No Bad Songs

Those that know me know that Queens of the Stone Age is my favorite band. I’m not sure when I would’ve been exposed to them first, but they continue to embody what “rock & roll” means to me: edgy, sexy, fun. They’ve been around for over 20 years now, all held together by leadman Joshua Homme, who I think is interesting in his own right. But with that much time as a band, they’ve built up a huge back-catalogue, and not all of it has even made it onto an album.

One song I come back to again and again is called “Infinity,” which features Homme’s signature lyricism: at times poetic, often somber.

I think it was in the YouTube comments section of this, or another one of their B-Sides that I saw a comment along the lines of: “Man, Homme can’t make a bad song.” Well, holdup. I love this band, but come on, there’s some clunkers. “Leg of Lamb”? “I’m Designer”? I could probably go the rest of my life without hearing “Sick Sick Sick” again. But the comment got me thinking about critical distance: how far away from something you need to be able to analyze it properly.

I think people have this misunderstanding, that being a “true fan” means liking everything an artist produces, or worse, that the artists you like are the ones who made only work you enjoy. But sometimes being challenged by something, or seeing a piece of art you dislike can deepen your appreciation for what you do like.

If you’re too close to something, you can’t see its flaws. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but if you need or want to make an assessment, you need to be at a certain remove from it. One of the best things I learned from weightlifting is how this applies to our bodies. We have a sense of where our body is in space (called proprioception), but this has limits. I’d set up and do a squat, think to myself “wow, I got really deep there,” but it wasn’t until I watched recordings of myself lifting that I became able to see the gap between my perception and reality. Even something as simple as where your arms are might be different from reality; often we’re simply too close to tell.

I think the same can be true for things we like. Maybe there’s sort of a honeymoon phase with certain things, where we can’t or don’t want to see its flaws, or a level of adoration where you recognize something as good without looking too close. But I think there’s a deeper level, where you recognize the weird bits, the things that challenge you, or don’t come easy, and either figure out why that is, or find that this weirdness is exactly what gives a piece of art its charm. Maybe it’s not essential to critically analyze everything, yet this level of understanding can feel like its own form of care.

The ever-wise Brian Eno has a quote about this:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit—all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided."

How often have I added grain into a photograph? What about seeing the low-res graphics from the videogames I played as a kid gives me that pang of nostalgia, of comfort?

Beyond that, I often find it’s the “flawed” works that stick in my mind the best. I haven’t exactly figured out why, yet: maybe something about the gaps in the work gives you the space to think about how they could be different, or just gives you the room to dream on your own, bring your own ideas to a work.

I’m going through and reading Murakami Haruki’s novels in chronological order, starting with the two near-novellas he wrote at 29 and 30 (which later became part of the “Rat trilogy”). These books are short, and a little messy. While they have traces of the style he came to cultivate, they’re a lot more realist than his other works; they feel a lot different.

I read them first when this new translation was released, in 2015, and then again a couple years ago. I was so surprised to find they felt a lot more moving, a lot more evocative than I had remembered. There are jumps in time, in logic, but in these spaces I found they’d grown, like a plant whose roots push to the edge of the pot.

It’s hard to do this on purpose, I think. In Murakami’s case, a lot of this is attributable to his inexperience, his youthful energy, kind of like those bands whose first album remains their best.

Learning about criticism through writing book reviews has given me a ton of insight into art-making, in general. I feel like I have such a better vocabulary, framework, understanding to look at the works I love, the works I dislike. I think good criticism starts at recognizing what you like and dislike, but can’t stop there: it digs deeps, thinks about why that is, approaches the work on the terms it lays out for itself.

I’m not expecting to gain a newfound appreciation for the Queens of the Stone Age tracks I rank among their worst, but you never know. I remember being put off my the grittiness of so many black metal recordings, and now it’s something I look for (actually, I find recordings that are too clean or sound too “produced” to be off-putting, now).

The author Lincoln Michel made a tweet I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:

Again, hard to manufacture, but I’m thinking about it in regards to my own work. What am I obsessing over, fascinated by? What do I find myself thinking about constantly, despite what others might find “weird”? How can I create work that is as much “me” as possible: odd, flawed, and strikingly human. That’s what I want to do.