Meta-Music criticism
MEDIA: Prince - "All the Critics Love U In New York"
EVENT: A "discourse" occurred.
Note: This piece is based on an email comment that I sent to Michelle from Dirt for an article about the state of modern music criticism.
If you’re a writer “doing criticism,” you’re tasked with doing multiple things simultaneously:
1. Helping the reader answer, “Is this thing worth my time and energy?”
2. Giving the reader a sense of where this thing is coming from, both conceptually as well as providing some basic contextual facts, so that they know what they’re getting if they’re unfamiliar.
3. Interpreting the thing’s meaning through your personal critical lens — which is informed by everything from your musical knowledge to your life experiences to your intellectual interests to even how you happen to be feeling that day — ideally in a way that helps the reader work through their own reactions to the thing. As opposed to Thing 1, this is not a market-based question and instead a oofy-doofy-squishy-feelings-based question. (I am trying very hard not to use the word “vibes.”)
4. Creating a piece of word-based online content that will entertain someone for one to three minutes while they should be doing stuff at work.
5. Writing a thing of adequate or even above-average literary quality so that (A) editors will offer you more work and maybe get drinks with you and (B) other writers in your milieu will respect and/or fear you and also get drinks with you with the unspoken understanding that such an interaction brings you each closer to feeling obligated to hiring the other if one of you ever gets an editor job of your own.
6. Getting “mad clickz.”
7. Not spending an inefficient amount of your time writing the thing so you can get paid for it and move on to the next thing.
8. Not making anyone mad at you, or, if you absolutely must make people mad, making the “correct” people mad at you.
Obviously, you can’t write a piece that actually does all of these things, especially because each thing on the above list is in direct opposition to at least one of the others. It’s also a fairly fragile system — it depends on editors continuing to have jobs, advertisers continuing to mistakenly believe that “digital media spends” are a net positive, websites not being treated like assets to be traded around, readers being able to reliably access the music they’ve just read about, Twitter continuing to be a semi-usable website that writers can continue to treat as the digital version of the bar where they do all their networking, and a bunch of other stuff.
Music writing is particularly important for the journalism ecosystem in general because it’s a form that naturally offers an opportunity for younger writers to get their foot in the door. Young people generally care more about music than old people do, and taste is one of those things you can cultivate while in college and/or just being in a scene that legitimately translates into the adult world. I very much enjoy reading a person much younger than me going off about some record I’ve never heard of as if it's the best thing in the known universe; I enjoy it even when I don't initially “get” the music they're writing about, because the fact that someone whose taste I respect is super hype on something is going to make me motivated to engage with that thing in order to figure out what’s so great about it.
There are a lot of structural issues that led to music journalism ending up in the place it is now, but one thing I’d like to highlight is that “fan armies” began cohering around the time I started coming up, and they quickly figured out that you could use Twitter to yell at whoever wrote a mean thing about your favorite artist, and the artists figured out that they could, in fact, direct their fans to yell at whoever wrote mean things about them. (This has its origins in Lil B’s invention of the “Task Force” as well as all the Gamergate people discovering they could bully companies into pulling their ads off Gawker.)
Obviously, online harassment is an issue that has affected individuals in basically every field around and its effects have been felt in different ways in each field. In music criticism, I think that the specter of fan harassment has potentially driven would-be critics off, as well as caused critics to be overly effusive towards popular artists in an intellectually dishonest way that flattens “the discourse.” The critics hated Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and disco and Skrillex and NWA and all kinds of shit! They were wrong, but whatever!
Given Ice Spice’s recent comments where she was like “I think music criticism is good, actually,” this tendency also might be preventing the ability of popular artists who actually care about making interesting art (rather than coasting on the long tail of an initial viral moment) from getting objective and informed feedback about their work. Not that I think that musicians should be obligated to read their own reviews — intentionally appealing to critics is fraught at best and backwards-looking pandering at worst — but if a musician wants to read some stuff about themselves, they deserve to be able to read someone reckoning with their work in an honest, intelligent, and nuanced manner. A negative review can even be a sincere compliment to an artist if it’s clear the person who wrote it spent real time and energy on it, y’know?
Maybe there’s just not very much money in writing in general these days, especially on the web. Almost all of the great writers I know have become editors or have gotten into other stuff and just write on the side. There are a handful of Real Writing Jobs that still exist, obviously, but they’re mostly at legacy outlets and they open up like once every five years maybe. Part of this is also probably has to do with the rise in podcasts as a medium — literally us — as well as people exploring the potential of video as an “information-rich” format.
But also, everything on the internet is competing against everything else for your attention. Until music writing stops being in economic competition with actual music and also pet pictures and also hard news and also podcasts and also random shit people are posting on Twitter or whatever, I don’t know what to tell you.
