This seems to suggest that the danger of perceptive appreciation is a risk of the sin of SCANDAL- which I don’t think really matters much, personally. Just who are we scandalizing by expressing our musical tastes, and how? It’s almost an argument that we put ourselves in the OCCASION OF SIN of scandal, which I think pushes it too far and is pharisaical.

Colin and John, I had a long comment complimenting both your comments, but it seems to have become lost. Thanks, though–John in particular clarifies a number of points I was trying to make.

Put the stress on “in our day particularly.” The piece to which you link discusses only contemporary music. The pop, rock and soul music of the 60s and 70s stands up remarkably well, even if it’s not great art. Much of the 80s stuff was great too, although I think the general level of quality began to decline.

Of course, maybe I’m just being nostalgic for the sounds of my youth (although I hasten to add that the 60s stuff was released before my time).

The Steyn and Nordlinger stance saves that ornament in terms of higher forms of culture, in that it recognizes the joys to be had in pop music (at least for Steyn on Broadway), but it judges popular musical forms like hip hop and rap according to a standards alien to their internal development. Like Derbyshire, it looks crankish, even if it is more worldly. It is fine to uphold standards, but then rap cannot live up to that which it is not. Wynton Marsalis once claimed that despite its appeal, rap was only the “middle”–meaning there were no songs in rap as compared to some of the most apparently simple (Louis Armstrong) or complex (Duke Ellington) in jazz. Instead, it contained nothing but a constant repetition of beats and riffs with no development–no beginning, middle, and end.

So knowledgable rap criticism would require a degree of surrender to its detrimental modes, but conservative rap criticism would need to be able to hold those detrimental aspects at bay with an ironic (?) distance. It would need to come to know standards intrinsic to the form itself. But then this could lead to an appreciation of rap and hip hop in its more esoteric modes beyond what is most popularly listened to.

In this mode, to be a conservative rap critic one would become a rap snob–picking out the best in rap according to musical inventiveness and sophistication and/or lyrical complexity and profundity. Such a critic would end up speaking about a pop culture for a few–or about a past rap popular culture of the Golden Age.

So to be appreciative–but CRITICAL–one needs to know rap and hip hop, as well as other musical genres. Also, one needs to know both popular rap and its higher manifestations. But at the end of the day, one needs to be able to defend this music where it is defensible. To do this, one needs standards internal and external to the form and one needs full knowledge of its history and development.

In this post, you seem to be laying out the basic criteria of conservative rap criticism–but for someone else (NOT ME!).

Furthermore, I would think that a proper conservative criticism would have to remember what Maritain said about art – how “art” or “making” is a virtue (not a moral virtue but a habitus) of the practical intellect, and therefore is concerned with “the making of the work, on which depends the fact of this very work’s being good or bad” – what you had said about there being “standards and levels of quality in pop culture itself, even in the more debased genres.” This isn’t to suggest that we ignore the moral element of works of art – or the “vice-aiding and civilization-eroding quality” of that work; just that we shouldn’t solely focus on that level of criticism, because we certainly aren’t doing justice to the work.

Docta ignorantia. Erasmus. (Studied or witting ignorance.)