Overly Critical in the Internet Age

I think we can all remember a time when there was such thing as “an opinionated person.”  Those people who seemed to have very little figured out, but they were trying.  They formed solid opinions, stuck to them, defended them, and often fought for them.  Others floated by with the comfort that it wasn’t important to judge things like music, movies, comedy and other arts.  There was a clear distinction of people who enjoyed that kind of confrontation, and those who chose not to get involved.   

NOW, in a sense, that distinction is completely gone.  Opinions no longer require arguers to look each other in the eye, and complete strangers can argue without the burden of context or the personal history of their opponents.  Critical argument in the Internet age can take place at the drop of a hat, in the Comments-section of an article, on Facebook with a friend’s friend, or on a message board with like-minded fans.  Confrontation can be instantly provoked, and within moments, people have reached conclusions that are as hard as cement, and formed with mere seconds of thought, and they are published publicly.   With the commentary established, these comments can be read by untold amounts of people looking for information, despite the fact that the author could very well have cooled to the topic moments after making the judgment.  These comments can very well be viewed as intellectual litter, scattered by millions of authors in moments of careless abandon, provoked by impulse, and fueled by the desire to feel heard...or possibly as an attempt to transfer frustration or anger onto a topic rather than it's real cause.  But readers are nonetheless subjected to it, and it can often sour others before anyone’s even had a chance to examine the subject for themselves.  It’s a very curious phenomenon, and something that surely has not been experienced in any other way in history:  The dissemination of public information, written by the public, and read by the public, in one shockingly instantaneous motion.

Let’s look a particularly normal example, pulled from a site called AV Club, a collection of music/movie/book/TV reviews and commentary that I find frequently interesting.  This conversation is happening as I am writing this, and will surely be done being discussed by the time anyone reads this.  The subject: The bands Mumford & Sons, and Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes are going on tour on vintage train cars through the American Southwest.  The tone: this is a silly idea by goofy bands.   My take is that it is a silly idea, but a fun and novel one.  Surely this can’t be a bad thing, in my opinion.  About halfway through the comments I find this:

Ed Sharpe is pure fauxhemian crap. He was actually in a failed spaz punk band called Ima Robot before he decided to hop on the bearded folky indie trend that was happening a couple years back.

Let’s break this down a little bit.  First, “Ed Sharpe is pure fauxhemian crap.”  This assumes that the words fauxhemian is a meaningful term for “phoney bohemian.”  I suppose that Edward Sharpe (which isn't his actual name, but hey...) is a phoney bohemian.  Edward is likely to be seen walking around barefoot despite the wide-availability of footwear, sings songs that seem drawn from equal parts 60’s folk and depression-era country music, all the while licensing these songs for use in TV car commercials.   In his case, “fauxhemian” is actually a cleverly applied title.  But what’s the problem?  The songs aren’t offensive to any sort of standards, they’re well performed and there’s a delightful back-and-forth of female/male vocals.  Is that a problem?   Is fauxhemian-ism so rampant in the author’s region that just the mere mention of that evokes a sense of dread?  Is there a well of personal experience of these types of people that leaves the author no choice but to insult the band based on this perception?  I suppose that’s possible, but seems unlikely.  Besides, it’s music.  Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeroes is just a band, shouldn’t they be judged by their songs?

The second critique in this blurb refers to his past in a band called Ima Robot, which is a band that I’ve heard of but have never listened to.  This time, the assumption is that this band failed (despite being famous enough for me to have heard of them) and because of that failure, Edward Sharpe formed a band in the red-hot scene of bearded indie-folk bands.  Because bearded indie-folk bands so incredibly successful right now.   Being bearded and in an indie-folk band is like owning a money-printing machine, in this author’s opinion. 

With this we have reached one of the most common insults leveled at musicians and artists in the history of the Internet:  “The artist is just doing this because ____________.”  This criticism can be pointed at anyone, for any reason, and can shoot down any creative effort in a heartbeat, and 99 times out of 100, the critic will never have to answer for this.  Why?  Because it’s an opinion that can’t be proven wrong, even if the artist himself insists that it’s not true.    In this case, Edward Sharpe formed this band because he wanted to trick everybody by playing a popular style of music and make a bunch of money off of you saps.  Ima Robot was his real musical style, and The Magnetic Zeroes is his cop-out cash-grab.  And in an instant, the critic has completely shot down this whole band’s past, present and future.  The argument is now, “This isn’t even a legitimate band!  This effort is completely fake and manufactured to make money!  Anyone who enjoys this is being fooled!”  And I don’t want to sound overly sensitive, but that hurts.  That’s an argument that’s so incredibly devastating to its target, but it doesn’t have be proven, and anyone can read it and believe it’s true without any further reasoning.   As a member of many bands in the past, I can just simply assure people that all bands are manufactured to a point, but every band that writes songs needs a level of sincerity in order to complete their mission and create an album.  To assume that a band like Magnetic Zeroes exists just a moneymaking operation would be to dismiss thousands of donated man-hours, massive quantities of personal sacrifice and huge creative risk.   Making an album is not something to be scoffed at as a purely one-sided affair, it’s too complex, involves too many voices and too much input to be dismissed so simply; yet it’s shockingly common to see it done.  Take a look around the internet, and marvel at how easy it is for people to reduce the lives, work and efforts of untold millions of people down to one snide comment or two, and ask yourself why it’s so necessary for people to do that to one another.   I suppose that’s not my area of expertise, so I’ll leave that to the sociologists to figure out.  In the meantime, let’s concentrate our critiques on things that we can see, smell and hear, and leave the motivation-bashing out of it for a while.  I think if we all decided to scratch with our fingernails rather than slash with a sword, we might realize that things we dislike aren’t so sinister and evil, and merely just someone else’s take on things.  And if they still don’t hold up, we can simply move on to something that will.