Meta-Critique Is a Doing Word

Yesterday in class, TMac made a reference to a type of music sounding like its underwater. As I rode the train home with my iPod on, I realized I was drowning happily on the A Train. I have such an affinity for this type of music, and to some extent, I think an overwhelming majority of my music has this watery quality. To what could I attribute this (almost) cliché of my iTunes library?

1. I'm a Cancer, one of three Water signs in the Zodiac
2. I've lived near/on the water my whole life
3. I enjoy showering

Well, maybe everyone enjoys showering, but I'm getting further away from this meta-critique. I always am fascinated by the scope of this one music website, allmusic.com, and I probably spend countless hours surfing it per week. They have album reviews for pretty much any artist or album you could think of. Getting to the water connection, "Teardrop" by Massive Attack from the album Mezzanine was recommended to me by a friend in high school. I remember listening to it the first time and feeling like I was burning in a rainstorm while underwater. "Teardrop" is reviewed on allmusic by Amy Hanson here. I'll post the music video (directed by Walter Stern) before my critique.



Hanson begins by exploring the historical background of the group Massive Attack highlighting that the group had wanted to work with Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins. She writes that even though Fraser and Massive Attack would collaborate on more interesting tracks on Mezzanine, "Teardrop" was a welcome and sweet commercial success. Hanson then touches on the virtual feeling of the piece--"Melancholy, dreamy"--and syntax mentioning its "unrushed" length of five and a half minutes. After the virtual feeling, Hanson mentions the phenomenology of the piece, and then adds that it's "an interlude to soften the soul" in her own one-sentence referential analysis of the song.

Comparing her critique to one utilizing an eclectic analysis, she does hit a number of the steps necessary to Ferrara's eclectic method. She begins with an historical analysis but then veers off into virtual feeling before addressing syntax and sound-in-time. Her review might be more grounded if she took note of the instrumentation and used her phenomenological reference to "scuttling" with the syntax. What really stands out to me with the scuttling reference is that
Mezzanine's album cover is a Hercules beetle--scuttling is imminent in this album. The lyrics are also integral to "Teardrop" and she didn't mention them other than one can "nearly clearly hear Fraser's lyrics." Reference to the lyrics could strengthen her cause for the song being an "interlude to soften the soul."