In January, the poet Michael Robbins wrote an excellent article for the Chicago Tribune titled “On Criticism: Why Read Reviews?” I love criticism, but I know many people do not, and, further, that many don’t understand its beauty or its purpose. Like anything, it has many purposes, of course, but Robbins hits on the big important ones very concisely. He writes that,
We eventually ask of a critic not “What should I think of this movie?” but “How can you unsettle my thinking about movies?” or “What can you teach me about what I don’t want from them?” And we return to the critics we love for reasons that, it may be, have little to do with movies (or literature or music or architecture) and everything to do with the play of wit and insight and the construction of sentences. What I want from criticism is that it make me think about art in new ways, or respond to things in it I hadn’t before.
At the end of the article, he sums up with this: “what I want from criticism is, to put it crudely, great writing, which will always involve great noticing.” I couldn’t agree more—over two decades in to my love affair with music criticism, it’s the writing and the “noticing” that have contributed so much to my critical and intellectual development.
All of that said, the critic can also have a very concrete function in our lives: he or she acts as a filter for the incomprehensible amount of art available for us to sift through day-to-day, year-to-year, from youth to old age. Granted, some may believe that art is very precious, and that we must protect it from the vulgarities of commerce and mass culture lest it be corrupted; I think it’s safe to say that within this train of thought, the amount of art to cherish is somewhat small and more-or-less finite. However, if you’re like me, and you believe anything can be art, and that anything created or experienced with attention and care can be great art, then each and every one of us is just drowning in the shit—art is everywhere all the time and we can’t get enough of it, and the sheer quantity of it is overwhelming. We’d each need several lifetimes to experience even a small portion of it, whether it’s visual art, music, literature and movies, or artfully made advertisements, jingles, music from children’s TV (which must be in a golden age: have you heard Evan Lurie’s work on the Backyardigans?), the endlessly creative YouTube videos that go viral every day, and so on. For sure this is a #firstworldproblem, but it is a problem nonetheless. A few trusted critics can help us sift through these wonders of human productivity. And now that so much art is available to so many of us so easily, the problem of over-saturation has actually gotten worse.
When I was a teenager, and technology wasn’t what it is today, I originally found critics to be essential to my consumption of art because it saved me money. When I was young, I bought a lot of CDs. A foolish amount. No concept of savings. Total post-Reagan era copious spending. For example, as a college student I had a job in a packing warehouse for two summers which paid union wages, so I was making a big chunk of money for someone my age. What did I blow it on? CDs. Tons of CDs, MSRP $18, but I’d shop at Best Buy, which sold music as a loss leader for $2-3 less, or at Tower Records if they had a good sale. My purchases could be very hit or miss, but, thankfully, for years I’d been reading music reporting and then reviews, beginning with USA Today’s Life section before graduating to Rolling Stone as a pre-pubescent, then eventually SPIN and Blender as a teenager and young adult. I would cut out the reviews I liked and tape them to my wall, and would seek out albums whose reviews made the music sound compelling—I banged my head on a wall listening to Lou Reed’s Set the Twilight Reeling for weeks until I understood how it could possibly get 4 stars in Rolling Stone (I love it now, but at the time that album’s aesthetic was very foreign to me). This reading expanded my understanding of art and aesthetics of course, but it also led me to hear more interesting, and perhaps better, music, and to waste less of my money on duds. Eventually we got a Barnes & Noble in our town, and I spent many evenings leafing through all of their record guides, especially the 1992 Rolling Stone Album Guide; I know now that I paid special attention to everything written by J.D. Considine, who wrote for the nearby Baltimore Sun, though I didn’t know his local beat until college. Though I still bought some clunkers, my hit-to-miss ration started to improve.
As a consequence of this consumer guidance, I ended up developing my personal opinions in congruence with these critical writings, for better or for worse—I expect Robbins and I had similar experiences and revelations in this regard. As noted above, it was cost-prohibitive to hear most of the music I read about, at least in the suburbs of Annapolis, MD—there was no internet, so unless a friend or the library owned it, or it was on a Tower Records listening station, I couldn’t hear it without forking over $12-18. This led me to have opinions on a lot of albums and performers that I had never actually heard, and these opinions were based on these record guides. I suppose my confidence in my opinions came from the fact that these record guides would establish allegiances and aesthetic similarities between particular bands and albums, so that if I knew a few of the albums mentioned by a friend or a magazine, I could generalize about the other music that was referenced. This was a fun game, and I wasn’t the only one cheating like this—all of my music friends were in the same boat as me. Without internet communities, or big brothers and sisters, or endless cash flow, or cool record collections from our parents, we only had ourselves and these publications. I often wonder, what if instead of all those Simon & Garfunkel and Kingston Trio LPs, our parents had Live at the Apollo and Let It Bleed? Would we have turned out differently? We will never know.
Getting back to my original thesis, it is obvious that in the 21st century, not only do we have more access to music without a prohibitive financial barrier—whether through legal means, such as album streams and music samples on iTunes, or through P2P sharing—but we also have more available dialogue about that music. Obviously, not all of that dialogue is useful, and so, as before, many recommendations still lead us to what we consider crap. But thankfully, now what we lose is just time, rather than both time and money. Can anyone discovering the rock canon today even imagine my friend Cam Bell’s story about what it was like to FINALLY find Big Star’s Radio City, after having read about it YEARS before without ever laying eyes on an actual copy of it? Even I just had to wait until I had enough money to buy the twofer CD, which wasn’t too hard to come by. Today, if we’re sticking to legal means, you can get a sense of it within seconds of reading about it. What a luxury.
So in the end, I ultimately agree with Robbins as to the great pleasure of criticism as thought and writing. But let us not forget that even though music is now free or at least far less expensive to enjoy and listen to, we still need critics to act as a filter to weed through the hundreds of recordings released every week and write about the dozen or so (if we’re lucky) that we might be willing to give our time to. Granted, for many the radio acts as a filter for music consumption, so that lessens the individual’s burden, and of course there’s the age-old word of mouth—if my friends like it, I’ll probably like it too. But beyond that, music journalism and criticism has long been an essential means to learn of music that is not fit for commercial radio, either aesthetically or financially (payola is real folks, and always will be), as well as music that may not have made it out of certain regional or urban markets so as to be promoted by word of mouth. Critics tend to establish and promote aesthetic and historical lineages between performers, songs, and albums, and this service is both enlightening and useful. For example, I would have never heard of the Replacements’ Let It Be outside of those record guides in my formative years, not to mention the dozens if not hundreds of others which I still cherish, and learn from, today. (The suburbs of Maryland were great if you like thrash metal and prog rock [I do], but not for the clever wiseacres of indie rock. That shit never made it to Broadneck High School.) So print (and web) music journalism and criticism still has this utility—at root, critics with tastes similar to your own, or writers with compelling ideas, can lead you through the surfeit to magic communities of music you might never otherwise know about. And that remains an indispensable service. Also, sometimes record reviews are funny. That’s another perk.
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