On critics and jealousy

Did you know that I'm hugely jealous of Alastair Campbell? Jealousy is not the driving animus for my work but it's in there.

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A comment I received about yesterday’s newsletter:

Sad. Jealousy masquerading as outrage is such a sad look, Mic. 

You’d have done a much better job if you’d critiqued Campbell’s content. Better still, have you wondered why The Rest Is Politics is so popular? It might be to do with the fact the content is good and they get top-rate guests.

The ‘jealousy’ jibe is a common one if you’re a critic. In 1983, Elvis Costello reheated an old maxim coined by the musician-comedian Martin Mull:

Framing all the great music out there only drags down its immediacy. The songs are lyrics, not speeches, and they're tunes, not paintings. Writing about music is like dancing about architecture—it's a really stupid thing to want to do. 

I think it’s a stupid thing to assume that criticism is not an art in and of itself and that you cannot do beautiful and creative things in the act of criticism. I became a music journalist because I was obsessed with music and a fan of music writers.

It’s to a music writer that I don’t even particularly like that much that I turn for two punchy answers to the “dancing about architecture line”. Robert Christgau says:

Writing about music is writing first.

… and …

One of the many foolish things about the fools who compare writing about music to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space whether they mean to or not.

I’m a media critic because I’ve been a journalist for 20 years and I had become increasingly frustrated with the compromises and structural failures of the media I was working and am still working within. Is there any element of jealousy in the things I write? Of course. I’m human and it can be galling when I see people with limited talent but an unlimited ability to climb into the colons of those in power get highly rewarding jobs for their trouble.

Am I jealous of Alastair Campbell? No. Because even though I don’t believe in a literal concept of hell, I think Campbell is destined for some form of it. I have listened to The Rest Is Politics and it is a polished product but it’s not impressive for characters with Campbell and Stewart’s backgrounds to book “top-rate guests”, most of whom are friends, acquaintances, former bosses, or ex-colleagues from parliament / the media / the security service (👋🏻 hi, Rory!).

If your first instinct is to scream, “You’re just jealous,” when you read a critic doing their job or jump to the well-worn Teddy Roosevelt quote from his 1910 speech at the Sorbonne (‘Citizenship in a Republic’)…

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

… I regret to inform you that you’re being a hack. Learn to be a better critic. It’s a skill.

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