perpetua:

“In the ’00s, no indie-rock band put out material as consistently strong as Spoon. Britt Daniel steadfastly refused to write even one clunker on Spoon’s records, which were released every two or three years to an audience that was impressed, then amazed, and then slightly bored by how Spoon never made an artistic misstep. This consistency proved to be a double-edged sword. Spoon was both highly respected and yet not passionately adored. Almost everybody that followed indie rock seemed to like Spoon, but never as much as bands not necessarily expected to be brilliant. It was only when you looked back over the course of several years that you realized that, holy shit, Spoon was one of the best bands of its era.”

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Steven Hyden’s Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? series on the Onion AV Club is one of the best things going on in music writing right now. Every bit of it is brilliant, spot-on, thoroughly wonderful. This digression about Spoon, which has little to do with its ongoing remembrance of the alt-rock 90s, is so ridiculously CORRECT CORRECT CORRECT that I had to share it here. This phenomenon is the #1 thing I am most bitter about as a music critic. I hate that the thing I most treasure as a fan of music — artists who are consistently brilliant — has this way of damning great musicians to faint praise and/or indifference. Spoon is certainly the best example in recent memory, but it happens with a lot of my favorite acts and ugh ugh ugh. Watch out, James Murphy. You’re next.

this is all very complicated. i’m tempted to agree with the sentiment expressed here, but i also think you could come up with a better example, a group who’s music was more consistently brilliant and who is more underrated. because in a nutshell what this is saying is that spoon is underrated.

it’s also tough because people DID obsess over spoon. the premise seems a little false. they consistenly made critics’ top ten lists and stuff for a long time.

another challenge is that if you are consistently brilliant but don’t do anything new or interesting with it, then being just very good at what you do stops being good enough. criticism can be about finding the “good artists,” but it’s also ideally about talking about WHY they are good artists, and if those reasons don’t change from record to record, then the criticism loses depth and, in some sense, purpose.

this also all depends on how you get pleasure from art: being surprised, or just having a positive reaction to something that is very similar to something you’ve heard before. spoon offers a lot of the latter, but not much of the former. whereas, kanye west, for instance, offers a LOT MORE of the former. moving into 2011, it’s pretty clear that from a global critical sense, when thinking about the past ten years, spoon will have less of an impact than, say, the black eyed peas (innovative but maybe not good) or kanye west (innovative and also very good).

i guess the short answer is, that’s an interesting stance to take as a critic, but there’s a lot to unpack before it becomes a useful statement about culture. much like a LOT of the av club’s stuff. the av club is bound up in culture and has opinions about it, but it’s disappointing that sometimes the interesting things they say are only interesting in the context of their one-episode review, not in a larger critical framework. but maybe that’s just me.