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It all starts with the listening, of course, ideally
multiple times, ideally multiple ways: passively (play the record while you
make fudge, grout the tub or knit a sweater for your cat) and actively (sit
and really listen to the record, distracted only by occasional glances at its
liner notes or maybe the artist’s website, so you know what the singer’s
saying, and who’s playing what where). You hear different things when you
listen different ways.
Once you’ve digested the disc in this way, but before you set pen to paper,
it’s time for analysis--both internal and comparative. Internal analysis has
three elements. You can label them past, present and future. Or you can label
them objective, subjective and speculative. The past/objective analysis puts
the disc in context, explaining from whence the artist came and how the
record to be reviewed fits in terms of the artist’s known history and
existing body of work (if there is one). The present/subjective analysis is
your very own spin on what the artist has accomplished with the disc in
question. This is the heart of the review--and don’t let people tell you that
subjectivity is a bad thing here, since at the core, a record review is a
subjective assessment of how you feel about the work. The future/speculative
analysis provides your take on where the artist might go next, or how music
in general may change as a result of the artists’ success or failure.
Comparative analysis is designed to give the artist’s work context and
meaning in terms of other artists or sounds with which your readers might be
familiar. You can compare your artist to other artists, so listeners who are
unfamiliar with the disc you are reviewing can get a sense of whether they
might be interested in it or not. or you can compare
your artist’s music and lyrics other poets or songwriters, or even to
non-musical sounds, movements or emotions. It’s helpful to not be needlessly
obscure here, particularly if the record you are reviewing may be well of the
beaten popular path itself.
Once you’ve listened and re-listened and organized your analyses, it’s time
to write. Note well that music criticism is one of the most cliché-heavy
genres of journalism, and do your best to steer clear of stock buzzwords and
catch phrases. Create your own imagery whenever possible, rather than relying
on imagery you might have read in other reviews. If you’ve read something
once in a record review, it’s probably been used a thousand times before you
encountered it.
It’s better for guitars to sound like a rain of metal locusts or for drums to
sound like a muffler dragging beneath a tank than it is for them to them
"jangle" or "thunder," for instance. Avoid intellectual
sounding, but typical meaningless, manufactured words involving the prefixes
"retro-," "proto-," "neo-," "aggro-," "post-" and "trans-."
Likewise the suffix "-esque." Steer
clear, too, of "seminal" and "erstwhile." Use "eponymous" only at your
own peril.
After you’ve written, it’s not a bad idea to tweak and tighten: music
listeners and readers are notoriously short-attention-span types, and they’re
not likely to read deeply into a long review unless they’re already deeply
interested in the record you’re reviewing, in which case you’re just preaching
to the choir.
When you’ve got your review as lean and elegant as its going to get, then
it’s time to publish, since a review is nothing more than a diary entry if no
one else reads it. Of course, you may not have a print outlet, but that
shouldn’t stop you from sharing your views with others. So put your reviews
on your website. Or on somebody else’s website. Or e-mail them to your
friends. Or bundle a bunch of them together (or with reviews by your
friends), go to Kinko’s and make your own ‘zine. Or
send them out to media outlets in the hopes that they might actually get a
traditional print outlet.
However your do it, it’s important to get your thoughts and words about music
out into the public domain if you’re serious about wanting to review records
on an ongoing basis. Before you know it, people will begin to incorporate
your thoughts when making their own decisions on musical acquisitions and
investigations, and at that point, you’ll be well on your way to being able
to market yourself as an expert critic of music.
Happy listening . . . and analyzing, writing and publishing!
Copyright 2003: J. Eric Smith.
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