Musical Platonism and the Burden of Young & Projectile Bands

The Quietus op-ed by Mimi Haddon berating the Dirty Projectors and their fans has the unfortunate stench of musical Platonism: an emptily snobbish derision of the band on the grounds of its status as “ephemera,” implicitly hugging the big, safe buoy of whatever music has already been stamped as eternally viable—i.e., “classic”—by the media (or in this case, by celebrity supporters with better standing than, er, David Byrne?).

In any case, there’s a better argument to be made against the band’s critical acclaim at the musical level (as opposed to the more abstract cultural level, from which the slur “hipster” presumably derives, in this context): it’s not that they’ve failed to do anything new (what bands are *really* doing anything *new*? See Michael Jackson on this!) and are boring Brooklyn poseurs, but more simply that they’re overrated as such. It’s easy to be overrated when there’s practically no creative competition. And, in my opinion, pop bands at least have to carry the lyrical burden of articulating, in a creative way, some personal feeling that’s widely relatable; the Dirty Projectors just don’t do that for me.