention to the folks all around me,” he writes in the op-ed. “They were enthralled. And what I realized as I gazed at them was this: I was totally missing the point.”
As a result, Almond essentially lost his religion. He felt that music criticism was pointless because of what he calls the “Music Critic Paradox: that we can’t capture in words what it feels like to listen to music.” This is essentially the old argument expressed by, depending on whom you believe, Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello, or someone else entirely: that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Well, perhaps. But, in truth, it can be done, and it has been done for years. Maybe even about MC Hammer.
I’ve covered plenty of concerts featuring bands whose music is—to say the least—not my cup of tea. But unlike Almond, I’ve never once prejudged them. Not the Jonas Brothers. Not Mannheim Steamroller. Not even Yanni. I found that for concerts like those, all I had to do was simply report on what I saw and heard. The details proved damning enough without me having to pile on with a bunch of nonsense that I thought would make me look cool.
In the book, Almond prefers to call himself a “DF,” short for “drooling fanatic.” He writes about some of his favorite artists, nearly all of whom are obscure. I share some of his fanaticisms—with Joe Henry and Ike Reilly— while others—his self-described man-crush on Bob Schneider—I most certainly do not. But what I am completely baffled by is Almond’s insistence on meeting his musical heroes and hanging out with them—inserting himself into their lives in ways that always turn out to be awkward and never actually help in terms of understanding the work at hand. What Almond ultimately finds out in his unseemly stalking of Reilly, Schneider and Dayna Kurtz, is that, offstage, that while their work may be transcendent, the ultimately unheralded artists he champions are just average Joes and Janes who’ve got troubles of their own. And now they’ve got a drooling fanatic in their living room and he won’t leave.
In the end, the work is what’s important. There is such a thing as critical distance for a reason. Doing thoughtful interviews of artists certainly helps, but trying to be friends with them, or worse yet, trying to help their careers, does not. And besides, that’s not journalism.
I could have told Almond that years ago and saved him a lot of airfare, nights spent sleeping on strangers’ floors and long, uncomfortable silences between him and his heroes. But then he wouldn’t have written this book, or the op-ed. And I wouldn’t hold that Steve Almond thinks that all music critics are worthless simply because he was a bad one.
