When it comes to creative pursuits, I’m a big believer in honesty.
Let’s say you have a good friend who’s putting out some kind of creative content, and you think their creative content sucks. Or maybe not ‘sucks’, but you feel they could do better – but you don’t tell them because you don’t wanna hurt their feelings.
In my opinion, that makes you a bad friend.
If you can’t trust your friends to have your back, who can you trust? Putting aside those few people who cry and bitch at the first sign of criticism – and I’d argue such people shouldn’t be creating any kind of content at all if they’re not capable of handling anything less than adulation – criticism should be encouraged. It’s not rude to be critical of someone else’s work if you’re constructive of it, not just saying ‘this sucks’ but saying ‘hey, I wanted to talk to you about that thing you did, cos it didn’t seem like your best’ and maybe going into why. They’ll appreciate your candour, and be grateful that you’re saying what nobody else will. In some cases you’ll even become their go-to guy or girl for opinion, because they know you’ll be straight with them. And the other great benefit of this is that when you have something nice to say, it’ll be appreciated even more, because people will know you genuinely mean it.
There have to be rules, of course. I’ve learnt not to just send my opinion to people when it hasn’t been invited. I’ll wait for people to ask me what I think of something before I tell them. And in a lot of cases, it’ll just be a misinterpretation; there have been times where I say to someone “why did you do that?” and they give me a perfectly good reason that I hadn’t thought of before and it shuts me up. That’s where you have to realise the difference between what’s objectively wrong/bad and what’s just your personal preferences, which is a distinction I think I’m getting better at.
I’ll always endeavour to be respectful and try and give a balanced opinion. I won’t say “I think that song was lame”, I’ll say “I think that song could have been stronger; here are the things I think let it down, but bear in mind this is just my take on it”.
And most importantly, I’d never bother sending anyone an email saying “here’s how I think you could improve” if I didn’t believe in their existing talents and their abilities to push themselves further. It’s tough love. Luke described it as the spit before the shine.
(I have very high standards, I should point out. If I think someone can do better than what they’ve done, I’ll say so, even if the content is still entertaining and enjoyed by other people. I don’t see the point of bothering if you’re not going to aim for the best.)
Anyway, I bring all this up because Alan asked what I thought about Erase This and I sent him back a review which was quite detailed and went into what I thought were the highs and lows of the album. Alan posted it in his blog, so I thought I’d link it here for two reasons. First of all, it gives you a review of an album by a fellow artist/friend which I feel is more objective than any of the others I’ve read, which tend to be posted on Tumblr and consist of words to the effect of “erase this is awesum lol”. But more importantly, it gives you an insight into my attitudes and approaches. I got a blog comment the other day saying:
So I give you this review in the name of getting to know me a little better :) Click here to read it.
x
