One nation under a Moog | Music | The Guardian

Oddly, these are the very things that music critics usually seem to have the hardest time discussing. “Oh, I dig that new x because it’s catchy and it makes me feel y!” How often do you read a review and have a sense of how the music makes the reviewer feel?

(via desnoise)

Why don’t reviewers write about how they feel?

1. Construction of the reviewer as an ideal or universal listener.

2. (maybe UK only) horror of the first-person singular in critical style guides from about 1985 on.

3. Emotional connection implies interpretation and I think there’s been a (healthy in some ways) growing distrust of that as applied to music.

4. A lot of really awesome music demands a physical expression of feeling which makes the sympathetic one an afterthought or a point-missing distraction. (Critics love and privilege sad dance music, but not because it’s DANCE music)

5. I see a lot of people - not just critics - talk about how music stirs their emotion but not about the specifics of the emotion being stirred. Someone on my twitter feed today said that Bon Iver made him cry, but there was no talk of why or how or what the resonance was. It being Twitter, this is a 140chars thing, but I see similar claims made on message boards: the action or claim of feeling an emotion stands in for the emotion being felt.

6. Similarly, emotion is often claimed as a property of a piece of music, it “has” emotion in the same way that it “has” a snare drum on it.