Oh dear.

Rhys Chatham’s Essen­tial­ist @ CEC 9/8/2006

It was actu­al­ly a lit­tle quaint. And Mr. Smith overde­ter­mines the influ­ence of South­ern Lord on Chatham’s set; run­ning through a few rehashed Slay­er and Black Album-era Metal­li­ca riffs is nei­ther avant-garde nor met­al. No. It’s “high cul­ture” slum­ming as “low cul­ture”, which is both pedan­tic and patron­iz­ing. As John Darnielle put it in Deci­bel’s now infa­mous hip­ster met­al round­table:

They start lis­ten­ing to a lit­tle met­al, but they sort of want to describe the met­al in terms that makes it part of their shtick instead of its own uni­verse. Their mode is sort of the gate­way drug to that. It seems a lit­tle intel­lec­tu­al sometimes.

Addi­tion­al­ly, this. And, while I’m at it, this. Oh, the guilt! Is it impos­si­ble to judge met­al on its own mer­its, “art­ful” or oth­er­wise, rather than false­ly ele­vate it in the name of good taste? Sure, it’s a cheap polemic and the eas­i­est way to approach extreme music in a spe­cious man­ner, but it does such a dis­ser­vice to artists who don’t find them­selves adorn­ing the pages of The Times, The New York­er and Art­fo­rum before being accord­ed the respectabil­i­ty they deserve as artists in and of themselves.

That sort of crit­i­cism is bet­ter left to cagey A&R per­son­nel and twitchy PR attachés, hired to devise mar­ket­ing strate­gies for crossover appeal, etc.