Let's Talk About "Let's Talk About Love"

Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste
By Carl Wilson

"There are two kinds of music - good music and bad music. Good music is music I want to hear. Bad music is music I don't want to hear."

-Fran Lebowitz

I first read this quote in a Norton Anthology when I was in high school - it's the opening to an essay in which Lebowitz elaborates on the same idea in her brash, New York City way - and I wrestled with it for years. At first I thought she was wrong. Some music is just objectively good and some isn't, isn't it?

Eventually, reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that Lebowitz is right.

How do you define what's good music in any kind of objective sense? Sometimes - well, always - I want to hear some sloppy, drunk, poorly recorded Guided By Voices track more than I want to hear some exquisitely crafted work by Steely Dan. Does that mean GBV is good and Steely Dan is bad? To me, maybe. To the vast majority of music listeners, no way.

I thought about this again when reading Carl Wilson's book about Céline Dion. When it first came out in 2007, "Let's Talk About Love" was part of the 33 1/3 series of short books about great albums, and it became much talked-about in certain circles for the the audaciousness of its premise, putting Céline Dion in the company of the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, and so on. Virtually no critics or readers of 33 1/3 books would ever list Céline Dion's "Let's Talk About Love" among the canon of greats. Indeed, Carl Wilson himself disliked Dion. He wanted to write a book about why music lovers hate certain artists, and about the meaning of "good taste" (it was originally subtitled "A Journey to the End of Taste") and so he chose someone he had long found insufferable and unbearably uncool.

Play it cool, boy

Why do we decide that some music is uncool, anyway? Why do we decide that some people are uncool for liking certain music, or that certain songs should be "guilty pleasures" at best, or otherwise completely dismissed? These are the questions that Wilson tackles in the book.

However, Wilson sort of steps around a question that, for me, is a necessary corollary: Who decides what's cool and what's uncool?

I will explain why this is a problem, but first I want to say that "Let's Talk About Love" is really good. Wilson is a great writer and talented critic. As a Canadian, he is in a special position to write about how Dion is understood in her home country, where she has been a star since her teenage years. It's really interesting to read Wilson's explanation on the contrast between the image of Dion in Québéc, where she is considered somewhat "kétaine" (a French Canadian expression that's something along the lines of "corny," or "hick") with the way she just appears everywhere else. (She's apparently very popular in the Middle East and parts of Africa.), In the United States, where, Wilson writes, the context of Francophone Canadian history appears as a "null set" - she's not quite foreign enough to appear exotic, but she's different enough to appear weird.

I really liked Wilson's take on Elliott Smith's famously odd appearance on the Academy Awards, when Smith's "Miss Misery" lost Best Song From a Motion Picture to Dion's "Titanic" theme song "My Heart Will Go On." To indie rock fans like me and Wilson, this appeared like an example of the mainstream not knowing genius when it saw it. But Wilson digs a little deeper and finds that Smith himself didn't see it that way. Apparently, the showbiz veteran Dion was kind to the underground-bred Smith backstage that night, making him feel more comfortable before a high-pressure event, and he always remembered it. According to Wilson, Smith, for the rest of his too-short life after that night, always stuck up for Dion when people made snide comments about her.  

In addition, Wilson does good work in summarizing scholarship on the concept of good taste, and how it is inextricably linked with our notions of social class. 

Yogi  and Boo Boo

All that said, as I was reading the book I kept thinking of that Yogi Berra line, "No one goes there anymore; It's too crowded." Wilson keeps returning to the idea that there is a consensus of good taste, and that the consensus has decided that Dion is tacky. The problem is that he usually neglects to explain that this consensus consists of, I don't know, Pitchfork readers, college radio DJs and people Wilson meets at the EMP Pop Music Conference every year. So, that's maybe 150,000 people. Place that number up against the tens of millions of people who have bought Céline Dion albums.

Now, I'm one of those 150,000 people. But even so, as I read Wilson's book I kept thinking, Come on, dude; It's just us music geeks who think she's tacky. Céline Dion has millions of fans; she doesn't need us to appreciate her. I mean, look for the befuddled reactions on Twitter after Arcade Fire wins at the Grammys or St. Vincent appears on "SNL" and you'll realize that most people don't even have a frame of reference to allow them to understand what these artists are doing, let alone to decide they like them better than Céline Dion. You might say that the critical consensus appears to most people as a "null set."

Cheerleaders for Beyoncé

This touches on a sore point of mine: poptimism. This mini-movement that has been ascendant in musical criticism circles over the past decade, and many critics see it as a welcome correction to "rockism."

There's a lot to be said for tearing down the Rolling Stone magazine view of rock/pop history, but poptimism strikes me as kind of phony. I see it as an academic exercise more than anything else. I may be wrong, but I assume many of poptimism's fiercest proponents went to liberal arts colleges, where they were taught to be suspicious of Eurocentric "Great Man Theory," and so they are turning that lens on rock criticism.

This approach may please the critics' old professors, and it may make for lively discussion at music conferences, but is there any other need for it? Who is being served when geeky rock critics write odes to the greatness of Beyoncé? Does Beyoncé need more attention than she already gets? Do these critics' readers need to be told about Beyoncé, as if they have never heard of her?

The point of Lebowitz's essay is that music is all about the listener. The point of music criticism should be the reader, shouldn't it? Outside of the the EMP Pop Music Conference, the primary role of the critic is not to talk to other critics, it's to introduce readers to music they might love.

If, as Wilson and so many other critics say, the Internet has leveled the landscape - making previously unobtainable releases by Judee Sill nearly as accessible as the latest smash hit by Beyoncé, doesn't that make it more, not less important, for critics to call attention to Lydia Loveless, Tony Molina or some other obscure but great new artist whom readers may never have heard of? After all, any readers who are interested can probably find that artist's work semi-legally on YouTube today, so you can't say critics are just praising the obscure for the sake of being obscure. But at the same time, readers won't know what to look for unless someone points them there - and that someone is probably not going to be Spotify's recommendation algorithm. That thing is a terrible critic.

But I digress. 

We've Got an Appendix for That

In this edition of the book, Wilson attaches several essays elucidating certain points or responding to the book. Some of these are better than others. Ann Powers writes about her mom, making the point that maybe people dismiss Dion because they think Céline Dion makes music their moms might like. Someone else writes about a mashup disco night in which the DJs played Céline Dion, practically daring people to stay on the dance floor. Daphne Brooks writes an interesting piece about Diana Ross because ... I don't know why. Wilson's ex-wife writes something about songs that meant something to her during different relationships, and I have no idea what it has to do with Céline Dion, or why her ex-husband would want to read it, let alone put it in his book. And James Franco shows up because James Franco shows up everywhere.

You can skip all these and go to novelist Mary Gaitskill's essay, which pretty much summarizes the book and notes how the kind of dismissive snobbery that Wilson is writing about is, if anything, worse in the literary world.

It's an important point. We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss artists, their art and their admirers simply because they don't fit into our elitist notions of taste. But it's important to remember who you mean when you say "we."