Report From the Underground: That Dancing About Architecture Quote is Retarded

The designation “music critic” often gets conflated with that of “music reviewer”, and really, due to the fact that there is no such thing as “music criticism”, that is to say, there is no academic discipline on par with literary criticism or art criticism, there is no discernable difference between a music critic and a music reviewer. There are some though that would reserve the critic appellation for the venerable reviewers, the Christgaus and Marcuses and other aging Creem-ers, but is this fair?

So, these guys are enthusiastic and can write about rock music. Great. Someone remind me why I should care again? Not to denigrate what these guys do, but - I read part of Lester Bangs’s book. So, he likes rock and roll. I still see no evidence as to why these people are critics, and the rest of us are merely reviewers. Or maybe it’s not like this. Maybe I’m fixated on a distinction that no one ever makes, like I said ten sentences ago, people use the terms interchangeably, so what’s the problem?

Although it’s been convoluted so far, I think what I’m trying to aim at is that I’d like to see something exist that is music criticism proper; something that isn’t merely a recommendation or even worse, some pseudo-personal creative non-fiction dreck that seems to pass for an essay these days. To clarify this, I just want to say that I’m not bemoaning a fault in music journalism because there are a lot of good magazines out there, but what I want is something more than that, something on the level of a Barthes or a Bloom. Maybe I haven’t found it yet though and this is all superfluous; possibly it already exists, but a lot of people more knowledgeable than I don’t seem to think so, so I’ll run with it.

Let us begin then with an examination of why there is no such thing as music criticism. What looms in my mind as the driving factor behind the lack of serious criticism is the economic symbiosis that exists between record companies and music magazines, newspapers, etc. Take Fake Jazz for example, a record company sends us an album (usually) hoping for us to give it a good review, or to just review it period. This serves an economic function, it 1) provides relatively free press for the band (whatever the cost of a CD is plus shipping and handling, probably a few dollars at most) and 2) gets, if you’ll excuse the phrase, a buzz going about the album in question. So, in other words, the ideal album review, from the point of view of the record company, is going to be one that describes the album, tells people a little about the band, gives a positive opinion, etc.

Here (and I assume it’s like this at other places too), no one really minds the fact that what they are doing is simply fulfilling an economic role for the record company; most of the people here are unabashed music lovers and feel enthusiastic about spreading the word re: the bands they like, so the record company gets the above benefits, and the reviewers get free music and the chance to promote bands they enjoy in the hopes that said band will remain economically viable and make more music, or something like that. Of course in reality, many reviewers end up being simply shills, which is even more detrimental to there being such a thing as music criticism.

The problem with this relationship is that reviewers have a duty to the record companies and to the readers to write something that is fair and balanced, but also, something that is a fairly quick read and is accessible. Why? Because, in the end, we are simply trying to get people interested in music, not put forth grand theses or examine Marxist slants or whatever. In the course of a review, we can, and often do, explicate themes that come up while listening to the album, but due to certain constraints such as time (the time we receive albums to review to the time the review is due is often very little - and even if we had more time, real criticism would require months of listening and formulating ideas) and space (this isn’t that much of a concern online, but print prejudices still remain, and to keep people’s interest, we must often be concise) those concerns must be limited to a few paragraphs at most.

By the nature of the game, the reviewer cannot really spend a lot of time criticizing the works she reviews. It then behooves us to look elsewhere for criticism and next month (after I hopefully actually do some research into the subject) we can look at academic music programs and see why no real criticism has surfaced there.