Hooves on the Turf

David Byrne blogged a response to a negative review of his show in New York Times yesterday, and he mentions something I think about all the time. I’ve italicized the relevant parts, and bolded what hits the hardest:

I still haven’t read the review, and don’t intend to. While taking criticism on board can be constructive, it can also be detrimental to the creative process if it’s considered while that process is still under way. It undermines one’s enthusiasm and will — which is OK, beneficial even, but only after a tour (for example) is over.

I agree with all of that except for the “which is OK” part. How can it ever be OK to let anything undermine “one’s enthusiasm and will”? I’d go even further and say your whole musical existence is one big, never-ending process and it’s pure treachery to your craft to seriously consider any criticism unless the critic reveals to you what you already knew but you didn’t know you knew.

I was walking with two young men from a very talented Brooklyn band one day, and we were talking about their friend’s band scoring a major label deal, and I mentioned how it felt like these deals seem to always ruin a great band (which was an exaggeration, of course) and they asked me why I thought that. First of all, if you’re a bad musician, no criticism or training will ever help you, so I’m only referring to good or great musicians here. It seems that much of the “struggle” they have to go through makes them who they are, it puts them in a circumstance where an important part of them must surface, and if you have a major label deal where your only goal is make music that sells, then you’ve totally lost all of that. There’s always the common tragedy of crap artists making it and talented artists not making it, and even decent artists making it way more than what’s necessary, but I think the real tragedy is when an artist who already has a wonderfully special thing caves in to the pressure of stowing that way in exchange for something the majority of the world will grasp quicker–and even when the “critics” are right in their own terms, this is still tragic, and yes, there can be two contradicting rights. Of course, one band who’s withstood it all is Radiohead, and I wonder if there’ll be many more examples from today’s bands.

But I disagree with David Byrne on another point (or maybe I agree with him more than what he’d intended):

This review, by all reports, wasn’t helpful criticism anyway — it seemed to be one of those reviews that comes from some psychological issues the writer has — and therefore even a belated reading is not going to help us refine what we do.

A review is always a reflection of the reviewer’s psychological condition no matter what the condition may be. A review can never be anything more than what the subject of the review reveals about the writer, which in turn may or may not reveal a new understanding of the subject. And anyway, the reviews that are the most technical and “objective” are rarely worth reading because they’re usually quite mundane and does nothing to massage your poor little soul. I think my main point is that reviews are to be read, to be consumed, to be enjoyed, to be annoyed by, etc., but rarely to be taken seriously.