Weak And Strong Exceptionalism
Imagine you find a record you like in a genre you don’t usually listen to very deeply. Here are two broad ways you might talk about it publically:
“I don’t listen to much [genre] but I really like [artist].”
“[Artist] transcends [genre] and exposes its limitations.”
These positions are what I’m calling weak and strong exceptionalism - the adjectives not meant as value judgements, incidentally. In weak exceptionalism, the qualities of the artist are measured against the relative yardstick of the listener’s experience of the genre, which is admitted to be low. In strong exceptionalism, the qualities of the artist are measured against the typical qualities of the genre.
For a critic, strong exceptionalism seems a lot more tempting - it feels more authoritative, it’s likelier to start arguments, it puts the artist in a general rather than a personal context.
But I’d say strong exceptionalism is a trap. Weak exceptionalism puts the focus on what you are getting out of an artist. Strong exceptionalism moves the focus away from an artist and puts in on what you’re not getting out of a whole genre. This is immediately shakier ground, and also risks sidelining the very thing you supposedly want to praise as debate inevitably moves onto the wider issues around the genre.
(This seems to happen particularly with hip-hop in my experience. But I wanted to put the ideas forward as abstracts, rather than get into specific examples just now.)
