I try really hard to maintain a positive lens for the works I review. I like to think that art has merit to someone, somewhere, so it is not my place to condemn it or to pass judgment. I generally gravitate toward pieces which speak to me personally or which resonate with my value set so that I can highlight strengths of a given work and inspire others who might similarly enjoy it.
And then there’s this record.
I can appreciate Serrano’s
The Piss Christ. I can appreciate that mall pop speaks to a particular demographic which is exploring and developing their personal and associative identities. I can acknowledge that value and beauty are in the eye of the beholder and respect that perspective among my fellow man as equals in a humanitarian scope.
And then there’s this record.
But I shall not lower or compromise myself to derisive scoffing at it as an inferior work. I may find its superficiality reprehensible, its production quality sonically offensive, the banality of its cookie-cutter lyricism tiresome and ubiquitous, and the general presentation indolent and ineffectual, but that is only the album as it relates to my own personal passions and pursuits.
I did, however, find value in this record as being quite exemplary of the culture described by Guy Debord in
Society of the Spectacle which I’d finished reading just moments before cueing up this week’s listen. I believe
my reactionary summary of the text serves as the most revealing insight into the impression this album had upon me. So I’ll leave it at that for your interpretation.
Not my bag, but maybe it’s yours. Or maybe it’s exquisitely demonstrative of the systemic erosion of our cultural competence in a late-capitalist nightmare world of banality and conspicuous consumption.
You decide.