What makes for a good music critic in 2010 ?

pete is pretty resoundingly otm

This is something that certainly goes against the zing culture, but I would add to Pete's list:
11/ Don't be cruel just because you can. It's one thing to criticise the music; it's another to start making assumptions about the worth of the person making the music based on their album. Cruelty might raise easy laughs, but it doesn't make you a critic, and it diminishes you in the long run.
12/ Remember, you're reviewing the band. not the fans. Too much music writing takes pops at the people who buy the music: "it's music for idiots". Maybe you think only idiots could like it, but chances are there are plenty of people who aren't idiots who feel differently, and who might take against a writer who calls them idiots. Call the music rubbish, not the fans stupid.

Not a professional by any means - and this thread has been great reading - but my suggestion wd be

Postpone judgment

By which I mean certainly moral but also critical judgment. Enjoy exploring, analysing, adding context and describing before anything else.

So much criticism seems to hit the ground running with its ultimate opinion tacitly apparent in its tone while pretending to review. Find good (even if it's a struggle), find bad (ditto), but keep postponing that 'this is good'/'this is bad' moment (if you feel you need it at all.) it is in some ways for the reader the least important part.

if only that was even possible what with, you know, deadlines and lead times and promos

i mean i basically agree - i feel most "ready" to take on an album a few months after first hearing it - but this is pretty much impossible

I took that to mean "delay making a judgment in your writing until the end"

Yep, sorry, wasn't clear - what HD said. Although that's perhaps also because of what lex said.

there's always ways to talk about music that you've taken the time to consider -- year-end pieces, genre overviews, looks back at an artist's catalog with a news hook -- but as far as reviewing new releases go i think it's understood by the reader and everyone else that you're going with a gut instinct first impression. but i do agree that emphasizing the badness/goodness in reviews of new records is probably not a great idea, which is one of many reasons why numbers/stars do far more harm than good.

Yeah, the one thing I might take issue to in Peter's great long post (which has tons of excellent advice) is the stuff about "Why does this matter?"...I mean, I think I know what he means (you have to get the reader's attention), but a lot of reviewers might take that advice to mean "Why is this important?" (assuming the music is important --which, honestly, very little music ultimately is, in the long run), something that's often better to let the reader figure out his or herself. It's not always possible, but at least keep the "show don't tell" rule in mind. If your description of the music (and/or whatever context you put it into) is smart enough, the "mattering" can come naturally, and if your ideas are interesting, mattering might not even matter. With wordcounts under 100 per album in many venues these days --one thing that sucks about 2010 music-crit obviously -- killing two birds with one stone is frequently the only choice you're gonna have.

And obviously, another thing that really sucks about 2010 music-crit (as Lex alludes to) is the stupid universal insistence on reviews coinciding with (even preceding) release dates. Wasn't always that way, believe it or not -- and right, sometimes the smartest things written about records are written months (or years) after they come out.

emphasizing the badness/goodness in reviews of new records is probably not a great idea, which is one of many reasons why numbers/stars do far more harm than good

Strangely, one thing I've liked in the past few years about reviewing music for places like Billboard, rhapsody, and emusic (where wordcounts are all extremely short oddly enough) is that trashing records is rarely if ever an option -- It forces me think more about what makes a record singular, and what's actually happening on it, and how I can say that in an interesting way, whether I love the music or don't like it much. And since every word counts -- if my limit is 600 characters, I'll probably use all 600 -- there's little room for empty superlatives, either. Which might not necessarily make for the most memorable writing -- having strong opinions and room for wisecracks often helps criticism -- but I bet it makes the reviews useful.

okay so sure in 2010 Whiney's Twitter has dropped a nuke in the arms race to be FIRST but does that in any way prevent future consideration at length and writing of smart things months (or years) later? like in 2011 when all music criticism will be performed at length and leisure by gifted amateurs anyway?

like in 2011 when all music criticism will be performed at length and leisure by gifted amateurs anyway?

is this a given?

j/w

With wordcounts under 100 per album in many venues these days

This denies any notion of actually practicing journalism. Even if you're an editor presiding over it at some publication. Then, more accurately, one is a scheduler, a job that more accurately dovetails with
the tight lacing of every single review to release schedules.

Then there's the big quid pro quo thing.

What xhuxk describes about Billboard, rhapsody and emusic (except for the wordcount thing; I can go as long as I want, though I usually wind up in the 200-250 word range because that's how I was trained) is also true of my work for AMG. It's much more about description than rendering a hard-and-fast verdict, and I have to stay away from stuff like "an early contender for Album of the Year" because, in theory, AMG reviews aren't locked to the time they're first published or to street dates - they're supposed to linger there for when someone looks the album up for research or something.

xpost i dunno how light does a check have to be before one considers oneself an amateur?

xp I don't blame Whiney -- I blame Entertainment Weekly, 20 or so years ago. That was the first shot in this war. But sure, people can still write at length, and ages after a record comes out, on their blogs and other websites, just like they could write for fanzines in the old days. They just can't (usually) get paid for it. (And I'm not saying that's entirely bad for music criticism, either. But I dunno, for me personally, a paycheck tends to be a good motivator -- even though some of the writing I'm proudest of has been done for free.)

So much criticism seems to hit the ground running with its ultimate opinion tacitly apparent in its tone while pretending to review. Find good (even if it's a struggle), find bad (ditto), but keep postponing that 'this is good'/'this is bad' moment (if you feel you need it at all.) it is in some ways for the reader the least important part.

This is what Manny Farber (especially in the late reviews co-written with Patricia Patterson) was quite good at.

op: animated .gifs

Remember, you're reviewing the band. not the fans.

I'd amend this slightly: oftentimes you're reviewing the track or album or mix or performance, rather than the artist themselves. I think that makes a difference (and I'm guessing it's part of what ithappens means anyway), if only because a work doesn't usually add up to a whole. (I keep thinking of Scharpling & Wurster's Rock, Rot & Rule, in which Wurster's clueless book author says that Neil Young rots. "But what about . . ." Scharpling asks, naming the obvious canonical stuff. Wurster, who's only heard the bad '80s records: "That's six albums.")

NB I don't blame Whiney either and I hope that's clear. and I agree -- as with The Death of The Newspaper these forces have been in motion since long before the average home had access to broadband internet. also agreed that paid work today will almost always trump spec work today. which is sort of baked into my crack about In The Future All Music Writers Will Be Amateurs.

at this point I read 33 1/3 more than I read pfork so who knows

It forces me think more about what makes a record singular, and what's actually happening on it, and how I can say that in an interesting way, whether I love the music or don't like it much

I have to admit, my old dream/ideal used to be that one could find a way to describe how a record works that would make everyone who'd dislike the record cringe, and everyone who'd like the record get excited, all without suggesting an opinion either way. (I think I may have gotten close to this once -- a review that got loads of email saying either "you're right, this sucks" or "you're right, this is awesome" -- but this is one of those unreachable ideals, obviously.)

x-post: Totally agree about show don't tell, I was more thinking about how for years I struggled with leads until I remembered that sometimes you just need to start writing about what you're writing about and not worry about a clever way in, especially if your clever way would break the momentum, and always if it would make anyone wonder, "So why is this being written about again"?

So I don't agree that you should avoid reading other criticism, but I would avoid explicitly responding to it in your writing, because there's so much more there, both in the art and in yourself.

True to a point--you'll certainly save yourself a lot of grief, and there's something kind of noble about staying above the fray--but one of the best things for me about reading Kael and all her rivals from the early 60's was the way they'd have at each other. Kael would complain about Sarris, he'd complain about her, Simon would complain about both of them, Macdonald would chime in, etc., etc. I suppose it was quite annoying if you just wanted to know whether or not The Disorderly Orderly was worth seeing, otherwise highly entertaining and instructive. (The nobility of above-the-fray: Stanley Kauffmann, most of the time.) And Kael's "Circles and Squares," her epic diatribe against Sarris, is one of her greatest pieces of writing. (Unless you're a Sarris acolyte, in which case it's just shrill.) Maybe you just mean that stuff shouldn't creep into regular reviews. Mostly, I think that's a good idea.

It's important not to take attacks seriously too. Poor Sarris never forgave Kael, despite several attempts on her part to mend fences.

I'd have to look it up, but as I remember it, there was still lingering bitterness in the piece he wrote after her death.

Yeah, he still hadn't gotten over it.

Here's the piece. "In berths and hard cash, she profited much more than I did--in addition to its prestige, The New Yorker paid better than The Village Voice, and Pauline did stints as a consultant in Hollywood. But she deserved it for her relentless self-promotion and her artful suggestion that she was the ultimate authority on all movies because the opinions of colleagues were worthless."

And, uh, oh yeah--RIP!

hatchet jobs on other critics who are just plain wrong and stupid is so much fun, though. LOVED doing it the one time i got commissioned to do so. still regret that at the time of the taylor wift feminist débâcle i was too tied up with work to have time to eviscerate that autostraddle piece.

It's important not to take attacks seriously too. Poor Sarris never forgave Kael, despite several attempts on her part to mend fences.

idk, publishing a diatribe against someone is as definitively bridge-burning as you get.

(i don't think having a thick skin is necessarily a good thing for a critic!)

Like someone else said upthread, I don't really care too much for historico-contextual screeds about how the album fits within the artist's oeuvre. For me the key is to find words to describe the music in arresting and interesting ways. The master of this is David Keenan, who gets a lot of stick from all quarters but has an unmistakable style based around a more or less unique critical vocabulary. Any of his capsule reviews on VT would serve as examples.

I generally quite like Keenan's turn of phrase but it strikes me as heavily cribbed from Byron Coley (who I guess is pretty in thrall to Beat-ish vocab himself)

xpost Thanks for that Sarris piece, so much there.

Keenan is like a humourless, arid & v. pompous mystic version of Byron Coley.

I'm a longtime reader of the bimonthly classical review Fanfare, and once in awhile its critics just eviscerate each other in a special section in the back of the mag. Last time it was a dude whose reviews are really useful to me sonning a dude whose reviews don't do shit, but it was so harsh I felt bad for the vic.

that sounds like an awesome idea for a section though

Yeah, not on topic for music but the letters section of The Comics Journal in the mid-late 80s was a war zone, you'd have these critic vs critic flame wars that went on for issue after issue. Not like that any more sadly.

[i]idk, publishing a diatribe against someone is as definitively bridge-burning as you get[i]

Those confounded bridges. I'm good at burning them. Finding or building them, less so.

Ha, Clemenza and I have been burning each others' bridges for years (his diatribe against me is definitive), and we're still friends!

what diatribe? can i read it? is clemenza jo jo dancer?

Pretty sure it's findable at rockcritics.com somewhere, Scott. (And nah, Jo Jo Dancer was pretty easy on me, in comparison!)

I have often been tempted to definitively eviscerate my own critical writing under a pseudonym, but then I re-read my own reviews and I'm like "wow this stuff eviscerates itself WITHOUT ANYONE HAVING TO LIFT A FINGER."

I just remember Clemenza (on the Rock Hall Of Fame clusterfuck poll thread) saying 'if I told you my name you probably wouldn't recognize it anyway'...

As above, but without the qualifier. Anyway, I'm glad xhuck still counts me as a friend--we're doing better than Kael and Sarris.

John Lennon knows your name, and I've seen him.

ROCK!

sorry, t rex moment for the day.

http://rockcriticsarchives.com/features/phildellio/accidentaltheorist.html

Nice CIUT shirt. I have fond memories of "Introspective Guy Town". And in regards to the firing of TP mentioned upthread, about freakin' time.

http://rockcriticsarchives.com/features/phildellio/accidentaltheorist.html

― jaymc

Posts very much in character. :)

ρεμπετις (hope I didn't mispronounce that): Wow--don't know who you are, but I'm flabbergasted and thrilled beyond words that someone remembers "Introspective Guy Town." I'm starting to feel self-conscious, like I've accidentally hijacked this thread, but I'll just say quickly that I'm on CKLN these days. Now back to word-counts and Chief Justices and the aristrocratic style, please.