Can't agree with this. The best critics are like being sucked in on a peak acid trip. The point is not to make you doubt, but to upend everything you thought you knew. If your feelings about a critic are like oh I disagree with them because xyz, then they aren't a good critic. They have to make you either love or loathe them. They have to be magnetic. You either wanna buy them a few pints and talk about music for days with them or kick them to a pulp. Otherwise it's just boilerplate goldsmith-ism. It's why I hated Mark on Dido, not because Dido's music I find dull (though it is to me personally) but because the only thing he could do is treat it as surrogate literature. But if I want literature, I'll go for James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or Dostoyevsky. I'm quite against middle ground compromises. I tend to like them as a fancy, but I can never commit to them. It's why I didn't mind Joy Orbison for instance, when I first heard him, it was quite pleasant actually, but when people started falling head over heals about it, I began to dislike his stuff intensely. Cos people were seeing a peak experience in it which was not there, and that to me became nauseatingly pretentious, in the original sense of the term, pretending to be historians of the hardcore continuum when they were anything but.
internationalorange.io
