The readings for this week revolved around pop and rock criticism. While mulling over these pieces, a question arose that I am grappling with. If music is meant to be a personal, relatable experience, why do we need critics? We often think of music, like other all forms of art, as a way of evoking feeling in the audience. That feeling and reaction is so subjective and personal, it seems impossible that anyone else could interpret the art in the exact same way, and thus have the exact same judgement.
In her essay which explores the landscape of music criticism from a femininst perspective, Tracy Moore writes, “critics often appear to write to other critics, and that is why criticism often deserves every punch in the softballs it gets”. From a feminist-centered view, the criticism changes. The unapproachable superiority of traditional criticism dissolves, allowing for a more music to be written about in a way that is, “accessible, not to be put on a pedestal or pinned down or traded like baseball cards, but to be experienced viscerally.”
This method of approachability and acceptance aligns with methods that Daphne Brooks suggests, “that we think really hard about how to forge new methodologies, newly uncovered genealogies and legacies, and new ways of writing.” However, this is straying from criticism to musical historians, in my eyes. What Brooks is suggesting is that we take into account all perspectives, influences, races, genders, and scenes into musical writing.
So while I agree with Brooks and understand the shift in criticism discussed in Moore’s piece, I still ask, why do we as people listen to musical critics when we agree that music is so visceral and subjective? Is it to curate our own musical taste? Is it to validate your personal taste by seeing it is shared with someone deemed more knowledgeable? Is it to keep music as an artform rather than a stream-based commodity?
Song Selections
To answer the question I posed, I think that the importance of music criticism, at least in part, is to help the audience find what they like, as critics can put into words the feelings which we as the audience may have, but not be able to articulate. When I look to critical writing, I generally read on albums after I have listened to them. This is a self-validating exercise in part, but it is also nice to understand, from a professional, why I like a particular song, album, or artist. One of my favorite critics is the NYT pop music critic John Caramanica.
On Kanye West’s 2019 album Jesus Is King, the majority of the album was forgettable to me, save for a few tracks, including “Use This Gospel”. I went to Caramanica’s review, where he writes,
“Use This Gospel” begins with a persistent, needling drone that bespeaks anxiety, disorientation and a pressing need for healing. “Use this gospel for protection/It’s a hard road to heaven,” he sings, with the vulnerability he channeled on 808’s and Heartbreak.” Writing like this helps me understand what I like and why I like it.
https://youtu.be/8yQVcGkbpAc
To continue with Caramanica’s writing, he wrote a piece in September 2019 on Pop Smoke, an up-and-coming Brooklyn rapper who saw a meteoric rise over the previous summer.
The piece is able to articulate Pop Smoke’s appeal, which was in his gravelly voice and UK Grime-influenced production. This kind of writing expands on what most people would phrase as ‘his vibe’. “Pop Smoke makes the kind bad-moods-beget-bad-decisions-beget-bad-consequences music that New York rap once specialized in, and which feels, in the current landscape, almost refreshingly Stone Age. The production is skittish, ominous and visceral, a soundtrack for puffed-chest face-offs. As a rapper, Pop Smoke metes out verses in tight clusters while still sounding relaxed, as if untroubled by the battles he knows are just around the corner.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goYgHnsQdtY (Rest in Peace)
Music critics, who professionally listen to music, give the common audience a way to better-contextualize the artist they like, what they like about that artist, and new artists to follow, all of which are necessities.
