Thursday, December 3, 2009
Crickets / Music You Know What They Say About Assuming
Posted by Miles Raymer on 12.03.09 at 12:28 PM
Last week the Village Voice published a scathing review of Pelican's latest album, What We All Come to Need, by critic Stewart Voegtlin, in which he takes them to task for their "pancake-handed attempts to fuse phony triumphalism with the concrete-feet prog with which Neurosis took its baby steps but eventually, wisely discarded." He then goes on to rip on Baroness, Mastodon, Torche, and other allegedly similar bands for (I guess) not being metal enough, or perhaps just not being metal in the right way.
The review hasn't been received kindly in certain parts of the metal world, but I wasn't aware of the beef until the Daily Swarm posted a link to the review and to a well-written response from Justin Foley of the Austerity Program, a band that could easily be deemed "not metal enough" by the standards Voegtlin seems to be using.
What Foley gets at—which is also my major problem with the review—is that Voegtlin's thesis is based on the bands' motivations, which is an extremely tricky and failure-prone approach for any kind of arts criticism. Of course that's not to say it's always unsound to make assumptions about musicians' relationship to the music they create and the influences that they draw from. For instance it's pretty safe to say that music delivered with an obvious wink—like much of the output of Trans Am, a band Voegtlin weirdly holds up as an alternative to Pelican—has at least a little ironic distance involved in its creation. But Voegtlin's main problem with Pelican et al seems to be that they are, in his opinion, not emotionally invested in their music. Which is a ridiculous assumption to make.
If he's trying to say that Pelican aren't connected to metal in a deep emotional way, then he's dead wrong. I've talked to those guys, and they're the type of dudes who, if you mention Iron Maiden's Powerslave, get a strange far-off look in their eyes, then try to express exactly how much that record meant to them in high school. Guitarist Laurent Schroeder-Lebec DJed a hopelessly, chronically underattended Wednesday metal night at the Continental for months and months just so he could hang out and listen to metal with the few friends who would come out to the Continental on a Wednesday.
And if on the other hand he's claiming that Pelican aren't invested in the music they actually play—seriously, what? Only a tiny handful of acts even luck into Pelican's level of popularity without putting a lot of effort into writing, playing, recording, and the thousands of other things a working band has to do for itself, and that requires deep emotional commitment. The reason you haven't heard of 99 percent of the bands in any given practice-space building is that they don't care enough to drive to Minneapolis in January to play to seven people, or to live for weeks at a time in a van, or to go through with any of the other ridiculous shit you have to endure to get good and get noticed.
Voegtlin also uses Pelican's fans to attack the group—another dubious mode of criticism—and in this case it's way off point. He says, "The stock crowd response at a Pelican show isn't running in circles in an aimless mosh pit or cliched fist-pumping, but instead folks clutching themselves and rocking to and fro, overcome with the music's relentless emotional ambiguity." Half the dudes at any given black-metal show spend entire sets clutching themselves and rocking back in forth in contemplation of the music. If I were to use Voegtlin's favored technique and guess at his motive for going in this direction, I'd say he went after Pelican's audience, and Pelican themselves, because they don't conform to his notion of long-haired "true" metal fans.
Voegtlin is apparently in love with metal cliches, which is understandable; metal cliches can be fun. But he seems to hold them up as representations of the genre's ideal form. Fans who aren't engaging in cliched behavior are, to him, not real fans. He offers Conan-metal band Gates of Slumber as an "actual-metal" alternative to cerebral types like Pelican. Over the past decade metal has undergone an aesthetic revolution, spinning off more styles and bridging more genre and sociological gaps than arguably any other kind of music. I guess to some people this is bad news.
Comments (11)
Showing 1-11 of 11
i've never cared for pelican; their music just doesn't connect with me in any meaningful way. however, voegtlin's comparison of bands like mastodon and gates of slumber to pelican was ridiculous. those three bands are trying to accomplish completely different things in terms of their music and image. he's obviously just lumping together bands that he dislikes and grasping at parallels for the sake of his review.
like
dislike
Raymer, are you also one of those "TLDR" drones?
I don't agree w/ the piece but I only had to read it once to "parse" it.
The argument is simple: Pelican is inauthentic. The music they make is aesthetically unclear; songs are grown from emotional peaks and valleys that are either retreads of past work or full-blown self-parody.
Kicker is this critic writes the piece as a parody of parody. Saying so little with so much (sec 'graph). Get it?
If going Pavlovian over a mention of Maiden's Powerslave is your criteria for "good intentions," you are no better than this critic you take to task.
What's worse is bitching about someone's excessive vocabulary and not dealing specifically with the arugmument laid out - and how it's laid out. This doesn't show this critic to be "wrongheaded." It shows you to be clueless.
My trouble with Voegtlin here is how fast and loose he plays it. The assumptions he makes about his targets are unsupported and probably insupportable. In my book that counts as wrongheaded, regardless of whether I agree or disagree with his opinion.
He introduces Trans Am, for instance, by calling them a formative influence on Pelican. Am I just supposed to accept that connection on his word, without any evidence that the band ever considered Trans Am an influence at all, much less a formative one? Because honestly I'm not buying it.
Voegtlin is using his love of Trans Am to bludgeon Pelican, and he seems to make this dubious claim of influence solely because it helps those blows land harder. "Trans Am's skill at making 'meaningful' songcraft meaningless is misunderstood by bands like Pelican." Is he seriously saying that when Pelican developed their style, they did it by trying and failing to parse Trans Am? No, he's probably not, but anything to score points, right?
This kind of problem recurs throughout. He later claims that Trans Am can connect emotionally with listeners despite their own emotional indifference; Pelican supposedly cannot connect because the emotion in their music is faked.
Setting aside the sloppy thinking and internal contradictions here (the alleged absence of "authentic" emotional investment by an artist apparently only cripples artists of whom Voegtlin does not approve), how is it possible for this writer or any other to know, without asking, what an artist is thinking and feeling, and furthermore to judge whether those thoughts and feelings are valid or genuine? It's shitty, flawed logic, resting on prejudicial assumptions--a messy attempt to stitch together an argument to drape over the naked fact that he doesn't like these bands.
It's totally OK not to like Pelican and Baroness and Mastodon and Torche. Just don't pretend you know what they're thinking or feeling. Your impression of the emotional content of a piece of music cannot simply be mapped backward onto the artist. "This does not move me, and therefore the person who made it must be insincere or confused or inauthentic." No, sorry, that's just solipsism dressed up as criticism.
It's almost impossible for me to take a reviewer seriously if he's willing to use a phrase like "consumers' unwillingness to accept the authentic." This kind of empty rhetorical high-handedness is flat-out fucking radioactive and should not be handled carelessly. There are very few music writers out there who have the depth of knowledge to persuade me that the word "authentic," when it falls out of their mouths, means anything other than "music I personally respond to."
This review amounts to Voegtlin scolding large groups of metal fans, and several popular bands, for liking (and making) music he doesn't personally respond to.
If that's the core of your project, it would serve you well to have an actual argument, not just name-calling dressed up with a flimsy thesis that unravels under scrutiny. Because people are not gonna accept your scolding gladly.
Also: Calling Neurosis "post-apocalyptic bubblegum"? I am still trying to figure out if I'm just being trolled. If so, bravo!
Stewart Voegtlin never overtly says he "loves" Trans Am. I don't understand where that comes from.
He does say Trans Am wrote a single song that essentially bottles what Pelican was/is doing and Pelican never produced anything better than the tune.
He does compliment Trans Am, i.e.,
"Whereas Trans Am revel in their self-awareness, Pelican don't appear to realize the thin line they walk between retreading past efforts and full-blown self-parody."
But he never outright claims to know what Pelican are thinking and feeling. This seems to be based on reader response(s) and not the actual text. Imagine that, Internet.
Perhaps it's this line:
"Sure, Pelican may be simply feigning the emotion they try so valiantly to communicate."
"May be..." Not, "are."
When writing provokes a response like this it wins. That's the long and short of it.
I may not agree with this, you may not either, but for the Chicago Reader to "waste" its time on this "wrongheaded" swipe shows there's more to it than simply being fast and loose.
Sorry, guys. The kid got you.
@Boy Howdy
He says that the one Trans Am song he names has "true brilliance" and surrounds the band with words like "skill" and "talented" and "having too much fun," and you're wondering why I think he likes them?
And if saying Pelican arrived at their aesthetic by misunderstanding Trans Am isn't making an assumption about what they were thinking, what is it? Take this passage too, which baldly states what the band supposedly believes: "Pelican, by contrast, overthink and underemote, believing that abrupt atmospheric changes and winding structures disguise the band's dismally one-sided approach to jam rock."
Voegtlin forgets the usual "seem to be" and "apparently" qualifiers there, and as a result he ends up projecting his own thoughts onto the band, with ridiculous-sounding results. I just can't accept that he actually believes the guys in Pelican sit around thinking, "Man, we sure do make dismally one-sided jam rock. But you know what would disguise that? Abrupt atmospheric changes and winding, overthought structures!"
So yeah. Please don't suggest that I don't know how to extract information from "the actual text." You've found one quote where Voegtlin remembers to cover his ass with a "may be," but that hardly shores up his sloppy argument and sloppier writing.
And I don't care if the fact that I'm responding at length to his crappy review means he "wins." I like debating stuff like this, and I'm interested in discussions about why music writing succeeds or fails.
Say what you will about the bands name-dropped here, good or bad, but Pelican and Torche have very little in common besides being "metal" bands.
Its good to see the Village Voice can educate us as to what is truly false-metal.
Whew, I certainly got worked up about that Village Voice piece, didn't I?
I feel like I should say that I often enjoy Stewart Voegtlin's writing when he's talking about stuff he likes. (His Anvil show review at the Left Hand Path, for instance--very personal and very effective.) I don't retract any of the points I made about that particular essay, but I am sorry that I said it was "crappy," since that's just a step away from name calling.
Hey, Philip:
Enjoyed reading your cogent responses to this piece (don't mind the 'crappy' thing either), and thanks for reading Left Hand Path.
Thanks, Stewart! Always nice to encounter a polite human on the Internet.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I probably got a little hot under the collar (more so than I would've under different circumstances) because Pelican was one of my gateway bands into metal, back in 2003. I have a soft spot for those guys. Before them I was mostly about avant-garde Japanese crazies and squeaky free jazz and filthy garage punk. You know, the usual.
Anyhow, if you ever feel like pitching something to the Reader, hit me up at pmontoro [at] chicagoreader [dot] com. Take care!
