Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture Book

NOTES FOR A REVIEW OF DAVID HAJDU'S "HEROES AND VILLAINS" :

Hajdu notices that in the King Features animated Beatles TV show John Lennon is voiced with an upper class English accent. And proceeds to make interesting observations about class in the U.K., and how U.S. residents tended to see all U.K. residents as culturally superior to themselves. What other critic has noticed this? All good criticism is a heightened paying of attention.

Excellent cultural criticism illuminates its subjects in ways not just unsurprising but unavailable to other minds until so illuminated; then the new way to think about something is afterward a permanent feature of what makes these subjects fascinating; we owe a debt.

It's very irritating at first and sometimes remains so when another mind makes us aware of the mediocrity of something we love, or think we love; we naturally resent the challenge to grow up and to adjust our self-conception; all human impulses at bottom are infantile ones.

"Indifference to the art is a profound act of hostility to the artist." - David Hajdu

Intelligently noting the subtle imperviousness to criticism of Paul McCartney's "Silly Love Songs."

I have to force myself to push through my resistance to ever again read anything about any of The Beatles in order to get to surprising ways of thinking about the world, via another person's careful thinking. I love much of their music, but thinking about The Beatles produces an unpleasant sensation of fullness. Enough, already.

At one point Hajdu observes that a song is catchy rather than memorable and I wonder what the difference is. Is catchy a necessary but insufficient condition for memorability? But music can be memorable without being catchy, so fuck it, they're different. But they can overlap. WHO GIVES A SHIT.

I still don't quite get the phenomenon of completely losing your shit over a performer, like some teenage girls of the era at Beatles concerts. It makes me feel contemptuous, and then I feel guilty about feeling this way. Were there girls at the back, arms folded, snapping gum, unimpressed?

That smug feeling of, "I don't like Sting, either." Don't trust it.

The only consistently irritating stylistic tic of Hajdu's I can find is his over-reliance on "veracity" as a descriptor.I know that almost all the pieces in the book were published separately in magazines but still.

Is is somewhat cruel for Hajdu to use one of Joni Mitchell's most famous lyrics as a means to describe her diminished artistic power? Can criticism be free of aggression toward its subject? Do critics have moral responsibility toward their subjects?

ESSAY TOPIC: ON ASSIGNING STARS TO COMPLETED ARTISTIC WORKS