The critic, especially the pessimistic one can ruin a thing forever. I’m sure we’ve all encountered this phenomenon as we have to embrace ‘irony’ or humour just to like something, even something popular or…I don’t know, your own damn opinion being paramount. It’s okay to enjoy Judas Priest without a caveat for people who weren’t even born in their heyday. It’s alright to appreciate something that your friends or family don’t like. Enjoy it, appreciate it, discuss it where you feel the need or when that’s enjoyable.
Don’t do things with irony or a sour stomach. Letting yourself just enjoy things not only feels better; it makes you look less of an arse.
Often the matter of irony, of enjoyment itself has become about social acceptability, which increasingly becomes less of a wariness or joke, but the thinnest of pretexts.
A time, hopefully fully arriving very soon will come, where like past ages people do not question the nature of what they enjoy.
The subversive piece, the nature of the term itself has the desire to undermine. Pleasure comes not from creativity, or art per se. but other emotions. Others rooted in sociology. And, let us be honest; are those fundamental root emotions the best ones for a result? Is it different to the mean-spirited joke, that we guffaw at from a safe distance when not pointed our way?
Strength comes from high and low places. Hollywood is so bad that we appreciate older films and literature. A bad break up teaches us self-respect, and shows us the friends and others we may have been blind to. Often even the success of a very popular mainstream story follows from the sense of sharing, the notion of the couple’s movie, a family movie; in short something with enjoyable personality safe -a word I use with disgust- to do so.
It is high time to avoid the pursuit of being clever, in favour of being wise, light, or just enjoy a thing for what it is. Not the bitter work inseparable from vacuum, but even the cheesiest, silliest, or most acquired taste of a novel, song or film rests comfortably upon its own merits, which we would all be far better off enjoying.
By J.W.H. Hobbs.
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