I recently read an interview in the A.V. Club of The Onion where the bassist of a death-metal band named Skeletonwitch, which, according to the AVC, “has released three excellent albums,” discussed the song he hates the most. He chose the song “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies.
Despite my essay’s title, this article is not about these two bands, but to make my point let’s look at them for a second.
Not only did I own two Barenaked Ladies albums in high school, I actually saw the band twice and greatly enjoyed myself both times. However, this particular interview was entertaining, and the bassist from Skeletonwitch, Evan Linger, made some decent points about “One Week’s” vapidly poppy rap verses and how it “seems like a song that you’d write if nothing ever went wrong in your life,” as if “you never got a flat tire or a hangnail or anything like that.”
If you know the song, that isn’t a poor analysis. Just reading this article reminded me of all those great Barenaked Ladies songs I liked in high school; at the same time, I was intrigued by the excellentness of Skeletonwitch. So the next day I listened to my old BNL staples while also venturing into Skeletonwitch’s brand of death metal (which is an interesting term itself).
The interviewer for the A.V. Club called these two bands the “polar opposite” of each other. And yet, in my listening I found that I enjoyed the old Barenaked Ladies songs (“Break Your Heart,” “When I Fall,” “Life in a Nutshell”) as much as in my youth, and even had renewed insights into some of them. They ring true. You know heart when you see it, and they come off as honest to me. “One Week” is bouncy bubblegum to me.
Then I listened to Skeletonwitch, and they are archetypal death metal: guttural double bass drum and serrated guitar riffs coming together for a crunching sound like a bear trap chewing on a car engine. Skeletonwitch is a tight, talented band with interesting rhythms and melodies. It reminded me of old-school Metallica. And I really enjoyed a few of the songs, except for the vocals. The vocals are typical death-metal vocals: screaming scary things about blood and the devil, the meanings barely audible, like the singer is trying to bite the air with each breath. I think an instrumental Skeletonwitch album would be for me.
No offense to that guy, or that style. I’m not calling him not talented. Fans of Skeletonwitch, rock on. Music resonates with us ineffibly, beneath the words. It’s very subjective and personal. But the words we use to talk about our opinions, and the way those words shape our identities, can marginalize people by not acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in personal opinion.
Pardon the self-indulgence while I explain some of my music. At three I’d walk around singing, “Booorn in the U.S.A!” No other lyrics. My first album was Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits at four. By eight, Aerosmith was my favorite band. Yup. Then the alternative explosion happened, and all throughout high school and college I mentioned to no one that I liked Aerosmith. I heard so many times that "Aerosmith is horrible/awful/terrible/the worst band ever" that I wouldn’t admit to myself that I liked them. While I was learning about Dylan and the Beatles, it was safer to ridicule other people for liking N*Sync or Nickelback or Christian rock, safer to find the commonalities between the shared musical tastes of those whose companionship I desired than it was to admit to myself I still liked Aerosmith. Comes on the radio. Click.
Why? Because we wanted people to think we had good taste. We wanted to fit in; we wanted acceptance. And maybe in no other artistic discipline do you get the widespread and accessible pretentiousness that you get in pop music purists, whether it’s folk fans, punk rockers, classic rockers, metal heads, hip hoppers, country folk, jam banders, and so on. And even these categorizations are a Western-centric handling of the subject. It’s so much easier to say, “That song is terrible,” “That song is garbage,” “How can you even listen to that?” (and because it’s so easy that we do it so often) than it is to be tolerant, and even understanding, of someone who has tastes so much different than yours.
We think of the objective world as outside of us, a thing that we touch and interact with with a truth that is accepted and agreed upon by any sensible person (by which we mean anyone who agrees with us). Immanuel Kant poked many holes in this idea, however, by positing that the objective world is not immediately accessed by us, but is mediated by our sense perceptions. We also know that every human being has a unique nervous system, a unique psychological and emotional makeup, a unique set of inclinations and biases, and a unique catalog of historical events and memories. Each of these things filters the objective world into our awareness in a way that makes each of our experiences purely unique. Sometimes similar, but still unduplicated.
The differences in our subjective experiences of the objective world are seen in less in the sciences and mathematics (though they still exist there) than in politics, religion, philosophy, and art. Music is perhaps the most powerful example, due to its ineffability, its nature to move us emotionally, and its cultural popularity. Maybe Skeletonwitch or N*Sync do not speak to me like Neil Young or Ronnie Lane, but they speak to someone. We can compare musical talent or the depth of lyrics, but the moral judging of one’s character due to their artistic tastes is a post hoc fallacy.
In the oft-stated, “That band is terrible,” the linking verb “is” declares truth, and truth is universal. Cue grammar buzzer. In a Youtube video I’ve watched too many times, science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson talks about E-Prime, a dialect of English without the use of the word is:
“Instead of thinking ‘the grass is green,’ I think, ‘The grass appears green to me.’ And this saves me a lot of time…I don’t get embroiled in arguments like Beethoven is better than Mozart or rock is better than soul. I define such things as meaningless. And so when people get into arguments like that, I just say to them, ‘Well, Beethoven seems better to me than Mozart most of the time.’ I don’t say ‘Beethoven is better than Mozart.’”
This is a more conscious application of words than, “One Week is a terrible song,” which thankfully our representative from Skeletonwitch didn't say. He said “he hates it” with the active verb denoting personal opinion and choice (because of subjective agency). But by using the word “is,” the first statement is trying to fallaciously declare an objective truth about something that could never be objective because it is always dependent upon the listener’s personal experience. This is the case for just about every opinion we have. "This is good. That's bad. That's awesome. This stinks." All attempted declarations of truth.
But the shortcuts of language force us to talk this way. Linking verbs take our opinion and assign it a truth label. “This tastes skunky,” “He is ill-tempered,” and “She doesn’t pirouette well” are all trying to be statements of objective fact when they are really just opinions: descriptions of our individual subjective experiences. Maybe we have similar experiences, but group consensus is not objective truth either.
I don’t know if there’s any way around this language trap other than to recognize it when you hear it. I’ve tried cutting it out of my speech and will continue to, but if you want to beat yourself up every time you express an opinion in a way that is masquerading as objective truth, then be prepared for a waterfall of self-judgment. Keep working on it though.
And be aware of it. Paying attention to our language (and the limitations of it) isn’t a hot topic in the public discourse unless the word or words are controversial. Listening and discussing art is a skill that not many people actively develop in a sophisticated way. People who do this professionally are called critics, and critics 1. love their artistic medium and expose themselves to a ton of it in multiple genres 2. cultivate their knowledge of the tools and artistry of it, both cognitively and emotionally, and 3. use the poetry of language in a way that captures the experience. But we can’t all do that professionally, and who’s got the time? A highly developed, highly nuanced opinion—from simply the point of view of the experience—can’t claim higher moral ground, let alone validity, over a less developed opinion, and therefore shouldn’t be expressed as an objective truth. The experience is always the experience. One may be far more nuanced than another, but people can and should be allowed those experiences free from linguistic judgment.
To be fair, words absolutely help us understand our artistic experiences. But applying a label , while a structure that helps our understanding, also confines that understanding. It was now become the word instead of the thing. When this phenomenon becomes widespread it can influence whole societies, from the power of fascist chanting, to religious canticles, to advertising jingles. The words and music get into our heads deny our personal agency or opinion and influence us toward their view of reality false claims of objective truth, like “We are superior,” “God is great,” “The best in its class.”
More subtle objectification of opinions can be seen in the shifting of cultural norms, which are based upon the cultural medians of opinion, and paradigm shifts (blues to R&B, hair metal to grunge, etc.) are shifts in those medians. People are constantly measuring their opinions against cultural norms to determine how “with it,” they are, how they will be looked at by others (as a friend, or as a threat to my opinions and worldview?) and so often this is a product of the way we talk about music and art.
When we phrase our opinions in a way that implies objective truths, and when we focus on those words instead of the purity of experience, we are conforming to ideology. We buy what corporate demographic studies sell us. We shy away from the friction of differing opinions, and we judge ourselves based on how we think others see us because we want their acceptance. We trick ourselves into thinking we need that, as if those "shoulds" could ever let us become or express our truest selves. Working through those tricks brings us, after much toil, to the maturity and confidence to claim ownership of our own tastes. The way our individual human mechanisms accept and process the data of this reality makes up a huge chunk of our identity, but our identity is also based on how we think we should be. Hence, there is always the interplay between what you like creating who you are and how you are perceived against how you are perceived and how you create yourself determining what you like. Perhaps an answer to Nick Hornby's chicken-and-egg query in High Fidelity: "Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
Years after college, I heard an Aerosmith song on the radio—“Angel,” I believe—and I cranked it up and I let myself love it again. Felt awesome. On the other hand, I dislike it for being written with a professional songwriter, presumably to make money, sucking a lot of the authenticity out of it.
I can state the deficiencies I think the song has to me but I should not pronounce them as truth, only interpretation. I’ll describe my experience of a song and you describe your experience, and we Venn diagram it. Tolerance is learning how to not judge people’s character based on what you don’t agree on.
The obvious thesis inherent in art is that we each have our own personal reactions and interpretations of each work. Some pieces resonate with us, others don’t. It’s different for everybody. But awards shows try to put objective labels on works of art that could never replace and individual’s experience, and there are plenty of insecure teenagers trying to find their way who mimic other’s tastes or even (like me) lie about what they like and don’t like to be accepted. Anything to avoid the terror of ostracism or the cold cell of self-judgment that what you think and what you like is wrong and here’s why.
At the time of this writing, Kanye West recently released a song called “Bound 2” about that people on Youtube have thrown all sorts of creative epithets at, and the video has been famously filmed with his beau Kim Kardashian and brilliantly parodied by James Franco and Seth Rogen.
I got swindled. I inadvertently began liking the song. What? I had a problem with until the tenth listen and I couldn’t deny it any more. Can I argue with what I enjoy and don’t enjoy? Even if it is bad, we’re allowed some trash once in a while, right? Damn. There’s that “is” again. And who says the parody was brilliant? How do you know I know what I'm talking about? See what a slippery slope this can be?
Sometimes I’ll fall in love with a song and can’t get it out of my head for days. I want to play it for everyone and say, “Isn’t this amazing!” but I know it probably won’t resonate in the same way with them. Here we see the inescapable loneliness of the human condition, the isolation of each subjective perspective.
The way we bridge that gap is language. The words we use to describe these songs are not the songs themselves. We transcend that isolation by communicating about our experiences, and our experiences are created from the union between our subjective perspectives of the objective world. The words we use to describe a song are really describing our relationship to this song instead of the song itself. Along with being flat-out wrong, labeling a subjective viewpoint as an objective fact can be hurtful to others, especially when it comes to something as personal and emotional as our relationships to the music we like, when we listen to it, and why. Because for music lovers, our taste is a large part of our identity, and a slight to our taste is a slight to who we are, and it takes some of us to feel less insecure about what we like than others.
Again, I’m not good at the language thing either. Just yesterday I said, “This movie is bad.” When I’ve taught college writing, I teach my students not to write, “I think that…” or “I believe that…” We say, “Don’t announce! Just cross that stuff out!”
But you can do that with your writing because you get to fix writing. Spoken language is spontaneous and not always as conscious, and because it’s easier, we phrase things as though they were truth instead of opinion. Giving each other some more “I think…”s and “I believe…”s in our speech won’t draw as stark lines between people on account of their differences in opinion, whether we’re talking about music, art, politics, religion, or morality. Without tolerance, the commonalities can be too few to prevent friction, camaraderie, and progress.
It takes a lot of work to consciously use of language to develop this openness of expression—an openness to the purity of the direct experience instead labeling it or judging it—and it takes a more open heart and mind to be tolerant and understand of perspectives so different than ours. There aren’t many things more difficult than that, or more important.
At least from my point of view. This is from a guy who likes two bands as polarly opposing as Barenaked Ladies and Skeletonwitch. So enjoy whatever your crazy opinions are. I just want everyone to _________.
(The words I use to fill in that blank are "rock out." But everyone has different words that sound good to them.)
Despite my essay’s title, this article is not about these two bands, but to make my point let’s look at them for a second.
Not only did I own two Barenaked Ladies albums in high school, I actually saw the band twice and greatly enjoyed myself both times. However, this particular interview was entertaining, and the bassist from Skeletonwitch, Evan Linger, made some decent points about “One Week’s” vapidly poppy rap verses and how it “seems like a song that you’d write if nothing ever went wrong in your life,” as if “you never got a flat tire or a hangnail or anything like that.”
If you know the song, that isn’t a poor analysis. Just reading this article reminded me of all those great Barenaked Ladies songs I liked in high school; at the same time, I was intrigued by the excellentness of Skeletonwitch. So the next day I listened to my old BNL staples while also venturing into Skeletonwitch’s brand of death metal (which is an interesting term itself).
The interviewer for the A.V. Club called these two bands the “polar opposite” of each other. And yet, in my listening I found that I enjoyed the old Barenaked Ladies songs (“Break Your Heart,” “When I Fall,” “Life in a Nutshell”) as much as in my youth, and even had renewed insights into some of them. They ring true. You know heart when you see it, and they come off as honest to me. “One Week” is bouncy bubblegum to me.
Then I listened to Skeletonwitch, and they are archetypal death metal: guttural double bass drum and serrated guitar riffs coming together for a crunching sound like a bear trap chewing on a car engine. Skeletonwitch is a tight, talented band with interesting rhythms and melodies. It reminded me of old-school Metallica. And I really enjoyed a few of the songs, except for the vocals. The vocals are typical death-metal vocals: screaming scary things about blood and the devil, the meanings barely audible, like the singer is trying to bite the air with each breath. I think an instrumental Skeletonwitch album would be for me.
No offense to that guy, or that style. I’m not calling him not talented. Fans of Skeletonwitch, rock on. Music resonates with us ineffibly, beneath the words. It’s very subjective and personal. But the words we use to talk about our opinions, and the way those words shape our identities, can marginalize people by not acknowledging the subjectivity inherent in personal opinion.
Pardon the self-indulgence while I explain some of my music. At three I’d walk around singing, “Booorn in the U.S.A!” No other lyrics. My first album was Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits at four. By eight, Aerosmith was my favorite band. Yup. Then the alternative explosion happened, and all throughout high school and college I mentioned to no one that I liked Aerosmith. I heard so many times that "Aerosmith is horrible/awful/terrible/the worst band ever" that I wouldn’t admit to myself that I liked them. While I was learning about Dylan and the Beatles, it was safer to ridicule other people for liking N*Sync or Nickelback or Christian rock, safer to find the commonalities between the shared musical tastes of those whose companionship I desired than it was to admit to myself I still liked Aerosmith. Comes on the radio. Click.
Why? Because we wanted people to think we had good taste. We wanted to fit in; we wanted acceptance. And maybe in no other artistic discipline do you get the widespread and accessible pretentiousness that you get in pop music purists, whether it’s folk fans, punk rockers, classic rockers, metal heads, hip hoppers, country folk, jam banders, and so on. And even these categorizations are a Western-centric handling of the subject. It’s so much easier to say, “That song is terrible,” “That song is garbage,” “How can you even listen to that?” (and because it’s so easy that we do it so often) than it is to be tolerant, and even understanding, of someone who has tastes so much different than yours.
We think of the objective world as outside of us, a thing that we touch and interact with with a truth that is accepted and agreed upon by any sensible person (by which we mean anyone who agrees with us). Immanuel Kant poked many holes in this idea, however, by positing that the objective world is not immediately accessed by us, but is mediated by our sense perceptions. We also know that every human being has a unique nervous system, a unique psychological and emotional makeup, a unique set of inclinations and biases, and a unique catalog of historical events and memories. Each of these things filters the objective world into our awareness in a way that makes each of our experiences purely unique. Sometimes similar, but still unduplicated.
The differences in our subjective experiences of the objective world are seen in less in the sciences and mathematics (though they still exist there) than in politics, religion, philosophy, and art. Music is perhaps the most powerful example, due to its ineffability, its nature to move us emotionally, and its cultural popularity. Maybe Skeletonwitch or N*Sync do not speak to me like Neil Young or Ronnie Lane, but they speak to someone. We can compare musical talent or the depth of lyrics, but the moral judging of one’s character due to their artistic tastes is a post hoc fallacy.
In the oft-stated, “That band is terrible,” the linking verb “is” declares truth, and truth is universal. Cue grammar buzzer. In a Youtube video I’ve watched too many times, science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson talks about E-Prime, a dialect of English without the use of the word is:
“Instead of thinking ‘the grass is green,’ I think, ‘The grass appears green to me.’ And this saves me a lot of time…I don’t get embroiled in arguments like Beethoven is better than Mozart or rock is better than soul. I define such things as meaningless. And so when people get into arguments like that, I just say to them, ‘Well, Beethoven seems better to me than Mozart most of the time.’ I don’t say ‘Beethoven is better than Mozart.’”
This is a more conscious application of words than, “One Week is a terrible song,” which thankfully our representative from Skeletonwitch didn't say. He said “he hates it” with the active verb denoting personal opinion and choice (because of subjective agency). But by using the word “is,” the first statement is trying to fallaciously declare an objective truth about something that could never be objective because it is always dependent upon the listener’s personal experience. This is the case for just about every opinion we have. "This is good. That's bad. That's awesome. This stinks." All attempted declarations of truth.
But the shortcuts of language force us to talk this way. Linking verbs take our opinion and assign it a truth label. “This tastes skunky,” “He is ill-tempered,” and “She doesn’t pirouette well” are all trying to be statements of objective fact when they are really just opinions: descriptions of our individual subjective experiences. Maybe we have similar experiences, but group consensus is not objective truth either.
I don’t know if there’s any way around this language trap other than to recognize it when you hear it. I’ve tried cutting it out of my speech and will continue to, but if you want to beat yourself up every time you express an opinion in a way that is masquerading as objective truth, then be prepared for a waterfall of self-judgment. Keep working on it though.
And be aware of it. Paying attention to our language (and the limitations of it) isn’t a hot topic in the public discourse unless the word or words are controversial. Listening and discussing art is a skill that not many people actively develop in a sophisticated way. People who do this professionally are called critics, and critics 1. love their artistic medium and expose themselves to a ton of it in multiple genres 2. cultivate their knowledge of the tools and artistry of it, both cognitively and emotionally, and 3. use the poetry of language in a way that captures the experience. But we can’t all do that professionally, and who’s got the time? A highly developed, highly nuanced opinion—from simply the point of view of the experience—can’t claim higher moral ground, let alone validity, over a less developed opinion, and therefore shouldn’t be expressed as an objective truth. The experience is always the experience. One may be far more nuanced than another, but people can and should be allowed those experiences free from linguistic judgment.
To be fair, words absolutely help us understand our artistic experiences. But applying a label , while a structure that helps our understanding, also confines that understanding. It was now become the word instead of the thing. When this phenomenon becomes widespread it can influence whole societies, from the power of fascist chanting, to religious canticles, to advertising jingles. The words and music get into our heads deny our personal agency or opinion and influence us toward their view of reality false claims of objective truth, like “We are superior,” “God is great,” “The best in its class.”
More subtle objectification of opinions can be seen in the shifting of cultural norms, which are based upon the cultural medians of opinion, and paradigm shifts (blues to R&B, hair metal to grunge, etc.) are shifts in those medians. People are constantly measuring their opinions against cultural norms to determine how “with it,” they are, how they will be looked at by others (as a friend, or as a threat to my opinions and worldview?) and so often this is a product of the way we talk about music and art.
When we phrase our opinions in a way that implies objective truths, and when we focus on those words instead of the purity of experience, we are conforming to ideology. We buy what corporate demographic studies sell us. We shy away from the friction of differing opinions, and we judge ourselves based on how we think others see us because we want their acceptance. We trick ourselves into thinking we need that, as if those "shoulds" could ever let us become or express our truest selves. Working through those tricks brings us, after much toil, to the maturity and confidence to claim ownership of our own tastes. The way our individual human mechanisms accept and process the data of this reality makes up a huge chunk of our identity, but our identity is also based on how we think we should be. Hence, there is always the interplay between what you like creating who you are and how you are perceived against how you are perceived and how you create yourself determining what you like. Perhaps an answer to Nick Hornby's chicken-and-egg query in High Fidelity: "Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"
Years after college, I heard an Aerosmith song on the radio—“Angel,” I believe—and I cranked it up and I let myself love it again. Felt awesome. On the other hand, I dislike it for being written with a professional songwriter, presumably to make money, sucking a lot of the authenticity out of it.
I can state the deficiencies I think the song has to me but I should not pronounce them as truth, only interpretation. I’ll describe my experience of a song and you describe your experience, and we Venn diagram it. Tolerance is learning how to not judge people’s character based on what you don’t agree on.
The obvious thesis inherent in art is that we each have our own personal reactions and interpretations of each work. Some pieces resonate with us, others don’t. It’s different for everybody. But awards shows try to put objective labels on works of art that could never replace and individual’s experience, and there are plenty of insecure teenagers trying to find their way who mimic other’s tastes or even (like me) lie about what they like and don’t like to be accepted. Anything to avoid the terror of ostracism or the cold cell of self-judgment that what you think and what you like is wrong and here’s why.
At the time of this writing, Kanye West recently released a song called “Bound 2” about that people on Youtube have thrown all sorts of creative epithets at, and the video has been famously filmed with his beau Kim Kardashian and brilliantly parodied by James Franco and Seth Rogen.
I got swindled. I inadvertently began liking the song. What? I had a problem with until the tenth listen and I couldn’t deny it any more. Can I argue with what I enjoy and don’t enjoy? Even if it is bad, we’re allowed some trash once in a while, right? Damn. There’s that “is” again. And who says the parody was brilliant? How do you know I know what I'm talking about? See what a slippery slope this can be?
Sometimes I’ll fall in love with a song and can’t get it out of my head for days. I want to play it for everyone and say, “Isn’t this amazing!” but I know it probably won’t resonate in the same way with them. Here we see the inescapable loneliness of the human condition, the isolation of each subjective perspective.
The way we bridge that gap is language. The words we use to describe these songs are not the songs themselves. We transcend that isolation by communicating about our experiences, and our experiences are created from the union between our subjective perspectives of the objective world. The words we use to describe a song are really describing our relationship to this song instead of the song itself. Along with being flat-out wrong, labeling a subjective viewpoint as an objective fact can be hurtful to others, especially when it comes to something as personal and emotional as our relationships to the music we like, when we listen to it, and why. Because for music lovers, our taste is a large part of our identity, and a slight to our taste is a slight to who we are, and it takes some of us to feel less insecure about what we like than others.
Again, I’m not good at the language thing either. Just yesterday I said, “This movie is bad.” When I’ve taught college writing, I teach my students not to write, “I think that…” or “I believe that…” We say, “Don’t announce! Just cross that stuff out!”
But you can do that with your writing because you get to fix writing. Spoken language is spontaneous and not always as conscious, and because it’s easier, we phrase things as though they were truth instead of opinion. Giving each other some more “I think…”s and “I believe…”s in our speech won’t draw as stark lines between people on account of their differences in opinion, whether we’re talking about music, art, politics, religion, or morality. Without tolerance, the commonalities can be too few to prevent friction, camaraderie, and progress.
It takes a lot of work to consciously use of language to develop this openness of expression—an openness to the purity of the direct experience instead labeling it or judging it—and it takes a more open heart and mind to be tolerant and understand of perspectives so different than ours. There aren’t many things more difficult than that, or more important.
At least from my point of view. This is from a guy who likes two bands as polarly opposing as Barenaked Ladies and Skeletonwitch. So enjoy whatever your crazy opinions are. I just want everyone to _________.
(The words I use to fill in that blank are "rock out." But everyone has different words that sound good to them.)
All work on this website © 2004-2016 Derek Lazarski. All rights reserved.