Features
Jumpin’ in the Night #2: How Not To Be A Feisty Rock Crit
By Andrew Stafford
In the second installment of his new monthly column, ANDREW STAFFORD reveals why he turned his back on rock criticism.
On my fridge at home I have a photocopy of an old Life in Hell strip by Matt Groening titled, “How to be a feisty rock critic”. It features a sagging Groening caricature complete with field marks: obligatory band T-shirt, baggy eyes, hearing loss, empty wallet and, pointing to what’s left of the poor sap’s brain: “Vague sensation that career choice is ridiculous.” (A few years ago, I had the opportunity to introduce myself to Chris Bailey after a show. “Yes, I recognised you in the crowd,” he responded to my greeting, in his best Oscar Wilde from Inala sneer. “You were wearing that earnest rock journo look.” That one’s not in Groening’s cartoon.)
I was a feisty rock critic once. I unwittingly adhered to Groening’s unerringly accurate template for writing record reviews, dipping constantly into my grab bag of feisty rock phrases. Really, a robot could do it – as John Gorenfeld has so cleverly demonstrated – and naturally, as time wore on, I became progressively less feisty. When I found myself writing a moderately favourable review of an Engelbert Humperdinck disco album, I realised I’d better stop. Allow me to explain why.
A few years ago, I finally bought my first guitar. I’m left-handed, something that prevented me from picking up my friends’ instruments when I was younger, and I used to say that held me back. In truth, I was intimidated, but it took me 20 years to own up to the fact that I was just making excuses. Being left-handed never stopped Hendrix, right?
These days, I have one of those alarm clocks that you can plug your iPod into, and a little while ago, it woke me up to the Animals’ version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’. Now, I’m a shithouse guitar player, but thankfully my ears are a quicker than my fingers, so I jumped out of bed and in a few minutes, I’d figured out the song: A minor/C/D/F/A minor/E minor, cycling throughout the tune.
So many classic songs are like this. Naturally, I was inspired by punk, but even the great democratic myth of the DIY ethic was daunting to me. After all, if The Ramones’ songs were so goddamned simple, how come none of their thousands of imitators came close to bettering them? The rarely stated corollary of “anyone can do it” is how few actually do it well.
Finally learning where the chords were seemed at once to unlock the mystery of popular songwriting and deepen it. How was magic ever made out of such base ingredients – and even more incredibly, how do songwriters keep making magic from them?
You’re probably aware of ‘The Four Chord Song’ by comedy troupe Axis of Awesome, but if you believe Lou Reed – who once famously said “One chord is fine. Two and you’re pushing it. Three and you’re into jazz” – such sophistication is overkill. (Of course, old misery guts wasn’t above the odd jazzy moment himself – as I found out to my chagrin when I tried to learn one of my favourite Velvets songs, “New Age”.)
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While punk ultimately failed to break down the superstar system of popular music, it did briefly manage to erase the divide between performer and audience by celebrating the illusory ease of songwriting. In a famed issue of the English fanzine Sideburns, the shapes for three chords (A, E, and G) were crudely drawn, accompanied by the following scrawled captions: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.”
If only it were so straightforward. Maybe it really is.
One of the earliest songs I figured out was Nick Cave’s ‘Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)’, from Dig!!! Lazarus, Dig!!! It’s got a vigorous E minor/C/A minor progression followed by a G/A minor/F chorus, and honestly, you’d only have to be a tiny bit better than Sausage Fingers Staff here to master it. Say what you will about Grinderman (and plenty has been in these pages recently), but learning to compose songs on a guitar rather than piano certainly seemed to open up Cave’s writing. Coming after what I felt were a few pretty sluggish albums, I loved Dig!!! Lazurus, Dig!!! for its energy and immediacy.
Simple though it may be, the fact is I couldn’t write a song as great as ‘Lie Down Here (And Be My Girl)’ if you gave me a detailed instruction manual. As I wrote in my earlier column, quoting Paul Williams, what we are dealing with here is mystery. That uneasiness – the feeling that while I might think I know a good song when I hear it, and could give you a well-reasoned opinion why I thought so, that didn’t mean I could produce a better one – was something that eventually led me away from reviewing.
At this time of my life, while I’m happily, idiotically falling in love with pop music all over again, and making some kind of effort to figure out how this stuff actually works, the last place I want to put myself is above the artist I’m talking about. Everett True, possibly the world’s feistiest living rock critic, told me I was “wrong on every count that matters” about this, and he’s probably right, but whatever they are, I guess they’re not the counts that matter to me any more.
“I’m not a great deal interested in writing about stuff that doesn’t move me, and you have to do plenty of that in this caper.”
Not that I think you have to be a fellow artist to criticise another – much as I admire the musician’s perspective Robert Forster brings to his always illuminating and considered pieces in The Monthly. But Forster has the advantage of carefully choosing what he wants to write about from month to month, in extended prose. That’s a rare gift in an age where we’re so flooded with product that most music magazines settle for McNugget-sized 100-word summaries.
And often not even that, as True proved recently. He might argue the point – actually, I know he would – but these days I can’t bring myself to dismiss someone else’s work so summarily. We can be grateful to the likes of M+N, Pitchfork and the net generally for freeing us from the tyranny of such brutal word limits, allowing for reviews as lengthy as René Shaefer’s lengthy recent critique of Grinderman 2.
Personally, though, I’m not a great deal interested in writing about stuff that doesn’t move me, and you have to do plenty of that in this caper. Mediocre music typically only inspires in me what the late David McComb once described as a nauseous silence. That might make me not much more than a booster, but that’s OK, being perfectly in keeping with my original motivation of telling as many people as I could about the good stuff.
So, on that note, feel free to take or leave these recommendations: I’ve fallen in love with the Jenny and Johnny record I’m Having Fun Now, all infectious harmony and boy-girl baiting lyrics (that’s Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley, teamed up with paramour songwriter/actor Johnathan Rice). At the recent BIGSOUND conference, I found myself grinning from ear to ear while watching Melbourne’s The Eagle and The Worm, who manage to distil a clutter of instruments into surprisingly hooky, carefree fun, and at the other end of the spectrum, I can’t wait to see France’s murderous Dimi Dero Inc. when they swing through these shores in a few weeks’ time. Have fun.
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