HE DON'T KNOW ME VERY WELL, DO HE?

[Below is the full text of a press release I received in today's mail.]

ARTIST: Shaw
ALBUM: Pretending We're Not Animals
LABEL: Swordfish Records
RELEASE DATE: February 1st, 2010 on CD (eco-conscious packaging!) and digitally via iTunes
IN A SENTENCE: Simple, poignant pop songs dipped in molten silver and buried in the sand for weeks before being played back to your ears through an old Russian submarine.
IN PARAGRAPHS: Shaw is the quintessential self-produced art pop musician, a do-it-yourself soundchemist, exploring what is possible with limited resources and unlimited creativity. After producing a string of bands in his basement, Shaw set about conceiving an album of his own design. He locked the doors, shut the blinds and didn't leave his lo-fi laboratory until a perfect brainchild lay whole and conscious before him, with wolf-white teeth and a heart-machine pumping blood in rhythmic dances. Pretending We're Not Animals, a coy nod to modern man's schizophrenic self-image, was born.
If Pretending We're Not Animals was a building it would be an old Victorian house in San Francisco, a post-Earthquake dwelling with an expansive view of Golden Gate Park and the Pacific Ocean. It would present a wine red facade over old, vulnerable brick. The foundation of washed synths and delayed guitars would be poured upon pillars made of tiny bits of broken drum machines. The mantle would be decorated with self-portraits of artists the landlord once knew and loved. Thick carpets would sprawl over old growth redwood, basking in the warmth of the hearth. Some doors would only be large enough for cats and dogs, but otherwise it would be a fine place for an intimate party or quiet night re-reading a favorite book, far away from the near threat of December's frigid air.
MIGHT BE ENJOYED BY LISTENERS OF: MGMT, Animal Collective, The Faint or The Handsome Furs
ON THE WEB: www.shawmakesmusic.com and www.swordfishrecords.com

[It almost makes me wonder if I was sent this - and the envelope was hand-addressed, making me think I was chosen with slightly more care than some publicists take - so that I'd wind up publicizing it in exactly this manner...once I stopped laughing. Which I haven't yet.]

MAN, I'M GLAD THAT'S OVER

I think 2009 was the year I finally stopped caring about critical consensus. It was definitely the year I felt most distant from my “peers.” I clicked on Pitchfork dutifully every morning M-F, and at least four days a week was confronted with reviews of albums that meant less than nothing to me musically or sociologically. The same thing happened when I stumbled across a Slate piece or some random daily paper article trying to make me think and care about Beyonce or Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga (whose videos are frequently pretty awesome, but whose music has yet to be even half as good as the visuals that surround it). I was as disconnected from what the loudest critical voices were discussing with each other as I have ever been.

There was a time when I would have seen this as my fault, when I would have been upset with myself for not keeping up, when I would have felt like it was my responsibility as a critic to know what Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors (not to mention all the mainstream pop and country and hip-hop acts) sounded like. But this year, that didn’t happen. I finally internalized cultural atomization and the existential futility of generalist/broad-stroke music criticism.

When you try to go large-scale, you end up lost in a fog of platitudes and generalizations that offer no insight and may in fact impede real understanding of individual works of art. Art doesn’t fit into sweeping narratives. Each album or song must be taken on its own merits, instead of trying to contextualize it within a genre or, worse yet, hammer it into some imagined soundtrack to an equally ill-considered version of history.

The rewards of being a music critic are so low at this point – you don’t even get the free CDs anymore half the time – that trying to be an omniscient cultural arbiter only makes the striver look foolish and hubristic. Critics can’t make bands, and they can’t break them. It’s all just diary-keeping now. (If we're being honest, it always was.) Solipsism is the future – the ever-increasing use of the first person singular in reviews and even features is proof of this, and that’s a major psychological breakthrough every critic needs to make, soon. I’m comfortable with my tastes (metal, jazz and Latin music), but more importantly I’m at peace with my own insignificance. I know I’m having no measurable impact on the shape of pop culture. Technical death metal is never gonna top the charts, jazz is gonna keep selling jazz numbers, and Paulina Rubio is never gonna be as big as Shakira. And I don’t care. I’m just out here enjoying the music, and occasionally sharing my thoughts with whoever happens along. I hope my fellow critics will embrace their own insignificance in 2010. It’ll probably make their writing better.