Nothing sets off the contrarian impulse quite like a frantic buzz around a band that’s only just released its first proper record. Sometimes I’m glad to be in the disreputable subprofession of music writing, where in the final analysis it doesn’t matter much if I’ve got my fingers around a gem or a wad of muck. This encourages many of us to play the contrarian, hoping to expose someone else’s find as a fake–and the more unanimously the conventional wisdom ratifies the value of a claim, the more zealously we try to scrub away its patina of legitimacy. I’m the only one who really cares about the truth, and I can bring it to light, even through all the mud these other idiots are stirring up. Just about everyone in this business occasionally indulges in self-aggrandizing fantasy: I’m a pearl diver among the bottom-feeders, we tell ourselves, secretly. But I’m wearing my own pundit hat now–why should you believe me, instead of seeing for yourself? John Kerry makes a different impression in the flesh than he does on the tube so does Ozzy Osbourne. When I visited the ruins of the World Trade Center in September 2001, they hit me totally differently in person than they had on TV, bracketed by familiar logos and accompanied by sententious commentary.
It certainly seems that the chattering classes–who filter and process every thought and expression and piece of information over and over again, lest actual people come to their own conclusions–are doing more harm than good. I know I’m not the only one to wonder this past year whether pundits provide any benefit whatsoever to society.
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