Every Critic’s Dream

Dear Critic,

I agree with all of your theories. They are amazing. I’ve never thought of any of these things before, but the way you come up with these ideas and word them so skillfully, it’s like you’re inside my brain. You make me laugh and you make me think. You make me better at enjoying music.  Thank you. Without you I would still be listening to Chumbawamba. I would have no idea that it isn’t actually good. I would think it was good.  My life would be sad. I would be living in one of those duplexes with no yard on a very busy street near the Auto Zone in the shit town of my birth, listening to my Chumbawamba CD’s. I would not believe in myself or life’s possibilities if not for you.

You are right about music. I can tell by the way I agree with you all the time. Even when I don’t immediately agree with you, I think about what you wrote and it lodges in my head and I find that after I spend a little while reinvestigating the validity of the assumptions I’ve held dear for my entire life, I eventually understand and agree with your point of view. I do not question that you know what you’re doing. Of course you know what you’re doing. Even if you don’t really, I believe in you. You will figure it out, and you will be right because you have great taste in music.  You have probably, like, the best taste in music of anybody ever. And you are SO GOOD at writing, too. Man oh man.

Do you have a DJ night? You should have a DJ night. I would go to your DJ night just to hear all of the songs that you think are good because I bet I would think they’re good too. I would either dance to the songs or quietly and reverently listen to them, all the way through.  Whichever is best for you.

If you had a DJ night I would bring all of my friends. I have many friends (I’ve been out making like a thousand friends while you’ve been busy finding great music for other people to hear) and I’m going to bring them to your DJ night. You would like my friends. They are smart and funny but not like NPR smart and funny where they need your approval with every incoming breath. They are discriminating without being self-aggrandizing, fashionable without being superficial, and attractive without expecting your attention, these friends of mine. They are perfect.  I will instruct them to all sit on the floor Indian style and listen to what you’re going to come up with next. They will not want to, but you will win them over. And then my friends (and they’re the best set of friends to have, trust me, you won’t be able to do better than these guys) will be your friends too. It will be a whole big scene. Right away. And it will center around you and your impeccable, perfect taste in music.

What do I imagine your DJ night will be like?  You will always play us something we’ve never heard of before, and it will always be SO great that we just won’t believe our fucking ears when we hear it.  If you ever play a song we’ve heard before, it’ll happen at EXACTLY the right time.  No matter what you play, we’ll go fucking CRAZY for it.  Like we’ll all dance in that perfect 1978 Soul Train boogie-style that we know you love the most, and we’ll do it for real, with no self-consciousness or joking. We will dance like this perfectly in rhythm to anything you play, even if it’s some weird experimental thing without a rhythm, because we take our dancing seriously and we will always always always be feeling you. We will only pause from dancing to ask you what you’re playing and write it down. On our foreheads. In tattoo ink. The musicians who did it, they’re one thing, sure, but you: you’re spreading the gospel. You’re gonna be an evangelist of sound. To me and all my friends.  In fact, they’re already in.  We’re ready.

Let us make this happen for you. Please.

We do have some requests. We request that you continue to blow our fucking minds. Zapruder style. We request that you change nothing about yourself or what you’re doing. We request your presence in blowjob heaven. Or if you’re a girl, cunnilingus heaven. Point is: there is going to be some extremely enthusiastic and expertly practiced oral sex, and you will be on the receiving end of it. That is what we’re requesting.

We have a few demands, too. We demand that you front a badass rock band that sounds like an exact hybrid of Malcolm Mooney-era Can and The Zero Boys. We understand your reluctance to do this. Fronting a rock band is a childish, idiotic act, and the learning curve involved in creating something worthwhile is too embarrassing for a person of your stature. We want to assure you that we are one hundred percent already convinced that you are great, no learning curve needed, and in fact we have decided that we need you to front this band in order to have any chance of happiness in our lives. Think of it as an act of mercy. Of giving. You must. We insist.

We will provide the musicians. They will be anxious to listen to your correct theories about music. They will be competent and creative and intuitive and they will bring your vision to life. They have no agenda of their own. Specifically what musicians? Tony Iommi, and the drummer from the Boredoms, and Brian Eno, and Peter Newman, the bassist for the T.S.U. Tornadoes who played the bass line for “Tighten Up.” They have all been drugged and lobotomized and cajoled into a state of you-worship. We are kidding, all we had to do was mention you. Those guys were on board immediately.

What else?

Oh. We are definitely going to follow you on Twitter. We are way, WAY into that. You’re going to have so many twitter followers, it’s like you’ll be one of those people who can do whatever they want whenever they want to because they’re just bleeding Twitter followers. We want you to put all of your tweets in a book and then self-publish that book with money from a Kickstarter we’ll set up for you, and then you can sell the book online for “whatever you choose to pay” and we will all choose $1,000 please, and the rest of your life will be a continuous money enema.

We’re going to do whatever it takes, collectively, to make you happy. You will not have to lift a finger. Over a prolonged period of years and years we will donate a high percentage of our disposable income to support your every creative whim, the output of which we will all eagerly eat up with spoons though we are a discerning bunch and our respect is hard-won. We will gladly and truthfully tell you that you’re already perfect and everything you do is great, but we know you won’t believe us, for your taste in all things is so exquisitely exacting. But you will know once we prop you up as a cultural icon of sufficient merit for Bill Murray to want to hang out with you. You don’t have to return his phone calls, but he will be calling you.  Often.  It will get to the point where you become kind of annoyed by all these “we should hang out” texts from Bill Murray. And then you will know that you have arrived, and you will see yourself as we see you: perfect.

Congratulations on being the best of all time ever, and good luck with the rest of your completely perfect life that we are going to dedicate ourselves to creating.

Sincerely,

Every Person You’ve Ever Wanted To Have Sex With

@itsbenjo

www.chunklet.com