Heavy, Man

In the age of 'everyone's a critic,' the vast majority of people are still not critics, and have no pretensions to criticism. No one studies these things, but I imagine most people have little exposure to arts criticism on a daily basis. The most widely-read form of criticism, movie reviews, rarely seem to influence people's behavior. It seems people would rather listen to music than read about it.

This is understandable, but it might help if high-profile criticism was engaging or thoughtful. Things like newspaper and TV arts coverage rarely rise to either of criteria, though. In fact, just this morning I opened the paper to find this interview with (who else) SuperHeavy. It is really, really awful.

So, in order to demonstrate the vapidity of our celebrity press corps, here are some favorites from the SuperHeavy piece. Celebrity interviews aren't the same thing as criticism, but this piece got a lot more space in today's paper than any music reviews, essays or thinkpieces (it was the only music coverage, unless Dancing With The Stars counts). Lest I be accused of picking on Jagger, I'll note that he really did say all these things. Italics are mine.

They had no idea if all the group's members, which include soulful singer-songwriter Joss Stone [?], Oscar-winning composer A.R. Rahman and reggae singer Damian Marley, would even have chemistry.

Dave Stewart: "We just did it because we wanted to do an experiment, and that got developed and more and more developed until in the end, this record appeared." 

Jagger's legend was formed with the Rolling Stones and other successful musical collaborations, but he says none of that can be compared to his experience with SuperHeavy [this is an astounding statement]

Jagger: "Every time you get into a room even with the same people, it is different because people come up with different things."

Jagger: One thing serious [sic] that we did think about, we didn't want people with loads of entourages and that would have too big of egos 

Jagger: I went toasting, we call it, but it is the same thing (as rap). Damian was doing this really good toasting, West Indian rapping, so I thought, "I could do that. It can't be that difficult." It actually was quite difficult. With a bit of practice, it is all right. It is a laugh. 

Jagger: Dave created this whole raison d'etre why we didn't have songs. The raison d'etre for why we didn't have songs was because if we had songs ... people would feel that it wasn't their project as much [contrast with above statement about egos]

Jagger: This is quite conventional so we followed those 

Q: All these musicians working together -- was there sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll?
Jagger: For Joss there was lots of sex (laughs). She is the only woman so she has her pick. That is the sex part.