If You'd Really Like To Know

what it is like to be me [Lillet], you could do one of the following:

1) Watch Mullholland Drive
2) Watch Cat People (Tourneur, not Schraeder!!!)
3) Stand under the nice whale at the American Museum Of Natural History

But if you'd like to save some time, just watch this YouTube interview with Kate Bush.

From her crazy outfit to the godawful batshit dumb questions she is asked, this is often exactly how I feel: trying to just make something nice and tell the truth, only to be assaulted by mendacious crap.

In particular, listen to the tone in which the interviewer states: "I'm really trying to find out more about your influences."

When you hear that question, what you are really hearing is:

I don't want to have to have my own opinion about the inheritances I can't be bothered to hear in your music because I am too preoccupied with delivering an acceptable soundbite: Just spew me one worthy of Pitchfork already?

We are all more than the sum of our parts: and our chosen "progenitors" don't always tell the whole story. There are influences in whose clutches we struggle, making very beautiful things in the effort to free ourselves. But even if "those who can't, critique": don't make artists do the work FOR YOU on top of your own covetousness and passivity. Real criticism is an art of its own: true critics have the desire and balls to discern what the artist is too enmeshed to articulate.