January 25, 2008
another album of the year...and not: five-paragraph essay
One always wishes to be generous. So we will make a generous assumption about the gushing over Miranda Lambert's 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, by various of our finest critics and the Village Voice year-end poll in general. We will assume these are apologetic makeup votes for having missed the yacht on Lambert's superb, delightful 2005 record Kerosene, which is to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as Appetite for Destruction is to Use Your Illusion II. So it goes: a blown call a couple years ago, and a little guilty retroactive dap.
It's a little hard to maintain that generosity of spirit, given further information: most tellingly, the way Lambert's appearance on all these '07 year-enders tends to hold the place of country music in general. The Voice poll is exemplary: all those voters, all that eclectic and well-informed taste, and Lambert's is the only country album to make the long list (no, the Krauss/Plant album doesn't qualify, thanks). That's not a story about Lambert so much as about the limits of music critics, and the kinds of value judgments that everyone not-so-secretly agrees on.
The critical effusion in re the entirely decent Crazy Ex might be a makeup call, but it's also evidence that said critics are neither thoughtful nor informed about the genre — that they don't fashion their jobs description to include keeping up with an American music which features an almost identical popularity to hiphop, according to SoundScan. Theres a technical name for this practice of deciding before hearing: one might call it "pre-judging," or, in common parlance, prejudice. At least Jody Rosen's heard of Brad Paisley.
Here's a thought problem. What if we were to devise a category and limit it to country albums by women? Or even just by blond women — no, wait, let's limit it to blond women who write most of their own material, got started as teens, and released a country album in 2007? Even if we narrow the aperture down to that very tiny category, Miranda Lambert is in a tough fight for runner-up, with Kelly Pickler. And neither of them is particularly close to Taylor Swift, whose debut album Taylor Swift isn't as good as Kerosene (which might be a once-in-a-decade disc), but is a whole lot better than this year's models, with three songs that could've made the top singles list except that one of them made last year's and got a lengthy writeup about the next generation.
Which is to say: Swift's been around, and all over the radio long enough that music critics should be all over her. Except they don't hear that frequency. One fears they'll be playing catchup again, or taking notice of her now that she's covering Rihanna and Beyonce in concert, which will somehow do more to establish her talent and credibility and general fun-to-listen-to-ness than any number of terrific country singles could do. And so they will end up voting for her next album by way of apology, while missing out on any number of popular and beloved albums of 2009 that also happen to be aces all the way down. Which will turn out to be a sort of embarrassment for said critics, just like this year's Lambert votes.
Posted by jane at January 25, 2008 04:16 PM | TrackBack