Those who bemoan it aren’t necessarily averse to emotion — the artifacts of indie culture are, by and large, quite sensitive — but they recoil at seeing it laid bare. Elitists prize ambiguity, art shrouded in dualities and murkiness. It’s Dion’s “Love can touch us one time/And last for a lifetime” versus Elliott Smith’s “And I try to be but you know me/I come back when you want me to.” If Smith’s weary resignation what appeals to us, what does that say about our emotional health?
For a visual example of the hipster aesthetic, take the films of Wes Anderson, a director whose popularity extends nowhere beyond cool-kid circles. These movies (particularly The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited) are all about shallow depths, bad cases of ennui made to seem more important because his characters wear track suits, carry immaculately detailed Marc Jacobs luggage, and sit in bathtubs all day to express their vague yet overpowering depression. This isn’t profundity; it’s an art of delusion, hinting at truth through quirky visuals and opaque dialogue.
Wilson rescues himself (and his increasingly bewildered audience) from this emotionally deflating wormhole by thinking of the sentimental art he has enjoyed. That is, art that made him cry. It’s a grab bag of pop culture bits with some semblance of hipster appeal — the Buddy Holly song that made him fall in love with his ex-wife, an episode of Gilmore Girls — that remind him that he actually can appreciate pure sentimentality in his own context. Everyone gets sappy, just on their own terms. The end result of this regarding Celine Dion, of course, is that we shouldn’t belittle her or her fans for being moved by such tripe; we’re all moved by art that someone else thinks is cheesy or, worse, pretentious.
Let’s Talk About Love serves as both a handy affirmation of opinions — snobby and sappy — and a guidebook to what Wilson hopes could be “a more pluralistic criticism,” one that “might put less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment.” One, in essence, less based on taste, and more based on personal response.
This is itself a sentimental idea — newspapers and “formal” outlets of criticism spurn personal asides and allusions of subjectivity (as though they could be avoided) — but it’s an effective thought experiment when considering music we otherwise wouldn’t be drawn to. This personal and pluralistic mindset is fairly common in Web criticism, where some of the most influential MP3 blogs — Daytrotter, Said the Gramophone — are both heart-on-sleeve and uncommonly perceptive.
Wilson’s “journey to the end of taste” doesn’t eradicate taste as a concept, but it makes a convincing (and, to my mind, pretty harrowing) argument that taste as something “good” or “bad” is a lie. We all want art to enlighten us, but some of us need to get over Miss Misery and others just need to be reminded that their hearts will go on.
Christopher Gray gets disturbingly personal about schmaltz, Elliott Smith, and this book at thephoenix.com/AboutTown this week. He can be reached at cgray@thephoenix.com.
