"Don’t be cool. Like everything."

Why I look for Greatness Instead of Flaws.

Sure, they’re funny, but they’re damn sure not making anything.

If I could tell my younger self just one thing, there is a good chance it would be these words from John Frusciante: “Don’t be cool. Like everything.”

I was a cynic in my youth. And there’s nothing dumber than an uninformed cynic. Sure, if you’ve gone out into the world and have experience with it, maybe then be jaded and disappointed. When I recently met a younger version of myself in a friend’s teenage daughter, I joked, “Oh, it’s all so awful and pointless. Nothing’s worth doing… but I haven’t even done anything yet.”She laughed and said, “It’s so true!”

Artistically, the sources of these feelings are envy and fear. I was envious of what others had done, afraid that I would never do anything well and terrified of the complexity of finding my way in the world. I think it’s all normal stuff that nobody talks about, and, if they grow out of it, never speak because they want to pretend that it never happened. I remember it well.

I think it is this spirit that animates a lot of criticism. It is the desire to tear down something great, because it has a beauty or power I feel that I could never attain. How else do you explain post-structuralism?

Resisting the Snare of the Savage Quip

One of the temptations I’ve had to overcome along the way is my love of razor-sharp quips and savage burns. As a writer, there is something about a brilliant takedown that can be delightful in its own artistry. Like H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding.

“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

Or this all-time great from Dorothy Parker:

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

But sometimes, when a savage review is done well, it just serves to hide the fact that the critic doesn’t understand what works about what they are reviewing, and can’t or won’t figure it out.

For example:

E.L. James in the New York Times on 50 Shades of Grey

“This book reads like it was written by a virginal 14-year-old, and not even a particularly imaginative one at that.”

Mark Twain on Jane Austen:

“Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Rex Reed on The Shape of Water

“A loopy, lunkheaded load of drivel about a mute woman who cleans toilets, falls in love with a monster from beneath the sea, and has sex with it.”

The Shape of Water won four Oscars, including Best Picture, and Best Director. I haven’t seen it, but Del Toro is a genius and there are reasons that the Academy voters liked it. I might not agree with them, but something about that film works, and it behooves me as both creator and consumer to understand it.

I am not a fan of 50 Shades of Grey, but it has sold over 165 million copies worldwide. Even if the book was written by a virginal 14-year old with no imagination, the book struck some kind of a chord. Perhaps the thing to review is the audience. But another thing worth reviewing is the critic’s perception.

And on Mark Twain, savaging Pride and Prejudice, the original rom-com: It’s a book I greatly enjoy. It’s full of wit and insight. And, for me, to understand it is to understand a genre. Maybe your hatred of romance or the time period will not give you access to this book’s charms. If that is the case, you probably like westerns, or detective stories. On some level, I think everyone loves detective stories.

You can find the same genre defining effect in The Virginian by Owen Wister. The whole western genre emerges, seemingly fully formed in a single novel. The same with the first detective story, Murders in the Rue Morgue, by Edgar Allen Poe.

EXAMPLE ONE : Napoleon

I recently read a pretty shoddy review of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. It tried to be bitingly funny, but it was, at best, someone beating up a straw man and hoping you would see it as a prize fight. But nobody really cares. Kicking straw is as useful as pounding sand.

But, as the subtitle of my review said, “It beats every Napoleon movie that doesn’t exist.” What was remarkable about it was the internal story that David Scarpa (the screenwriter) found. Napoleon’s relationship with Josephine.

…she was the most important relationship of his life. And even after he divorced her, it continued in the background. And there was some aspect of having to prove himself to win her, that was present throughout his life.

Because Napoleon is such an impossible historical figure — so unlikely, so varied, so larger than life — maybe you can’t actually make a good biopic of him. Stanley Kubrick tried to make his Napoleon film for 33 years and couldn’t pull it off.

EXAMPLE TWO: Taylor Swift

I don’t really like Taylor Swift’s music. If I evaluate her with my tastes, she seems, at best, mediocre at everything she does. She doesn’t seem to dance, sing, write, or play an instrument very well. When compared to performers like Beyonce, Pink or a young Madonna, she doesn’t exude a sense of explosive sexual power or stage spectacle as a performer.

Now right here I could crack an absolute monster of a line about how awful I think she is. Maybe some kind of an analogy using mayonnaise or skim milk. Or something grandiose and historical, like “If this is the decadence of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire why bother?”

I’m so savage, I’m so cultured. I’m… such an idiot.

But if you agreed with me, you would feel gratified that your preference had been confirmed. If you were a Taylor Swift fan, you might hate me or unsubscribe. But I wouldn’t learn anything and neither would you. Which is a shame. Because Her Era’s Tour is the highest-grossing tour of all time. She sold 10 million tickets at an average ticket price of $204! Total earnings from the tour including merchandising and ancillary rights is something on the order of $3.5 billion.

Something is going very, very right there. Wouldn’t it be useful to know what? I have three thoughts about what makes Taylor Swift great.

ONE

She uses her fame as well as anyone ever has. She sends handwritten notes and personalized gifts to fans. She is in constant engagement on social media in ways that an old Dad like me might not be able to comprehend. She never forgets who she owes her success to. Her care of and relationship with her people is a full-time job and something worthy of the highest admiration.

TWO

She’s not selling the experience of seeing a virtuoso. She’s selling transference and transcendence. What I called her ‘mediocrity’ is what allows an ordinary girl to identify with her. Her performances are something like a religious rite, where all are united because all those girls can see a way they can be — not be like Taylor Swift — but BE Taylor Swift. Just because it’s an experience I’m not interested in, doesn’t mean it’s not remarkable.

THREE

the superstar musician at the top of the hierarchy is brave, independent, generous, and willing to challenge the system.

Those aren’t my words. Those are the words of Ted Gioia, who’s work I whole-heartedly recommend. He wrote Taylor Swift a very interesting open letter. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s the important part for our purposes.

By the time your tour ends, you will have generated more demand for live music than any artist in history—with huge beneficial effects for everybody. When you show up in town, it gives a Super Bowl-sized boost to the entire local economy.

Along the way, you have made so many other contributions to the music ecosystem. You treat everyone generously—paying out $50 million in bonuses to your team. Even truck drivers got $100,000 bonuses. You’ve also made donations to food banks, employed locals, and have even purchased carbon credits at twice the level of the emissions of your tour.

You also revitalized physical music media by convincing a million or so fans to buy their first vinyl album—boosting demand for LPs to levels not seen since the last century. You’ve actually done more to help record stores than the record business.

Nobody else is doing these kinds of things with such impact. It’s not even close.

So I feel that destiny has blessed us.

For the first time in ages, the superstar musician at the top of the hierarchy is brave, independent, generous, and willing to challenge the system. You stand up for artist rights. You stand up for live music. You stand up for people. And you do all this with a grass roots power base that nobody can match—no politician, no billionaire technocrat, and certainly no other performer.

Musicians have never had that kind of visionary leader.

Returning to the Wisdom of Frusciante

So, should I spend more time listening to Taylor Swift? Probably not. But what I shouldn’t do is hate her music. And certainly not her. I should like them both. Because that is a better way to understand it.

You can’t criticize your way to greatness. And there’s a really good chance that the fastest path to greatness is loving something so much that you make it great. Even if the thing you love wasn’t great to begin with. Case in point, Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino’s whole career has been an attempt to recreate the experience of being taken to see a Jim Brown movie, in an all-black theatre, by an L.A. Rams player on a Saturday night in 1972. He wrote about it in his excellent book, Cinema Speculation. And here he is talking about it in an interview:

When seen through the lens of his love for genre film, his body of work makes perfect sense. He loves Grindhouse and Blaxploitation cinema so much that he made the very best version of it he could. Arguably the best version of it that is possible.

And the best possible version of anything? Well, we usually call that art.