Why don't girls who like ballads become critics?

[koganbot]

Jonathan writes ("Luis Miguel 'La Incondicional'"):

This project has really been testing my patience with the Big Ballad, the single song form which I have to work harder to appreciate and, appreciation won, have less desire to revisit, than any other. I'm hardly alone: the single most widely-hated song of the last twenty years (at least among respondents with pretensions to youth and cool) is "My Heart Will Go On"...

So I thought I'd reprint here my Pazz & Jop ballot for 2005, where I asked "Has a ballad ever won Pazz & Jop?":

Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop Ballot 2005

Has a ballad ever won Pazz & Jop?

The answer is maybe - if you're willing to call "Ms. Jackson" and "Gangsta's Paradise" ballads ("Fast Car"? "When Doves Cry"? "O Superman"?). But basically no, and whichever nonballad wins this year will come from a long line of previous nonballads. (None of the strong contenders is a ballad, though I suppose "Stay Fly" is something of a crypto ballad, which is why I didn't vote for it.) Occasionally a ballad makes my list (for what it's worth, Hilary Duff's "Fly" - which is something of a power ballad, if "power" is a word that's usable in connection with small-voiced Hilary - would have been my number one in 2004, if I'd been paying attention to Hilary), but in general I don't vote for them, and in general I don't like them.

This isn't just about ballads. I'm looking back on Nelson George's half-smart essay in the 1989 P&J supplement, wherein he identifies white critics' blind spot in regard to upscale bourgeois black music but doesn't take in that the blind spot is shared by most black critics as well and that it's a blind spot that critics black and white have in regard to white music too (Phil Collins, anyone?); furthermore it's based on a very questionable idea of what counts as upscale: the Sex Pistols' progeny that we (or "we") often vote for are at least as upscale as the performers we shun, but it's our version of upscale, and we're not willing to call it such (among other reasons because it, and we, have some genuine populist ideals).

Let's pretend for the sake of argument that most P&J voters are pretty good critics. Well, this means that Pazz & Jop has a built-in blind spot in regard to music that sucks. I mean, most ballads are sentimental shit, and they're deadening to listen to. That's why I don't vote for them. But it therefore means that P&J doesn't represent the year in pop and semipop. It can't. My ballot doesn't even represent my year in music, much less pop's. It wasn't designed to. "Gasolina" made the bottom of my Top Ten, and I'm guessing it'll make the bottom of P&J's Top 40, but it - and the hot-dance Luny Tunes reggaeton thing it represents - is not the major story in Latin crossover of the last few years, or it's only half the story, the other half being genteel stuff for smooching like "Suga Suga" (which is nice enough, but kind of bland); for the most part it's only Latinos who even know that the guy - Baby Bash - who did "Suga Suga" is Latino.

But being what it is, Pazz & Jop is good for telling us something about "us," that is, about the sort of people who become rock critics. It isn't that we vote only for people like ourselves, but that we vote for the sort of thing that people like us vote for - which is a tautology. But, among other things, by liking what we like and writing about it in the way we do, we turn some of the readers into people like us. But this is the question that P&J starts to address but never quite gets to: Why do people like us like what we like? You can't really address this unless you're willing to ask why people like us don't like the things we don't like. The P&J supplement (and too much of the ILM commentary about P&J) fumbles around because it keeps changing the question to something like, "How can we get white male rock critics to stop overlooking all this good stuff by black people/women/Hispanics/Asians?" So here are some alternative questions: Why do women rock critics hate ballads? Did they always hate ballads - most teenybopper girls like ballads - or did they learn to hate ballads? If the former, why don't girls who like ballads become critics?

Look back at the 2002 P&J: The most important hip-hop track of the year - one of the most important of the decade, probably as important as "Get Low" and "Still Tippin'" - Fat Joe f. Ashanti "What's Luv," got 4 votes, as opposed to Missy's "Work It," which got 212; now my problem isn't that Missy clobbered Joe (though 212 to 4 is ridiculous, and "What's Luv" is better than "Work It" anyway), since P&Jers shouldn't vote for something if they don't like it, but that neither you nor Sasha F-J said anything about it, and this was an absence that should have screamed at you. Jess and Sterling over on the ILM thread were the ones who, reading Sasha's piece, asked "Where's Gotti?" I'll point out that I didn't vote for "What's Luv" either - it was a near miss at #11 on my ballot, and I genuinely felt that my 10 choices were better (though it would be interesting for me to relisten now). But also I was looking hard for better choices because I wanted "What's Luv" off my list, due to Joe's telling Ashanti from the start that he wouldn't go down on her and because of all the similar but terrible thug-n-slush tracks that followed "What's Luv" onto the charts.

I wouldn't say that "What's Luv" is a ballad, necessarily, and the fact that I did like it makes my example not quite typical. When people dislike something they don't think to themselves, "This is the sort of thing that people like me don't like," they think "This sounds terrible." (And of course they might be right to dislike it.)

But the question here: Why "Since U Been Gone" and not "Breakaway" or "Because of You"? Well, "Since U Been Gone" is better, but why do people like me think so? In 2005 the Kelly Clarkson song that got the most play on Radio Disney was "Breakaway," with "Behind These Hazel Eyes" and "Since U Been Gone" getting about three-quarters as much play. (And of course Jesse McCartney's "Beautiful Soul" was ahead of all of them.)

But this leads into a final thought. In the past I'd have assumed that someone like Kelly Clarkson would eventually feel the need to go legit and leave stuff like "Since U Been Gone" behind. I'm not so sure now. For one thing, "Since U Been Gone" - its sugar as well as its rock - is considered more legit than it would have been in the past. And another is that the adult charts have changed. Not only do a lot of adults stick with Top 40 rather than jumping to Adult Contemporary, but also the ones who go AC aren't necessarily forgoing the bouncy stuff. Mediabase actually lists two AC formats to register this difference: Mainstream AC and Hot AC. (I think Billboard divides it into Adult Contemporary and Adult Top 40.) The cliché is that you go from "fun" to "serious" as you mature, but I don't know if this ever was the case - or, for that matter, that the bounce and the sugar make "Since U Been Gone" altogether not serious. In the song she claims she can breathe for the first time, but lots of other Clarkson songs (including some that, unlike "Since U Been Gone," were written by her) have her unable to breathe, not breaking away, or breaking away but finding that her breakaway leads to fear not growth, etc. etc. So the bounce is part of a more complicated story.

SINGLES
1. Kelly Clarkson -- "Since U Been Gone" -- RCA
2. Rich Boy -- "Get to Poppin'" -- Zone 4/Interscope
3. Ashlee Simpson -- "La La" -- Geffen
4. T. Waters -- "Throw'd Off" -- So So Def/Virgin
5. Deana Carter -- "The Girl You Left Me For" -- Vanguard
6. Miranda Lambert -- "Kerosene" -- Epic
7. Foxy Brown f. Sizzla -- "Come Fly With Me" -- Roc-A-Fella
8. Pharrell Williams f. Gwen Stefani -- "Can I Have It Like That?" -- Star Trak/Interscope
9. Ciara f. Ludacris -- "Oh" -- LaFace
10. Daddy Yankee -- "Gasolina" -- V.I.

ALBUMS
1. Fannypack -- See You Next Tuesday -- Tommy Boy (13)
2. Ashlee Simpson -- I Am Me -- Geffen (13)
3. t.A.T.u. -- Dangerous and Moving -- Universal (13)
4. Various Artists -- Run the Road -- Vice (12)
5. Lady Sovereign -- Vertically Challenged -- Chocolate Industries (11)
6. Deana Carter -- The Story of My Life -- Vanguard (9)
7. M.I.A. -- Arular -- Interscope (9)
8. Annie -- Anniemal -- Big Beat (8)
9. Franz Ferdinand -- You Could Have It So Much Better -- Sony (6)
10. Robyn -- Robyn -- Konichiwa (6)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

A question I asked on ILM years ago was "can a music matter if its fans don't like to read?" (something like that, anyway)

This was -- deliberately -- rhetorically provocative and compressed: what I wanted to get at was the issue of the meaning of "it matters", and not very many respondents twigged this, and thought i was just claiming that the musics favoured by non-readers and non-writers obviously COULDN'T matter... (I was thinking more about dancemusic than ballads when I posted it; and the sense -- in uk writing anyway -- that enthusiasts of rave and techno and etc were historically considered a good deal less agile or interesting as writers) (This was certainly the case in the late 80s and early 90s; I'm not up enough on matters these days to know if the gap closed...)

So does your conundrum overlap with mine? Why does it matter whether a music "matters"? Why -- aside from anxious justification -- are we writing about music at all?

Is there a constituency who (if they craed at all) would answer "it really doesn't matter if a music matters, as long as I know what I like" -- and does this constituency generally favour different kinds of music than those favoured by people who care which music matter and why?


(We actually quite sharply disagree over the definition of a "critic" -- to me, you mean "Let's pretend for the sake of argument that most P&J voters are pretty good REVIEWERS"; this is probably worth thrashing out; I half started the debate on Popular and then as usual got weighed down by off-net concerns)

[koganbot]

Last parenthetical point is easy to thrash out, actually, since I don't see a deep division between us here. I was being generous with the word "critic," and mitigated the generosity with the word "pretend." But anyway, real criticism is what I was doing in these P&J comments and what I try to embed in my reviews, whereas those you're calling "reviewers" I might call "truncated critics" (who can be very good). The reason I'd call them "truncated critics" rather than "reviewers" is that they do branch out beyond reviewing, to aesthetics, the social environment, business, the interplay between themselves and other people, etc.

Truncated critics: what makes this music good/bad? what makes music in general good/bad? how can we serve and promote good music? what's going on in the music and the world that makes it?

Real critics: not only what makes this music good/bad, but why do people similar to me (as opposed to other people) like or dislike this music (as opposed to liking or disliking that music)? why in general do people similar and dissimilar to me act the way we do around each other and towards the music? When we write up the people who make the music, why do we (as opposed to others) choose these people to write up (as opposed to some other people) and why do we write them up in this way (rather than in some other)? Etc.

(Recall my three types of critics in WMS #7; I was suggesting that type 3 - someone who leaps into the convo as a participant - could simultaneously do type 1 and type 2 criticism as well, and that leaping in was a better way of pulling off type 2 anyhow [type 2 being the social critic].)

I think you were simply wrong over in Freaky Trigger* about Lex not being a critic. He most certainly engages the second set of questions as much as the first, at high volume.

*Assuming you're referring to the discussion in the canon poll. Tom put the canon poll in Freaky Trigger but didn't subclassify it under Popular.

[koganbot]

Quick glib answers to your questions:

Can a music matter if its fans don't like to read?

(Should there be an "about it" after the words "read"? I'm thinking of the stereotypical fan of rock and indie who also goes out dancing to "dance pop" and quite enjoys herself but only reads about the former and doesn't spend time thinking about much less reading about the latter?* Or, say, an intellectual in the Fifties who likes show music and Sinatra and ilk fine, and still takes out his old Benny Goodman discs, but doesn't go out of his way to read about any of it - doing so doesn't cross his mind - his serious reading devoted to more serious subjects: politics, sociology, etc.)

But anyway, to answer your question, yes, of course "Happy Birthday" and "Auld Lang Syne" and "Silent Night" and "Gypsy Davey" and "Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues" etc. etc. matter - the stories they tell or the rituals they enrich matter to the people who listen and engage, etc.

Is there a constituency who (if they cared at all) would answer "it really doesn't matter if a music matters, as long as I know what I like" -- and does this constituency generally favour different kinds of music than those favoured by people who care which music matter and why?

Not sure, but I'd bring up a slightly different constituency, or a slightly different use (as in my parenthetical start to my previous response, it's not necessarily a division between readers and nonreaders but between X that people read about and Y that they don't, but the people may be the same): people who value "light" music for the same reason they value "light" reading and "fun" movies etc., value the music because it doesn't matter and they don't have to think about it. And my paradoxical response is that stuff like this can especially matter, precisely because, being "entertainment," it escapes the censorship of the serious mind, it doesn't COUNT, it's not going to be on the exam. So dark stuff can happen in this light area that wouldn't be permitted if anyone took it seriously. Except once we realize it does matter...

But I think ballads (and pop music) generally do matter in the sense that the people care a lot, e.g. the fans of Manilow, of Iglesias pere and fils, of Liberace, etc. Some might be fanatics (from which the word "fan" derives). But they don't make this music and their fandom a matter of sociopolitical rumination, so in this sense it also escapes the censorship of the serious mind, but by "serious mind" here I don't mean their minds but the minds of society at large, whose ruminators don't bother with the ballads. But ballads still get to be part of the cultural unconscious, despite existing in plain sight.

But I'm wondering if this "lightness" is mostly obsolete in the post-Beatles world anyway. I don't know if Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat and Michael Buble escape the cultural commentary of the commenting classes, or how they're taken by their fans, but Pink and Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus sure don't escape cultural commentary, and the latter three are as big on the adult contemporary charts as the former are. And I doubt that Pink and Taylor, especially, are seen as unimportant.

*I use this example because Simon Frith brought up something like it in one of his columns, citing an actual young woman who behaved like this in the '80s and then was hit with the sudden revelation that the music she danced to was "her music" more than any of the others.

[koganbot]

they don't make this music and their fandom a matter of sociopolitical rumination, so in this sense it also escapes the censorship of the serious mind

This doesn't mean that, e.g., the lyrics can't have sociopolitical content and can't have a sociopolitical moral (e.g., "We Are The World," "Independence Day," the former of course getting written about plenty but still in the category "not the sort of song that generally gets written about"), though I'm guessing that music that doesn't get written about much won't end up in the category "Music the consumption of which makes one think one is sociopolitically transgressive." I'm still being fast and glib in my answers and not thinking things through.

Ridiculously short and limited answer

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Ballads are hard to write about and tend to have been heard by a lot of people already, so they lack the glamour of the offensive for the payoff in writing about them.

Boys also like ballads, I feel I should point out.

Mind you, you do get a lot of young people of both genders writing about, eg: 'Samson' or 'Apres Moi' by Regina Spektor. But indie bedwetters (whom I happen to be massively and guiltily fond of) Death Cab For Cutie and even more bedwettingly indie side-project The Postal Service get a lot of *play* but not necessarily a lot of text.

Actually I may go and write something about said indie bedwetters now.

(ie: this can all go in the 'God Help Us If There's A War' archive)

Re: Ridiculously short and limited answer

[koganbot]

More girls than boys are considered to like ballads, though I don't know if this has been confirmed by any studies. Also, if it is true, maybe it's not as true as it once was. But anyhow, it would sure seem to be that boys and girls who grow up to vote in Pazz & Jop polls don't vote for ballads.

It hasn't been confirmed that critics hear nonballads earlier than ballads in the commercial life of songs.

[koganbot]

By the way, "Umbrella," which was released several years after I wrote this, might well be classified as a ballad, despite its hard beats. Won Idolator and finished second in Pazz & Jop.

[koganbot]

Unlike a lot of ballads it doesn't have an underlying swing rhythm, however.

[bilboslaptop.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

To the question of why girls who like ballads don't become critics, I wonder if Tom Ewing's concept of use-value is helpful here. (I don't know if the concept was original with Tom; he's where I first heard it from. Sorry!)

What I mean is that the "girls who like ballads" (surely we can substitute that with "people who like ballads," since unless every songwriter ever is just cynically manipulating the market everyone who writes songs like ballads -- or do they just like their own?) get something out of the ballads that they can use in their emotional/psychological/physical/sexual/etc. ACTUAL LIFE.

What that use is probably depends on the ballad and the person: speaking for myself, I've used ballads as a means of contemplation, as an avenue into a generalized cathartic experience, as a means of wallowing in particular emotions (self-pity, unrequited love, generalized nostalgia), and as a tool for inspiring romantic feelings (as much in myself as in anyone else). None of which is to say that I LIKE ballads -- I'm not sure use and liking ever necessarily correspond. Does anyone like ballads as a category, instead of liking particular songs which are ballads?

Anyway, in this formulation it may be possible that the critics-who-don't-like-ballads either a) don't have a use for them or b) don't like them when they're not using them. If it's the latter then well, hypocrisy is human; but if it's the former, it may be because critics prefer music which doesn't explain itself and so needs them to explain it; their use-value for music isn't tied to how they use it in their life so much as to how they use it in their thinking/writing. And ballads explain themselves really well! So well that when trying to write about them I often find myself with nothing to say. "Just listen to the song; it tells you everything you need to know."

I haven't thought this through very much either; but it occurred to me as a possibility, so I thought I'd share.

(In case the OpenID doesn't work: this is Jonathan Bogart, whose quote opened this thread.)

What would it mean to say that one knows how to use a ballad but not a rocker?

[koganbot]

Well, a question to ask would be (for instance):

What would it mean to say that one knows how to use "Heart Of Stone" and "Lady Jane" and "Back Street Girl" but one doesn't know how to use "Under My Thumb," "Street Fighting Man," and "Midnight Rambler"?

Those are all Rolling Stones songs that I've never had any trouble writing about, and I've focused on what's similar among them - all use a rhetorical strategy in their lyrics of faking you out as to what the song is about, it seeming to be A then B then flashing back between A and B without ever coming to rest. But also, what those songs sound like is integral to how those lyric strategies work. All three ballads never stop sounding like - hence being? - the love or heartbreak songs their sound pegs them as, and all three rockers never stop sounding like - hence being? - the tough angry-boy rockers their sound pegs them as, even while elements of the delivery and the words pull the rug out from under you.

My point here is that one set being ballads and the other being rockers don't stop me from finding something to explore, and it's more or less the same thing I'm exploring in each.*

I can always find at least one question to ask myself about any song: why do I like (or dislike) this song as opposed to an apparently similar song that I dislike (or like)? (See the Boney Joan Rule.") And there is a second question that's almost always as available: why do I like (dislike) this song that someone else dislikes (likes)? And then a third question can come tumbling in on the heels of the second: why does there seem to be a difference in social class between the people who like something and people who like something else? (See also "Jocks and Burnouts" and "School's Out" for my self-questioning about how I use the term "social class.")

There sure seem to be class and gender differences between those who like ballads and those who don't, even if the differences aren't universal (and even if the liking and disliking aren't one hundred percent consistent within an individual, either).

All you need in order to write about something is to find a difference in need of explanation.

It's not remotely obvious why it should be easier to talk about a rocker than about a ballad, why the latter tells you everything you need to know and the former doesn't - which doesn't seem to be the case for me anyway. But if it were, what would make rockers inarticulate in comparison to ballads? Everything you say about ballads you could say about rockers - except maybe for the "wallowing in romantic feelings," and even there some rockers do as well for that, Kelly's "Never Again" (fast song) being as much a wallow as "Addicted" (slow song) (though what they're wallowing in isn't romance so much as pain, but those two get run together under the category of "romance" anyway).

Finally, what about the people who don't find much to say about rockers, those people being most of the rock-listening world, even if the commenting classes veer towards rockers (or towards funk or rap or nonslow dances etc.)? Would it be that for those people rockers explain themselves really well too, just as ballads do?

Just because people think that a song explains itself doesn't mean they're right.

*Grammar question: why do I want to say "doesn't stop me from finding something to explore" even though when I analyze the sentence grammatically "don't stop me from finding something to explore" seems to be correct?

Re: What would it mean to say that one knows how to use a ballad but not a rocker?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

the subjects doing the stopping are "being" and "being" -- formally this is a plural, but existentially the fact of plurality is vaguely arguable...

[koganbot]

The reason I asked the question "Why don't girls who like ballads become critics?" rather than "Why don't people who like ballads become critics?" - though obviously the latter question is more accurate - is that asking the latter question might produce the answer, "Well, most people who become critics are white males, and they have blind spots for the music of girls and women and nonwhites etc.," which is true, but ducks the question I want to ask, which is why does the class or category of people that writes about music - a class or category that includes nonwhites and women, though not nearly enough - not like ballads? So asking the question my way - "Why do women rock critics hate ballads? Did they always hate ballads - most teenybopper girls like ballads - or did they learn to hate ballads? If the former, why don't girls who like ballads become critics?" - throws my question in the reader's face. My assumption is that if I don't throw this question in people's faces, they'll evade it, as they always do. Not that they won't evade it anyway.

(And yeah, obviously not everyone who doesn't vote ballads hates ballads, but in the aggregate there's a shutting of ballads out of the discussion, and a shutting out of the people who make and listen to ballads as well, though obviously people who listen to and make ballads also listen to and make nonballads. But, you know, for some people ballads are bread and butter.)