SEVEN red flags in music writing
...and SEVEN tunes to take your mind off godawful writing-on-writing
SEVEN is a vehicle of chaos and I am an itinerant weasel; I have nothing to offer you but the prose, the whole prose and nothing but the prose (along with a generous, sevenly handful of tunes).
But what, dear reader, is the whole prose? And what is the copious amateurish faff that undermines any authority you’re trying to pose as a Reputable Music Writer? Well, wouldn’t you like to know. (Please leave this page immediately if this topic is not of interest, I would earnestly rather you did.) There are countless icks, ticks and generally naff moves immortalised out there in good ol’ ungainly words, but these are a few of my biggest peeves and I hope, uh, I hope you agree!
I should clarify that these red flags are for raw prose and not for politics, for the sole reason that I am working like a flea on a jellyfish’s toenail this week and have neither time nor means to Go Properly Into Politics. I’m a writer not a politician. No one elected me. So, hike it! Release my arts funding! Subsidise me and my fellow citizens, etc.. Don’t talk to me about due diligence — are you a misogynist journalist? Can you prove you’ve never been retweeted by Palantir? Fuck you and the other Bad Ones!
This, needless to say, is a huge gatekeep, and I’m sure it’s unfair to many well-intentioned pieces from writers who are perfectly earnest listeners but just happen to be incapable of throwing a sentence together with as much as an ounce of conviction behind it. Keep at it, y’all! I’ve done probably all of these at some time or another too! Just, uh, keep on keeping on without these fallbacks.
Each entry contains a tune because this is a music site.
And without further ado, SEVEN words/phrases to avoid (or at least be extremely cautious about) using in any earnest music prose ever :):)
aesthetic
The aesthetics of chaos deserve handsome dividends for elevating Angine de Poitrine to the discourse.
love deftones even when theyre terrible they are just tooooo aesthetic
Uh, real high stakes with this one.
Is it a noun? Proceed with caution. Those aesthetics deserve their analysis, but don’t you get slippery with them.
Is it an attributive adjective (aesthetic blasts of massive bass)? Delete your draft.
Is it a predicative adjective (this song is very aesthetic)? Torch your entire blog and probably your career plans.
I really hope this one doesn’t require any further unpacking. Here’s (probably) my favourite Aes Dana tune, stop thinking about stupid words and enjoy it. (I neither know the meaning of the word carmine nor care to.)
balance / two
There are two core themes on The Life of a Showgirl: humour and sincerity. Taylor Swift’s gargantuan personality helps her find the perfect balance between them.
File this one under when it works, it works, but if you’re the kind of writer whose analytic template includes instructions for pinpointing the nearest conceivable dichotomy just so you have something to structure a piece around, you can take a bloody hike! Here are some things I have been asked to believe in recent months:
There are two halves of Record X: the good half and the bad half.
When you think about it, Record Y ultimately breaks down into smooth jams vs. gritty jams.
Band Z has two vocalists. The balance between A’s mouthwash and B’s gangrene is critical to their success.
Not only are statements of this kind often too facile to be convincing (especially if they’re about a record I’ve already heard), they are insufferably boring to read and I resent that the writer considers it worth my time to mull over them in lieu of, y’know, a comprehensive mapping of the myriad complexities that swirl around most music worth hearing.
As Kerry in her wisdom puts it, balance is a fundamentally uninteresting relationship for two things to have. Too right! Why do so many unimaginative writers hold the conceit that strong art should be balanced? This isn’t politics, this isn’t middle-school bipartisan horse bollocks, and it’s not a bloody maths equation — now treat thought-provoking, lopsided, challenging artistic statements like the freakshows they are, and give me the critical judgements. With zest, please!
doesn’t reinvent the wheel
The latest Counterparts may not reinvent the wheel, but it certainly speaks at a higher volume than my ex and therapist combined.
This one annoys me as much for how uselessly it reads in some pieces as for how inescapable a disclaimer it is in others.
Sometimes a band does need to be shielded from any intrusive expectations of novelty opinion when they’re playing music that relies on anything; sometimes you’re inadvertently bringing those expectations into the conversation for no other reason than the way you, your readers and music discourse at large fetishise originality for a lack of any deeper foundation; sometimes you’re just protesting too much.
So which is it? Are you telling me that a drum and bass record sounds like a drum and bass record, or are you trying to handwave your way around Metallica’s artistic bankruptcy? If appropriation is really so far removed from innovation, you can shut your trap about Lou Reed and the Velvets and start spieling about the damn Who.
The parasitic relationship between critical acknowledgement and perceived innovation really does sharpen my blades on this, but, well, you try coming from a country that has spent the last decade living through Brexit and the Windmill Scene at the same fucking time! End of the day, if you do need to shout out how the work in question is made of the good ol’ tropes and demands to be approached as such, then you owe it to yourself and the record to flip the bird to any misplaced notion of reinventing the wheel the reader may have been harbouring.
sonic/aural/auditory [equivalent of a] ____
Milli Vanilli’s hooks explode like my first auditory orgasms since my aural divorce with my big bad sonic ex MJ.
Most of these entries have some amount of leeway, but this one is exclusively the realm of cowards who should get a bloody grip and stand by their own metaphors. You want to tell me that that feedback assault from whichever godawful Brooklyn act you’ve been hooked on lately produced an aural stab wound? That the bass on that trending remix is an auditory magma flow. That the thirst trap you’ve been real parasocial with lately offers sex in sonic form?
My response ten times out of ten is to hire a fucking editor. If your audience clicked knowingly on a piece of music commentary, they don’t need this kind of useless signposting; if they didn’t, that’s your fault for bad advertising.
In other news, here’s the Sonics playing a punk(?) tune so primitive that it hits like a literal bludgeon, hurr hurr.
subjective
Subjectively speaking, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu is not what I would typically call a ‘deep’ artist, but there's no denying the depth of footprint that she has left upon media as a whole.
Uniquely among the items on this list, subjective is here because it adds oil to the wayside drums of Bad Readers. Every reader of every one of these other tropes is a presumed Good Reader and any blame for anything that happens is to be heaped upon the writer alone, but Jesus Christ I am past extending any patience whatsoever to the simpletons and/or partisan goons that lampoon any form of criticism whatsoever for failing to meet some imagined criteria of objectivity.
You are reading another human being’s selectively candid reaction to a piece of art, and even if they are (hopefully) savvy enough to draw reference from actual real-world points of context, these are still their associations with the work and nothing but your own idiocy should elevate this to some infantile realm of Objective Truth.
But yes, if you’re a writer vain, self-deluding or outright stupid enough to actively encourage the reception of your work as objective, then you can absolutely make your bed under the bus for enabling these morons.
BONUS LEVEL: In my opinion —> as opposed to what, the rest of this opinion piece?
(For what it’s worth, I abide the occasional X is, for me, a jolly good record! to keep things anchored, but the risk of this falls off a cliff into self-conscious tripe or conceited pontification is just too real. Be humble, but be readable too and don’t enable.)
[surname] / [forename]
Musgraves is at the top of her game. It’s unbelievable how much Kacey has grown in just three years. I can hardly conceive of her as a teenage upstart anymore.
I find it hilarious how this one blends a piss-thin conceit of professional distance with a cloying impression of overfamiliarity with whomsoever the unfortunate artist happens to be. It is the worst of all worlds. You look like a chump. The insistent alternation reminds of the stereotypical addicts, but, like, you have two fucking names to work with there: two names! Pick one — you’re a ‘critic’, so show some bloody conviction. He’s either your mate Trent or your gimp Reznor. She’s either mythical muse Adrianne or established cultural phenomenon Lenker. If you are unaware of the difference in nuance, you should not be writing anything at all — and don’t you even think about separating the Sioux from the Siouxsie.
X is a band that
This one is innocuous flab in some contexts, but it makes the list specifically for its use at the start of the first sentence in a review. Unfortunately, this is by far the most frequent place I’ve seen it used. All the other citations here are fictitious, but we’ll take the gloves off for this one and, uh:
[X] is a band that really needs no introduction. With a rich history dating back over 40 years…
[X] is a band that doesn’t need an endorsement from anyone. For over 30 years, they’ve…
[X] is a band that personifies such concepts as ‘independent’, ‘alternative’ and ‘experimental’, but...
In terms of substance, I can survive the bloat, but the immediate editorial wince this one induces is unparalleled. You seriously couldn’t be bothered to think of a more interesting kick-off to your piece? You seriously expect me to commit to however many more paragraphs of procedural bilge you have in store here? If there’s any circumstance that makes me regret that a writer didn’t have it in them to harbour an inner monologue, this is the one. Read a fucking book.
Here’s a band that is X:
Having built a personality around committing all seven of these in every piece I’ve ever written, I’m going to respectfully disagree