While many people are aware of Roger Ebert and his thumb-based approach to film criticism, music critics live in relative anonymity. Lester Bangs, the only remotely famous rock critic, is better known for dying while listening to synth-pop trio the Human League than for his actual writing.
And this has entirely to do with the merit of most music criticism.
Many music critics don't even have the ability to write well and critically at the same time. Album reviews are routinely sloppy, lazy writing that exist as a catalog of reasons why "this album is good/awful" without explaining the connection the music plays to the outside world. As such, I've found it necessary to discuss how Immanuel Kant can be adopted to music criticism to solve a few of the problems that plague two of the giants of popular music criticism.
In "Critique of Judgment," Kant makes an important distinction between "art of genius" (or anything regarded as "fine art") with more ordinary, "imitative" works. He characterizes "fine art" as a work that exhibits beauty, sublimity, and a preconceived aesthetic idea for the work.
Trying to make the judgment of what modern music constitutes as "fine art" is a different animal. It's easy to say that "early" Beatles doesn't display the mark of genius though "later" Beatles albums do but an intriguing question arises: Is something as subjective as rock music capable of producing "art of genius" that would be impossible to dispute as otherwise?
To answer this question, I turn to Kant's four possible "reflective judgments" - the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime and the good. The "agreeable" is anything "which the senses find pleasing in sensation." Like I might say, "the beat from Coolio's 'Fantastic Voyage' was totally dope" and it would be purely subjective judgment. On the other end of the spectrum is the objective "good." Kant explains that "to deem something good … it must have a concept to it" and then serve that end. This explains why I play Michael Jackson at dance parties: It has a concept behind it (to get girls on the dance floor) and then it serves that end.
Kant places the other two judgments, the beautiful and the sublime, between the "agreeable" and the "good" and gives them the oxymoronic label of "subjective universal." Kant views the "sublime" and "beautiful" forms of judgment as subjective but something everyone "ought" to agree with - even though he understands that not everyone will. The "ought" comes from Kant's concept of "sensus communis" or a community of taste that dictates when a seemingly subjective opinion should have "universal" acceptance. Thus with rock criticism, albums accepted within the community of taste should more or less make up the canon of great rock 'n' roll albums.
While 50 years of rock music criticism has done a decent job in developing a community of taste, it still fails on many fronts. Looking at two of the music industry's most notorious sources for criticism, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork Media, each fails to contribute to establish a proper "community of taste."
Gearing itself solely towards pop music, Rolling Stone has become disturbingly irrelevant in all other genres of music. The magazine lacks Kant's idea of a "form of finality" in that it is designed with a final form "is attributed to some purpose" though with an end with no practical function. Bands covered in this magazine do serve an end: Make money and as much as possible.
Pitchfork Media, on the other hand, covers bands of varying influence and popularity but has failed to create the indie community of tastes it presents itself as having. Instead of identifying works that should be universally considered "art of genius," all it has done is promote one particular mode of taste. It's not so much a community of tastes as it is a singularity of taste. (I think this explains the popularity of American Apparel and their purposeless sleeveless hooded sweatshirts, but that's a different story). Certain bands are inexplicably Pitchfork-friendly, and then rather curiously, the Web site takes in the bulk of their advertising from the labels of the these bands. The singular voice taints the impact of the Web site's laudable music criticism as albums that are presented as having universal appeal are really just subjectively "agreeable."
1st: ZE
2nd: VO
Kant, Music Criticism, and the Community of Taste
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