The Average Listener Lacks Real Criticism
Tuesday evening I was wrapping up a phone call from a guy that owns a studio in midtown Manhattan giving me the run down about a former engineer of his. I had to put him on speaker phone to look up a few things and as I opened up my phone twitter popped up. I was getting ready to swipe over to another app when I saw the words “The Weeknd is washed.” Confused but the matter on the phone call was much more important. I closed twitter and proceeded my conversation with the guy. Once off the phone I jumped back on twitter and searched the hashtag #dawnfm to see what the word was on The Weeknd’s latest album. I had listened to it this past Saturday but I was curious as to what others thought. Adding more to my confusion I kept seeing tweets saying “he’s fell off”, “he doesn’t care about making real music anymore”, and an occasional mention about his vices that I won’t get into. I don’t understand. How can someone on their fifth studio album, have a multi-million dollar grossing tour, and three Grammy’s be considered “washed?” I’m not the biggest Weeknd fan but for some reason I started clicking on the profiles of the people with these disheartening opinions. Much to what I already thought these were regular people, living regular lives, and doing regular things. Not one person was a musician, writer, inventor, artist, or even a semi-pro athlete. None of them had any media or tweets to suggest that they did anything creative on a pro-level or at least trying to get to a pro-level. So I ask myself, how in the hell can someone who doesn’t create anything have such strong opinions on someone who does? Not only are they missing the point of the album, which is probably because they only listened to it once, but they couldn’t even point out what in the album they didn’t like. So in today’s post I’m going to give five reasons why the average music listener’s opinion doesn’t matter
- ) They Don’t Create Anything: Now I’m not saying that these people have to learn how to create a song, start a company, or create an app. What I’m saying is that to really appreciate a creative, or what they’re doing, you have to understand the effort that it took. For example, my family and I with some friends went to the Brooklyn Museum to check out the Obama portrait. Once inside we got a chance to see their whole process of creating both pieces and there was a video of one of the painters describing the steps she took to create the Michelle Obama portrait. She went into full detail talking about the tune of realism, the dress, location, the pose, lighting, and everything. Before the video even finish I could hear the couple behind us say “Damn, I didn’t even catch all that.” Exactly. Most people aren’t even aware of the time and patience it takes to create art, let alone music. So if this is the case across the board, then why do we feel the average music listener’s opinion holds any weight?
- ) They’re Not Musicians: This is where I start to sound like my father. My pops is a man from Detroit in his late sixties and an avid lover of Jazz and Motown. He was in high school when a lot of those acts broke and even has a funny story about being kicked out of piano practice by a neighbor because some blind guy named Ray stopped by. As much as I am not a fan of hearing him talking over and over about how my generation doesn’t know how to play an instrument I’ve got to agree with him on this point. Most people don’t know how difficult it is to write or create music. Sure, everyone has their favorite melody and song lyric but do they know how many were written by their favorite artists before that one even came to mind? In fact, do they even know if that artist even created the melody in the first place? (i.e. people finding out the Cyhi da Prynce writes for Travis Scott). We all use a DAW to create our music and it’s made us much better musicians. However, try explaining to someone that’s never played the piano how under appreciated Radiohead is for the complexity of their chord progressions. How Thom Yorke would trick the human ear by inverting the bass notes in his chords so that the listener didn’t even catch that they were listening to a song in C Major (which is supposed to a ‘happy’ key) yet the record sounded like death knocking at their door. An extreme example, but if the average music listener isn’t even aware of something like this then them saying “the music sucks” should fall on deaf ears.
- ) They Lack the Education on Why They Don’t Like Something: One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing “I don’t know why I don’t like it, I just don’t.” Okay, can you tell me what part of the song you don’t like? “No.” Okay, can you tell me if it would sound better without the vocalist? “No.” Okay, can you tell me the sound that you don’t like? “No.” Then how the hell do you know you don’t like it if you can’t tell me? “I don’t know, I just don’t.” No formal education is needed when telling someone why you don’t like Brussels sprouts. They taste bad, end of discussion. We don’t need a masters class on why you don’t like that dress either. The color is terrible and it’s not fitting. Done. Yet, when it comes to music, which is something that most people listen to everyday, they can’t tell you why they don’t like a song? Any real music fan of any genre can tell you why they don’t like the song. The lead singer is over performing, the guitar riffs are lack luster, or the drums in the beat just ain’t it. The next time someone tells you they don’t like a song, ask them why. You’ll get a kick out of the response.
- ) They’re not really Listening. They Just Want to be a Part of the Conversation: I’ve been on twitter long enough to have supreme confidence in making this statement. You should’ve seen my timeline light up the night Drake’s CLB dropped. By 12:15am people already had their top five songs, which ones were trash, had analyzed all the lyrics, and even certified the album a classic. That’s not possible. The entire album is 1 hour and 16 minutes. You mean to tell me that everyone already had time to sit with that album an analyze 20 songs in fifteen minutes? Just shut your phone off and go to bed. Yet, blog sites and YouTube reaction videos were coming in by the dozens every hour. People were hosting livestreams of listening to the album for the first time just to increase traffic to their channel. I actually watched one. Not one time did the guy stop the music to discuss anything. He just wanted you to like and subscribe.
- ) They’ll Fall in Love with the Music Later: Over and over we see this time and time again. An artist drops a new album, the reviews are lackluster and then two years later a b cut makes a movie soundtrack pushing the album sales through the roof. You want to know why that happens? It’s obvious. It happens because the cool kids, or gatekeepers, said the album was trash and people listened. It’s not until someone hops in a car with a friend who’ll have the album playing and they get to hear it. We’ve all experienced this. You pick up a friend after work or you’re heading out on a trip and play your favorite artist’s latest album. About three tracks in your friend ask, “yo, this is fire is this new?” You turn in confusion and tell them that album dropped early last year. “Didn’t you listen to it?” Of course they didn’t, because if they did they wouldn’t be asking you such a silly question.
In conclusion, I believe we need to change the culture around music listenership. We should encourage people to take the time to dissect and appreciate what they are listening to. There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion I just believe people should have an educated one.
Makes you wonder if they’re all waiting for you to get a co-sign from a cool kid before they themselves become your fans.
