Let’s Talk About Nothing

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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In the primordial blogs and antediluvian websites where rock critics lurk and prey upon one another in an endless Darwinian struggle of tooth and snark, the steaming red meat of contention over the last few years has been rockism. Rockism is essentially a more or less deadly insult, directed at those critics (like, say, Jim Derogatis) who fetishize indie rock authenticity and gritty individuality and don’t like Mariah Carey because she includes ads from Elle in her CD packaging. Facing off against rockism are the adherents of popism (like, say, me) who embrace the fluid jouissance of transitory pleasures and guiltless booty-shaking, and don’t like Bruce Springsteen because everyone tells them they have to. Popists like to accuse rockists of being racist, sexist, uptight poseurs. Rockists like to accuse popists of being shallow, trend-following, tasteless poseurs.

For those who enjoy the spectacle of atavistic struggle, the rockist/popist survival-of-the-fittest donnybrook has actually generated a lot of entertaining copy, from Kalefa Sanneh’s Rap Against Rockism to Jody Rosen’s The Perils of Poptimism. My favorite broadside from the struggle, though, has to be Carl Wilson’s 2007 book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. Wilson, a blogger and critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, doesn’t necessarily fit comfortably into either rockist or popist camps, but his book is clearly inspired by a popist aesthetic. His project is to redeem the woman who Simon Frith called “the most loathed superstar I can remember” — Celine Dion.

Wilson picks Celine not because he likes her and no one else does, but rather because he hates her — and, because, contra Frith, that makes Wilson unusual. Though I personally don’t know anyone who likes Celine, and though you may not either, the fact is that no one sells records the way Celine sells records. For Wilson, this is part of her fascination. Celine stinks of democracy — of “grannies, tux-wearers, overweight children, mobile-phone salesmen” as one critic put it in the Independent. Like most Canadians, liberals, and rock-critics, Wilson has an instinctive mistrust of elitism, and he can’t help feeling that his own hatred of Celine is less about her intrinsic worth than it is about placing himself above the drooling masses. This conviction is only strengthened as he goes out to interview actual Celine Dion fans. One of these is Sophoan Sorn, a Californian film-maker and former Vietnamese refugee, who Wilson says struck him as “one of the nicest people I’ve ever talked to.” Wilson goes on to say that, “Not only does [Sophoan’s taste] seem as valid as my own, utterly incompatible tastes, I like him so much that for a long moment his taste seems superior. What was the point of all that nasty, life-negating crap I like?”

It’s not quite so easy to utterly abandon one’s viewpoint, as Wilson finds. “You don’t know what an egotistical control freak your taste can be until you try to turn traitor,” he muses. He admits, with some regret, that he’ll never like Celine the way many of her fans do. But he does manage to find a way, if not to love her, then at least to rationalize her. He argues that critics too often act as if the point of music is to sit still and be aesthetically dissected. This works, he argues, for bands like Sonic Youth, but makes much less sense for an artist like Celine, who produces “lousy music to make aesthetic judgments to” but whose songs “might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandparents, or breaking down in tears.” He adds that aesthetic distinctions are necessary for enjoyment, but he argues that critics need more humility, and a willingness to admit that they are arguing from a subjective and culturally determined place. In short, Celine is useful for her audience in specific, practical ways — condemning her through absolute standards is elitist, potentially oppressive, and compromised.

Wilson’s argument for Celine, is, therefore, on its surface, a basic statement of enlightenment, utilitarian tolerance (Celine is useful, she hurts no one — who are we to criticize?) It’s also a particularly clear statement of how those values end up in a post-modern rejection of judgments in general as absolutist. Underneath this conscious clarity and fair-mindedness, though, the book has another, less fully spelled out agenda — one which surreptitiously gives the book much of its energy.

In the period where Wilson was researching and writing about Celine, his marriage had come apart. Wilson mentions this forthrightly enough, and even links it to his burgeoning, on-off appreciation of Celine. For example, when he saw Celine’s Vegas show, he says, part of the reason he was able to enjoy it was that “Celine helped me feel that big, dumb emotion on some gut level.” His personal turmoil allowed him to see the point of Celine’s blatant sentimentality.

That doesn’t seem to be the entire story, though. In recounting his trip to Vegas, during which he was lonely and miserable, Wilson mentions as part of his litany of discomfort with his surroundings: “I am entirely too shy to hire prostitutes.” That casual tie between self-definition and shame is not explored immediately…but later it becomes one of the important themes of the book. While listening to Celine’s Let’s Talk About Love alone in his room, Wilson is intensely embarrassed — as, presumably, he would have been had he hired that prostitute. He is afraid people will hear what he has in his room, and judge him for it. What follows is probably my favorite passage in the book:

Yes, it was vain not to want the neighbors to hear me playing Let’s Talk About Love….But the worst part was feeling ashamed to feel ashamed…. Try it yourself: Pick some music you find particularly unattractive and crank it up every day for a couple of weeks. Or go out for the evening wearing clothes you find ugly, and not in a funny way Before having a dinner date over, hang a painting from a Christian-art sale over your bed….Shame has a way of throwing you back upon your own existence, on the unbearable truth that you are identical with you, that you are your limits. Which immediately makes the self feel incomplete, unjustified, a chasm of lack. It’s the reverse of the sense of self-extension that having likes and dislikes usually provides. It is humbling.

Wilson, then, is arguing that part of the benefit of listening to Celine is a sense of shame. He presents this shame as enforcing the boundaries of the self; increasing his consciousness of who he is and can’t escape. But surely the experience is not just about enforcing boundaries, but about destroying them. Wilson’s book is about changing himself; he starts as someone who hates Celine, and becomes someone who doesn’t. There is a transformation, and that transformation involves shame, and, indeed, degradation. In Bataille’s formulation, Wilson is violating a taboo in order to obtain sacred experience; he is bathing in the filth of democracy in order to be changed.

Perhaps it’s only coincidence, but to me at least, the juxtaposition in the quote above of Celine, dating, and Christianity seems suggestive. I don’t think it’s fair to psychoanalyze; to say — “Well, Wilson’s interest in Celine is inspired by his desire to escape from his self in the wake of a failed marriage.” But I think it is fair to point out that Wilson has constructed the book in part as a story about revelation and healing. He needs to be somebody different, and part of the way he does that is by becoming a person who can appreciate Celine Dion.

Wilson’s book, then, turns out to not really be a polemic in the rockist/popist internecine war. Instead, it’s a statement of faith — though of faith in what isn’t entirely clear. Democracy, perhaps? Art? Celine herself? Perhaps, more abstractly in the transformative power of aesthetic choices? Terry Eagleton comments in Reason, Faith, and Revolution that “certain of our commitments are constitutive of who we are, we cannot alter them without what Christianity traditionally calls a conversion, which involves a lot more than just swapping one opinion for another.” Wilson seems to be almost inverting this, proposing, or hoping, that if we can but treat our opinions as constitutive of who we are, we can experience a conversion merely by changing them.

As I said, the emotional commitment and the yearning in Wilson’s book are what give it its power and, indeed, its beauty. The single most affecting scene in the narrative is when Wilson remembers his now ex-wife singing Buddy Holly to him at the beginning of their relationship: “Oh Boy,” featuring as both corny weakness of taste and sacrament. At the same time, though, it’s hard not to feel — in Wilson’s longing, his shame, and his tentative renewal — a thinness and almost a self-parody. At the end of the book, he rather lamely admits, for example, that the Beatles and Louis Armstrong are better than Celine Dion on the basis of the fact that those artists “appeal to people across taste divides” — as if no one hates the Beatles, right? He also confesses — with his tongue not nearly far enough in his cheek — that Celine’s continuing, unassailable uncoolness is what may “give him the heart to go on.” Thus, after 160 odd pages of intense thought and deliberation, Wilson is left with no basis for aesthetic judgments except the extremely dubious one of popular approval, and no grounding for his own spiritual health other than critical disapproval. He has journeyed to the end of taste, and there he has found only arid clichés and a vapid contrariness.

Or, to put it another way: the only way you can experience a sense of shame and guilt is to play Celine Dion loud enough for the neighbors to hear? I mean, really? Haven’t you ever, I don’t know, betrayed a friend? Insulted a loved one? Told an untruth? Wilson is thoughtful enough to realize that a sense of sin — of the worthlessness of the self — is necessary for conversion. But as a tolerant but definitive atheist, and as a rock critic, he seems able to conceive of that sin only in terms of relatively banal aesthetic faux pas.

Terry Eagleton notes that “It is culture, not religion, which is now for many men and women the heart of a heartless world.” Art, Eagleton argues, often functions as a kind of displaced theology. This aesthetic theology is spread variously among denominations, like rockism and popism, and these denominations espouse competing values, such as democracy or tolerance or authenticity. These differences in values certainly matter; our aesthetic choices are bound up with who we are, what we believe, who we love, and what we want to become. But such distinctions are also limited — a band may save your life, in some sense, but it isn’t going to save your soul, or the world. Celine may be good, or she may be bad, but she’s not the Cross. Beyond taste, there are only those things that will not accept the condescension of your aesthetic pronouncements. You can call that reality, or truth, or God, or, for those of us who are atheists, the absence of God. In any case, it judges you, not the other way around. To forget that is to start worshipping idols, which means that you are outsourcing your spiritual and emotional life to another sinner, and are living a lie. Liking or disliking Celine is not a moral issue. Wilson treats it as one, which is why his book has so much passion, love and heart — and why, despite all that, his journey can lead nowhere.

25 thoughts on “Let’s Talk About Nothing”

  1. Oh, in ten years the hipsters will love Celine Dion. It’s so fashionable to dislike her now that you just know the 180 is coming.

    I’ve never really understood why there’s all this drama over liking or disliking pop performers like Dion. It reminds me of all the middle-school nonsense about wearing the right brand of shoes or jeans. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it, and tune it out when you don’t have a choice.

    For my part, I’ve always liked “Nothing Broken But My Heart” and the Jim Steinman-produced “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” The French-language recordings that she did before going mega aren’t bad, either.

  3. Here’s one of the French tunes. They’re a lot less bombastic than the English-language stuff. I think she’s a lot easier to take when she tones it down. The part of “Nothing Broken” that I really like is the final section, where she’s just murmuring over the melody.

    “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” is a different kettle of fish. That’s a Jim Steinman recording, and the bombast in his stuff is just so self-conscious and over-the-top that it’s a real kick.

  4. Sigh; that canned 80s backing is hard to take though. I don’t hear a ton of difference with her English language stuff, honestly.

    The thing I’ve really been into recently that is critically loathed is Journey. Steve Perry is an amazing singer, and the fusion/hair metal songwriting is by turns bizarre, hysterical, and bad ass. They’re a great band.

  5. Somewhere in all of this is the tension between a criticism informed by Frankfurt school arguments about aesthetic worth that focuses on works that most members of the Frankfurt school wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. The turn to Birmingham seems like a reasonable way to cope with this, but that school of thought carries with it the assumptions you cite above, namely that consumption and identity are intertwined in ways that are both historically specific and bound up with ideology. So the object of appreciation again becomes a problem here, as it signals ideological commitments and expresses a public identity. That’s what makes blasting Dion at high volumes different (at least on the surface) from cheating on your partner. The latter is a private expression that makes you the potential subject of private approbations. The former is a public exrpession that makes you the potential subject of community approbations. Anyway, it seems to me that there is a sort of public morality at work in acts of consumption and criticism, but that the stakes might be so low when we talk a bout rock vs. pop that, as you say, chasing after it might yield only trivial insights.

  6. I know what the Frankfurt School is, but not Birmingham. Could you help an ignorant dilettante?

    That’s a good point about private vs. public morality — though, of course, hiring a prostitute is public in the sense that another person is involved and knows (which is where the sense of shame comes from, presumably) while blasting Celine in your room is a very private kind of publicity (how do you know who is listening, if anybody?)

    I don’t know that Wilson’s insights are trivial, so much as the are insights about triviality? The emptiness of aesthetics in confronting certain problems seems like an important point….

  7. The resurgence of stuff like Journey probably has a lot to do with the way it’s been used in movies and TV. Boogie Nights added tension to Night Ranger just as The Sopranos did to Journey. Try taking long trips with a girlfriend devoted to this music and it’ll reveal something else. Most amazing to me over the past decade is the really bad covers of these bands that can be heard on Glee or American Idol or sometimes the radio. You discover that there was some soul to be destroyed in the originals.

    I tried listening to the Rick Rubin-produced Josh Grobin album. Not even could’ve saved that one.

  10. I had no idea the Sopranos used Journey. Never seen that show.

    On the other hand, I listen to Journey on long road trips regularly. And yes, Journey is awesome.

    Thank you for the link!

  11. Journey awesome…at least some albums. “Don’t Stop Believin'” was used to end The Sopranos…final scene in a diner…controversially (because of the lack of narrative closure).

    Are you aware of the recent doings of Journey, Noah, with a Perry soundalike replacement singer?

  13. My music tastes have always been eclectic, but I’ve never really cared for Celine Dion. Of the 803 songs on my playlist, the only Dion song I have is rock musics’s original Dion — Dion DiMucci.

    I haven’t succumbed to the subconscious and somewhat insidious hold of “guilt rock” since my teens, I believe. I know what I like when I hear it, and as Billy Joel once sang, “Hot funk, cool punk, even if it’s old junk, It’s still rock and roll to me.”

    I can’t fault anyone who likes Dion the Younger, of course, since we all have different tastes. There are so many types of music, even in the very loosely-defined “pop” realm, it really makes no sense to pay attention to critics trying to pigeonhole everyone’s tastes into some narrowly-defined definition of “good” and “bad.”

    For example, I’ve been an AC/DC fan for decades, yet it wasn’t until very recently that the “serious” critics of the rock community (Rolling Stone, et al) lowered their smugness bar sufficiently enough to finally embrace that group as historically important and noteworthy.

    On an unrelated note, I think the golden age of rock — especially bands featuring kick-ass guitar players — was from about 1965-1985. I know I’m right because, in addition to listening to all of the contemporary stuff from their era, my kids kept taking all of my classic rock CDs: Led Zeppelin, Molly Hatchet, The Who, Foreigner, Grand Funk Railroad, Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Deep Purple, Eagles, ZZ Top, The Doors, Aerosmith, AC/DC, Def Leppard, BTO, Queen, Boston, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Van Halen, etc., etc. The good news? I also had LPs of most as well.

  14. Regarding Journey, I like there stuff as well — in an Asia/Yes/Rush/Styx/Genesis sort of way.

  16. Sorry about the drive-by post. The Wiki page on the Birmingham School probably cleared it up well enough, though. Thanks CR!
    I almost mentioned the prostitute thing, but in relation to the divorce. Both are instances where the private and public mix in potentially embarrassing ways, unlike the unequivocal public embarrassment of wearing pleated khakis and a blue oxford shirt to the Knitting Factory.
    As for aesthetics, I’m going to side with Bourdieu and say that our aesthetic choices are the means by which we distinguish ourselves from others. That, I’d venture to say, makes these choices and our justifications for them moral acts in the sense that they produce and reproduce culture. The idea that there’s something outside these actions against which they might be judged seems a bit Platonist.

  17. Plato is often dismissed out of hand…though it’s hard to say on what grounds. If you don’t believe in some sort of transcendent standard of truth, how can you dismiss a transcendent standard of truth? Either you’ve got ground to walk on or you don’t, and if you don’t, how can you tell?

  18. Plato’s dismissal owes a lot to what’s been read as his dismissal of rhetoric, and the Sophists. It didn’t sit well with the post-modern set, many of whom saw the Sophists in particular as an antidote to enlightenment theories of knowledge. Granted, that’s a pretty reductionist reading, and its been argued that his idealism was tempered by an appreciation for rhetoric, if not the Sophists. Anyway, Plato’s making a comeback thanks to Badiou.
    As far as the paradox of dismissing a transcendent truth, it’s only a paradox if you think a truth needs to be transcendent if it is to function as a basis for judgment, no? I can judge “ground” to signify “that which one walks on” in one case, and what a foot does to glass in another, and judge myself correct on both counts.
    The notion of the aesthetic has since Kant been tied up with notions of transcendence and morality, and it seems to me this is part of the problem. As soon as you start making these connections your put yourself in the position of being art therapist for the polis. Who wants that?

  19. Well, no one wants to be art therapist for the polis, maybe…but on the other hand, if all judgments are just rhetoric, it’s hard to make an argument for why you shouldn’t just as well be quiet….

  20. Wasn’t recommending post-Perry Journey (never heard it)–Just seems like an odd phenomenon…auditioning karaoke singers for the original band.

  21. Silence can be a rhetorical act. By choosing not to speak I can signal my agreement, assert that an argument isn’t worth pursuing, etc.
    The phrasing “just rhetoric” scans a little too close to “mere rhetoric” for my comfort, and not just because rhetoric is my business. It assumes a definition of rhetoric as either a means to adorn the truth (Bacon), or a means to negotiate uncertainty when the truth is unavailable (Plato). These views held sway through the enlightenment, and remain with us today, but they fail to account for the ways language and other modes of symbolic action, often apparently quotidian ones, construct very real social realities. Rhetoric isn’t so much about judgments, (the closed fist of dialectical reasoning), but about negotiating new, tentative truths into existence, usually by calling older truths into question.
    One of contemporary rhetorical theory’s basic tenets is that nobody should be quiet, and that silences often signal a missed opportunity to work through difficulties that people in power would prefer we ignore. Taking this back to aesthetics, I’d venture that calling into question why we call something “cool” or value certain forms over others is an important means to questioning prevailing orthodoxies. I imagine you’d agree with this given your commitment to questioning orthodox thinking about comics. What I’m wondering about is whether you would argue that there’s a hard truth about inherent quality (a Platonic “comicbookness”) at the end of these questions.
    And didn’t INXS hold a reality show to find a new lead singer? I read somewhere that they asked Mike Patton from Faith No More and Mr. Bungle fame to join, but he refused. Pop music is weird.

  22. Yeah; language is everything. It makes us us and then us make the world (as Hulk would say.) It seems odd to say it’s a way to question orthodoxies solely; it’s the orthodoxies too.

    That’s all Derrida/pomo thinking in a (rhetorical) nutshell, and I find it fairly convincing. At the same time, Badiou isn’t crazy when he looks at that orthodoxy and wonders where you end up if reality is only what falls from your lips. The idea that all orthodoxies must be undermined can be the most stifling orthodoxy of all, and the insistence that all cages are rhetoric can be a cage itself.

    Or, to put it another way, I’m so wishy-washy I can’t even commit to wishy-washiness.

  23. I think that Derrida would argue that all Orthodoxies are self-undermining, even the orthodoxy that language is makes the world (which his probably more of the orthodox-heterodoxy of the Academy, and a rather tenuous one at this point). As you note, the only place this orthodoxy isn’t wishy-washy is on “musts” or imperatives, which it views with knee-jerk suspicion. But you’ve said it yourself before, even this gets held up to question by the better post modernists.

  24. I forgot where this thread was, and now people have forgotten about it and my Adorno quote about how stupid the masses are is now irrelevant anyhow. Dang.

    But if anyone wants to argue about Plato, that would be really fun for me. (Yes, I know this means my life must be a wasteland… or, if you prefer, a void). I’m testing out the idea that I’m kind of an anti-realist Plato-hater, even though he’s super complicated and smart, as is Badiou. I’m kind of consistently contrarian shmuck– I was all dismissive of bodies and pleasures ten years ago, but I think it’s mostly Deleuze’s fault, and thus Plato’s fault (even though some might claim that it’s Heraclitus or Nietzsche’s fault, but I don’t buy it).

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