(guest post - a reply to the previous post on poptimism and the culinary style of criticism)

but...the problem with any sort of firm, exclusionary commitment is not so much that single-mindedness bores or narrows the soul but rather that it's usually successful to the point of being self-undermining. because in fashioning a hard outline, clear definition for the thing you affirm, you seem to necessarily do the same for the thing you want to negate as its opposite: that other becomes so well delineated in its turn, so vivid as other, that you're ultimately, irresistibly drawn towards it. you cannot help falling for its singularity, now. and then looking back on your first commitment externally also seems to be to know it for the first time, and to be drawn back to it transformed.

so 'portfolios' or not there's a drift there towards more and more 'appreciation', but it can be thrilling, troubling and decentering, an involuntary process almost where you can lose yourself deliciously, rather than just a shrewd way of hedging bets.

and there's the dunked-in-the-deep-end exhilaration of sudden lurches: buying Cuban Linx cos the NME gave it a 9 and falling for it, but before that it was all Beach Boys, Buckley and Nick Drake; fishing Tres Hombres out the bins and all the air rushing into the room when u first play it; going on a huge excursion into classical precisely because it seems so forbidding and alien; ditching yr half-way-house country-rock classics and getting deep into Waylon, Tompall and Hag. it can become overly 'culinary' yeah, but you still produce yr own canons within each genre, each space of fandom ('cherry picking' but we all do!), and curiosity can be a powerful drive.

- the Ig