“It’s Mid”: You Are Listening to Music Wrong
Tonchi
What is the first question you ask yourself when you listen to some new music?
Think about it first.
Is the question “Is this good (or bad)?"
If so, I’m here to posit that you are not engaging with art fairly or healthily.
I had a conversation in the TFL Messenger GC a few months ago about the practice of the negative review. My position was (and is) that they should absolutely be allowed to exist, and that important and interesting writing can arise from creating a negative review. Somebody messaged me asking if that conversation started because of a particular Instagram account. I responded that it wasn’t. I, then, checked the said Instagram account out, and reading through it convinced me to finally start writing this article. I begin with this aside because reading it galvanized an idea I had been thinking about for months into a belief:
Engaging with art so that you can assess or appraise it is the wrong way to approach art.
Let’s define our terms first, just so we can be clear:
First, engaging with art means to interface with, consume, or appreciate any medium of art in whatever way is needed. For the purposes of this article, I will mostly be dealing with listening to music, so from here on out I will be using the words “music”, “listening”, and “listener” (though you can replace those words with any medium and its matching action and appreciator).
Second, to assess or appraise music is to try to figure out whether it is “good”, “bad”, or anywhere in between and beyond (e.g. great, terrible, etc). I’ll return to the topic of words like these (let’s call them “appraisal adjectives”) later, but the important thing is that this approach to engaging with music implies the end goal is ascribing value to the music. Whether that value is according to a personal standard, is in order to understand one’s place in a wider consensus, is described by words or by numbers, or anything else isn’t relevant to this particular point. The point is that by approaching music this way, the listener resigns themselves to a way of thinking that prioritizes placing a value judgment on the music, a measurement of worth: “is this good?”
People engage with art expecting excellence instead of expression.
Third, I use the word “wrong”. This may seem like it contradicts the entire previous paragraph, as I stated my opposition to using appraisal adjectives like “good” or “bad”. I use the word “wrong” specifically because I believe that this way of thinking both weakens our relationship with music and fails to enrich our lives. What could be more wrong than turning something that is supposed to make life more beautiful into something soulless?
So, let’s begin: what’s the alternative?
I think that a much healthier approach to listening to music lies in listening to understand rather than to assess: to figure out what the effect of the music is, and why, rather than how good it is. The effect of the music can encompass many things, for example:
How does the music make you feel?
What meaning do you find in the music?
Do you think the music accomplishes its purpose?
Do you enjoy the music?
These seem like high school-level questions one would find on a reflection assignment, but think about whether any of these questions spring to mind for you before “is this good or bad?” when you listen to anything for the first time. If you’re the kind of person that would be reading an article like this, I would wager the answer is “no”.
Listening to music with its effect in mind first rather than its value encourages the listener to be more thoughtful in their listening. When listening with value in mind, the listener immediately is boxed into a sliding scale: from terrible to perfect, and the descriptors in between. When listening to music with effect in mind, instead a whole world opens up: how a chorus makes you feel can be described in so many different ways; what you think an album means could differ entirely from the reading of a friend; whether a performance accomplishes its purpose can vary based on the purpose and your own reaction; and whether you enjoy a song or not doesn’t place a value on its entire existence.
Now, a listener can indeed listen with both effect and value in mind, just because they’re thinking about one doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t think about the other. I’m just suggesting that listening with the purpose of ascribing value first is putting the cart before the horse: how can someone judge the value of a piece of art without understanding the art beforehand? If your first question is “is it good or bad?”, you’re doing exactly that.
I’m also going to bring forward another point: beginning your engagement with art with the goal of appraisal, whether quantitative or not, is actively detrimental to a fulfilling relationship with the art you’re engaging with, and with art in general.
First, it treats art as product rather than as expression. Going into listening to a work of music thinking first about its quality, rather than how the music makes you feel and its messaging, makes no sense if we think of music as art rather than product. To reiterate, how can we say how good something is if we don’t aim to understand it first? It’s true that music becomes a product as soon as it is released: we live under capitalism and the practice of putting music out into the world turns it into product by necessity, even if it’s released for free. However, as it is being made, it is not necessarily product yet: it’s in the process of an artist shaping a piece of self-expression. Sometimes artists think about their art as product already during the process, by paying mind to audience expectations and popularity trends. In a way, however, that can part of an artist’s self-expression as well, even if it can manifest in cynical ways. We, as artists, want to connect with people with our self-expression after all.
Regarding audience expectations, I believe that a very unhealthy habit in music listening audiences is placing expectations on artists. There’s something to be said about the entitlement encouraged by fan and “stan” culture, but that’s it’s own separate beast. Artists shouldn’t owe their audiences anything but the work that they create regardless of perceived quality, and audiences shouldn’t owe artists anything at all except for basic respect as a human being.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the expectations artists are hounded by are things the artists have no control over: hype, audience size and reaction, consensus verdict on quality. If an artist has no say in how these factors arise, I don’t think it’s fair to place expectations on them for it. I see people brand artists as “overhyped” or “underrated”, and these words have to do with somebody’s perceived audience consensus on an artist. Why should we let everyone else’s thoughts affect our own unique experiences with different pieces of art? We all have our own backgrounds, life experiences, and tastes: to adjust one’s expectations based on other people’s hype has nothing to do with one’s own potential experience with a work of art.
So, once one does have a personal understanding of how they feel and think about a work of music they’re engaging with, how should we articulate that reaction? What’s fair to cover and what kind of points aren’t in the scope of engaging with a work? I believe that critique, and the review format especially, should deal primarily with the work being critiqued. I don’t really think it’s either fair or productive to spend time illustrating what a work “could have done better”, what the listener wishes the work was, or speculating about the next direction the artist could take: that’s not taking the work for what the work is. That precious word count could be used talking about context, background, illustrating thoughts and feelings on the actual content of the work in terms that have to do with what the work is rather than what the work isn’t. Work that you perceive as “good” can be critiqued “badly”, and work that you perceive as “bad” can be critiqued “well”. But yet again, all of these descriptors are in the eye of the beholder. One’s “bad” may be another’s “good”, so why are we focused so much on appraisals that fall apart completely in the face of the vast variety of human experiences?
I’ll finish this piece open-endedly, I don’t have the answers here. I just have so much love for music and the expression that can be illustrated through it. As a result, it makes me deeply sad to see that expression tossed to the wayside for the easier discussions of quality, appraisal, and sortation. Music can make us feel and think in ways that are foreign to us, and music can also show that we’re not alone in thinking and feeling certain ways. We, as listeners and as artist, should pay more attention to what truly makes music special: its ability to affect us.