Writing about (mostly bad) music writing
The album review is dead, long live the album review; a dialogue of sorts
Music writing is under attack! This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it irrationally malicious — the free press, like any institution, should be held accountable for producing shit, which music-focused outlets, like the best of us, do with predictable regularity. Barriers to access and entry have been minimized. In the age of Spotify and #FakeNews, do we really need stodgy liberal arts grads telling us what we should be beaming into our ears while jogging?
Drew Millard penned a keen-eyed column earlier this month on the perilous state of the album review. Drew’s writing is knowledgeable and funny; he conveys a personality rare in his field and calls people on their bullshit without resorting to get-off-my-lawn cynicism. In the piece, he outlines the striation of increasingly ambiguous, attuned online audiences, and how they’ve diminished the resonance of — in some cases, entirely obviated — simple criticism. His observations are sharp, and could be easily employed for the widespread argument that music critics should either throw up their hands or lower their ambitions.
Music writing is an easy punching bag because music writing is often quite horrid. This I mostly attribute to market factors. There are ample opportunities to produce and publish content but not much money to go around. Most music writers are young or young-ish, white or white-ish, college educated, and male. They would be called Coastal Elites if they didn’t share railroad apartments with bartenders. The very best graduate to writing about politics or “culture,” which affirms music writing as low church.
Like anything reliant upon click-based monetization, quick and decisive takes carry the day over considered, nuanced commentary which might better assess the art’s significance. There’s a general aversion to frankly harsh appraisals, partly for fear of compromising access and partly due to actual manners. This market results in a compressed range of voices and perspectives; with small concessions to tone and House Style, most of what you read on Noisey is basically similar to what you read on Pitchfork and Vulture and the East Bay Express.
Writing about something which exists only as a series of longitudinal waves entails using a lot of adjectives, many of which have practically no other utility in the English language, and sometimes means right-clicking for six different synonyms of “(a)ethereal.” But beyond affronts to diversity and aesthetic, music writing’s crisis lies in asserting its purpose. When a would-be reader can easily listen to the same music on the same internet with the same hardware and the same aural appendages, then broadcast his own opinions via any number of digital vehicles, why should he for a second care what some writer guy thinks?
My answer to that question presupposes the existence of Taste, which as Drew points out is questionable or politically incorrect at best and offensively classist at worst. It’s the kind of thing you can’t discuss without sounding like an elitist prick/losing national elections to fascist candidates. And while it would be unconscionably pretentious to tell a reader that he should feel a certain way about a piece of music, some people are necessarily more qualified to analyze works of art than others.
Suppose I, Pete, have read two books (or five books, or a hundred books — it doesn’t really matter). Now, suppose my best friend Pat, a wonderful person, has only read one book. Because I can contrast that book with the other books I have read, I possess a referential perspective that Pat objectively lacks. This does not mean that Pat cannot write brilliantly about how the music makes him feel, which is a wholly commendable endeavor, nor that he cannot discuss the book’s success on its own merits or with respect to his life experiences beyond the realm of literature. It does not mean that I am a smarter or better person than Pat. But, all else being equal, I would argue that I have developed a more refined taste in books than Pat, and that I am better qualified to discuss a book’s merits, if only as pertaining to the world of books, due to my wider knowledge and experience of reading books.
When I read my favorite music writers, I like to imagine that I am, for a few minutes, inhabiting the minds of Christgau, Harvilla, Klosterman, or Sanneh. Had I the refined minds, ears, and referential perspectives of these men (and, suffice to say, they’re almost always men), would I deem it worth my while to devote an hour or more of my finite lifespan to the piece of music in question? This is an admittedly simplistic case for the album review as consumer’s guide, but people who have listened to more and more types of music tend to have more incisive things to say about it (until they get so old that they lose touch with the #teens). If I’m not interested in a random Twitter user’s thoughts on the new Kendrick Lamar album, I’ll likely be interested in those writers’, because even if I ultimately disagree with their assessments I’ll find something provoking in their arguments or narratives.
Labels exist because we need something to call stuff. To label writing which is about music “music writing” is not a pejorative unless it ascribes the qualities of bad music writing to all music writing. Art does not possess inherent value for the arbitrary genres we assign it. Good music writing is good writing, which for me usually means it makes me reconsider my own perceptions.
That said, I think it’s important that we approach writing as well as music on its own established terms. Music writing should not be compared with war journalism or economics texts, just like Lil Yachty’s album shouldn’t be compared with Midnight Marauders or Beethoven’s Fifth. As ever, the purposeful establishment of an audience is key, which Drew conveys perceptively in his breakdown of the dominant modes of album review. I can often deduce the success of an album review based on its fulfillment of two qualifiers: Does the writer and/or outlet clearly establish its intended readership? Then, does the writer succeed in speaking to that audience on the audience’s terms? The audience for this Medium post consists of some music writers who write for the same pubs I do, friends from home and college, whichever of my aunts have Google alerts set up for our surname, and whatever seedy corner of Rap Twitter I occupy this week.
Drew also discusses the pitfalls posed by individual preference, a difficult obstacle which needs to be overcome in any critical pursuit. I’m of the opinion that what we often aim for in “journalistic objectivity” is an impossible ideal, but speaking to any audience requires dissociating, in some sense, from the things you hold dear.
If Freeway is my favorite rapper, which he is, I should be able to acknowledge that it is because he is a charismatic cartoon character who is very good at one or two things and often can’t be bothered to rhyme his couplets together. This is a good thing — the world would be a very boring place if everyone’s favorite rapper were 2001 Jay-Z. But it also means that the optimal audience for anything I write about Freeway is the monthly newsletter of his local fan club chapter. This shouldn’t disqualify me from writing about his music for a wider audience — in terms of familiarity and knowledge of his work, I might even be uniquely qualified — but I should strive to speak to people who will not find a Freeway album meritorious solely on the basis of its being a Freeway album. If I know that something is not good (either on its own or someone else’s terms) but I like it anyway, a good writer should be able to explain why.
One of the best and most widely leveraged arguments for the triviality of the album review is that online platforms have supplanted criticism by increasing access to musicians not being pushed by big labels and major outlets, arming listeners with the tools to cultivate their own tastes. As a consumer, platforms are great! They have fantastic selections, better sound quality than MP3s, employ people like me who lack the talent or balls to write full time, and are cheaper than any form of music ownership (which screws most artists, but that’s a discussion for another time).
Often, my platform of choice’s algorithm will turn me on to cool performers I’ve never heard of and would never otherwise have heard. But just as frequently it will make a bad recommendation, because it is an algorithm based on user #data. I may, for instance, be listening to one of Nas or Common’s respective four-and-a-half good albums, and be told that because I like Nas and Common, I may also like Logic and Macklemore. This is wrong — I hate Logic and Macklemore, and although many people apparently like Logic and Macklemore for some of the same reasons they like Nas and Common (which is fine!), I’d argue that to conflate them is wrong and to be discouraged.
Algorithms can’t discern the subtle distinctions which inform my subjective beliefs that Nas and Common are good and Logic and Macklemore bad. Streaming products are catered to consumers; they are populist, liberating, empowering, “democratizing.” But if listeners are reasonably wary of music writers’ pretension, they should be similarly wary of the mass mind which informs an algorithm.
Luckily, we have a counterweight — the music writer, and the album review! If I so choose, I can use my powers of perception to write about why I think Logic is a hack and Nas a genius, and depending on the strength of my argument my readers will decide whether or not they agree with me. This, of course, has its own problems, but I think it’s preferable to being told based on user data that Nas and Logic are the same, if only as a second opinion.
I think that good writing is good writing, just like good music is good music, and both are predicated on successful resonance with an audience. To tell someone how they should feel about a piece of art would be pretentious, but to discuss, criticize, and contextualize merits and shortcomings based on established (if not shared) referents is, I think, no less pertinent an enterprise than it ever was. As in any field, the people best qualified for the job — through experience, perspective, motive, and God-given talent — tend to do it best. Which makes me confident that as long as there is a market for art, there will be a market for reasoned, considered criticism of it.
After I wrote this post I shared it with Drew to make sure I wasn’t woefully off-base or taking him out of context, and he was nice enough to expound even further (Dialog SZN!). Drew has a weekly music column at Noisey called Future Days and blogs at drewscoolblog.com, and his words are below.
Thanks, Pete, for saying a nice thing about my article and then write an article based on my article. The number one way to get me to abandon any and all deadlines I may have and participate in a Medium post-off is to pay a compliment to a thing I wrote, and then use it as a springboard to say other stuff. It’s like catnip, and also I have low self-esteem.
I think one of the reasons there are a lot of music writers and a lot of them are young (and therefore not as good as the good music writers Pete cites above) is also because of the erosion of more traditional reporting jobs. Back when the internet was newspapers, somebody looking to be a journalist could find a job at the Burgsborough Herald-Picayune-Gazette-Times covering traffic court or whatever, honing their craft while secure in the knowledge that they would be protected from their plentitudinous fuckups by the watchful eyes of their editors as well as the fact that they were writing for a part of the paper that nobody read. Nowadays, many of those jobs — and as well as the papers themselves — don’t exist.
Enter digital media, and also music writing. Instead of these cub reporter gigs, aspiring journalists often take low-paying work from digital media outlets of all stripes. This is unfair and sucky for like a million reasons — the lack of full-time employment means those who come from wealthy backgrounds have an even BIGGER leg up, there’s less IRL mentorship, if you write something dumb or make a mistake your potential audience is “everyone online” instead of “everyone reading that section of the paper.” So instead of developing the necessary skills to do deep reporting work and uncover stories that people don’t already know about, these publications tend to employ young writers to write shit about stuff people already know about (like music).
Music is a thing that young people know and care about, so it makes sense that, because it’s a thing they are invested in, they write about. Music writing is almost the new beat reporting, in a sense. It takes a relatively accessible skill set to do the bare minimum, and in a media climate where it’s often assumed that people click because of the headline and not out of faith for the quality of the writing, it can be hard to discern the bare minimum from something actually good, especially when one considers a piece at face value. When a magazine or newspaper runs a long piece, they are literally making an investment in that piece — they’re spending more money to lay it out and print it, so they might as well make it good. In many people’s minds, that idea of length being tantamount to quality has carried over to the digital age, even though if a website publishes a long thing it might just mean some dickbag with a cultural studies undergraduate degree was way too hopped up on Adderall when they sat down to write, typed a bunch of pretentious and incomprehensible bullshit, and the editor was like “fuck it, nobody will remember this tire-fire of a piece tomorrow,” set it live, and hopes the thing gets buried in the feed. This sort of pattern, if perpetuated, erodes public trust in writers of all sorts — especially (generally inexperienced music writers), for the reasons I’ve outlined above.
Still, I don’t think my piece’s conclusion suggests that music writing is fruitless or that criticism doesn’t matter — quite the opposite. Basically, I just think music writing should be, like, better. There isn’t really a place in which music is regularly discussed with the same close analysis and insight one might find, say, the London Review of Books discussing literature (though to their credit, the LRB does occasionally run pieces about music, and even pop music). Part of this has to do with the fact that often, when someone reaches a certain age/level of intellectual maturity, they start caring about heavier stuff than music — i.e., politics/activism, literature, relationships, “prestige TV” (ugh), jobs, their crippling student debt, film etc — and are more interested in devoting their ever-dwindling free time to in-depth writing about those topics, rather than music.
But just because there’s less “demand” for something doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. In fact, if better music writing along these lines did exist, maybe it would even cause more people to consider popular music a more “serious” subject, simply by dint of conditioning them to think about it in those terms, rather than as a “product” or this pro wrestling-esque thing in which music plays a part in an artist’s greater “storyline.” (Which from where I’m sitting seem to be the two ways most people view music these days, or maybe these two viewpoints are effects of the same greater cultural phenomena?)
Anyways, in closing, capitalism is horrible, the death of the local newspaper has had far-reaching implications when it comes to journalism of all stripes, music writing should die but also should just become less shitty, and everyone should listen to the new Big Boi album.
