Frank Kogan

One question that immediately came up for me is, "is social critique up to the task of creating a social critiques?" I don't know that music is any more or less "inherently" opaque in that regard than actual (written?) critiques, which tend to be refracted through its audiences in varying levels of comprehension and interpretation. My guess is no -- music's meaning can be widely shared even when (1) it's not "on the page" and (2) it seems not to be "about" the critique from outside some community of shared meaning (e.g. the god-awful music of Rodiguez and its apparently unifying place in the anti-apartheid movement, though I don't know if that's an accurate way of putting it).

Do you need to be conscious of creating a social critique to end up with a good one? My gut says no, of course not, a lot of good social critique happens sometimes despite or sideways to whatever the intentions of the critic were. But then my brain says "yeah but you *finding* a critique in something is not the same as the critique being *put* there. Which is to say that the question is where the onus of the work of critiquing lies -- of course Black American culture contains critique. But everything "contains" critique, because a good critique finds its way into everything (how could the critique NOT be in the omissions, distortions, etc. of white American culture?).

But this still ends me thinking that the role of the critique is in the listener more than the sayer, so hmmmm.