made of plastic and elastic

The Dresden Dolls are on a grueling tour right now, and Amanda is writing about it in her blog, which is wonderful and a great example of why we should always trade quantity for quality.

There's an entry this morning which touched a nerve with me. She's talking about the new album:

The reviews are 98% amazing, but we will focus on the 2% that think the music is terrible and the lyrics are trite and overdramatic. How does one scrape oneself out of the goth pigeon coop? This has been a problem from day one. I never thought that wearing whiteface on stage would land us in the predicament of being compared to Marilyn Manson. Are you shitting me? Have you listened to our music, fool? We have as much in common with Marilyn Manson as we do with Cher. Did people lump KISS and david bowie together?

I had a lot of frustrations with O'Reilly and the release of Just A Geek, but the worst thing of all was that they classified my autobographical, narrative non-fiction story as "Science Fiction," because I was once on a Sci-Fi show. That's as idiotic as comparing the Dresden Dolls to Marilyn Manson, and a great way to limit the potential audience.

When someone doesn't like my work, there's not a lot I can do about it; I try to dig something constructive out of it, and move along. But when someone just doesn't get it, and uses an entirely inappropriate comparison or categorizes me with another artist based on something as stupid as what kind of makeup I wear on stage (ahem), it makes me want to deliver the cockpunch.

I don't know what it is about artists, but so many of us can't ignore the bad reviews. It's almost like we think that they know something real, something secret, something that nobody else is willing to tell us. I think that, deep down, we all know that this thing we've created really doesn't suck, so we listen to all the people who want to convince us that it does. It's like we have a dysfunctional, battered-person relationship with some invisible force called The Critics.