IS ROCK CRITICISM DEAD?

Yeah, def. some interesting stuff here. A few things I don't get:

Like the connection between tweeting about 1,000 LPs in a year and the death of criticism. Is this just a Nero fiddles as Rome burns kind of situation? It seems like this kind of approach was presented as a solution, and if so, I don't follow.

Also, there are some interesting questions here about whether pointing people toward good stuff is what criticism should aspire to.

I think plenty of lit (and definitely film) critics are very invested in personal readings of works rather than technical/close readings (certainly seemed like a vast majority of the lit crit I read in college was of that type and not of the "let's look at what writer X is doing with similes here" in paragraph to.) It's not unique to music criticism at all.

music criticism should aspire to just be good writing because it'll never be music

the only reason to write about music is to use music as a crutch to get the pen to the paper

"whether pointing people toward good stuff is what criticism should aspire to"
I'm totally fine with critics doing this instead of apple 'music genius' or pandora doing this.

some dude killin it itt

btw i really dont see how thoughtful music crit is going to disappear any more than the written word as a medium for expression is going to disappear. can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the critics making a living off of music writing were embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs (ie tim's innovator against a sea of genericism) & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

im honestly not sure i ever liked music criticism as a 'job'. im doing it anyway because there are a few people i like who do it really really well & help me think about the music i listen to in different ways but thats such a small group, & always has been ... i cant say that since ive been reading rolling stone ive ever been particularly moved by a review (this is not a whiney diss ive never read his work in RS)

^^ I think golden age of music criticism arguments are basically like golden age of music arguments. Just as people mentally screen out the unfathomably popular, now forgotten stuff that haunted the charts in 1982 or whenever, people tend to focus on that one lifechanging article they read back in (insert year) and ignore that most critics have been autobots since day dot.

(on the golden age of music point, one of the finest Freaky Trigger articles ever was when Tom Ewing and Greg Scarth did a head-to-head on the top 20 UK records of 1982 versus the top 20 UK records of 2002, and 2002 won by some marginal amount)

can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the critics making a living off of music writing were embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs (ie tim's innovator against a sea of genericism) & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

^^^^please please let's

Basically, can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the people making a living off of anything are embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

Sure and all the people lamenting the death of the team sportswriter are basically full of shit too.

haha it's the same mixed feelings i have about all the "death of the newspaper" lamentations. on one hand, it's sad. on the other, most of them are pretty bad.

(but it's not like they're being replaced by anything better, i guess is the problem in these cases)

the thing vs. newspapers is that paying for actual reporting is different than 'music criticism'

"music criticism" is not journalism.

music journalism, im worried about

Sure and all the people lamenting the death of the team sportswriter are basically full of shit too.

― Alex in SF, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 11:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah columnists for the most part i'm not gonna mourn, at least my local clowns but yeah we are blessed with some great beat writers and i'll be sad to see them go.

Basically, can we be honest abt the fact that a giant majority of the people making a living off of anything are embracing a whole lot of received wisdom, filling in staid narratives like madlbs & generally saying a lot of dumb shit?

― Tim F, Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:25 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

maybe. but some jobs dont require that kind of innovation

i mean the kind of innovation that would break from that received wisdom etc

xxxp Yeah I'm not saying ALL music critics are clowns mind you.

xpost - Absolutely, but nor does music criticism as a "job".

I'm constantly banging on about the need of music criticism not to be boring, but it's more in the sense that I'd not want to be friends with boring people rather than based on some notion of the music critic's obligation to society.

"music criticism" is not journalism.

i don't know, i think arts criticism in general is a form of journalism. and i think there's something lost with local papers all over the place ditching their local critics in favor of wire stuff, which a lot of them are doing -- even if a lot of the local critics aren't very good. (also, in a lot of places the local critics are also the local arts beatwriters. if you lose one, you lose both.)

i don't know, i think arts criticism in general is a form of journalism. and i think there's something lost with local papers all over the place ditching their local critics in favor of wire stuff, which a lot of them are doing -- even if a lot of the local critics aren't very good. (also, in a lot of places the local critics are also the local arts beatwriters. if you lose one, you lose both.)

― would you ask tom petty that? (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 6:37 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah but see, i think that ideally what will happen is that (& yes im being optimistic here) good critics will still want to write about music & will do so on the internet, with more freedom than they are allowed in rolling stone or wherever, & will develop some kind of following that will of course require multiple sources of income & self-marketing, & the best ones will be popular&smart enough to sustain themselves

while the shitty ones will continue to write & have no following because no one understands where they are coming from (obv i mean "best" in terms of "ability to connect with an audience" here, speaking in pure capitalist terms not a subjective quality of writing debate) & will write on their little journals to their small audiences.

kind of feel like the internet has sorta leveled the kinds of wack writers who were being subsidized by the good writers to write about shit -- back when every newspaper could afford an arts critic no matter how bad, when every magazine employed an army of writers to say boring things that rehashed what smarter writers had already said, etc

i had a bunch of thoughts about this but i have been shocked into silence by HI DERE saying that MN is the Michael W. Smith capital of the world

this is kind of idealized -- there are tons of shortcomings, i.e. writers writing to a small niche are often very valuable & good at what they do but have very small audiences & cant maintain ... but at some level i kind of feel like the drought of money in the industry is maybe not as much a bad thing as a different thing

do u get what im saying?

xp Alex: The lit crit that I read in college was a bit of both, some new criticism that focuses on the text as a thing in and of itself outside of historical context (which drove me crazy), a lot of criticism that also engaged technically with the writing and did close reading for things like assumptions/views on race, gender, sexuality, economic/class politics, etc. The personal response to the work - that I see in a lot of music reviews - wasn't something I saw as much in criticism of other media at the time (though that was approximately 15 years ago).

In some ways, I felt the personal response approach (outside of using that as a means to challenge conventional assumptions about how someone of one's race/gender/etc. would respond to the work) was somewhat lazy and didn't really tell me all that much.

But I think people respond to music differently than literature, with film being somewhere in between. I'd guess that most people listen to music while doing other things (even at a live show), as opposed to reading or watching a film, which generally require more active involvement, or at least more intellectual engagement in a "what's going on? what just happened? do you think they're gonna do (blank) next?" But that's the thing - it's generally the case - but not true for everyone. There's a wider range of levels of engagement with music than with literature and film.

I think that wider range makes music criticism more challenging - add to that a lower degree of music literacy of the audience (compared to literature) - and you have something that is difficult to do well.

yeah but see, i think that ideally what will happen is that (& yes im being optimistic here) good critics will still want to write about music & will do so on the internet, with more freedom than they are allowed in rolling stone or wherever, & will develop some kind of following that will of course require multiple sources of income & self-marketing, & the best ones will be popular&smart enough to sustain themselves

I would love nothing more than to shit-talk my way out of the industry by leaving a definitive list of worthless hacks who are doing better than myself tireless, excellent writers I love because they're either cloying or controversial in a way that gets hit-counts

*myself and/or tireless*

lots of people will generate hit counts. byron crawford is an awful music critic but hes often hilarious & more importantly highly readable

its not like its taking money out of your pocket when other people succeed

or maybe it is, but its certainly not helpful to think about it that way

i think i should brand myself as a motivational writer for rock critics concerned that rock criticism is dead.

http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~nhiggins/matt_foley.jpg

We've got ourselves a writer here! Hey, Dad, I can't see real good... is that Bob Christgau over there?

@sarahel, I'm reminded of this quote from Carl Wilson:

I was being interviewed for a teevee show about music writing and blogging today, and among my staircase moments afterwards, I thought that my answer to the question, "If writing about music is such a non-lucrative career, why do it?" should have been that precisely because music is so abstract and inimical to verbal capture, it opens up an infinite field to write across, an unending series of creative near-or far-misses - and because music is so insinuated in everyone's personal lives and consciousnesses, it burrows tunnels into every subject matter, making it a subject that potentially permits you to write about anything and everything in the world. But then again, I thought, that could be said of writing about food or clothing or a hundred other things. You could do it even if you were covering the scrap-metal industry, and it would be all the more dazzling because more unlikely. At least with scrap metal you probably couldn't fall back on writing a lot of articles using the words "angular" and "seminal."

Then it occurred to me that the real TV answer should have been, "Because it still pays better than writing poetry."

that carl, he's a hoot.

i think basically i just get really tired of hearing about the end of rock crit when 1) i dont write about rock but i write about music (sorry silly pedantic complaint) but more importantly 2) i basically started writing abt music since all this shit happened & while ive gotten a few freelance checks i dont think i ever expected to be able to make a living doing it nor did i want to particularly?? I just knew i wanted to write about it because i liked thinking about it & reading a few writers who made me think about it.

but theres no, like, before-internet crit for me really. i mean ive read old stuff & some of its obv really great (altho my fav Bangs piece is STILL his most 'journalistic' piece - innocents in babylon) but i dunno i never really thought of it as, like, a real career or something (sorry if this is getting too personal/judgmental) it just seemed like a way to look at the world & figure shit out about life & stuff while getting to listen to music at the same time. maybe i just missed out on the golden age of record labels offering blow & hookers for 'greatest thing since jesus' PR-rewrites i dunno

@sarahel, I'm reminded of this quote from Carl Wilson:

I was being interviewed for a teevee show about music writing and blogging today, and among my staircase moments afterwards, I thought that my answer to the question, "If writing about music is such a non-lucrative career, why do it?" should have been that precisely because music is so abstract and inimical to verbal capture, it opens up an infinite field to write across, an unending series of creative near-or far-misses - and because music is so insinuated in everyone's personal lives and consciousnesses, it burrows tunnels into every subject matter, making it a subject that potentially permits you to write about anything and everything in the world. But then again, I thought, that could be said of writing about food or clothing or a hundred other things. You could do it even if you were covering the scrap-metal industry, and it would be all the more dazzling because more unlikely. At least with scrap metal you probably couldn't fall back on writing a lot of articles using the words "angular" and "seminal."

Then it occurred to me that the real TV answer should have been, "Because it still pays better than writing poetry."

― Bianca Jagger (jaymc), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahaha this is great

wheres that from

i think basically i just get really tired of hearing about the end of rock crit when 1) i dont write about rock but i write about music (sorry silly pedantic complaint) but more importantly 2) i basically started writing abt music since all this shit happened & while ive gotten a few freelance checks i dont think i ever expected to be able to make a living doing it nor did i want to particularly?? I just knew i wanted to write about it because i liked thinking about it & reading a few writers who made me think about it.

but theres no, like, before-internet crit for me really. i mean ive read old stuff & some of its obv really great (altho my fav Bangs piece is STILL his most 'journalistic' piece - innocents in babylon) but i dunno i never really thought of it as, like, a real career or something (sorry if this is getting too personal/judgmental) it just seemed like a way to look at the world & figure shit out about life & stuff while getting to listen to music at the same time. maybe i just missed out on the golden age of record labels offering blow & hookers for 'greatest thing since jesus' PR-rewrites i dunno

― autogucci cru (deej), Wednesday, June 17, 2009 7:21 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

um i think the key i missed explaining here is that the internet is what ENABLED me to be able to write about music & think about it this way -- i grew up pretty poor (like for real poor) & i remember thru out jr. high being way 'behind' on whatever the latest shit was, i could only tape stuff off the radio & everyone else was walking around with discmans or whatever. not trying to suggest that the internet is 'better' for socializing music crit but its like ... i wouldnt really be here (here where i am in my life, obviously i wouldn't be on ilx) without it

haha socializing music LISTENING, & entirely destroying the career of 'music crit'

kind of feel like the internet has sorta leveled the kinds of wack writers who were being subsidized by the good writers to write about shit -- back when every newspaper could afford an arts critic no matter how bad, when every magazine employed an army of writers to say boring things that rehashed what smarter writers had already said, etc

i think this is true and it's in line with my ambivalence about the collapse of print media overall -- a lot of what's being lost isn't worth lamenting. otoh (and here's where i get to be creaky old-media man) i really like the idea, or the ideal, represented by the presence of arts criticism in accessible mainstream media -- whether it's the local paper or the new yorker or wherever, but in a place where sort of casual readers without necessarily a niche interest in arts writing might (out of boredom or at the airport or on the toilet) stumble across an interesting essay. i think the problem with even good writing on music websites is that it is by definition mostly going to be found by people looking at music websites. (unless of course it gets linked to by some general-interest blogger or something.)

i think basically i just get really tired of hearing about the end of rock crit when 1) i dont write about rock but i write about music (sorry silly pedantic complaint)

not that silly and i thought about it when i was looking for the appropriate thread to post whiney's link on. i sort of regretted that this one said ROCK in the title, but it was the best fit overall.

deej is POSTIN

Personal: I mean, I'm not gonna lie, deej. I'm passionate about it because I went to school for it for four years and have been living off it for eight more. It's nice that the internets helped a young'n like make some extra ends, but all my gigs are drying up because young'ns-making-papes do it for CHEAP if not FREE.

I'm going to be a 30-year-old grown-ass man in a few months. I can't just pick up and be a chemist or a neurosurgeon. I did the grunt-work and heavylifting and interning for free when I was in my early 20s and I'm going to have literally nothing to show for it in a few years, if not sooner.

yah & my mom is almost 60 & works in textbook publishing. life suxx

haha sorry that sounded dickish

i just mean like ... did you really major in 'music criticism' in college?? are your skills so limited that all u can do is offer opinions on records? youre a smart dude, theres got to be a way to make a lane for yourself & market yourself. i mean look @ how you showed up & charmed in that video (being mostly serious here!) cant you push yourself into being the next klosterman or something? i dunno

just trying not to be pessimistic. listening to a lot of writer-types get all depresso is bringing me down lately. feel like we need more positive energy to be successful

if journalists werent the ones losing their jobs, would journalists be covering the loss of their jobs so frequently?

Deej, the Carl Wilson excerpt was from a blog post.

sweet thnx