Criticism is More Important Than Ever

Over in the world of food, a controversy recently brewed over a review The New York Times’ Pete Wells wrote about a California restaurant, LocoL, which from what I’ve gathered is an attempt to make a neighborhood fast food place with healthier options that will serve lower income neighborhoods. Wells gave it 0 stars, because he didn’t like the food. The restaurant’s founder, Roy Choi, responded with this:

Zero stars. I know many of you want me to respond or snap back at him but the situation to me is much more than that. I welcome Pete’s review. It tells me a lot more about the path. I don’t know Pete but he is now inextricably linked to LocoL forever. So I’ll share with you what I wrote to a friend and our team. We got that PMA: “The truth is that LocoL has hit a nerve. Doesn’t mean all people love it, some hate it. But no one is indifferent by it. That’s the spirit of LocoL. It has nothing to do with my ego. It’s something bigger than all of us. Pete Wells is a component to its DNA. His criticisms are a reflection of us and the nerve that LocoL touches. And our imperfections. Also the nerve of challenging the binary structure of privileged thought patterns and how life is not just about what’s a success or failure, but some things are real struggles and growth journeys. We all know the food is not as bad as he states. Is it perfect? NO. But it’s not as bad as he writes. And all minorities aren’t criminals either. And all hoods aren’t filled with dangerous people either. But the pen has created a lot of destruction over the course of history and continues to.. He didn’t need to go there but he did. That’s why he’s a part of LocoL. The power of this change and this nerve that it hits. It compelled him to write something he knows would hurt a community that is already born from a lot of pain and struggle.. Crazy, right? But I see it as a piece to this whole puzzle.” #LocoL #Watts #Oakland

Choi’s response sort of set me off, because it is so emblematic of this irritating type of response to criticism that I see all the time, including in music. It’s when someone thinks that, because the thing they are doing is admirable, it’s exempt from criticism, and anyone who does criticize it is on this fictional “other side” and is an enemy. What Choi doesn’t get is that it’s unlikely Wells strolled into LocoL looking to tear apart this restaurant that clearly is trying to do great things for people. He wanted it to be good, because if LocoL’s food is good, that means it is more likely to make the positive impact is striving for (as the last line of Well’s review reads: “The most nutritious burger on earth won’t help you if you don’t want to eat it”).

After receiving this criticism, Choi could have taken it and looked to improve his menu. But instead, he does what most people in his position do lately: he went on the defensive, portraying Wells like he was out to get him, and seemingly learning nothing from the review. In particular, I find his implied stance that the quality of his food is somehow irrelevant to his mission to be insulting to his customers.

I respect Wells’ review a lot, because I read so many writers that treat art with kid gloves and would just fawn over a restaurant like LocoL because of its concept instead of its execution. This is understandable: it’s hard to criticize something that is coming from a very honest place, and there’s a lot of external pressure to be positive and nice. But it does a disservice to art and the people who make it to act like everything is great. If anything, something like LocoL needs criticism the most, because it can do so much good if it is done well.

Lately I’ve been depressed over how nobody seems to understand the purpose of criticism anymore, especially younger people who have grown up with the internet and sites like Buzzfeed, which are popular because of their unrealistically positive tone. I can often be overcritical — to the point that it comes off as kneejerk negativity and cynicism — but I do wish everyone was a little more skeptical and a little more willing to dish out and accept criticism.

I remember first thinking this when I was taking creative writing classes in college. I’ll pat myself on the back slightly here: I think I’m a pretty good writer, or I wouldn’t write as much as I do. But I also know I’m not close to perfect, and I often ended up submitting pieces that I wasn’t proud of in these classes. In each session, there was typically a roundtable where we read our pieces aloud, then the rest of the class would critique your work, and invariably everyone would get all Minnesota Nice and only say positive things (I was also guilty of this, because I was too afraid to come off as “mean”). The professors were also rarely any help, as they understandably felt like they couldn’t rip into their students for a variety of reasons.

Eventually, it got to the point where I pretty much tuned out the roundtable, because I knew nobody was going to call out the mistakes I knew I made or give me concrete advice on how I could do better in the future. And I had this wish that someone would finally just be like “Josh, this piece sucks. Here is a list of all the things that are horribly wrong with it.”This would sting initially, but assuming the criticism was reasonable and substantive, I would be glad I received it.

So that is my experience with criticism on a micro level. On a macro level, I’ve recently started to see real consequences that happen when a society devalues criticism. One of my pet reasons for Why Trump Happened is that liberals became too complacent and were unwilling to criticize and improve parts of their platform and message that weren’t working. It became so easy to deride the extreme right wing crazies and feel proud of not being Those Guys that we didn’t stop to look within ourselves at the things we could be doing better. So this isn’t just about art — I think the world would literally be much better if criticism and its lessons were more widely understood.

And of course, now our president is a guy who can’t handle or tolerate criticism whatsoever. Trump’s constant lies and thin skin make him the perfect president for a populace that no longer emphasizes thinking critically and favors comfortable decorum over honesty. In the next four or eight years (oh my god), Trump is going to constantly test America’s ability to think critically and to not believe everything you hear. Let’s hope everyone improves at this very quickly.

Annie – “Out of Reach”

Before there was Carly Rae Jepsen and Kristin Kontrol, there was Annie. The Norwegian singer gained some amount of fame over a decade ago with her 2004 album, Anniemal, which was a hit on music blogs back when music blogs were semi-relevant and people read them. I heard the album a few years later, when I was a stereotypical indie snob who looked down on any kind of pop music, and it helped convert me into someone who saw the craft and emotion that good pop can have.

Annie has fallen out of the limelight since, in part due to not being a very prolific artist (she’s released just one full length since Anniemal, 2009’s underrated Don’t Stop) and in part due to music websites turning into PR factories for established pop stars. Once Pitchfork and the others started celebrating celebrity-driven pop made by Beyonce, Drake and Rihanna and covering their every move, there wasn’t room for artists like Annie, who had found her niche as a pop artist for the people who enjoyed a good song but didn’t particularly care about the public lives of famous people.

That’s why I missed Annie’s Endless Vacation EP in 2015; it got some token reviews from websites, but virtually no discussion that could be heard over everyone clamoring for Taylor Swift and others. It turned out to be one of the releases in I listened to the most in 2016, and has a couple perfect Annie songs on it: the opening track, “Kiara Mia,” and “Out of Reach,” which I think is the best song she’s ever recorded.

At its best, Annie’s music combines the blissful feeling of pop with melancholic, wistful lyrics, like on “Heartbeat,” which was the song she was most known for back in 2004. “Out of Reach” is like the platonic ideal of this type of pop song, with a tropical sound, Annie’s light, dreamy vocals and lyrics that I find deeply relatable and poignant. On the surface, it tells the story of a potential lover that got away, but for me it taps into deeper feelings of how I live my life and parts of me I want to change.

I’m a very introverted, passive person, and it leads to me always feeling like I’m missing out on something in the moment because I’m too scared to go out of my comfort zone. Then, like Annie on this song, I spend time in the present dwelling on those mistakes in the past; the possible friends I could have made, the dumb things I said, the various forks in the road where I went down a path I wish I hadn’t. I assume this is a somewhat universal thing, but I am egregiously bad about it, and instead of confronting the issue head-on, I tend to stay to myself and listen to songs like “Out of Reach” while avoiding human contact.

I am not typically a New Year’s resolution type of person (I’m more one of those obnoxious “YEARS ARE JUST CONSTRUCTS THAT MEAN NOTHING” people), but in 2017 one of my hopes is I can be less of a recluse and take some of those chances that I’ve avoided in the past. And I don’t know if I would have been fully motivated to do that if not for “Out of Reach” and how perfectly it articulates that human experience.

The Year of Bandcamp

This year, I came to the realization that writing about music is a giant waste of time. No one is interested in finding or appreciating new music; people only want to be told that the thing they like is good, or the thing they hate is bad. And trying to describe why you love music often feels like speaking some alien language that has too many adjectives. As far as I can tell, the only people who read music writing are other music writers, who do it to check in and make sure they’re better at writing than the author.

That might be why in 2016 I finally stopped looking at music websites, which I had read somewhat frequently and used to keep up to date on new releases. (Another likely cause: the fact that most album reviews just read like advertising copy.) This made me need to find a new method for discovering music, ideally something that was separate from all the hype and noise. I came up with a nice solution: scouring the hell out of Bandcamp.

Bandcamp is mostly praised for offering a way for musicians to release music straight to their audience without dealing with record labels. More importantly, it offers a way for music to be available that isn’t curated by music websites and aggregation like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, which have taken the joy out of discovering music by spoon-feeding it to listeners and coldly evaluating it with star or number ratings. On Bandcamp, there is just music, with only a few easily avoided distractions.

Most pieces that praise Bandcamp compare it to the old style of shopping at a record store, where you browse through the bins and try to find something that catches your eye. This feels close, but it’s an imperfect analogy, because Bandcamp has some staggeringly bad music that would never have seen the light of day in a record store. My preferred analogy is that it’s like a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean from Harry Potter. One taste might be a complete gem, the next might be something impossible to listen to by a person who has no business even thinking about music, much less recording and releasing it for the world to hear.

That ended up being one of my biggest takeaways of my time on Bandcamp: the sheer volume of music that people are putting out there, which I find oddly inspiring even if I can’t comprehend why some of them do it. I have heard some truly horrible music and read some really long, pretentious band profiles. It makes judging some books by their cover a necessity. I skip really bad band names — especially any that is just a woman’s first name, since it inevitably ends up being a bunch of untalented dudes. And I pass over albums with bad, generic cover art — apparently I care about album art much more than I realized.

This needle-in-a-haystack approach might turn some off of Bandcamp, but I think it’s why the site is great. It makes finding good music fun again by requiring a certain amount of effort, with all the bad music providing a context in which good music feels special and not like something that should be taken for granted. And, I should add, the music itself is often every bit as good — if not better — than what is being released by bigger labels and talked about by everyone else. I found myself enjoying music a lot more this year (even though I think the overall quality of releases wasn’t as good as 2015) because I rediscovered that initial thrill I had of finding music that was totally new to me.

As the year comes to an end, I’m back in the mode of making a meaningless year-end list, which is all over the place thanks to this Bandcamp fixation. There are tons of different genres, a few different countries, and a couple releases that aren’t even in English. I’ll probably be sharing those albums in a few days, assuming I have some time I feel like wasting.