Okfairenough

but I worry that the response to the reductive, academic, uninspired/ing way music generally gets written about is too often to plunge into quasi-poetic Me-Narratives...or at least I'm afraid that that's what I'd do. Maybe that sort of approach is fine, as long as the person writing has The Knack.

This is all getting very B&W though; obviously it's possible to write intimately and emotively without subordinating your object, or just using it as a mirror. Well, not so sure about that last bit.

In the Christgau response to that Meltzer article (the one by Meltzer?) he counterattacks by saying that Meltzer, while a great writer, is not really a 'journalist' (I think that's the word he uses), and that the point of journalism is to bring writers out of themselves. That seems like an appealing notion, to an extent, although I've never read any Meltzer, so I have no first-hand evidence. At the same time, I sympathise with Tom's criticisms of Christgau: he does seem to have this heavy Kantian perspective where all music is part of some rational absolute and comparable and graspable, which ends up just enervating everything.

Which reminds me of something Camus said about Rousseau: his grandiose ideas about loving humanity in general derived from his inability to love any human beings in particular.

Anyway, that's enough philosophical name-dropping.