Great! and Other Ways to Tell Someone They Suck
August 30 2009

You've come to see your friend perform.

She's a wonderful woman. Warm. Bright. You know she works non-stop at her music career. Making calls. Booking. Marketing. Recording. Practising. It inspires respect.

She invites you to a gig. How could you say no? You say yes. You come with high expectations. Looking forward. A nice night ahead.

She begins. She sucks.

Out loud.

What do you do now?

This is a problem in the arts, dear reader. The Pianobabbler finds himself in this situation from time to time. What to do?

The first thing not to do: never reveal exactly what it is you do in such circumstances.

A musician friend once disclosed his trick to the Pianobabbler. "If I hear some act I really don't like, I tell them 'Great', and that's it. That's all I say"

Great. Now, if buddy boy shows up to one of my gigs, finds it truly great, and tells me so, I'll be wracked with doubt.

Out of respect for my fellow musicians, I will not reveal my personal strategy for dealing with colleagues who P.U. Why do I have to make their already hard lives harder by giving their anxieties a deep massage.

Just don't do it.

I do recommend that you think of a strategy for yourself, though. There are a number of techniques. Most common, is to find the one thing you did like. "Hey, I really liked those chord changes you did in the last tune." Or: "I love your choice of songs. A real nice mix" This is the distraction technique. By talking about one detail, you can leave out the other ones, which trigger your aesthetic vomit reflex.

Then there's the enthusiastic mono-word approach. My friend's Great! is an example. So are "Wow!" and "Well!". It provokes a thank you from the artist, and ends the need to continue discussing the show.

There's the read-the-fine-print technique. This is where you say something that sounds congratulatory. It is nothing of the kind. Classics of the genre include: "I'm so glad I finally got to hear you,", "Where did you learn to do that?", and "You guys are sounding really tight."

You can also always lie outright. Tell them they are great artists (thereby perpetuating the sounds whose appeal to you is as great as a meal consisting of dirty socks. A stranger's dirty socks.)

Funny thing is, there's no real cause for worry. Artists are insecure and self-critical. If you say something nice about what you've heard, we don't believe you. But if you prick us, you only bleed the inner doubts we harbor. (Not that these doubts never prevented us from working at our art, and bringing it to the public. They simply deepen the inner rumbling misery that drove us to share our art publicly, in the first place.)

So sit back. Relax. Enjoy the show. Even if it's awful.

At least you don't need to worry what you're going to say to your friend.

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