AudioShocker

Primed once again to not run out to the movies (this time to Watchmen--I'll see it eventually, probably sometime this week, but I'm in no hurry, really) over the weekend, I find myself at a bit of a loss as to what to tackle this week. A while back I promised to reconsider Weezer's second album, Pinkerton, so I did re-listen to it, prepared to make some notes on it and give it its fair do (the charge was that I had unfairly labeled it as being a thing that it is not okay to like), but I don't even like the couple of songs that I think are pretty good enough to make it feel worth the effort to write up a whole post about it. Every so often we just don't like things that other people like... I'm not ready to give up just yet (and, in fact, I might as well promise here that I still will, eventually, do a full write up of Pinkerton just to further clarify why I'm not just agreeing to disagree about whether its good or not.

Which brings up the issue that is at hand with any given critical enterprise: whether or not one can really say more than just "this is good or bad." Not that goodness/badness isn't a worthy inquest in its own right--it certainly is. However, generally speaking, the goal of Culturology is to make this interpretation of the goodness-badness spectrum as scientific as possible. The reaction to that that I'm trying to preempt here is the one that says that my notion of "science" is just a bunch of bullshit rationalizing what is really only my own taste in the matter (such as with Pinkerton--I presume that the reaction from the emo set would just be that I'm a douchebag whose afraid of his own emotions and doesn't get what good music means). Which is why I don't claim to be offering reviews of the various things that I write about--I wouldn't be offering a 13-years-later "review" of Pinkerton, rather I'd be trying to analyze its current cultural status, and whether or not its quality (or lack of quality) matters in that context (my general argument, I suppose, is that its more important for mainstreaming until-then only localized scenes of what was/is known as "emo," one of the worst travesties of supposedly "independent" or "post-punk" music).

But, yes, I'll admit, my taste does affect what I write about, and the stance that I take. But, to take another example, writing about what the words mean in a commercial for corporate swill-beer is not the same argument as "this stuff tastes life shit." But, does making a supposedly distanced, thorough critique of a cultural artifact require a certain amount of negativity? I suppose the argument hinges on whether being positive--liking something--is more delusional than being negative--disliking it. I think the common conception towards this is that it is easier to get more distance on something that you don't care that much about, or dislike. Indeed, I don't think my stance towards all the pop cultural garbage which helps keep America's middle-class powerless and placated is necessarily negative on a piece-to-piece basis; my beef is more with the trend as a whole, and I would argue that, in fact, its this bigger picture which keeps the negative/critical enterprise more than just a matter of taste (and let's, for at least the time being, ignore the conversation from back in Autumn, about whether or not criticism ever does anything but implicitly enforce the status quo which pre-conditions it).

As another example (and further evidence as to why, exactly, this post seems to lack any specific examples): I was in Key West over the weekend, which you may well be aware is the southernmost point of the Continental United States, an ex-smuggling town with a history of permissiveness and a reputation for being a good place to be a drunk or a writer or both. Which mostly holds up--it really does seem like a good place for literary drunks to live for a while and write. But all is not well in Key Westville, as its main drag becomes more and more commercial, being infiltrated as it is by either actual national chains or other stores/bars which pander to the demographic which supports such things. This is not a matter of taste. In a small, mostly quiet tourist town, what the hell is an American Apparel and a bunch of other, similar "mall stores" doing on its main drag? I suppose I might be accused of supporting a vision for an "authentic" Key West, but to me the logic is pretty clear, regardless: in a tourist-industry town, do the tourists really just want to go shopping at the same stores they could find in their malls back home, or something more unique?

The friend I was visiting Key West with grew up there, so was able to provide a good deal of insight into this. To his mind, a lot of it actually can be blamed on Girls Gone Wild, which strikes me as a rather bizarre insight. But it goes like this: Key West used to be a lazy/quiet place, with more middle-aged or at the very least, alterna-crowd tourists, but in the age of handheld camera videos of titty flashing, suddenly the fantasy fest (which I presume y'all are aware of) became a commodity-vehicle as opposed to just an enterprise in hedonism. This boob-flashing vision of Key West then bleeds over into the more general conception of the place, bringing in more of the bland humans that don't mind going to the same old stupid mall stores, thus turning the main drag into an outdoor mall not dissimilar from Miami's Lincoln Road (which also sucks). My friend told me as story about the period of time when the town had a Ben & Jerry's shop but no Starbucks, and all the tourists would come off the cruise ships, go to the Ben & Jerry's, and there ask where the Starbucks was, acting all shocked when it turned out that there wasn't one. To me, its unquestionably bad, since having the same shit everywhere undermines what tourism is supposed to be, and even worse preempts the opportunity for tourism to ever improve itself, in terms of what the travelers might learn. And culture, really, if you think about it, is a lot like tourism.