Response from a Disgruntled Gotye fan

(Teeth?! They’re fine! It’s an American thing, right? He’s got nice hair, though.)

Secondly, I too have to call you up on the Banksy ref. You can call me uncultured or closed-minded or just plain out-of-touch, but I regard most modern art as bollocks. You can tell me something’s by Banksy, and I’ll still think it’s bollocks. You can tell me the context or the history or give me an academic reason why I should appreciate it, and I’ll still think it’s bollocks. I’ve long held that opinion about most non-traditional art.

Except for ‘Red on Red’.

That abstract painting by Mark Rothko … it just does something to me. I couldn’t tell you how or why splodges of subtly different shades of red paint would provoke an emotional response in me, but somehow it just does. It hits a spot that can’t be reached by words, and that’s why the artist chose paint, not poetry.

Great art does that. It hits the spot. Melody Maker said of Skinny Puppy that their music has the power to manipulate mood. I’d agree with that. My favourite songs – by them or anyone else – has the power to find me in one mood and leave me in a totally different mood. It can change me from happy to sad, or lift me from the depths of despair. It can make me smile or feel relaxed or energised, or vent aggression. I don’t have to know anything about it for it to do that – I don’t need context or history or academic discourse. Knowing more can help, and finding out the processes or rationale behind it can enhance the enjoyment, but it can’t add enjoyment where there was none to begin with.

I played the Gotye clips, and they made me feel cold. Not spooked or chilled, but coolly indifferent. It wasn’t the worst music I’ve ever heard, but it provoked absolutely no emotional response whatsoever, other than one track that made me yell, “Gaaah! Make it stop! Make it stop!”

The best art doesn’t start a conversation because it stops conversation. It goes beyond words and hits the audience on some primal level that cannot be articulated.

“I couldn’t give a rats what some world-weary writer (or anyone else, for that matter) thinks of the music that I happen to like.”

Given the length and detail of your reply, I beg to disagree.

But, although I don’t find any of your arguments against Scott’s review convincing, kudos for replying. I mean that.

Your reaction to the music Gotye makes is just as subjective as Scott’s, you know. The fact you know stuff about him and his methods (the samples he uses, the way he constructs his music); the fact that you have familiarity with the cultural context in which his album has been produced, marketed and bought by thousands that Scott doesn’t: these things have contributed to the way you hear the music. But it doesn’t make your response a more valid one than Scott’s, and certainly not a better expressed one. Music criticism isn’t about writing a text book or a commentary: it’s about articulating a personal reaction, about being perceptive about the way the music works on you, insightful about the way you hear it, the way it lives & breathes out in the world.

This:

“When I listen to the album as a whole, I feel a sense of boundless freedom, which is probably a product of Gotye’s music-making philosophy.”

That’s more the sort of thing, even if – sadly – listening to ‘Someone… ‘ induces in *me* all the freedom of an afternoon spent looking for new work shoes in the local shopping centre, rather than wide open skies and endless oceans.

I don’t know why human beings respond to music in the way they do. I can’t draw up definitions to describe music’s effects on the human brain/body. Criticism tries to pin down the ineffable, so arguing that someone hasn’t ‘got’ the music, that they have the wrong ears on, that they don’t understand, is really, truly, never going to work. You’ve got to persuade me with more than facts about its process that it is worth another listen.

Btw, Wallace: that was lovely to read. Thank you. I’m so glad that humans have art. I’m so grateful for music. I’ve just come back from a funeral for a friend gone way before her time and when the music that she had chosen started up, the thing it did, the thing it did to us all in that room, was to clutch at our hearts and let us be lost in it; it provoked a whole cluster of different emotions at once – grief, communion, joy, suadade – like lights rippling across water. It was exactly what was needed. (It wasn’t Gotye.)