Category: What’s Wrong with Rock Criticism?

“what even is a review?”

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A formidable question, posed by Mark Sinker at Freaky Trigger, and a fetching/daunting examination of its many contours and contradictions. The surgery begins with a complaint (from a friend of Mark’s) about Nick Tosches’ review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid in Rolling Stone, I think because Tosches seems to not address the record itself. Which leads to a trail of thought that includes Flaubert, the Grotesque (not the Fall album), Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and the dread NoiseBoysism. Sinker on the latter:

Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches: when James Wolcott dubbed them the Noiseboys, he did everyone (as so often) a disservice, including them, by collapsing them into just one wild-style jerk-store project and mislabelling it to match. They were friends in mischief, to be sure, but they were none of them particularly like one another in style or even tactic. What they did in fact share was a perverse attitude towards deep cultural knowledge, a feel for how to write and how to play and what was out there besides just rock. Elsewhere rockwrite was already sleepwalking uneasily — so they felt — towards a narrow pedantry, autodidact learning as a mode of borrowed bad authority. One escape route: knowledge as all-purpose bust-it-wide toolkit, as weaponry on behalf of the militant mutant grotesque that was rockthink’s earliest best contribution.

Regarding Her Husband’s Stupid Record Collection

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“Because it was endearing when I wanted to consume my boyfriend’s record collection at 15 and liked being quizzed on singles and trivia — but when I later covered music for years for the alt-weekly in Nashville at 28 as the local rock scene there simmered up, I got an unending stream of shit for daring to write like I thought I had something to say that mattered in the slightest. (Yes, this is true in many ways for any woman who writes anything on the Internet, but especially in male dominated fields.)”

– Tracy Moore, Oh, the Unbelievable Shit You Get Writing About Music as a Woman (Jezebel)
– A lot of good stuff in this firecracker of an essay, which summarizes and spits out an online fracas last week regarding the blog, My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection.

“In Defense of Pop Criticism”

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re: yesterday’s link to Ted Gioia’s rant, New York magazine’s Jody Rosen has at it.

“Reading Gioia’s article, you are forced to draw one of two conclusions. Either Gioia is being coy about the periodicals and critics in question — is he worried about hurting the feelings of a Stereogum stringer? Doesn’t want to burn his bridges with Jan Wenner? — or his stack of music magazines wasn’t much of a stack, and his investigation comprised a cursory flip through one or two mags and a little casual web-surfing. Actually, my suspicion is that Gioia didn’t do much background reading at all, relying instead on his vague impressions — on the vibe, as they put it in poorly written rock reviews, that he’s picked up over the years. I mean, Gioia comes right out and says it: I’ve just spent a very depressing afternoon looking through the leading music periodicals. And what did I learn? Pretty much what I expected. He decided he wanted to write a piece about how music criticism sucks; he knew what he wanted to say in the first place, and, lo and behold, his extensive researches — a whole afternoon’s worth, and a depressing one at that — confirmed the suspicion he’d had coming into the project: that critics need to ‘stop acting like gossip columnists, and start taking the music seriously again.'”

(Ironically enough, I’m curious now to read Gioia’s jazz tome which Rosen says lots of nice things about.)

State of the Nation part 7,894

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“I’ve just spent a very depressing afternoon looking through the leading music periodicals. And what did I learn? Pretty much what I expected. I found out what the chart-topping musicians are wearing (or, in many instances, not wearing). I got updates on their love life, and learned whose marriages are on the rocks. I read updates on the legal proceedings of the rich and famous. I got insights into the food preferences and travel routines of megastars. And I read some reviews of albums, and got told by ‘critics’ (I use that term loosely) that they were ‘badass,’ ‘hot,’ ‘sexy,’ ‘tripped-out,’ and ‘freaky’.”

Ted Gioa, Daily Beast, Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting
(True or not, I nevertheless prefer the way this is titled on the Daily Beast sidebar: “Music criticism has gone to hell.”)

The Critical Economy (correspondence from Richard Riegel)

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Richard Riegel writes:

“I’m really impressed with Jennifer Szalai’s review of a collection of Dwight Macdonald’s criticism, in the December 12 issue of The Nation, the paper version of which I still subscribe to. It’s a good discussion about Macdonald himself, and his concepts of ‘Midcult’ and ‘Masscult,’ but Szalai’s comments about the current state of criticism are even better for our purposes. She’s talking about literary criticism, of course, but a lot of what she says applies to rock criticism & its fade too. I’d been thinking all along that ‘we’ were being hollowed out by the general economic decline, and that’s exactly what Szalai says here, especially in the two paragraphs I’ve excerpted below:

If one were to point out that the wider authority of literary criticism is barely discernible today, one could hardly be accused of courting a controversy or kicking up a fuss. There certainly is a coterie of Americans for whom literature and its criticism is a matter of urgency or livelihood or both, but the notion of the literary critic as a cultural gatekeeper, whose judgments shape tastes and move units, sounds either fanciful or anachronistic, depending on whether you believe that such a creature ever really existed. Our culture is now so big and so varied, the population so diverse and so fragmented, that the very idea of anything or anyone having “wider authority” sounds silly, if not absurd.

The critical landscape has since been denuded of a whole class of reviewers — the professional critics for those many newspapers and magazines that have cut down their books pages or else eliminated them. Optimists have pointed to the proliferation of online reviews as an indication that criticism is flourishing, but the payment for most reviewing these days is meager to nil. When writing a review becomes a diversion instead of a vocation, or else an arena for book authors to horse-trade and log-roll—the literary world’s penurious equivalent of the financial world’s “revolving door” — then reviewing will list toward clubbiness, bitterness or mushy praise. There are clearly some brilliant exceptions, and even a few determined critics who make a living from reviewing; but like the society of which it is one minuscule part, criticism has largely become a winner-take-all profession. Those who wonder what happened to criticism should wonder what happened to the economics of it.

Writing about Music is like Writing about Architecture

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Beppe Colli, longtime rockcritics reader from Italy, posts a mammoth “what is wrong with music criticism” sort of piece (the type every rock critic wants or needs to write at least one of during their lifespan). He uses some stuff I posted here about the Ellen Willis book as his starting point.

Sample: “Nowadays nobody considers ‘objective’ descriptions as being worthy of any consideration, but I think it’s quite possible to agree that ‘an adequate description’ that is intersubjectively verifiable is to be preferred to one that lacks those qualities…”