Those Windmills Won’t Tilt Themselves
Okay, so this is my thing:
You can be a generalist, or you can be a specialist. You can give a shit about what’s going on with the Top 40, or you can scour the web for every edition-of-40 bedroom-born cassette. You can mark your territory however you see fit, but the minute you puff out your chest and start sounding off on shit that’s not in your comfort zone like your slanted ill-informed cockeyed rigid-as-fuck opinion is worth one hot steaming damn, you should just go back in your hole until you learn how to play well with others.
It’s inevitable that you’re going to feel slighted or out of step if you’re not with the general consensus. And lord knows that if I had to rely on criticism as my main source of income, I’d probably be losing my shit right now regarding what I like versus what I have to write about in order to get paid. But is it really that hard to just like what you like without having a mondo-sized chip on your shoulder about it? Is it really so difficult to conceive that your taste might not sync up with what most folks appreciate, and that neither you nor the other folks are necessarily wrong?
Earlier today on Twitter, I asked the sort of dopey question that probably deserves to go unanswered: can someone’s opinion be objectively wrong? Of course, it can be wrong if it’s formed through bad info or research, or whatever biases the thinker in question might have. But, if someone dots those particular Is, and comes clean about where they stand, and still comes to a conclusion that’s bucking the general consensus (there’s that phrase again), is there something intrinsically wrong with that conclusion? (Don’t mind me while I reinvent these particular wheels; I like the spinning.)
There’s a line between having the courage of your convictions and thinking your convictions are all that matter that I’ve always had trouble coming to terms with. When I didn’t know much of anything, it was much to easy for me to mount the high horse and think I knew what the hell I was talking about. The older I get, though, the harder it is for me to mount that horse. Nowadays, whenever I deign to give my opinion on something, I either have to fool myself into thinking that I am King of Shit Mountain regarding my opinion, or I expend way too much energy (relatively speaking, of course) weighing the pros and cons of a particular thing until I either get frustrated & start blurting out whatever comes to mind, or I get bug-eyed & confused and cut bait on even sounding off.
So maybe my beef with folks that throw their weight around & say This Is Good and This Is Bad is purely jealousy. But it just seems silly to toe that particular line when there’s no way in hell of there being any absolute truth in all of this. An arbiter of taste only has as much power as people are willing to concede it. Ratings are bullshit, rankings are bullshit, scores are bullshit. Hell, even the words that back up those ratings and scores with cogent thought-out analysis are bullshit after a certain point. And they’re definitely bullshit when they throw down the hammer.
Which is to say that I prefer a little equivocation or vulnerability with my critical exposition, some sense that the writer doesn’t know everything & is willing to cop to that. I dare say it takes more courage to stick to those particular guns than to simply be a stubborn mutt about what makes for truth and beauty in the world. And willing to admit your shortcomings doesn’t immediately mean that your opinion is some sort of glad-handing trifle; if you’re going to throw punches, it’s better to pick your spots than to simply start flailing away.
And I’ll stop with the tortured extended metaphors right there. I get these sort of flare-ups every time some sort of critical hoe-down is going down, & more often than not I just keep this roundabout go-nowhere meandering to myself (though I’m pretty sure I could find a write-up or ten in my blog about this very thing, if I had the interest to research that shit). That I’m bothering to make my “grievances” public isn’t to take veiled shots at unnamed folks whose work or attitudes rub me the wrong way; it’s more to just let off some steam and decompress, and maybe to help recenter myself regarding the non-monetary reasons why I ever speak out on anything.
(And also to kill some time semi-productively, because holy shit there are no good NBA games on tonight.)
