What is ‘Ply’?

Last month the Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones felt the need to defend the role of criticism. I am unhappy with his claim that “it is the job of a critic to reject the relativism and pluralism of modern life” (shouldn’t his job be to make sense of it, not reject it?). But I do often hear the sentiment that, in the new world of try-before-you-buy Internet audio the Rolling Stone writer (or whoever) is rendered obsolete by the ability to instantly check it out for yourself. Jones argues that making the ultimate distinction between “good” and “great” is the critic’s true calling.

In this garbled sensorium we call a culture, criticism is more necessary than ever… Real criticism is not about distinguishing good from bad; it is about distinguishing good from great. There’s plenty of terrible art around, but it usually finds its level in the end. The curse of our time, in the arts, is mediocrity and ordinariness: the quite good film that gets an Oscar, the OK artist who becomes a megastar. Truly remarkable art is rare and to see it when it comes, to fight for it, to hold it up as an example for the rest — that is the critic’s true task.

The piece is pretty weak—“good” and “great” are pretty foggy terms, and he nonsensically attacks aesthetic tastes that are “consumerist” (without saying what that would entail). In responding to comments, he admits that he’s still basically interested in telling people that they really need to check out such-and-such. If you concede that criticism aspires to that basic journalistic purpose, I am skeptical that the traditional review is more capable than an audio-clip.

The reason I’m posting about this at all is because I just ran across a much more persuasive imagining of the critic’s role, made in a roundabout way by Jacques Rancière in an interview with Naked Punch. Admittedly, his examples come from literature and painting, and the writing here is a little involved (Rancière is a philosopher of aesthetics), but bear with me: mixed in with all the Foucault there is a rich conception of the importance of criticism that I think applies equally well to music.

Rancière says:

Regimes are not separated from one another by thunderclaps or by a clash of cymbals. A regime is not a radical historical irruption that would annul another regime. The birth of “literature” as a new historical regime of art took place without a single manifesto, without an institution of new rules. And it took place by reinventing a tradition: the Romantics reinvented the Greek tragedy, against its Classical domestication. They set out to mobilize Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare against the norms of the poetic arts and the distinction of genres. Art critics mobilize the Venetian colour, the Dutch chiaroscuro or the village scenes of Flanders against norms of the Beautiful inherited from Raphael’s drawing technique and Poussin’s composition. They create a vision of the painting as gesture of the artist and the metamorphosis of matter, thus an “abstract” vision that precedes by a long stretch abstract painting proper. There is thus a mutation in the regime of perception that lends a non-figurative visibility to figurative paintings. A regime is thus an articulation of materials, forms of perception and categories of interpretation that are not contemporaneous. This articulation never defines a necessary structure. There are possibilities that define new emergences, but there is no limit that would render impossible certain forms of art. And art forms themselves are very often a mixture of several logics. This is what I have attended to with regards to film: it was considered, by the authors of 1910s–1920s manifestoes, as the art of light and movement that would cast into oblivion the old narrative art of stories and characters. Yet film did no less than reinstate the art of stories and characters precisely at the point when literature was discarding it. And it settled in the position of a mixed art in which the logic of history and that of the visible ceaselessly intertwine, unite or separate themselves from one another.

This also speaks to how recording itself is a form of criticism: a traditional example in pop-rock would be the Ramones. The story goes: they reinvented rock and roll by dressing the catchy simplicity of early-sixties pop in the abraded sonics of late-seventies provocateurs like The Stooges. They reimagined rock’s tradition, rejecting the linear progression toward complexity (that followed from the later Beatles records) and the demonstrations of skill (that had evolved out of Eric Clapton) by putting all their chips on persistent melody and the directness of a relatively raw recording. It was pretty explicit that all the components were already there—after all, early on they covered pop tunes like “Do You Wanna Dance?” and “California Sun”—but it was just a matter of making a case for what parts mattered.

Anthologists, the music world’s equivalent to gallery curators, can have a similar effect: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was instrumental in the formation of the New York folk revival; and Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets proved to be important to underground rock for generations.

Writers—in magazines and newspapers, yes, but also on blogs and message boards—are merely another voice in this continuous process of coming to terms with the tradition and making sense of the new forms the music takes. I don’t think they are uniquely equipped to tell the good from the great (or that it in itself matters an awful lot—it would seem to me we each have our own good and great). But they have the potential to make verbal sense of developments in genre or style, and attempt to figure what, in Rancière’s terms, its “several logics” may be.

I became interested in collecting pieces for Ply in speaking to people who did not consider themselves writers—or were indifferent or even contemptuous of “criticism.” Often these conversations, at a party or in the back of a cab, revealed insights that did not seem to me to fit themselves tidily into a magazine-style column or record review. But what they contained—often much more than the sort of thing I see appearing in columns or reviews—was very much this sort of criticism.