Sometimes after listening to a CD I'll go to amazon.com to have a look at what the reviews say. I prefer reading these to reviews in mainstream magazines as they are: (a) more plentiful and varied; (b) written not to impress (with occasional exceptions) but just to say something the writers felt worth saying; (c) usually enthusiastic and wanting to communicate that enthusiasm, which is always refreshing. Oh, and sometimes they're genuinely informative regarding the background to material. I think there's a basic human need to share feelings and ideas, especially related to what might broadly be termed art, and these critical communities (a bit accidental in amazon's case, but that's the effect) work because they fulfil something of that.
But something else I've noticed about these reviews alerts me to the downside of such communities. It's interesting just how often a reviewer will feel the need to stand in judgment over the material under consideration, and I mean 'over' - as in above, superior, from on high. One example from the last time I checked some reviews illustrates this nicely. The album in question was Neil Young's Silver and Gold, a gorgeously mellow, tuneful collection in an acoustic, 'gentle Neil' vein. As I expected, the reviews were predominantly enthusiastic - how could they not be?
Yet the frequency with which songs were singled out as not being worth putting on the disk, or not first-rate Young material, was striking. One reviewer picked out Daddy Went Walkin' and Buffalo Springfield Again as candidates for dismissal, for example. Astonishing. Two delightful, beautifully crafted tracks, with obvious personal resonance for the singer, and the reviewer, basically a fan, would have preferred they didn't exist. What's going on here?
I think there's another very basic, and dangerous, need at work here. The need to place things, to magisterially stand in judgment. To control, as it were by proxy, the manifold creativity of all that is around us. This is the reason why so much academic criticism sucks. (Yes, I know I'm making a judgment, but it's fun to contradict oneself occasionally.)
Oh, and if you need to mellow out Silver and Gold is one great place to start.
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