Goldring Arts Journalism

Music Writer on Trial
Author faces off against ornery pianist

By David Hajdu

Rare is the musician who, when asked if he would like to be the subject of a major profile in The New Yorker, starts propping up hurdles. A few months ago, I phoned the pianist Don Shirley, an iconoclastic septuagenarian whom Stravinsky used to admire, and he told me to come immediately to his apartment above Carnegie Hall - Shirley lives in a vast, Rococo studio a few hundred feet above the great stage - whereupon he announced that he would consider granting me an interview only after observing me at the piano. It is not my instrument. Indeed, I play at a level only nominally above that of my primary early influence on the keyboard, Peter Tork of the Monkees.

Nonetheless, I took a seat at Don Shirley's nine-foot Steinway grand and plodded through a few choruses of blues until he waved his hands to relieve us both of the displeasure.

"You are not qualified to write about a pianist unless you are a pianist yourself," Shirley said, and declined to do the interview. (He later changed his mind, after learning that I had had formal training on the guitar and am conversant in music theory.)

Don Shirley is incorrect, of course, but not entirely wrongheaded. While good writing on any of the arts requires study in the theory and the practice of that art (as well as its history, its traditions, its culture, and more), music journalists need to be working musicians no more than political correspondents ought to be office-holding politicians. Insiders, being on the inside, rarely see the totality of the thing they're in, and the arts of reporting and writing prose are wholly distinct from those of composing and performing music. Yet, both fields are arts, and therein the estimable Shirley is onto something important.

Much of the best writing on the arts has always been artful as well as timely and informative: George Bernard Shaw's fiery music criticism, Auden's lyrical essays on Van Gogh, Manny Farber's unorthodox, painterly film critiques, Lester Bangs' deliciously overdone rock record reviews. In their reach, their uncompromising veracity, and their individuality, as well as their rigor, they not only attend to the artistic imperative, they embody it. Bangs may not have been much of a lead guitarist, but he wrote like Jimmy Page.

Today, the field of arts journalism is facing a complicity of challenges that make the artistic imperative all the more vital. First among them is surely the pervading contemporary absorption with celebrity, a phenomenon that subordinates creative artistry to the cult of personality. For some time now, gossip has dominated the mainstream writing on popular entertainment (and, often, on the fine arts), institutionalizing a kind of pulp entertainment journalism. Fixed on the vagaries of performers' private lives, largely unconcerned with aesthetic values or ideas, such writing undermines the whole creative sphere by continually eroding the already paltry expectations of a jaded, cynical public.

At the same time, there has been a shift in the character of critical writing, particularly but not exclusively in the popular arts, toward something closer to consumerism than criticism: a view of creative work as product and a reduction of the discourse on it to shopping advice.

What movies should I rent? What music should I collect? What category is that title? Who else is getting the same stuff? What number is that on the top-ten? How much money has it made?

These questions tend to drown out those voices still asking, What does that mean? Where did that come from? Why did someone make that? What do I do with the way that makes me feel? In course, the creative act seems just another kind of branding.

The Internet, meanwhile, has, for better and worse, democratized expression of all sorts, including arts criticism or what passes for it in the culture of blogging, where every voice has access to every ear. Unchecked, unedited (that is, wholly unmediated) opinions of every sort now function in place of informed, authoritative, reasoned assessments of artist's work on Web sites such as Amazon.com. Much of this digital noise, in its rash, hyper-opinionated binaryism (Love it! Hate it!) represents not only a degradation in critical standards, but a disregard for such standards, in fact, a contempt for them.

It can hardly be a coincidence that serious scholarship in arts journalism is on the rise in this atmosphere. Corrective forces may be coalescing. If so, their best prospects surely reside, as ever, in the primacy of the artistic imperative.

David Hajdu is the author of two award-winning books, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively Fifth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. From 1990 to 1999, he served as a top editor at Entertainment Weekly. He currently is a columnist for The New Republic and writes frequently for magazines such as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Hajdu teaches magazine journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.