Comments on: Critics: What are They Good For?

By: Where Worlds Collide » Blog Archive » Critics: What are They Good For? II

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 20:57:06 +0000

[...] a previous post, I questioned the value of mainstream critics, whose overwhelming groupthink makes them worse than [...]

By: Flightless

Flightless — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:21:55 +0000

‘We made a land where cr*p is king
And the good don’t last too long’
Neal Morse / Spock’s Beard
The Good don’t last

If anybody doubts just how right Kalyr is about rock / pop criticism being broken they should have been watching the BBC over the weekend. On Friday night Jonathan Woss had Pete Dougherty as a guest, Saturday the series Seven Ages of Rock ended with a double length episode on how indie came to rule the world, and Sunday saw Donnie Osmond and Jason Donovan at Wembley to remember Princess Di. Ok so the latter were not critically acclaimed but….

Outside of a ghettoised underground most things that pass off as rock press and most broadsheet newspapers praise worthless, crass pop ephemera. Much of what is misrepresented as rock is commercialistic, lowest comon denomenator hype. If you were to play music with real substance and lyrics with genuine meaning to the twerps at Q or NME or any heavy newspaper, those philistines would react with scorn.

Part of the problem is that to be hip these days music has to be ironic, not take itself too seriously, and to be disposable. Music with real quality is too earnest for the average critic.

In an ideal world Jonathan Ross would be interviewing the new singer in Nightwish, Seven Ages of Rock would be discussing how Dream Theater led to an entire genre of progressive metal bands, and Mostly Autmn would be headlining Wembley while competing with Magenta for shelf space in Tesco.

By: NRT

NRT — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 09:18:45 +0000

And it often appears that theyâ€™re reluctant to listen to any record more than once, so anything that takes several spins to appreciate will have trouble getting a fair review.
I think that’s all one can reasonably expect from a mainstream critic (and that’s not a criticism of the critic). There just isn’t time for a non-specialist to commit to hearing something multiple times – the demands of the format are such that an album has to catch the attention first time, or not at all.

Doesn’t mean I like it, but I do think you’re criticising apples for not being orange and citrusy. Newpaper reviews are supposed to be about what’s hot now and attractive to a mass-market, so don’t expect anything deeply-considered.

I rarely read ‘em at all, myself, but I do think they’re fit for purpose.

By: Serdar

Serdar — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:54:16 +0000

“Groupthink” is a good word for it. This is not a case of critics trying to set up a bulwark of taste against what their perceive to be an imperceptive public — like, say, Lester Bangs defending “Metal Machine Music” or the downtown no-wave crew DNA against almost certain critical and popular rejection. It’s a case of all of them not wanting to defect from the hive mind and admit that maybe their conceits aren’t built on the most solid ground anymore.

The point of a critic, as I see it, is to recognize good music in whatever form it comes. I try to do that on my own, when I can, with the things I know I’m interested in, and that I feel qualified to comment on. Many critics don’t seem to think there are many things they are simply not qualified to talk about. I wouldn’t dream of trying to write a coherent review of a Van der Graaf Generator album, although I’d dearly like to — if only because I suspect I wouldn’t be able to do it justice.