Not Everyone's A Critic
Some thoughts on the recent uproar about music criticism and its discontents
Man, there sure has been some spirited discourse about music critics the past two weeks, apparently triggered by the New York Times’ (triggering) feature on “The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters,” a title whose qualifying modifiers get weirder the longer you look at it.
The jazz pianist Brad Meldau seems to have fired the opening shot, and others have kept on leaping in, with knowing disses, takedowns, and screeds about lists, rockism, poptimism, and other meta-analyses of criticism’s form and practice.
So as a onetime player in this field, I wanted to share the sharpest, shortest, and most irrefutable critical take that I’ve ever heard, from anyone, in my life. Because I think it’s instructive about the current discourse.
I heard this take in early-’90s San Francisco, just after I’d made the fatal error of writing about music professionally. For the first few years after college, I wrote for and edited local newspapers and journals while privately continuing a decade-plus of music activity with a completely separate set of friends, teachers, and instructors.
I read pop-music criticism and played non-pop music, and saw no relationship between the two. Compartmentalized, they’d call me.
Right around this time, I fell for a woman I’ll call Trace who was two years older than me and a product of the mid-’80s Downtown New York City hip-hop scene that I’d only followed from a thirsty distance. Trace had moved to NYC the day after graduating high school in Fort Worth, Texas, bringing with her a feral glamor and the kind of comically hard Southern twang that disarms people in East Coast scenes rife with fronting and pretension.
She’d grown up in a depressed section of Fort Worth and was raised partially her grandparents (her “paw-paw” had been a struggling cattle rancher) and partially by the scene around the Bluebird Niteclub, a blues spot that was pretty rough by the early ’80s and where Trace had, as she put it, “learned about lahff.”
I’m still not clear on exactly how this unsupervised blonde teenager got to be a regular at this latter-day juke joint, but throughout high school Trace spent a few nights a week at the almost exclusively Black Bluebird, where she grew up around some very adult dancing and at least one attempted murder (a jealous lover shooting at her man on the dance floor).
She did all this while I was more or less getting tucked in by Mommy each night. And when I was living in student housing and trying to grok Foucault, Trace was having her birthday party crashed by the Beastie Boys, brawling with a coworker at a restaurant, and getting entangled with the artist and musician Jean Michel Basquiat, whose shocking death was among the events that drove her to escape NYC and make an uneasy home in early-’90s SF, where she worked as a teacher at the pre-K Marcus Garvey School in the Western Addition, studied design, received weekly cassette tapes friends made her of Funkmaster Flex’s show on Hot-97, and sought out clubs where her Rosie Perez-style dancing wouldn’t get her mobbed by dudes, which meant spaces that were primarily Black, or gay, or both.
What I’m saying is that Trace was cool. Cool in most every definition of the term I had back then, but also completely detached from “cool” as it was then being workshopped by the veritable industrial hipster complex of ’90s San Francisco—the whole post-collegiate indie, art-zine, noise-band alternative-weekly world from whence sprang the likes of Dave Eggers among others, in a city that was supposedly progressive and egalitarian yet more racially segregated than almost any I’ve ever lived in (and I’m from Boston).
Trace had unerring musical taste but it seemed to exist on a different plane of experience from that of the grad-school- and Village Voice-educated critics I edited, admired, and hung out with, even though their most name-checked artists tended to overlap with ones Trace was devoted to, in what felt like a sacramental way.
I’d certainly listened to, say, Stevie Wonder before hanging out with Trace, but she really opened me up to his early-’70s albums—plus others by Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Nina Simone, as well as Jungle Brothers, Black Moon, Ultramagnetic MCs—just by being in her presence when she’d play them, at very high volume, on her turntable in a shared apartment in Bernal Heights.
Trace would listen, move, emote, or holler along with these albums as they played, always connected by some etheric cord. She was also a Dylan head, loved the Beatles, ’60s-’70s Rolling Stones, roller-rink classics by ELO and Elton John, and Nirvana when they came out, attuned to rock frequencies that sometimes surprised me. And while I never bothered trying to play her the latest from Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Trace still wound up being a sounding board or litmus test for the soul, power, or spirit in a range of different musics.
All of this is to account for the power of a critical verdict that she rendered about a band that, right then, my peers and I were trying to build critical reputations on parsing, assessing, interrogating, and explaining. A band that had just released their eighth studio album, some 10 years after emerging as visionaries of an artfully diffuse, rootsy, and enchantingly oblique blend of the Byrds, Velvet Underground, and Nuggets-style garage rock—thereby nailing a rock-critic’s A-levels and guaranteeing that their latest releases on Warner Bros would receive a reverent reception. From everyone but Trace.
I can’t remember who brought the band up or why, but I do remember Trace recoiling at the mention of their name, and the ensuing exchange.
“Why do you hate R.E.M.?” I asked.
“Why?!!” she repeated in a long, incredulous, three-note gliding diphthong. Then turned around to look at me—a guy who’d probably spent half the day looking up synonyms for “jangle”—and simply said: “Listen to them!”
And that was the take. Q.E.D., motherfucker.
Rhetoricians would diagnose Trace’s prosecution of her argument—that R.E.M. sucks—as an appeal from ethos, the speaker’s authority, rather than from logos, pathos, bribery or other tools of today’s politician. And smart people think they’re immune to appeals from ethos.
After this conversation, I’d go on to favorably review one of R.E.M.’s albums for New York magazine as its pop music critic. But I’d be lying if I said I ever heard the band, and especially Michael Stipe’s singing, the same way after this.
I share this as an example of how pop music criticism actually works, especially in today’s environment where ethos increasingly seems like the determinative factor. And to say that any pop music critic who doesn’t acknowledge the social-affective dimension to their opinions is, in my opinion, self deceiving.
It is called popular music. At the very least it’s in conversation with what is and isn’t cool, as is, unfortunately, the persona of the critic.
Take the example that’s currently making the rounds, Billy Joel.
It is currently so uncool to like Billy Joel that doing so is a defining characteristic of the dorky protagonist of Prime’s “The Boys.” You could even argue that Billy Joel’s uncoolness is currently so well-established that denigrating Billy Joel is a bit of a sucker move, or develop some horseshoe-theory claim that Billy Joel is so uncool that he’s actually bad as fuck. (I actually have a weakness for this kind of rock criticism.)
What you can’t do is reach for musicological evidence to denigrate Billy Joel, such as claiming that his hundred-odd pop, rock, folk, doo-wop, jazz- and classical-infected original songs, including 33 Top 40 hits, amounts to “1 or 1.5 kinds of songs,” as the NYT critic Jon Caramanica did, off-the-cuff, during a podcast appearance he likely regrets.
You don’t need a degree in composition to hear this claim ring false. It’s like a scientist using too many significant figures, rizzing you up with phony precision. But it was also a hot-mike moment for someone who, like all top critics at the NYT and elsewhere, probably spent at least as much time learning how to write as he did assimilating the values, assumptions, and priorities of the last 50-odd years of criticism that help you be competitive in the field, including the gen-x critical consensus that 50,000,000 Elvis fans can indeed be wrong.
Critics of our generation were raised to be contrarian, underdog-oriented, and to take on a whole range of positions on gender, race, age, class as part of a larger aesthetic—or to define themselves against this aesthetic. (See: Poptimism.) But none of us read, listened, or wrote, for decades, in the hopes that someday, if we were lucky, we might be one voice among those music critics who hold the real power in the culture—the ones who share their critical takes in vertical short-form video.
What I’m saying is, Don’t hate Jon Caramanica, hate the game.
When it comes to music, I’m actually a fan of knowing what you’re talking about. But the critics who make taste and shift units today aren’t actually critics. They’re what my old flame Trace was back in the early-’90s, before it had a name or a platform. What she was, I now realize, is an influencer. She influenced me and others around her and did so through the force of her style, charisma, associations, fluency, constituency, and other qualities critics attain only through kick-ass prose.
It’s not a fair fight, but least let us choose the venue. Critics don’t stand a chance against people like her. They’ve always eaten us dweebs or breakfast. Isn’t that one of the reasons that we write?
I like Trace.