Rock Criticism Marked for Death

Answering a survey about something I barely keep up with anymore

A few weeks ago Nick Catucci, who decades ago was my intern at the Village Voice and who lately co-runs a Substack called Embedded that way more people subscribe to than this one, emailed me a survey asking questions about the state and future of music criticism. He sent it to lots of other people in what used to be “my profession” as well. And he asked for names of even more people to send it to, so I sent him a few.

When the article came out yesterday illustrated by a very young woman in a tight pink tanktop that says They Don’t Build Statues of Critics on it (guess that’s how you get subscribers!), none of the people I suggested were quoted in it, but I don’t know if that means Nick didn’t ask them for their opinions or they didn’t have any worth quoting. But he did quote lots of other people — some of whom I’d heard of before, some of whom I hadn’t, and a couple of whom apparently asked not to be identified by name.

I only got quoted once myself*, though to be fair it was a fairly long quote and to be doubly fair it’s very possible my answers were lame because I don’t really keep up much with music criticism anymore and therefore have no clue what I’m talking about. In places where I used asterisks to emphasize words since as far as I could tell italics weren’t available on the form we got sent to fill out, Nick and/or Embedded kept my asterisks instead of italics. Which is kind of embarrassing. Otherwise, my answers — at least to questions Nick wound up including in the piece — are below, so judge for yourself. (Oh yeah, the caption below the tanktop girl says “We still love you, Ethel Cain,” whose Wiki explains “Hayden Silas Anhedönia, known professionally as Ethel Cain, is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, and model. She became known for her ambient and Southern Gothic-style music and lyrics.” I am neither lying nor bragging when I say I have no memory of hearing of her before.)

Is the audience for written music criticism disappearning? Or has it stabilized? Or coulld it even potentially grow, the way the market for vinyl has been growing for the last 20 years?

I’m not sure that the audience has actually “disappeared” so much that it’s been abandoned, over the past several decades, by a field that stopped giving its readers enough credit. By now, generations of fans have grown up without something they never knew they missed. And while I believe criticism has potential to grow, I can’t imagine it growing the “way” vinyl’s (honestly still quite niche) market has. The main way I see it growing is geographically. By which I mean I suspect there’s an untapped market for music criticism in the places where the most interesting music is itself coming from: Uganda, the Philippines, Brazil, Colombia, Turkey, Morocco, Vietnam, wherever. Obviously criticism in those territories very well might be in a language other than English. For all I know, it exists already, and I’m just oblivious. (Who are the best critics in Germany or South Korea or New Zealand, even? I wish I knew.)

What, if anything, has been lost since the earlier days of music criticism? What are writers doing better -- or worse -- now than in the past?

I would pinpoint the beginning of music criticism’s downfall to a few years before the Internet really kicked in -- the early ‘90s, when some confluence of SoundScan and Entertainment Weekly (paving the way for an endless parade of media consolidation) started demanding that releases be reviewed the week (and eventually, the night) they came out, rather than how humans actually hear them, which is to say over time. This reliance on release dates and similar supposed news pegs tied the world of criticism inextricably to the music industry, forcing criticism to turn more and more into a kind of advertisement. One immediate effect was a depletion of sense of humor; making fun of most artists, for instance, became increasingly taboo (all the more so when “stan armies” started to threaten critics’ lives for less than glowing notices.) It was suddenly important to take even fleeting teen-pop idols seriously, and to let artists dictate the discussion. Critics acted more and more like fan club presidents, adopting cutesy nicknames for stars; they started focusing more on gossip about what was going on in artists’ lives than in their music. Meanwhile, whatever interesting ongoing conversation critics once had with each other began to wither away (give or take by now obligatory and eternally recurring poptimism vs. rockism debates that seem less and less useful as time goes on). And by now, outlets from, say, Rolling Stone to the New York Times (at least in their print versions) barely provide any space for record reviews whatsoever. On other hand, the critics themselves do seem to have become more diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity, which might allow for a wider scope and variety of voices out there. And certain genres that had once been too often ignored -- commercial country, metal, top 40 girl pop, probably certain global styles -- got more ink and attention than they used to get, even if the ink wasn’t usually as compelling as it used to be. So admittedly not everything got worse.

How important, if at all, is it that music criticism be written, as opposed to delivered in, say, vertical video?

As somebody who would almost always rather read the transcript of a podcast than listen to it, I may not be the best person to answer this question. I’m kind of biased. I’ve never seen a youtube music criticism video that gave me any real insight into the music being discussed, but that very well might be because I’ve never looked hard enough in the right places. My inclination is to believe that the format might not be able to support the sort of conversation I’m looking for, which would require more time and space than smartphone videos logistically allow. I did take some time the other day to hunt around for podcasts where new releases are reviewed, and it was way harder than I expected to find any at all -- as far as I could tell, for instance, Pitchfork used to have one, but gave up the attempt a couple years ago. And that was one of the few I even found! Maybe there’s just not an audience for such a thing? So while I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily “important” that criticism be written, I’m not particularly optimistic about ever stumbling across a viable alternative.

(Nick also asked “Where is the best place to read music criticism? Who is the best critic working now? Who is the best critic in history?” and “Is there an editor who has significantly guided or improved your work?” and “What is your advice to someone who says they want to make a career covering [not necessarily writing about] music as a critic?” I answered those as well, but my answers were even less interesting than my answers above. And given that Nick ultimately wound up leaving them out of the article*, maybe so were everybody else’s.)

(*Oh wait, spoke too soon, looks like there’s a Part Two. I have a few answers in there, too.)